Foreword

THIS BOOK is intended to give the facts and examine the meaning of Pearl Harbor. The facts have come to the American public in disjointed form, from many sources, and with many interpretations, over a period of four and one-half years.

Pearl Harbor is already a chapter in history. Historians of World War II cannot escape its implications. At this date, so soon after the end of a victorious war, there has been a reluctance to appraise these implications. The mores of a victorious nation dictate that the whole of the war guilt be attached to the defeated adversary. Pearl Harbor, as a study of war origins, is thus a national embarrassment.

For the United States World War II—“the most unpopular war in history,” to use the apt descriptive phrase of Lieut. Gen. Hugh A. Drum¹—officially began December 7, 1941, with the Japanese attack upon Pearl Harbor. The assault which brought America into the war was the greatest naval disaster in American history. It was originally investigated solely as a failure of the commanders of the fleet and garrison at Hawaii. As more and more facts came to light, it became clear that any balanced study of the events of December 7 could not be thus restricted.

Pearl Harbor was the terminal result of a complex of events moving in many parallel courses. National ambition and international intrigue, diplomacy, espionage, politics, personalities, and the personal responses of men to crisis—all of these were of equal or greater importance than purely military considerations. Finally, Pearl Harbor reduced itself to a study of the reasons for which the United States was taken to war, the methods by which it was taken to war, and the motives of those who determined that course.

Of some dozen investigations and studies of Pearl Harbor, most were plainly partisan, undertaken either in defense of President Roosevelt and his administration or of certain members of the civil government or of the Army and Navy high command.

An inquiry by Army intelligence for Mr. Roosevelt was so secret that its existence is known only by hearsay.² A second investigation was authorized but never occurred. Col. Charles W. Bundy and Lieut. Col. George W. Ricker of the War Department general staff, who were commissioned to undertake the project, were killed while flying to Hawaii when their plane crashed December 12, 1941, in the Sierra Nevadas near Bishop, California.

Other investigations and studies were conducted by the late Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, by a Presidential Commission headed by former Associate Justice Owen J. Roberts of the United States Supreme Court, by an Army Board of Inquiry,³ by a Naval Court of Inquiry,⁴ by Adm. Thomas C. Hart,⁵ by Adm. H. Kent Hewitt, by Maj. Gen. Myron C. Cramer, Army judge advocate general, by Maj. Henry C. Clausen, by Col. Carter Clarke, and by a Joint Congressional Committee.

Throughout these investigations the administration was in a strategic position, because of its control of Congress and the executive departments, its control of records, its influence on rank and status in the services, its power to initiate investigations, to appoint the investigators and counsel, to define the limits and control the course of the investigations, and, during the war and the continuing period of emergency, to exercise powers of censorship.

The administration has done its utmost to discourage examination of the acts and intentions of the men who were in the vanguard of the march toward war. It has suppressed relevant documents and permitted important papers to “disappear” or be destroyed. It has even sought legislation which, on threat of penal confinement and heavy fines, would have forbidden discussion of the vital intelligence which came into its possession as a result of penetrating the Japanese code.

There could be no guaranty of impartiality and disinterestedness when men who were in the position of defendants were empowered to investigate and to appraise their own conduct and that of their close associates. This generalization is particularly applicable to a political party which is in the process of canonizing a party leader whose name has had a peculiar efficacy in maintaining that party in power.

Mr. Roosevelt was at pains to protect his reputation and political tenure by forestalling any thorough examination and report during his lifetime. When the Army Pearl Harbor Board submitted embarrassing findings six months before his death, his Secretary of War, resorting to the pretext of “national security,” used the censorship to suppress the entire report for ten months. When, after both Germany and Japan were defeated, the report was finally released, 52 pages of it were still suppressed. They were made public two and one-half months later, when the hearings of the Joint Congressional Committee provided a convenient diversion to obscure their meaning.

The congressional committee, through the enterprise and resourcefulness of the minority members, made valid contributions to history, but the course of this investigation in itself provides discouraging evidence of the forces which were at work. On September 6, 1945, a concurrent resolution calling for an investigation of the Pearl Harbor disaster was submitted by Alben W. Barkley, the Senate majority leader. The purpose was described in section 2:

The committee shall make a full and complete investigation of the facts relating to the events and circumstances leading up to or following the attack made by Japanese armed forces upon Pearl Harbor in the Territory of Hawaii on December 7, 1941, and shall report to the Senate and the House of Representatives not later than January 3, 1946, the results of its investigation, together with such recommendations as it may deem advisable.⁶

The spirit and intentions supposed to animate the inquiry were described by Senator Barkley in his address. He said that reports of previous investigations “are confusing and conflicting, when compared to one another, and to some extent contain contradictions and inconsistencies within themselves.” He referred to the “widespread confusion and suspicion” that prevailed “among the American people and among the members of Congress.”

Senator Barkley said that the congressional investigation should fix responsibility “upon an individual, or a group of individuals, or upon a system under which they operated or co-operated or failed to do either,” and that it should determine what corrective action might tend to prevent a recurrence of the disaster.

The inquiry, Barkley said,

should be conducted without partisanship or favoritism toward any responsible official, military, naval, or civilian, high or low, living or dead. . . . Congress itself should make it own thorough, impartial, and fearless inquiry into the facts and circumstances and conditions prevailing prior to and at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, no matter how far back it may be necessary to go in order to appraise the situation which existed prior to and at the time of the attack.⁷

The resolution as so interpreted passed the Senate unanimously and was concurred in by the House on September 11. The administration then candidly confessed the partisan nature of the project by allotting six of the ten places on the committee to members of its own party and installing the Senate majority leader as chairman.* The majority established committee rules retaining control in its own hands and foreclosing important areas of inquiry. The effect of executive orders promulgated by President Truman was to deny minority committeemen the right to search government files.

Under these favorable auspices, witnesses with a direct concern in the proceedings were permitted to absent themselves, while those with a similar interest who appeared were emboldened to cover up what they could. In a courtroom many would have been adjudged reluctant if not hostile. The record of the hearings is filled with shabby and transparent evasions, special pleading, changes in sworn testimony, and unbelievable lapses of memory.⁸ In significant respects it fails to satisfy the general standards of credibility. A minority of witnesses displayed not only candor but courage, but there were few who did not have some particular ax to grind, who were not trying to justify their actions or protect someone, or who had not been thoroughly coached in advance.

Any show of independence in searching out the facts during the investigation provoked vituperative outbursts from New Deal spokesmen and the pushbutton press. There was an evident fear that someone might pursue the facts to their logical conclusion. A campaign was instituted to intimidate the minority with the argument that if they gave an exact description of the methods and motives of President Roosevelt and his administration in following the road to war, they could properly be pilloried as defenders of Hitler and Tojo. The investigators were exposed to the threat that by imputing censure to the nation’s wartime leadership, they would be depicted as blaming the United States for starting the war.

This defense was mercilessly exploited by the Roosevelt-Truman administration. It was reduced to the lowest common denominator by Senator James A. Tunnell of Delaware, who implied that any investigation of Pearl Harbor must necessarily be partisan and an apology for Japan.

“In their desperation,” said Mr. Tunnell, “Mr. Roosevelt’s opponents have in effect put on Japanese kimonos and said, ‘Honorable Roosevelt and Honorable Hull teased us into attacking.’”⁹

No one with the courage and capacity to confront facts need be deterred by such abuse.

The committee reports,¹⁰ submitted July 20, 1946, constituted three separate statements of opinion. The majority report was signed by all six Democrats and was adhered to without express qualification by Representative Gearhart. The minority report was submitted by Senators Ferguson and Brewster. Representative Keefe, although signing with the majority, filed a supplementary statement which, in essential respects, placed him with the minority.¹¹

The record of diplomacy which so vitally influenced the Pearl Harbor tragedy is admittedly incomplete. It is, however, far more complete than it would be if there had been no investigation.¹² Some day, when the passions of partisan apologists have cooled, when the archives are opened and candid statesmen (if such there be) have provided a more adequate account of motives and events, more may be known of the hidden history of our times. Enough of the truth is known now so that judgments may be formed and conclusions offered.

With all of the elements at hand, the reader has the ingredients of a mystery story. There are victims—3,000 of them in the Pearl Harbor attack. There are a variety of clues. There are a multitude of false leads. There are numerous possible motives. Innumerable obstructions are put in the way of the discovery of truth. Many of the characters betray guilty knowledge.

Only the writer of detective fiction, with full control over his plot and his characters, can hope to achieve a complete examination of motive and solve every subsidiary puzzle in the major mystery. The Pearl Harbor record ends with no signed confessions.

August 23, 1946

*Democratic members of the committee were: Senator Barkley, chairman; Representative Jere Cooper, vice-chairman; Senator Walter F. George, Senator Scott W. Lucas, Representative J. Bayard Clark, and Representative John W. Murphy. Republican members were: Senator Homer Ferguson, Senator Owen Brewster, Representative Frank B. Keefe, and Representative Bertrand W. Gearhart.