Bonner Fellers

Bonner Frank Fellers was born in Ridge Farm, Illinois, on February 7, 1896. He studied at Earlham College until he was appointed to the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, by the Speaker of the House, Joe Cannon. He entered the Military Academy in June 1916, ten months before the American entry into World War I. The increased need for junior officers during World War I caused Fellers's class to be accelerated and to graduate on November 1, 1918, ten days before the armistice with the German Reich which ended the war. Upon his graduation, Fellers was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the United States Army Coast Artillery Corps. After the usual post-graduation leave, Fellers attended the Coast Artillery School at Fort Monroe, Virginia, from December 1, 1918, to June 7, 1919. He was then sent to Europe to tour the World War I battlefields in France. He was one of several officers assigned to the 1919 American-Polish Typhus Relief Expedition. He embarked to return to the United States on September 18, 1919, and returned to the Coast Artillery School on November 14. He was promoted to first lieutenant on October 1, 1919 and graduated from the Coast Artillery School Basic Course on September 1, 1920. Fellers served with the 44th Coast Artillery at Camp Jackson, South Carolina, until October 1, 1920, and then with the headquarters of the I Corps Area in Boston, Massachusetts, from October 1920, to May 1921. A tour of duty in the Philippines, where he was stationed on Corregidor. Fellers returned to I Corps Area headquarters in October 1923 and remained there until August 1924, when he received orders to join the Mathematics faculty at West Point. He managed to get his orders changed to an assignment in the English department instead. While there he married Dorothy Ross Dysart in 1925. They had a daughter, Nancy. This was followed, in 1929, by a second tour of duty in the Philippines, as a battery officer stationed at Fort Mills, from October 4, 1929 to August 21, 1931. He then went to Fort Totten, New York, where he was a battery officer and regimental adjutant with the 62nd Coast Artillery until July 28, 1933. The drastic reduction in the size of the army after the war created limited opportunities for promotion, so Fellers was not promoted to captain until December 3, 1934. In 1935, he graduated from the Command and General Staff School, where he wrote a paper on "The Psychology of the Japanese Soldier", and the Chemical Warfare Service Field Officers Course at Edgewood Arsenal. His citation read: Fellers graduated from the Army War College on June 21, 1939. He then served as an assistant professor of English at West Point from July 5, 1939, to August 1940 and was promoted to major on July 1, 1940. He was promoted to lieutenant colonel in the wartime Army of the United States (as opposed to his substantive rank of major in the Regular Army) on September 15, 1941, and to colonel the following month. Before the United States joined World War II, Fellers was a member of the America First Committee. ==World War II==

Italian and German access to Fellers's reports In October 1940, Major Fellers was assigned as military attaché to the US embassy in Egypt. He was assigned the duty of monitoring and reporting on British military operations in the Mediterranean and Middle East Theatre. The British granted Fellers access to their activities and information. He dutifully reported everything he learned to his superiors in the United States, where his reports were read by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the G-2 section of the War Department General Staff. Fellers was concerned about the security of the State Department's "Black Code", used when he sent his reports by radiogram. His concerns were overridden. Fellers was right to be concerned, as the details of the code had been stolen from the US embassy in Italy in September 1941 in a covert night raid into the embassy by Italian spies from the Servizio Informazioni Militare (SIM), the Italian military intelligence service. This enabled the Italians to read the reports, and within eight hours, the most secret data on British "strengths, positions, losses, reinforcements, supply, situation, plans, morale, etc" would be in the hands of the German and the Italian military. Around the same time, the Black Code was also broken by German cryptanalysts. The Germans could read Fellers's reports, starting just before the American entry into World War II and lasting until June 29, 1942, when Fellers switched to a newly adopted US code system. Fellers's deciphered radiograms provided the Axis with detailed, extensive, and timely information about troop movements and equipment. Information from his messages alerted the Axis to British convoy operations in the Battle of the Mediterranean, including efforts to resupply the garrison of Malta. In January 1942 information about numbers and the condition of British forces was provided to Generalleutnant Erwin Rommel (Generalfeldmarschall from May onwards), the German commander in Africa, who could thus plan his operations with reliable knowledge of what the opposing forces were. The Germans referred to Fellers as die gute Quelle ("the good source"). Rommel referred to him as "the little fellow." For his services, Fellers received a second Philippine Distinguished Service Star. He also received the Legion of Merit and an oak leaf cluster to his Distinguished Service Medal. ==Post-war Japan==

with Fellers after the war After the war, Fellers remained on the staff of MacArthur, who was Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in the occupation of Japan. Among his duties was liaison between HQ and the Imperial Household. Soon after the occupation began, Fellers wrote several influential memoranda concerning why it would be advantageous for the occupation, reconstruction of Japan, and long-term US interests to keep Emperor Hirohito in place if he was not clearly responsible for war crimes. Fellers met with the major defendants of the Tokyo tribunal. Under an assignment with the codename "Operation Blacklist", Fellers allowed them to co-ordinate their stories to exonerate Hirohito and all members of his family of war crimes. This was done at the behest of MacArthur, who had decided that there was to be no criminal prosecution of the Emperor or his family. Fellers, who came from a Religious Society of Friends family (commonly known as Quakers) and attended the Quaker-affiliated Earlham College, ==Army retirement and later life==

In February 1946, Fellers reverted to the rank of colonel as part of a reduction in rank of 212 generals. He retired from the army on his own request on November 30, 1946. On August 16, 1948, his retirement rank was reinstated as brigadier general. After retiring from the Army, Fellers worked for the Republican National Committee in Washington, D.C. In 1952, he was actively involved in promoting Robert A. Taft as a presidential candidate. On July 24, 1953, Fellers met with a number of former U.S. military officers, including Pedro del Valle and Claire Chennault, to form the Defenders of the American Constitution (DAC). The DAC believed in a "one-worldist conspiracy" led by New York Jewish financiers who controlled international communism, and described their goal as the defense of "the US constitution against enemies and encroachments, both foreign and domestic." Fellers was a member of the John Birch Society, which is named after a military intelligence officer, who was considered by its founding members to be the first casualty of the Cold War. In 1953 Fellers, wrote a book: Wings for Peace: A Primer for a New Defense (1953). In 1964, he was actively involved in promoting Barry Goldwater for the presidency. Fellers sat on the board of trustees of the Americans for Constitutional Action group, founded in 1959, and on the "Co-ordination of Conservative Efforts" committee of Billy James Hargis' Anti-Communist Liaison, founded in 1962. He also served on the "Armed Services Committee" of the extreme right grouping known as the "Shickshinny Knights of Malta", not to be confused with the actual Knights of Malta, and on the National Advisory Board of Young Americans for Freedom. Fellers died at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C., on October 7, 1973, after suffering a heart attack, and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. ==Dates of rank==