1. War

Chapter One

WAR

AT 7:58 A.M. on Sunday, December 7, 1941, a radio warning was broadcast to all ships in Pearl Harbor. “Air raid, Pearl Harbor!” the radio screeched. “This is no drill! This is no drill!” Three minutes before, Japanese warplanes had come in over the great naval base at Oahu, launching their first torpedoes and dropping their first bombs.

Almost at once a second warning was broadcast by the commander-in-chief of the Pacific fleet: “From Cincpac to all ships Hawaii area: Air raid on Pearl Harbor. This is no drill.” The Navy radio station at Mare Island Navy Yard, San Francisco, intercepted this message. The country soon knew that it was at war.

For a year and a half a debate had raged the length and breadth of America over going to war or staying out. It was bitterly fought in Congress, in the newspapers, over the radio, in public forums, in private homes, by propagandists, by politicians, and by the plain people—and all the words, if people had but known it, were futile. Long before December 7 the United States was in fact at war. That decision had come at the policy-making level of the government and of the Army and Navy high command, and it had been put into execution without anybody asking a vote from Congress or bothering to let the people in on the secret.

For more than two years there had been war in Europe, and for more than four years war in the Orient, but, so far as the people knew, the United States was not a party to either war. In Europe, Germany and Italy, with their satellites, were at war with Russia, Britain, and the nations of the British commonwealth, supported by a group of paper allies, the governments in exile of Poland, Norway, Belgium, Yugoslavia, Greece, Ethiopia, Holland, and the De Gaullists of France. In the Far East Japan and China had been fighting since July 7, 1937, but neither chose to call it a war. To the Japanese it was “the China Incident.” The Chinese didn’t have a name for it until two days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, when they finally declared war.

The debate over American intervention was emotional and none too well informed. The totalitarian governments of Germany and Italy, with their scurvy and cutthroat leadership, had nothing to commend them, while the brutal efficiency of the German army terrified the timid. The saber-rattlers of Tokyo were no more ingratiating. The Japanese military, in the course of a long harassment of the inoffensive mass of the Chinese people, had earned the condemnation of civilized men, and, in such outbreaks of mass insanity and violence as accompanied the fall of Nanking, had aroused horror and revulsion.

On the other hand, the forces in opposition were hardly able to pin the sanctions of high-minded morality or abstract justice to their banners. Even the Chinese, who had suffered long and had a legitimate claim upon the sympathy of the outside world, were afflicted with a corrupt, devious, and scheming central administration under the domination of a leader whose methods had frequently been discreditable, exercising his will ineffectively through the one-party Kuomintang government. China was disorganized, shot through with internal dissension, and more an anarchy than an organized state.

The faults of Britain and France were of another order. The French and British Munichmen had been guilty of the betrayal of national self-interest—the cardinal sin in the conduct of statesmen—and were now appealing to America to bail them out. They had sacrificed whatever hope there might have been in collective security by their selfish and cynical policy, accepting the extinction in turn of Austria, Ethiopia, Czechoslovakia, Albania, and the legal Spanish government, and calling these sell-outs “appeasement” and “peace for our time.”¹ The judgment of Winston Churchill after Munich was prophetic: “France and Britain had to choose between war and dishonor. They chose dishonor. They will have war.”

The Nazi and Fascist slave states were abhorrent to decent people, but it was not easy to forget that the British Empire rested upon the exploitation of hundreds of millions of natives, sweating out their lives in the steaming mines of the Rand at 7 cents a day or in the jungles of New Guinea at less than 5½ cents a day, or subsisting, as 400 million of them did in India, with famine always half a step from the threshold.

Shocking as were Hitler’s concentration camps, his calculated campaign against the Jews, and his dictum that the conquered were “sub-human,” fit only for slavery or the charnel house, the barbaric government by terror, purge, and enslavement conducted by Stalin over his fellow-Russians was no more exemplary. The two tyrants had had no scruples in striking a bargain on August 23, 1939, when the ten-year “nonaggression” pact signed by them turned the German army loose eight days later upon Poland and western Europe, and permitted Stalin to roll up eastern Poland. Moral distinctions were difficult to perceive between this pair.

For its part, Britain, in guaranteeing to defend the corrupt Polish government of colonels and feudal gentry, had committed itself to a decision which was on a par with all of the other stupidities achieved in London. At any time up to the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia on October 1, 1938, the British and French, if they had been so minded, could have stopped Hitler.² When they finally chose Poland as the issue over which to fight a war, they assumed a task which was militarily impossible. They had waited too long and Hitler had grown too strong. Moreover, their commitment was neither complete nor candid.

Britain’s guaranty to Poland was first announced in the House of Commons March 31, 1939, by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. The Prime Minister stated that consultations were in progress between the two governments, but in the meantime, before their conclusion, “I now have to inform the House that during that period, in the event of action which clearly threatens Polish independence, and which the Polish government accordingly considered it vital to resist with their national forces, his Majesty’s government would feel themselves bound at once to lend the Polish government all support in their power.” Chamberlain added that the French government had adopted a parallel policy.

On April 6 a communique released by Chamberlain stated that “the two countries were prepared to enter into an agreement of a permanent and reciprocal character to replace the present temporary and unilateral assurance given by his Majesty’s government to the Polish government.”

“Like the temporary assurance,” the communique stated, “the permanent agreement would not be directed against any other country but would be designed to assure Great Britain and Poland of mutual assistance in the event of any threat, direct or indirect, to the independence of either.”

On August 25, six days before Germany invaded Poland, the tentative Anglo-Polish arrangement was converted into a formal agreement of mutual assistance, pledging each party to give the other “all the support and assistance in its power” in the event of either “becoming engaged in hostilities with a European power in consequence of aggression by the latter against that contracting party.” Eight articles of the treaty were made public. The first seemed to be an unequivocal pledge to fight any aggression. Such was not the fact.

Despite Chamberlain’s statement in Parliament and the clear commitment in the published articles that Britain would come to Poland’s defense in the event of aggression by any European power, it would later be discovered that strings were attached to the British guaranty, and that Britain had escaped from any commitment to defend Poland against aggression by Russia or to rectify any grabs Russia might subsequently make. It was finally disclosed on April 5, 1945, that the first article of a secret protocol to the Anglo-Polish treaty of mutual assistance provided, “By the expression ‘a European power’ employed in the agreement is to be understood Germany.”³ This escape clause paved the way for the Yalta and Potsdam deals handing over eastern Poland to Russia, thereby permitting Stalin the fruits of aggression under his deal with Hitler in August, 1939.

As the capstone to this edifice of bad faith, Hitler and Stalin, through the uneasy twenty-two-month existence of their “nonaggression” treaty, dickered for a full military alliance and a four-way partnership dividing up three continents among themselves, the Italians, and the Japanese. All that prevented the consummation of this deal was the cupidity of the tyrants in Berlin and Moscow, whose greed and distrust confirmed the validity of the definition that an alliance is “the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other’s pockets that they cannot separately plunder a third.”⁴

The memoirs of Prince Konoye, who committed suicide on December 16, 1945, provide evidence that Russia late in 1940 agreed “in principle” to broaden the tripartite alliance of September 27, 1940, among Germany, Italy, and Japan into a four-power entente. Konoye said that Iran and India were to be Russia’s “future sphere of influence” under a secret agreement accompanying the proposed entente. Japan was to receive the South Seas area, Germany would have taken central Africa, and Italy northern Africa.

Konoye stated that Von Ribbentrop, Nazi foreign minister, advanced the plan for a four-power agreement, providing:

Firstly, the Soviet Union will declare that it agrees with the principle of the tripartite pact in the sense of preventing war and swiftly recovering peace.

Secondly, the Soviet will recognize the leading position of Germany, Italy, and Japan, respectively, in the new order in Europe and Asia, and the three nations will pledge respect of Soviet territory.

Thirdly, the three nations and the Soviet Union pledge not to assist any nation being the enemy of the other, nor to join such a group of nations.

The Japanese government promptly approved the plan, which was handed to Foreign Commissar Molotov of Russia during his Berlin visit in November, 1940. Then Tokyo heard nothing further until March, 1941, when the Japanese foreign minister, Yosuke Matsuoka, visited Berlin. Matsuoka was told that Molotov had agreed in principle, but proposed “exchange conditions of over 30 articles which Germany could in no way recognize.” By then, Matsuoka told Konoye German officials were openly talking about the inevitability of a Nazi-Soviet war.⁵

Additional light on this cynical deal was supplied through captured German documents, now in the possession of the American government, tracing Molotov’s conversations with Ribbentrop. These documents disclosed that Russia’s appetite for more and yet more of the earth’s surface was all that prevented the formation of a Berlin-Moscow-Tokyo-Rome plunderbund.⁶

These intrigues are sufficient to demonstrate that there was not a major power involved in the mess in Europe or Asia that could come to the United States with clean hands, or represent itself as either a democracy or an exemplar of justice. The knowledge of all of this chicanery was, of course, withheld from the American people until after the war, and the debate on the question of intervention versus nonintervention was thus not illuminated by any perceptible degree of understanding or truth.

The American people, who thought that the issue of whether it was to be peace or whether it had to be war was still subject to democratic debate, did not know in the closing months of 1941 that the decision had long since passed them by. They did not know that already a state of war existed by executive action. Not for four years would they hear the admission from President Roosevelt’s chief of naval operations that by October, 1941, the American Navy was “in effect, at war” in the Atlantic,⁷ and that this shooting war against Germany and Italy constituted a direct invitation to Japan to attack the United States under the tripartite pact.⁸

On December 7, 1941, the policy-makers and war-makers in Washington were confidently awaiting the hour when their undeclared war would be regularized by the logic of events. On that same December 7, the people were still hoping that the peace which had already been lost could be preserved.

The previous day Pope Pius had said that the world needed faith more than great statesmen. In one American city there was a Christmas expression of such faith: a great “star of peace” emblazoned in lights 132 feet wide and 150 feet high on the side of a skyscraper office building. Even Lord Halifax, the British ambassador, had a kind word for peace as he busied himself talking up war. Lasting peace, he said, was foreshadowed “explicitly and implicitly” in the Atlantic Charter;⁹ but he implied that to catch up with the shadow Americans would first have to fight; otherwise the professed objectives of the charter could not be realized.

The war, so far, had made little impact upon civilian life in America. The national debt, after eight and one-half years of the New Deal, stood at 55 billion dollars. There were fifteen shopping days until Christmas and the display advertisements told of peace-time abundance. No one yet had imposed rationing, although some of the more vocal proponents of war in and out of the administration were impatient that consumer’s goods were still available, when, so these gentlemen thought, the nation’s entire production should be devoted to rearmament and lend-lease for Britain and Russia. Secretary of Commerce Wallace was later to pay his peculiar tribute to American industry and management, which outproduced all other belligerents combined, friends and foes alike, by saying that plant managers were “sheer Fascists” and that it had been necessary “to take industry by the scruff of the neck” to get it into war.

If war crept into the advertisements, it was only in the form of fifty-piece soldier sets offered as a Christmas gift for the children: twenty-four soldiers, one cannon, twelve shells, a popgun, and twelve corks—all for $1.

There was another kind of advertisement. The United States Army Recruiting Service was calling for volunteers. The appeal said:

Throughout the regular Army, there are thrilling jobs to be mastered—jobs that provide splendid technical training, combined with adventure, useful service to your country, and the opportunity to provide for a successful future career. More than a third of all enlisted men volunteer because of the recommendations of their friends in the Army. Most of them re-enlist after their first three years.

The actual war still seemed far away to those who read the morning newspapers of December 7, telling of a million and a half German troops, eight thousand tanks, and one thousand guns massed before Moscow. Hitler was talking as if the fall of the Soviet capital was a matter of a few days, if not of hours, and no one—least of all the Japanese whom he had been at pains to impress—knew that his armies had already been beaten by the terrible Russian winter and were even then preparing to retreat.

What hints there were that America would soon be committed to the slaughter were oblique. The people knew that relations with Japan had been deteriorating, but knew nothing of the course of the seemingly interminable diplomatic negotiations in Washington between Secretary of State Cordell Hull and the Japanese emissaries, Adm. Kichisaburo Nomura and Saburo Kurusu. Washington encouraged the notion that as long as the negotiations continued, there was still a substantial hope of achieving a settlement and keeping the peace. Not a word was let drop that the negotiations had come to an end and that war was inevitable, though the leaders of our government were fully aware of these facts.

True, Mr. Hull’s pronouncements were not encouraging, and President Roosevelt’s latest contribution—a personal appeal cabled December 6 directly to Emperor Hirohito—seemed, even for Mr. Roosevelt, a little frantic and somewhat excessively flamboyant. On Saturday Mr. Hull had acknowledged that relations with Japan were grave. He had called the President’s attention to the presence of an estimated 125,000 Japanese troops in French Indo-China, which Japan had effectively taken over after the fall of France, and manifested disquiet because 18,000 of them were loaded aboard troopships in Camranh Bay. That suggested that they were going somewhere, and the only places to which they could go were the property of nations other than Japan.

Mr. Roosevelt, in an ill-advised moment in April, 1939, had addressed a personal message to Hitler asking him to pledge respect for the territorial integrity of thirty of Germany’s neighbors in Europe and the Near East,¹⁰ only to be rewarded with a sarcastic response. Hitler pointed out that although there were interlopers in many lands; they were not Germans, and that although many peoples were oppressed, their complaints were directed, not against Germany, but against nations which were prone to parade their virtue, among them the United States.¹¹

Despite the dubious success of this venture in personal diplomacy, Roosevelt in his message to Hirohito followed virtually the same formula, and laid himself open to much the same retort he had received from Hitler. Hirohito’s advisers, however, did not see fit to present Roosevelt’s message to the Emperor until twenty minutes before the first bombs dropped at Pearl Harbor.¹² If Hirohito thought anything of Roosevelt’s message, which in itself is doubtful, he probably reflected that the President didn’t have much understanding of protocol, for not even presidents communicate with gods.

The State Department on the morning of December 7 did not disclose the nature of the note that Roosevelt had dispatched, but later it would become known that the message had appealed for Hirohito’s aid in “dispelling the dark clouds” of a possible Japanese invasion of Malaya, Thailand, the Dutch East Indies, and the Philippines. The Japanese might have conceded Roosevelt’s right to discuss the Philippines, which were under the protection of the American flag, but when the President also projected himself as the defender of British and Dutch imperialism, he merely confirmed the Japs in a belief they had entertained all along: that the United States would go to war to preserve the white empires. Inasmuch as the time would never be more propitious than the present, the new government of Gen. Hideki Tojo had determined, in the general’s own phrase, to answer Roosevelt “by quick action, not words.”¹³

Mr. Roosevelt knew this quite as well as Gen. Tojo and the other sword-rattlers in Tokyo. His appeal to Hirohito so late in the day was dispatched with an eye toward the justification of history, although originally the President had had another purpose in mind. A few weeks earlier Roosevelt might easily have succeeded in avoiding embroilment in a war with Japan, but by December both Tojo and he were equally intent that there should be no turning back.

By the final month of 1941 the western proprietors of colonial empires in East Asia and the Southwest Pacific were in no position to safeguard their title. Japan had found how easy the pickings were when, after the fall of France, Japanese forces had seized the defenseless French holding of Indo-China. Holland, occupied by Germany, was impotent to defend the Netherlands East Indies, while the British had been driven off the European continent and were on the defensive in their home island and engaged in an inconclusive see-saw war in North Africa. Britain could exact no great price from any invader which went after its colonies in Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

This, so it must have seemed to the Japanese militarists, was the opportunity of a lifetime. More than avarice prompted a program of conquest. The Japanese military machine was bogged down in China in a war now well into its fifth year. With the military needing vast amounts of war material in order to continue functioning, the United States had cut off critical supplies by embargoing the export to Japan of oil and steel.* It had then frozen Japanese credits,† threatening Japan with economic strangulation. Hull, although even his countrymen did not know it, had set a stiff price if Japan was to restore itself to the good graces of the United States. He demanded nothing less than that Japan evacuate Indo-China, get out of China, repudiate its alliance with Germany and Italy, and accept equality and no more in the trade of the Far East.‡

Such terms confronted Japan with a dilemma. All that had been gained in four and one-half years of struggle in China would be lost if Japan gave in. The Japanese war lords could look upon lands not far removed which were possessed by the absentee white proprietor and see all of the oil, rubber, tin, and other materials which were so highly prized by a Japan which was denied them. The Japanese people, bound in uncomplaining bondage to the military, could follow that same glance and see rice and opportunity denied them in the homeland.

In the last estimate, Japan was confronted with the option of striking out for a rich new empire or abandoning its conquests and resigning itself to the future of a third-rate nation. It made the natural if mistaken choice. Adm. Nomura and other intelligent Japanese knew that the choice meant the ruin of Japan; yet, there certainly seemed a chance of success in December, 1941, and a chance, which, very likely, would never again be so favorable. Nomura’s estimate proved correct. Japan now is not a third-rate nation. It is, by the description of a perspicacious general of B-29’s, a fortieth-rate nation—a Bulgaria or less.

The Japanese had hoped that the tripartite pact would serve to warn the United States off the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” which Japan had staked out for itself. This alliance pledged Germany and Italy to respect Japan’s position of leadership in the “new order” in East Asia, while Japan respected the ascendancy of Rome and Berlin in Europe. More important, it specified that if any of the partners was attacked by a nation not then involved in their respective wars, the other two should render all possible military, economic, and political assistance. Inasmuch as Russia had been speciflcally excepted when the pact was executed, and the United States was the only remaining powerful nation in the world, the alliance obviously was intended to caution this country against interfering either in Europe or the Pacific.

The purpose had failed, but at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack the tripartite pact still offered considerable insurance to Japan, especially in view of Roosevelt’s preoccupation with the task of defeating Hitler and saving the British. The Japanese military government knew that if it had to fight the United States, it would fight with the support of a still powerful Germany, which could be expected to engage a substantial proportion of the American Army, Navy, and Air Force in a theater far distant from the Pacific.

Furthermore, the Japanese militarists determined that, if they must fight America, they should seize every possible initial advantage, especially that of surprise. They had a precedent for their strategy. In 1904 Japan had broken off relations with Russia on February 5, but war was not declared until February 10. Not even waiting for the declaration, Adm. Togo sent his torpedo boats into Port Arthur the night of February 8-9 and caught the Russian fleet by surprise in harbor.

The Russians had played into Japan’s hands by splitting their fleet, and then splitting it again. Russia had a powerful fleet in the Baltic, in addition to its Far Eastern fleet. If the two could unite, they would decidedly outnumber the Japanese fleet, but the union was never permitted to take place. Russia had further divided its Far Eastern fleet. Four of its first-class cruisers were at Vladivostok, a fifth at Chemulpo, and the remaining four at Port Arthur, so that the Russian Port Arthur fleet under Vice-Adm. Starck was in no way equal to the fleet under Togo, which promptly put Port Arthur under blockade.

In 1941 the Jap high command could not but notice a striking parallel to this situation when it contemplated the American fleet dispositions. Roosevelt and the high command not only had split the fleet between the Pacific and the Atlantic, but had split the Pacific fleet further into an Asiatic fleet based upon Cavite, in the Philippines, and the main fleet body based upon Pearl Harbor. In the week preceding the December 7 attack, the Pearl Harbor fleet was split again when the only two carriers in Hawaii, with six heavy cruisers and fourteen destroyers, were sent to ferry a few Marine Corps planes and crews to Wake and Midway Islands, a mission which could easily have been performed by freighters.

In addition, a third task force, consisting of one heavy cruiser and five destroyer minesweepers, was off Johnston Island, 700 miles southwest of Oahu, while one heavy cruiser and four destroyer minesweepers were 25 miles south of Oahu. Meanwhile, the battleship strength of the Pacific fleet was bottled up in Pearl Harbor. All that had changed in the thirty-seven years since the Port Arthur incident was that the airplane had replaced the torpedo boat as the instrument of attack.

In the event of war, it was a foregone conclusion that the Japanese would seek out the American adversary for surprise attack at whatever place American fleet strength was concentrated.¹⁴ Pearl Harbor was the only possible objective because that was where the fleet was. The Japanese objective was simple. By attacking the fleet wherever it was to be found, Japan would destroy the ships of greatest range and fire power and thus prevent interference with its advance in Asia and the Western Pacific.

With the exception of the British battleship “Prince of Wales” and the battle cruiser “Repulse,” which arrived at Singapore only a week before Japanese planes were to seek them out and sink them as they steamed without air cover in the East China Sea, the only element that could possibly interfere with Japan’s program of conquest was the American fleet. Once it was immobilized, the Jap fleet and army could move at will on their mission of capturing American possessions and imperial colonies.

These strategic considerations alone were sufficient to have demonstrated to Roosevelt and the high command that war against the United States would be inaugurated by a Japanese surprise attack at Pearl Harbor and no place else. For years afterward the story was carefully cultivated that the Japanese attack was a treacherous surprise, launched when there was no remotest reason for expecting it, and therefore a great shock to the leaders of government. The excuse has been made that Japan’s success in attaining surprise was the result of striking at a time when the administration was engaged in peaceful negotiation and war was remote from its thoughts. And even if the administration had known that war was coming, the apologists say, it could not have known at what time or what place.

Nothing was then known of the interception by American intelligence of Jap secret messages which, decoded, pointed unmistakably to attack at Pearl Harbor December 7. Four years later it would become known that the Jap secret code had been cracked many months before Pearl Harbor, and that the men in Washington who read the code intercepts had almost as good a knowledge of Japanese plans and intentions as if they had been occupying seats in the war councils of Tokyo.*

But in the last month of 1941 the American people knew nothing of this. If war was close—indeed, was here—the people were ignorant of it. They had not read the intercepts, tracing the gradual deterioration of relations with Japan. They did not know of warnings sent out by Tokyo to its diplomatic corps that after November 29 “things were automatically going to happen,”† of statements that by the beginning of December negotiations in Washington would be “de facto ruptured,”‡ of instructions to destroy code machines and burn ciphers in the Japanese embassy in Washington,§ of Japanese confidences to Hitler at the end of November that a Japanese war with the United States might come “quicker than any one dreams.”|| They had never heard then of “east wind rain.”¶ They knew nothing of last-minute instructions to the Japanese emissaries to hand in their reply to Hull at 1:00 P.M., Washington time, on December 7.**

Roosevelt, the inner circle of the war cabinet, and the Army and Navy high command knew all of this and more, but the stage had been set that December Sunday to convey the impression that no one was more surprised than the President himself. That day Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins, with whom he shared state secrets, were in the oval study on the second floor of the White House. The scene has been described by Forrest Davis and Ernest K. Lindley.¹⁵ Their account runs:

Mr. Roosevelt had dedicated this day to rest. Today, tieless and in shirtsleeves, he hoped to catch up with his neglected stamp collection. The President might have been any one of a million Americans putting in a loafing Sunday with a crony and a hobby. Mr. Roosevelt expected war—but not this weekend.

That was the scene. That is the frame of mind which it was desired that the American people would remember. The President himself vouched for the fact that this was his attitude and these his thoughts.

All of the telephone lines through to Roosevelt had been shut off. A “do not disturb” order had been placed with the switchboard. “Mr. Roosevelt was topping his dinner with an apple,” his personal chroniclers report, “when his desk telephone jangled disobediently.” It was Secretary of the Navy Knox who had insisted on disturbing his tranquillity.

In his annual report, published that morning, Knox had been reassuring. He said:

I am proud to report that the American people may feel fully confident in their Navy. In my opinion, the loyalty, morale, and technical ability of the personnel are without superior. On any comparable basis, the American Navy is second to none.

The international situation is such that we must arm as rapidly as possible to meet our naval defense requirements—simultaneously in both oceans—against any possible combinations concerting action against us. Our aim always must be to have forces sufficient to enable us to have complete freedom of action in either ocean while retaining forces in the other ocean for effective defense of our vital security.¹⁶

At Oahu the Japs were revising Secretary Knox’s report, and now the crestfallen secretary was obliged to call Roosevelt and make some emendations.

“Mr. President,” Knox began, “it looks like the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor. . . .”

“No!” Roosevelt is supposed to have cried.¹⁷ The reaction would suggest that he was surprised.

*Cf. pp. 99, 132-36.

†Cf. pp. 99, 132.

‡Cf. p. 160.

*Cf. p. 390 [Note 7].

†Cf. p. 184.

‡Cf. p. 188.

§Cf. pp. 192-94, 197.

||Cf. p. 190.

¶Cf. pp. 183, 198-222.

**Cf. pp. 196-97, 275-76, p. 400 [Note 56].