Sherman Miles Sherman Miles ( December 5 , 1882 – October 7 , 1966 ) was a General of the U . S . Army . He was Chief of the Military Intelligence Division in 1941 , when the attack on Pearl Harbor happened . Life . Miles ' parents were General Nelson A . Miles and Mary Hoyt Sherman Miles ( niece to Civil War General William T . Sherman ) . In 1901 , he enrolled at the United States Military Academy at West Point , where he was graduated in 1905 . In 1909 , he married Yulee Noble ; they had two children . During his military career , he held various posts as military attaché in Europe . In 1940 , he became the head of the Military Intelligence Division of the U . S . Army in George C . Marshall ' s General Staff . Two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7 , 1941 , he was re - assigned from that position to that of Commanding General of the First Service Command in Boston . After his retirement from the Army in 1946 , Miles was a Republican member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1947 to 1952 . In 1948 , he wrote the article " Pearl Harbor in Retrospect " in the July 1948 issue of " The Atlantic " , in which he gave his perspective on the events just prior to the attack . After the death of his wife Yulee in 1953 , he married Edith Lawrence Coolidge in 1954 . He died at the Hospital in Beverly , Massachusetts after long illness and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery in the Miles Mausoleum on October 12 , 1966 . Military career . Miles entered West Point on June 11 , 1901 , from where he was graduated on June 13 , 1905 and was commissioned as Second Lieutenant , 11th Cavalry . With the 11th Cavalry , he was sent in 1906 to Cuba by then Secretary of War William Howard Taft . Upon his return , he was transferred to the 3rd Field Artillery and promoted to First Lieutenant in 1907 . From 1912 to 1914 , he was military attaché on the Balkans . During World War I , he served as military observer in Russia until 1916 . He returned to the U . S . and was detailed to the General Staff Corps . In 1918 , he was as an observer at the Argonne Offensive . As a General Staff member , he was temporarily promoted first to Major in 1917 , then to Lieutenant Colonel in 1918 , and in 1919 to Colonel . Immediately after the war , he was assigned to the U . S . peace negotiation team . As a field member of the " Coolidge Mission " led by Archibald Cary Coolidge , he traveled through former Austria - Hungary to assess the situation and to make demarcation recommendations for the benefit of the U . S . negotiators at the Paris Peace Conference , 1919 . On January 27 , 1919 Miles led the delegation of the Coolidge Mission which , on the way to Carinthia , visited the city of Marburg ( today Maribor in Slovenia ) . Prior to the First World War , Marburg had a population comprising 80 % Austrian Germans and 20 % Slovenes . During Mile ' s visit thousands of citizens of German ethnic origin gathered on the main city square , waving German Austria flags , many of which also decorated nearby buildings . Slovenian military units commanded by Rudolf Maister killed between 11 and 13 German civilian protesters in a central Maribor square , during event known as Marburg ' s Bloody Sunday . Regarding Carinthia , the Coolidge Mission focused on where to draw the future border between the newly formed Kingdom of Serbs , Croats and Slovenes and Austria . The U . S . position before the Paris conference favored , like the British and French , a separation along enthnographic lines , i . e . , a border along the river Drava ( German : " Drau " ) , which would have split the economic and geographic region of the Klagenfurt basin . The Yugoslavs also favored this solution . Miles became instrumental in reversing this position . In his field travels , he learned that many of the Slovene speakers in the region actually preferred to belong to Austria and had closer economic ties to the Klagenfurt area than to Slovenia . He proposed instead a border along the Karavanke mountains further south . Through his reports , he was able to convince his superiors that the best way to settle the question was through self - determination . The U . S . team eventually convinced the British and French delegations in Paris , and finally it was decided that the area should remain undivided , and that the question of whether it should henceforth belong to Austria or to Yugoslavia was to be decided by a vote among the population of the area . In the plebiscite held on October 10 , 1920 , the population voted for Miles ' border proposal . These post - war assignments terminated , he returned to the U . S . and was returned to the grade of Major in 1920 . In the 1920s , he attended various military schools ( Army War College 1921 / 22 , Coast Artillery School 1925 / 26 , General Staff School 1926 / 27 ) and was posted to various units in the Coast Artillery and in the Field Artillery until the late 1930s . From 1922 to 1925 he was military attaché at Constantinople in Turkey , and was sent in 1924 to Teheran to investigate the murder of U . S . vice consul Robert Whitney Imbrie there . Miles was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel ( this time regularly ) in 1929 and to Colonel in 1935 . From September 1 , 1938 on , he was commanding school troops at the United States Army Field Artillery School at Fort Sill , Oklahoma . On September 1 , 1939 , he was promoted to Brigadier General and served as military attaché in London for half a year before returning to the U . S . , where he became a senior member of George C . Marshall ' s general staff . In the General Staff , Miles was " Assistant Chief of Staff G - 2 " , i . e . , the head of the Military Intelligence Division ( MID ) . The MID greatly expanded during his time as G - 2 , but , as Miles put it , " always in a piecemeal manner " . Qualified cryptography personnel was scarce , and Japanese - speaking personnel was hard to come by . Miles ' suggestions to set up an espionage service were ignored until June 1941 , when U . S . President Franklin D . Roosevelt appointed William J . Donovan as Coordinator of Information . Donovan ' s unit would eventually become the OSS , but it was independent from the MID and needed time to mature , which made for a difficult collaboration ( if not to say a rivalry ) between the MID and the OSS from the beginning and continuing throughout the war . The attack on Pearl Harbor ended Miles ' career in the General Staff . MID very much relied on intercepted Japanese radio messages . The decoded " Magic " messages were top - secret and circulated only in a very select circle of ten people comprising the General Staffs of the Army and the Navy , the Secretary of War , and the President . No coherent analysis of these messages was done . The warnings that the General Staff sent to Hawaii failed to stress the urgency because MID themselves did not consider the contents of the " Magic " intercepts received prior to the attack as particularly significant at that time . In addition , communication channels in the U . S . military were convoluted due to the split commands of Army and Navy , each with their own intelligence branch , and the last message to Hawaii before the attack was delayed and was decoded at Hawaii only after the attack had already begun . Ten days after the attack on Pearl Harbor , Miles was sent on an inspection tour through South America to survey installations there and to make recommendations for military assistance to the Latin American countries ; Acting Assistant Chief of Staff G - 2 became Brigadier General Raymond E . Lee . On January 28 , 1942 , Miles was promoted to Major General and then reassigned from the General Staff to the First Service Command in Boston as Commanding General , a post he held until his retirement from the Army on February 28 , 1946 . The Service Commands , sub - entities of the Army Service Forces , were supporting services for the fighting forces . Military decorations . Major general Miles received a lot of decorations during his military service . Here is the list :