Last Survivor of MacArthur’s Staff : E.R. Thorpe; Warning of Hawaii Attack Ignored

Elliott R. Thorpe, a retired Army brigadier general who was chief of counterintelligence under Gen. Douglas A. MacArthur and who delivered an unheeded warning about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, has died at age 91.

Thorpe died Tuesday at Sarasota Memorial Hospital here.

He was the last surviving member of Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s staff and may have been the last living witness to the signings of the peace treaties ending both world wars. In post-World War II Japan he was responsible for Emperor Hirohito and outlived his former charge by about six months.

As a first lieutenant in the Army, Thorpe stood guard in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles when the World War I treaty was signed on June 28, 1919. In 1945, he was on the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay when the Japanese surrendered to MacArthur.

Thorpe was a military attache in Dutch-controlled Java in December, 1941, when the Dutch broke a Japanese diplomatic code. One of the intercepted messages referred to planned Japanese attacks on Hawaii, the Philippines and Thailand.

Informed of the message by a Dutch general, Thorpe immediately cabled the information to Washington. But he found that his warning was not taken seriously. A week later, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

As MacArthur’s chief of civil intelligence in postwar Japan, Thorpe played a major role in reorganizing Japanese society. He was in charge of Hirohito’s security, controlled his comings and goings and determined who could visit him.

Thorpe also set up a screening system to keep militarists out of the Japanese government, supervised the release of political prisoners and helped determine which Japanese officials should be tried as war criminals.

Thorpe was a native of Westerly, R.I. His military career began with the outbreak of World War I, when he left the University of Rhode Island to enlist in the Army.

Before World War II, Thorpe was lend-lease commissioner and U.S. military attache in the Netherlands East Indies, now Indonesia. After his service in Japan, Thorpe established the Army Language School and was military attache in Thailand. In 1969, he wrote “East Wind, Rain,” an account of his years as an intelligence officer.