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Dutch admiral recalled being shown location of Japanese fleet before it attacked Pearl Harbor

By BRUCE NICHOLS

HOUSTON -- Adm. Johan Ranneft sometimes told of visiting the Navy Department in Washington the day before the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor and being shown the location of a Japanese fleet near Hawaii.

Ranneft, who died Jan. 20 at the age of 95, was a captain in the Netherlands Navy at the time and was serving as the Dutch naval attache in Washington.

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'Apparently he was standing around with some naval officers and they had the position of the Japanese fleet located on a map north of Pearl Harbor,' Ranneft's son, Theodore, said in an interview.

'He said, 'What's the purpose of these ships being there?' And the people made non-committal comments. Obviously at the time they hadn't really considered that these ships might attack Pearl Harbor. This is more or less the story I recall. I just don't know how significant it is.'

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Admiral Ranneft's story is one of the main pieces of evidence cited by historian John Toland in his forthcoming book 'Infamy: Pearl Harbor and its Aftermath,' a account of interlocking events designed to show that Washington knew of the impending attack but did nothing about it.

In the book, to be published by Doubleday April 23, Toland says the presence of the Japanese fleet was never reported to U.S. commanders in Hawaii. He theorizes that President Franklin Roosevelt withheld the information to assure a surprise attack and thereby generate popular support for U.S. entry into World War II.

Toland interviewed Ranneft before his death and recovered in Holland the admiral's official diary, in which he noted that U.S. naval intelligence officers showed him the map location of the Japanese fleet on Dec. 2 and again on Dec. 6, the eve of the attack when the ships were reported to be 300 miles northwest of Hawaii.

In his official diary, Ranneft wrote on Dec. 2:

'Conference at Navy Department. ONI (Office of Naval Intelligence). They show me on map the position of two Japanese carriers (actually, there were six, plus supporting ships). They left Japan on easterly course.'

On Dec. 6, he wrote:

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'I myself do not think about it because I believe that everyone in Honolulu is 100 percent on the alert, just as everyone here at ONI is.'

The younger Ranneft said that, the way his father told the story, neither he nor the American intelligence officers attached great significance to the nearness of the Japanese fleet to Hawaii.

'I don't think he at the time thought they were going to bomb Pearl Harbor,' Ranneft said. 'That seemed such a wild sort of thought, although there was tension, of course.

Ranneft said he does not think his father told him the story until some time after the war. 'It was just a story he sometimes told later on,' Ranneft said. 'I don't remember really when I first heard it. I couldn't give you a date.'

Ranneft does not know why it took historians so long to take an interest in his father. He said his father did not particularly keep the story to himself.

'I wouldn't say that he was all that garrulous,' Ranneft said. 'He didn't make any effort to go to the newspapers and say look here, I've got something that really might interest you.'

However, Ranneft said his father had an interesting life and had a lot of stories to tell his friends. The possibility that Pearl Harbor was not really a surprise to American officials was only one.

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Johan Ranneft was born in Indonesia, raised in Holland, served in the Dutch Navy and then retired on a rear admiral's pension in 1947 to traveling and the hobby of archeology. He died in Houston of heart failure following surgery to repair a broken hip.

The son, a consulting geologist, said his father may have had access to such confidential information at the Navy Department because the Dutch were supplying intelligence from Indonesia, then the Netherlands East Indies.

Ranneft said his father and the Americans were quite friendly and his father received a special citation from the Navy in 1946 for helping obtain from the Swedish government the design of the 40mm Bofors automatic anticraft gun, which was used extensively by the Navy and Army during World War II.

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