Into Deep Waters – The Pearl Harbor Problem

The Mystery

Of the countless deaths of the Second World War, some 60 million but uncertain, the most destructive of history, and each a profound mystery source of suffering to those who lost a child, or mother or father, or anyon really, of many millions, there remain two major questions of a problem which, curiously, are rarely asked, perhaps to ensure we never come to know the answers.

A problem that takes us to Ottawa, and an early summer day, in 1961. When I happened to brush into the Pearl Harbor Problem

Along with my parents and two siblings, I had recently returned from Germany, and the Canadian RCAF fighter base where my father had been posted for four years. We had just returned to our home in Ottawa, at 363 Cunningham Avenue, in the tranquil residential area of Alta Vista, to see how the neibourhood had changed in our absence.

Three blocks further, I stopped and reached to tie a shoelace. There was a sudden, joyful, shriek from across the street. I looked up to see two young girls, flower in hand, racing toward a car that had just entered the driveway. By the evidence, driven by the father of the girls. One girl was perhaps my age, 15 years. The other perhaps 18 years.

I had witnessed the scene, apparently a daily ritual, from a distance, a week earlier. Today, I saw the girls climb the front stairs and disappear and through the front door. I found myself in a state of confusion. The thought crossed my mind that I might not get the chance to see the  girls again. Not long before I would have thought, “Girls, girls, “Who cares about girls?” That day, driven by a new, unknown animus, I cared, and thought:  “Two times lucky, don’t count on a third. Just cross the street climb the stairs, knock on the door, now”. The courage of youth. When doing so, I turned and glanced at the man, who had exited the car in the driveway, who now stood and looked on with an intense, penetrating, gaze.

It was the precise moment that I was,  unknowingly, was touched, like from a bird on the wing, by the  story, the true story,  of the attack on Pearl Harbor. 

The door opened and I was admitted me by the young girl. I saw your father”, I said, the first time to my recollection that I had spoken to a girl with more than a common purpose. “He works for NASA”, she said. Which made no sense at all, given that NASA was an American, and very distant, government enterprise, of which I had no knowledge, or interest, distracted as I was by her face, the lilt of her voice, her smile, and an intoxicating, unidentifiable scent that had appeared, wafting through the warm air. She obviously wished to conceal whatever her father did. Having been raised by an RCAF officer, and having just returned from four years in Germany, where the Germans had shown no desire to discuss their recent Second World War enthusiasms, her lack of interest was clear. At that moment, her elder sister walked down the stairs from the floor above,  and paused to look at me questiongly. Evidently, father had called, and asked her to find out wh0 I was and what I was up to. It was all a bit odd, although I did not know why, and I fell into a state of confusion. I said  said my farewell to the girls, and walked out the door.

Much later, I would learn, I had, in a manner of speaking, met the most important figure in the history of Canadian secret intelligence. A man of whom Canadians still know virtuly nothing at all.

Colonel Edward Michael Drake, during the Second World War, had been, successively, Director of the two Canadian signals intelligence units, snaring the messages of the German and Japanese enemy. One was the Examination Unit, largely concerned with civilian targets in a buildin at 245 Laurier Avenew, wich also held the residence of Canada’s Prime Minister Mackenzie-King. The other was MI2, Military Intelligence 2, the Canadian Army’s military signals intelligence unit, responsible for German and Japanese military targets, including those of the Japanese Imperial Navy, IJN, which became of particular interest during 1940 to 1941, from MI2’s Headquarters at the south-east of the intersection of Bank Street and Somerset Street, in downtown Ottawa, a now abandoned and neglected building, ten blocks from Parliament Hill.

That day in Ottawa, when I fell under his penetrating gaze,  Drake was Director, the first such, of the postwar CBNRC, Communications Branch National Research Council, Canada’s signals intelligence service.  Since 1975 known a CSEC, Canadian Communications Service Establishment. At the time, I had no knowledge of these services, what they did, and how they did it. They were, and now are, the most secret, and secretive, intelligence organization in Canada, virtually  absent from public discussion of the Second War, the war in the Pacific, and particularly, certainly, from any discussion of that mysterious matter, of 7 of December 1941, the attack on Pearl Harbor. Which include several  and troubling questions that had remained ever since.  

I you wish to about the true story of Pearl Harbor, and what had in fact happened there on that day, you might become acquainted with that building, which still stands.

It was only much later, and with much effort, that this author learned the story of Pearl Harbor, rather the two stories, the false and the true, both about the answer to two question: What did Winston Churchill ann FD Roosevelt know about the attack on Pearl Habor, and, When did they know it?

Colonel Edward MichaelDrake

Edward Michael Drake

Read moreThe Nature of the Problem

Michael McLoughlin

Author

 

2 comments