Chapter 13: 13. December 6, Part 2 First 13 Parts of Japan’s Reply to U.S. Note of November 26

U.S. officials assumed the Japanese government had not been bluffing when it wired its ambassadors in Washington setting a deadline after which “things [were] automatically going to happen” if they could not reach agreement in their negotiations with the United States by November 29. Thus special arrangements had been made to assure that our top officials in Washington would receive promptly whatever reply the Japanese might make to our November 26 note, the so-called “ultimatum.” The director of Naval Intelligence was to be notified immediately; a special weekend phone line connected Naval Intelligence and the State Department, and a special deputy communication watch officer was assigned duty at the White House on the evening of December 6.

The “Pilot Message,” advising the Japanese ambassadors in Washington to expect their government’s reply to the U.S. note shortly, had been intercepted, decoded, translated, and delivered Saturday afternoon, December 6.^[1] After Commander Kramer delivered it to the Navy personnel on his list—by then it was mid-afternoon—he stopped by the Navy Department to make

a final check with the Teletype Watch to see whether there was anything apparently hot coming in. . . . In view of other developments that we [the United States] had seen taking place in the diplomatic traffic and otherwise it was apparent things were shaping up to some sort of a crisis.^[2]

Japan’s 14-part English-language reply to the U.S. “ultimatum” began to come in at Bainbridge intercept station on the west coast very early Saturday morning, December 6. The first part reached there at 5:03 a.m. (8:03 a.m. Washington, D.C. time). From then until 8:52 a.m. (11:52 a.m. Washington, D.C. time), when the 13th part came in, Bainbridge was busy intercepting and relaying the messages, by teletype, still in code, to Washington, D.C.^[3] The first 13 parts had all been received in Washington, D.C., by 2:51 p.m. on December 6. Part 14 did not come in until more than 12 hours later.

In 1941, before the attack on Pearl Harbor, most government offices closed down at noon on Saturdays. “The War Department [cryptographic] unit at that time was observing normal office hours and secured from work at noon on Saturday, December 6, 1941, with the intention of doing no work until 8:00 on Monday, December 8, 1941.”^[4] Therefore, just past noon, after decoding the “Pilot Message,” the Army closed up shop for the weekend.

The Navy Department was operating on a different schedule. To keep in touch with developments, Admiral Wilkinson, chief of the Office of Naval Intelligence, “had set up a 24-hour watch in the Far Eastern Section alone.” “[W]hen it appeared that the Japanese advance in the China Sea was becoming more and more critical,” he had established “a watch of the senior officers of the Department, the heads of the branches, and the Assistant Director” so that responsible officers were on duty “in rotation” to cover the 24 hours each day. Admiral Beardall, himself, the President’s naval aide, was on call. So was Captain Kramer.^[5] Therefore the Navy decoders and translators were on duty that Saturday afternoon, even though this work was an Army responsibility on even-numbered dates.

When Kramer stopped in at the department “at 3:00 on the 6th, the message was coming in . . . [which] turned out to be a part of the [14-part Japanese] reply.” The Japanese government was transmitting it in English so that their ambassadors in Washington would not have to translate it before submitting it to Secretary of State Hull. This made the task of the Navy cryptographers somewhat easier. But the message was in “Purple;” it still had to be decoded. Kramer waited and “held [his] team of translators.”^[6]

The Navy cryptographers “turned to”^[7] and began decoding and translating. However, they were soon swamped by the heavy work load. At about 3:00 p.m., they sent “an urgent call” to the Army for help “and got some of the Army people back and they assisted the Navy throughout the night of December 6th in translating [sic] the very long and very important fourteen-part message.”^[8]

[B]y 9:00 p.m. Saturday, the evening of the 6th of December, [we] had received, broken down, translated [sic], and had typed ready for delivery thirteen of those parts, several of them somewhat garbled.^[9]

FDR Tells Australian Minister He Plans to Address Hirohito

Late in the afternoon of December 6, Australia’s minister to the United States, Richard G. Casey, spoke with FDR. Roosevelt confided to Casey that he was planning to send a special message to Hirohito. If no answer was forthcoming by Monday evening, December 8, he intended to issue Japan another warning the following afternoon or evening, asking that it be followed by warnings from the British and others.^[10]

Stimson Requests Inventory of U.S. Ships Around the World

While the cryptographers were busy decoding the 14-part Japanese message, War Department people, at Stimson’s request, were trying to determine the location of U.S. ships around the world. At about 8:00 p.m. December 6, Major George L. Harrison, an aide to Stimson, phoned the office of the Chief of Naval Operations asking for the following information by 9:00 a.m. the next morning:

Compilation of men-of-war in Far East, British, American, Japanese, Dutch, Russian. Also compilation of American men-of-war in Pacific Fleet, with locations, and a list of American men-of-war in the Atlantic without locations.

Admirals Ingersoll, Stark and the Secretary of the Navy were consulted and the Secretary directed that the information be compiled and delivered to him [Stimson] prior to 1000 Sunday, 7 Dec.^[11]

First 13 Parts of Japanese Reply Delivered to FDR

Between October 1 and December 7, 1941, Kramer, attached to the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington, was on loan to OP-20-G, Office of Naval Communications. He was a Japanese language student and headed the translation section of the communications security group, then made up of a staff of three civilian translators. Kramer reviewed their translations and did an occasional translation himself. He was also responsible for seeing that the decoded and translated intercepts were delivered to the authorized Navy personnel. As the volume of intercepts increased in the weeks before December 7, Kramer necessarily assumed more responsibility for organizing the intercepts with background material and assembling them for delivery.^[12]

Before Beardall left for home at about 5:30 p.m. that Saturday afternoon, he turned over his post to the special deputy communication watch officer, Lieutenant Lester Robert Schulz, on temporary assignment with the Office of Naval Communications. He told Schulz “to remain there that night to receive [a] special message for the president.” Schulz was to take it to Roosevelt immediately.^[13]

When the first 13 parts of the 14-part answer were in clear form, typed up, and ready for distribution, Kramer

proceeded at once to the White House, left a folder [with Beardall’s aide, Schulz] with that 13-part message and one or two others with rather emphatic instructions to get to the president as quickly as possible. Schulz immediately left with the locked pouch for the president’s study. The president was entertaining at the moment,^[14]

but when he learned the courier had arrived he left his guests for his White House study. Schulz opened the pouch and personally handed the president the papers, “perhaps 15 typewritten pages” clipped together, which included the first 13 parts of Japan’s 14-part reply to our November 26 note. Schulz waited—“perhaps 10 minutes”—while “[t]he president read the papers.” “Then he [FDR] handed them to [his friend and close associate] Mr. [Harry] Hopkins,” who read them and returned them to the president.^[15]

The president then turned toward Mr. Hopkins and said in substance . . . “This means war.” Mr. Hopkins agreed, and they discussed then, for perhaps 5 minutes, the situation of the Japanese forces, that is, their deployment.

The Japanese had already landed in Indochina. Indochina was the only geographical location they mentioned. FDR and Hopkins speculated as to where the Japanese would move next. Neither mentioned Pearl Harbor. Nor did they give any “indication that tomorrow was necessarily the day.” And “[t]here was no mention made of sending any further warning or alert.”^[16]

“[S]ince war was imminent,” Hopkins ventured, “. . . since war was undoubtedly going to come at the convenience of the Japanese, it was too bad that we could not strike the first blow and prevent any sort of surprise.”

The president nodded. “No, we can’t do that. We are a democracy and a peaceful people.” Then he raised his voice: “But we have a good record.” FDR implied we would have to stand on that record, that “we could not make the first overt move. We would have to wait until it came.”^[17]

Roosevelt went on to tell Hopkins that he had prepared a message for Hirohito, the Japanese emperor, “concerning the presence of Japanese troops in Indochina, in effect requesting their withdrawal.”^[18] FDR had not followed the usual procedure in sending this cable, he said. Rather than addressing it to Tojo as prime minister, FDR “made a point of the fact that he had sent it to the Emperor as Chief of State.” The president must have been thinking also about how he would describe the situation in the speech that had been prepared in the State Department for him to present to Congress if he did not receive a satisfactory reply from Hirohito.

FDR tried, unsuccessfully, to phone Chief of Naval Operations Stark. When told Stark was at the theater, Roosevelt said he could reach Stark later and hung up. FDR then returned the papers to Schulz, who left.^[19]

First 13 Parts of Japan’s Long-Awaited Reply Delivered to Navy and Army

After leaving the locked pouch with Schulz at the White House a little after 9:00 p.m., Kramer delivered the papers to Navy Secretary Knox^[20] at his Wardman Park apartment. After some discussion, Knox told Kramer “there would be a meeting at the State Department at 10:00 the following morning, Sunday.” Knox wanted Kramer there “with that material and anything else that had come in.” Kramer then drove to Admiral Wilkinson’s home in Arlington, Virginia, where Admiral Beardall and General Miles were having dinner. Beardall and Miles saw the papers then at Wilkinson’s dinner party.^[21] Wilkinson asked Kramer to have that material plus anything new at the Navy Department the next morning.

At about 11:30 p.m., Admiral Turner was rousted out of bed at his home to receive the 13-part message.^[22] A courier with the message called at Admiral Ingersoll’s home at about midnight.^[23]

After making his deliveries, Kramer checked in at the Navy Department—about 12:30 a.m.—to see if anything of importance had come in from Tokyo or Berlin. As nothing had, he went home. In any event, he “was on tap any hour of the day and night by GY Watch Officers.”^[24]

Meanwhile, the Army courier, Colonel Rufus S. Bratton, distributed the locked pouch with the intercepts to Chief of Staff Marshall’s secretary, Colonel Bedell Smith,^[25] announcing “that it was an important document. . . . And that the Chief of Staff should know about it.” Also to General Gerow’s executive officer, Colonel Gailey,^[26] and to the night duty officer in the State Department for delivery to Hull.^[27]

FDR Addresses Emperor Hirohito Directly

According to Hull, “On December 6, our Government received from a number of sources reports of the movement of a Japanese fleet of 35 transports, 8 cruisers, and 20 destroyers from Indochina toward the Kra Peninsula. . . . The critical character of this development, which placed the United States and its friends in common imminent danger, was very much in all our minds, and was an important subject of my conference with representatives of the Army and Navy on that and the following day.”^[28]

Sometime during the day, December 6, Hull drafted and forwarded to the White House a message for FDR to send the Japanese emperor.^[29] Roosevelt had written a draft of his own and preferred it.^[30] After a few editorial changes by the State Department, to which FDR agreed, he sent the revised version to Hull with his handwritten “OK.”^[31]

In his note to the emperor the president said that recent developments in the Pacific area “contain tragic possibilities.”^[32] The president desired peace, he wrote, but

During the past few weeks it has become clear to the world that Japanese military, naval and air forces have been sent to Southern Indo-China in such large numbers as to create a reasonable doubt on the part of other nations that this continuing concentration in Indo-China is not defensive in its character. . . . It is clear that a continuance of such a situation is unthinkable.

In his message, the president sought to assure Japan that “There is absolutely no thought on the part of the United States of invading Indo-China if every Japanese soldier or sailor were to be withdrawn therefrom.”

He continued:

I think that we can obtain the same assurance from the Governments of the East Indies, the Governments of Malaya and the Government of Thailand. I would even undertake to ask for the same assurance on the part of the Government of China. Thus a withdrawal of the Japanese forces from Indo-China would result in the assurance of peace throughout the whole of the South Pacific area.^[33]

Roosevelt did not address Japan’s economic problems, which had been aggravated by the U.S. embargoes barring her from world markets. Nor did FDR refer to the decades-long Russian-inspired conflict in Manchuria and China, the source of Japan’s difficulties on the Asian mainland. And he offered no assurance that he could, or would try to, keep the Chinese from stirring up still more trouble. (By this time, the American taxpayers were actually furnishing aid to the communist troublemakers in China and the communist forces fighting against Germany in Europe.)

The message for Emperor Hirohito was transmitted in “our nonconfidential code at that time, the gray code, which was perfectly open to anybody.”^[34] It left Washington at 9:00 in the evening of December 6. Our ambassador in Japan, Joseph C. Grew, was instructed “to communicate the president’s message to the Japanese Emperor in such manner as deemed most appropriate by the Ambassador and at the earliest possible moment.”^[35] A copy went also to Chiang Kai-Shek in China.^[36]

Roosevelt announced to the press and the world that he had sent a message of peace to the Emperor.^[37] However, the text of his message was not released at the time.

Saturday Night, December 6-7, at the White House

A meeting of FDR’s “inner circle” was held late Saturday night, a meeting which must have lasted from about midnight into the wee, small hours of December 7. With the president on this occasion were Stark, Marshall, Knox, Stimson, and Hopkins. These five men “spent most of the night . . . at the White House with FDR, all waiting for what they knew was coming after those intercepts.”^[38]

As far as we know, no record was made of their conversation. In view of the intelligence they had been receiving of a massive buildup of Japanese forces in the southwest Pacific, apparently headed for Thailand, Malaya, or British or Dutch territory, we can only imagine what they discussed. The six men in the White House that night must surely have speculated on how to respond if the Japanese attacked the Isthmus of Kra in Malaya, Thailand, the Dutch East Indies, or British Singapore. What action should the United States then take? What should FDR say to Congress? Should we go to the aid of the British and Dutch militarily, as FDR had promised British Ambassador Halifax? If we did, how would FDR and his associates justify to the American people this military intervention so far from the shores of continental United States? On the other hand, if the U.S. did not give the British and Dutch the “armed support” they had been promised, how would the administration explain to them, and to the world, the failure of our president to honor an agreement he had made?

With the crisis developing in southeast Asia, it looked as if the United States was losing the opportunity to take the initiative as Stimson had suggested a week earlier—namely to “maneuver them [the Japanese] into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.” Of course, it was still possible that the three small vessels outfitted, as FDR had directed, as minimal U.S. men-of-war might get to sea before a Japanese strike. If they did sail in time and arrive at the paths of the Japanese convoys, they could still provoke an incident “without too much danger to ourselves.” But events were crowding in around us thick and fast.