Why I think what I do
Well, Patrick, don't say you didn't ask for it.
In 1941 time was running out for everybody. The Germans had to finish off the Russians before it was too late. The Japanese had to go to war before they ran out of oil. The English had to get us into the war before pressures beginning to build for a negotiated peace forced Churchill out of office. There was a lot of sympathy for Hitler in the House of Lords and the Prince of Wales was showing signs of a willingness to return home and lead a campaign to make peace with Germany even if it meant forcing his brother Bertie to vacate the throne he had assumed when Edward abdicated for Wallis Simpson. The Germans won her favor by calling her Royal Highness, which the English refused to do, and she evidently had had an affair with the German ambassador von Ribbontrop. Time was running out for FDR, too. With England on the sidelines, Germany all-conquering – nobody believed the Russians could withstand the fury of the Panzers – and Japan on the march in Asia, things looked very dark.
Early in the year, Admiral Yamamoto was asked how the navy would fare in a war against the United States. He replied that it would do well for the first six months, but he couldn’t say how things would go after that. If war did come, he said, it must be with suddenness to catch America napping. Hawaii must be invaded and all the naval officers there killed or taken captive. The admiral knew it would take three or four years to replace that loss. He also wanted an invasion force landed in California between Los Angeles and San Luis Obispo. But the Imperial Japanese Army – often at loggerhead with the navy – refused to cooperate, so only the surprise attack survived of his original idea. Within days or weeks of the decision to attack Pearl Harbor, Tokyo churned with rumors about it. Ambassador Grew passed these on to Washington, where supposedly they were ignored as fantasy. FDR knew from his college days at Harvard where he had a Japanese roommate who told him so that Tokyo (as did American naval planners) assumed a war between the two countries was inevitable.
Yamamoto, by the way, was opposed to war with America. He had been a naval attaché in Washington and had crossed the country and was aware of its wealth and latent strength. But the army believed that the United States was corrupt and effeminate, like Rome in its period of decadent corruption and love of luxury, and lacked the spirit for war. Hirohito, who kept close watch over military operations and insisted both services keep a headquarters on the palace grounds, had misgivings but eventually gave the green light for the attack. Every major and many minor decisions about war, even down to the division level, went before him.
What was the Pacific Fleet doing in Hawaii? The dry docking and other facilities were far inferior to the West Coast and everything had to be imported at great cost. The official explanation is the State Department wanted it there to act as a brake on Japanese ambitions in the Far East. This is nonsense, of course. The fleet would have to return to the West Coast for provisioning and refitting before it could sally forth to the Far East – and the Japanese knew that. A more nefarious theory, one that I think fits the facts, is that it was there as bait.
When Admiral Richardson, commander of the Pacific Fleet, pointed out the danger (and, incidentally, told FDR in his blunt way that the navy didn’t trust him), he was sacked. The Germans and Japanese had a mutual defense treaty that obliged each to come to the aid of the other if attacked. The Germans being the Germans and the Japanese the Japanese, they each could have ignored the treaty if it suited their purpose. But FDR was gambling each would honor it. The Germans were going out of their way to avoid the many provocations we gave them in the Atlantic, so it was up to the Japanese to get us into the war.
One of history’s great victims is Richardson’s successor, Admiral Husband Kimmel. A lot of people in London and Washington knew Yamamoto’s fleet was heading for Pearl Harbor but Kimmel was kept totally in the dark as was his army counterpart General Short. London knew because an 18-year-old RAF mechanic stationed in Malaya had a curious encounter with a drunken Japanese civilian engineer in Cambodia. He met him in a restroom as he was running water over a painful mosquito bite on his thumb. The engineer evidently assumed he was Vichy French and they fell to talking. It became clear he was bursting about his insider knowledge of a great event that was going to occur soon. He had been installing wooden bomb racks on torpedo planes on aircraft carriers in Hittocappu, a remote bay in northern Japan. All around were warships of every description and enough oilers to tell him a long voyage was planned. The engineer showed the young Englishman sketches of the ships and made 40 strokes of a pencil to indicate how many there were. Then he showed him on a map that the fleet was bound for Pearl Harbor.
The mechanic, Peter Shepherd – who had this little noticed book published five years ago – managed to slip away with the map and some of the notes and reported this the following day to intelligence agents back in Malaya. He had even done the math and said the attack on Pearl Harbor would come three days later. So Churchill knew.
So did FDR. The case was made at the time that Roosevelt knew something was coming but thought it would be the Philippines, Guam or some other target in the Far East; the story was the Japanese attack force maintained radio secrecy, allowing the surprise: not true. Commercial and navy radio direction finders located Japanese warships between Hawaii and the Aleutians a week before the attack. The carrier Akagi was exchanging messages with Japanese civilian vessels.
The liner Lurline on November 29 bound from San Francisco to Hawaii heard what its radio operator described in the ship’s log as “The Japs blasting away on the lower marine frequencies.” After November 1, by the way, Kimell in Pearl Harbor was no longer given radio direction finder reports. The radio transmissions continued for the next two nights, December 1 and 2, and were intercepted by Navy listening posts in Seattle, San Diego, Corrigidor and Honolulu. What they were hearing were large ships repeating general orders from Tokyo to ships in the fleet whose antenna couldn’t pick them up. Between November 15 and December 6, there were 129 interceptions of Japanese naval communications, one of which was captured in Hawaii but kept from Kimmell, from the commander of the Fourth Fleet telling his forces that a declaration of war was imminent. A Dutch intelligence officer said after the war that he saw a map in Washington at the time that was tracking the advance of the attack force.
When the Lurline reached Honolulu, copies of the transmission were given to naval intelligence. The original radio log was confiscated by the Twelfth Naval District intelligence officer when the Lurline returned to San Francisco and hasn’t been seen since. The best guess is it was removed from the archives sometime in the 1970s. Ninety-eight per cent of these radio intercepts continue to be hidden from the public. And, of course, at the time none were given to poor Admiral Kimmel. But this capable officer knew something was up. He sent Admiral Halsey to sea with 46 warships and 127 aircraft to look for an enemy fleet two weeks before the attack. So certain was he that something would be found that he said enemy warships might be sighted at any moment and flag signals should be used at first sighting so the Japanese were not alerted by picking up radio signals.
Halsey was in the exact place from which the Japanese carriers a short time later launched their attack 200 miles from Oahu. A dozen PBYs were searching in the direction from which the attack force was coming – a 65 degree arc out 600 miles -- when Washington learned about this exercise. At that point Kimmel was ordered to avoid any action that might provoke the Japanese, and he told Halsey’s force to return to Pearl. Much has been written about our cracking of the Purple Code, used by the Japanese for diplomatic communications. We often knew what Tokyo was saying before the recipients of the messages did.
The instructions for the timing of the delivery of the fourteenth and last part of the message breaking off the diplomatic talks – there were four long messages sent over a 24-hour period -- clearly pointed to the timing of the attack. So did the instruction to destroy all the code machines at the Japan embassy. “This means war,” FDR told Harry Hopkins when he read it on the night of December 6. Even before that – on Saturday morning 23 hours before the attack -- our listening station in Hawaii had intercepted and transcribed seven copies of a message from Yamamoto to the attack force saying the emperor had ordered them to “annihilate the enemy.”
The message giving the 1 p.m. deadline Washington time for delivering the message – 7:30 a.m. Honolulu time – announcing that diplomatic talks were at an end arrived at 9 that morning on the Seventh. Military aides frantically tried to get this information to General George C. Marshall, the chief of staff. But he couldn’t be reached because he was out riding his horse in a park; strange behavior when everyone knew war was about to break out. Finally at 10 a.m. he was notified the message had been received. It then took him until 11:15 to reach his desk at the War Department, fifteen hours after Roosevelt and Hopkins agreed that the message from Tokyo to the Japanese ambassadors in Washington meant war. As an aide continually urged Marshall to take note of the 1 o’clock deadline, he slowly read the message, taking thirty minutes to do so.
Then, although a scrambler phone was available that would have put him in direct contact with Honolulu, Marshall chose to send it via teletype and scratched out a message that said “just what significance the hour set may have we do not know but be on alert accordingly.” There had been earlier warnings sent to the army and navy in Pearl Harbor, but they were so vague that the army commander, General Short, interpreted them as meaning to beware of enemy sabotage, not air attack, and he parked his plans in tidy rows for the Japanese to blast to smithereens.
Because of atmospheric interference, the navy’s radio channels couldn’t be used, so Marshall’s message was sent via Western Union and RCA. They were delivered as the bomb were falling on Pearl Harbor. But they didn’t fall on the two aircraft carriers that would ordinarily be there or on nineteen of the fleet’s most modern warships because Washington had ordered them to sea on what amounted to minor errands, the delivery of aircraft to Wake and Midway islands. Admiral Kimmel did not believe Washington would deprive him of the protection of those carrier aircraft if it thought war was imminent.
After he and General Short were made scapegoats, Admiral Kimmel wanted a formal court-martial to clear his name. But this would have allowed him to call witness to testify under oath, so the White House finessed this by appointing a commission headed by a Supreme Court justice to investigate the fiasco. Several other investigations were undertaken over the years. Only decades later did Kimmel’s reputation come out from under a cloud. The Senate voted in 1998 to exonerate him and General Short and to restore them to rank. This was ignored by the Department of Defense, but Kimmel’s grandson continues the fight.
But FDR got the war he wanted – and the war the United States had to enter if the world was to be saved from Hitler’s murderers and Hirohito’s barbarians.
In 1941 time was running out for everybody. The Germans had to finish off the Russians before it was too late. The Japanese had to go to war before they ran out of oil. The English had to get us into the war before pressures beginning to build for a negotiated peace forced Churchill out of office. There was a lot of sympathy for Hitler in the House of Lords and the Prince of Wales was showing signs of a willingness to return home and lead a campaign to make peace with Germany even if it meant forcing his brother Bertie to vacate the throne he had assumed when Edward abdicated for Wallis Simpson. The Germans won her favor by calling her Royal Highness, which the English refused to do, and she evidently had had an affair with the German ambassador von Ribbontrop. Time was running out for FDR, too. With England on the sidelines, Germany all-conquering – nobody believed the Russians could withstand the fury of the Panzers – and Japan on the march in Asia, things looked very dark.
Early in the year, Admiral Yamamoto was asked how the navy would fare in a war against the United States. He replied that it would do well for the first six months, but he couldn’t say how things would go after that. If war did come, he said, it must be with suddenness to catch America napping. Hawaii must be invaded and all the naval officers there killed or taken captive. The admiral knew it would take three or four years to replace that loss. He also wanted an invasion force landed in California between Los Angeles and San Luis Obispo. But the Imperial Japanese Army – often at loggerhead with the navy – refused to cooperate, so only the surprise attack survived of his original idea. Within days or weeks of the decision to attack Pearl Harbor, Tokyo churned with rumors about it. Ambassador Grew passed these on to Washington, where supposedly they were ignored as fantasy. FDR knew from his college days at Harvard where he had a Japanese roommate who told him so that Tokyo (as did American naval planners) assumed a war between the two countries was inevitable.
Yamamoto, by the way, was opposed to war with America. He had been a naval attaché in Washington and had crossed the country and was aware of its wealth and latent strength. But the army believed that the United States was corrupt and effeminate, like Rome in its period of decadent corruption and love of luxury, and lacked the spirit for war. Hirohito, who kept close watch over military operations and insisted both services keep a headquarters on the palace grounds, had misgivings but eventually gave the green light for the attack. Every major and many minor decisions about war, even down to the division level, went before him.
What was the Pacific Fleet doing in Hawaii? The dry docking and other facilities were far inferior to the West Coast and everything had to be imported at great cost. The official explanation is the State Department wanted it there to act as a brake on Japanese ambitions in the Far East. This is nonsense, of course. The fleet would have to return to the West Coast for provisioning and refitting before it could sally forth to the Far East – and the Japanese knew that. A more nefarious theory, one that I think fits the facts, is that it was there as bait.
When Admiral Richardson, commander of the Pacific Fleet, pointed out the danger (and, incidentally, told FDR in his blunt way that the navy didn’t trust him), he was sacked. The Germans and Japanese had a mutual defense treaty that obliged each to come to the aid of the other if attacked. The Germans being the Germans and the Japanese the Japanese, they each could have ignored the treaty if it suited their purpose. But FDR was gambling each would honor it. The Germans were going out of their way to avoid the many provocations we gave them in the Atlantic, so it was up to the Japanese to get us into the war.
One of history’s great victims is Richardson’s successor, Admiral Husband Kimmel. A lot of people in London and Washington knew Yamamoto’s fleet was heading for Pearl Harbor but Kimmel was kept totally in the dark as was his army counterpart General Short. London knew because an 18-year-old RAF mechanic stationed in Malaya had a curious encounter with a drunken Japanese civilian engineer in Cambodia. He met him in a restroom as he was running water over a painful mosquito bite on his thumb. The engineer evidently assumed he was Vichy French and they fell to talking. It became clear he was bursting about his insider knowledge of a great event that was going to occur soon. He had been installing wooden bomb racks on torpedo planes on aircraft carriers in Hittocappu, a remote bay in northern Japan. All around were warships of every description and enough oilers to tell him a long voyage was planned. The engineer showed the young Englishman sketches of the ships and made 40 strokes of a pencil to indicate how many there were. Then he showed him on a map that the fleet was bound for Pearl Harbor.
The mechanic, Peter Shepherd – who had this little noticed book published five years ago – managed to slip away with the map and some of the notes and reported this the following day to intelligence agents back in Malaya. He had even done the math and said the attack on Pearl Harbor would come three days later. So Churchill knew.
So did FDR. The case was made at the time that Roosevelt knew something was coming but thought it would be the Philippines, Guam or some other target in the Far East; the story was the Japanese attack force maintained radio secrecy, allowing the surprise: not true. Commercial and navy radio direction finders located Japanese warships between Hawaii and the Aleutians a week before the attack. The carrier Akagi was exchanging messages with Japanese civilian vessels.
The liner Lurline on November 29 bound from San Francisco to Hawaii heard what its radio operator described in the ship’s log as “The Japs blasting away on the lower marine frequencies.” After November 1, by the way, Kimell in Pearl Harbor was no longer given radio direction finder reports. The radio transmissions continued for the next two nights, December 1 and 2, and were intercepted by Navy listening posts in Seattle, San Diego, Corrigidor and Honolulu. What they were hearing were large ships repeating general orders from Tokyo to ships in the fleet whose antenna couldn’t pick them up. Between November 15 and December 6, there were 129 interceptions of Japanese naval communications, one of which was captured in Hawaii but kept from Kimmell, from the commander of the Fourth Fleet telling his forces that a declaration of war was imminent. A Dutch intelligence officer said after the war that he saw a map in Washington at the time that was tracking the advance of the attack force.
When the Lurline reached Honolulu, copies of the transmission were given to naval intelligence. The original radio log was confiscated by the Twelfth Naval District intelligence officer when the Lurline returned to San Francisco and hasn’t been seen since. The best guess is it was removed from the archives sometime in the 1970s. Ninety-eight per cent of these radio intercepts continue to be hidden from the public. And, of course, at the time none were given to poor Admiral Kimmel. But this capable officer knew something was up. He sent Admiral Halsey to sea with 46 warships and 127 aircraft to look for an enemy fleet two weeks before the attack. So certain was he that something would be found that he said enemy warships might be sighted at any moment and flag signals should be used at first sighting so the Japanese were not alerted by picking up radio signals.
Halsey was in the exact place from which the Japanese carriers a short time later launched their attack 200 miles from Oahu. A dozen PBYs were searching in the direction from which the attack force was coming – a 65 degree arc out 600 miles -- when Washington learned about this exercise. At that point Kimmel was ordered to avoid any action that might provoke the Japanese, and he told Halsey’s force to return to Pearl. Much has been written about our cracking of the Purple Code, used by the Japanese for diplomatic communications. We often knew what Tokyo was saying before the recipients of the messages did.
The instructions for the timing of the delivery of the fourteenth and last part of the message breaking off the diplomatic talks – there were four long messages sent over a 24-hour period -- clearly pointed to the timing of the attack. So did the instruction to destroy all the code machines at the Japan embassy. “This means war,” FDR told Harry Hopkins when he read it on the night of December 6. Even before that – on Saturday morning 23 hours before the attack -- our listening station in Hawaii had intercepted and transcribed seven copies of a message from Yamamoto to the attack force saying the emperor had ordered them to “annihilate the enemy.”
The message giving the 1 p.m. deadline Washington time for delivering the message – 7:30 a.m. Honolulu time – announcing that diplomatic talks were at an end arrived at 9 that morning on the Seventh. Military aides frantically tried to get this information to General George C. Marshall, the chief of staff. But he couldn’t be reached because he was out riding his horse in a park; strange behavior when everyone knew war was about to break out. Finally at 10 a.m. he was notified the message had been received. It then took him until 11:15 to reach his desk at the War Department, fifteen hours after Roosevelt and Hopkins agreed that the message from Tokyo to the Japanese ambassadors in Washington meant war. As an aide continually urged Marshall to take note of the 1 o’clock deadline, he slowly read the message, taking thirty minutes to do so.
Then, although a scrambler phone was available that would have put him in direct contact with Honolulu, Marshall chose to send it via teletype and scratched out a message that said “just what significance the hour set may have we do not know but be on alert accordingly.” There had been earlier warnings sent to the army and navy in Pearl Harbor, but they were so vague that the army commander, General Short, interpreted them as meaning to beware of enemy sabotage, not air attack, and he parked his plans in tidy rows for the Japanese to blast to smithereens.
Because of atmospheric interference, the navy’s radio channels couldn’t be used, so Marshall’s message was sent via Western Union and RCA. They were delivered as the bomb were falling on Pearl Harbor. But they didn’t fall on the two aircraft carriers that would ordinarily be there or on nineteen of the fleet’s most modern warships because Washington had ordered them to sea on what amounted to minor errands, the delivery of aircraft to Wake and Midway islands. Admiral Kimmel did not believe Washington would deprive him of the protection of those carrier aircraft if it thought war was imminent.
After he and General Short were made scapegoats, Admiral Kimmel wanted a formal court-martial to clear his name. But this would have allowed him to call witness to testify under oath, so the White House finessed this by appointing a commission headed by a Supreme Court justice to investigate the fiasco. Several other investigations were undertaken over the years. Only decades later did Kimmel’s reputation come out from under a cloud. The Senate voted in 1998 to exonerate him and General Short and to restore them to rank. This was ignored by the Department of Defense, but Kimmel’s grandson continues the fight.
But FDR got the war he wanted – and the war the United States had to enter if the world was to be saved from Hitler’s murderers and Hirohito’s barbarians.
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Patrick, I have maybe a dozen books on the subject, but the one that ties things together best is "Day of Deceit" by Robert Stinnett. The great naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison, who initially blamed the Pearl Harbor commanders, in later years admitted he was wrong.
Do you have any comments on the actions of MacArthur in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor?Arguably one our most brilliant military commanders, with the exception of post Pearl Harbor and the Chosin Reservoir, he too had all his planes lined up in a row for Japanese target practice and went into a 24 funk of inaction after the attack.
MacArthur acted dazed, like Andrew Jackson and Napoleon at various times when battle raged. He was sequestered and his staff -- more a court than a staff, as someone remarked -- kept others from seeing him. EIGHT hours passed before he was able to function. The general who commanded his air force was turned away twice when he came to plead for air strikes or at least reconnaissance over the Japanese airfields in Formosa from whence came the bombers that destroyed nearly all of MacArthur's air assets as the pilots and crew sat down to lunch. Many had hangovers because they had a farewell party the night before instead of flying their airplanes out of reach as they were supposed to. MacArthur should have been court-martialed for his negligence, but events moved so swiftly that the country needed him as a heroic figure to rally around before the sluggish peacetime army general staff loaded with deadwood could get around to it.
But the intent of my question was, Did he know it was coming?
Patrick wrote: "But the intent of my question was, Did he know it was coming?"How could he not? His command knew Pearl Harbor was attacked almost as soon as it happened. Putting yourself in his shoes, what would you do -- nothing? That's what MacArthur did. Even his biographer, William Manchester, was baffled by this behavior. MacArthur's orders said not to strike the first blow against Japan, but the first blow had already struck in Pearl Harbor. In the absence of anything factual about him on that day, I had tried to imagine it based on various sources. This is what I came up with from the point of view of my protagonist, Lowell Brady (MacArthur is speaking, referring to himself, as he often did, in the third person:
“They telephoned to say Pearl Harbor had been attacked,” he said. “I dressed and came here at once. After orders were issued, I withdrew to compose my thoughts. Feeling a strange weakness, I sank to the floor. Contemporary accounts say Napoleon was confused and uncomprehending at Waterloo. I never understood before how so great a commander could become a sleepwalker at such a supreme moment, but in his defense it seems not uncommon. Washington was in a daze at the Battle of Brandywine, and Jackson similarly afflicted at a critical moment at White Oak Swamp where he sat on a stump with eyes closed. Matters take on a phantasmagorical aspect. You barely grasp one idea before another takes its place. One is overwhelmed, drowned by the melee of fact and supposition and the emotions they release. Given a few more months, General MacArthur could have put these islands in a position beyond any aspiration of success by an aggressor. There is brandy in that cabinet. Pour a good measure for me.”
I poured myself a stout one as well and we clinked glasses.
“Brandy was the soldiers’ great comfort in the trenches,” he said. “Hell almost certainly is a place of cold and mud rather than the fiery pit warned of by ecclesiastical authority.”
We sipped in silence while he thought. “I had hoped my dear Filipinos would be spared the mailed fist of Mars, but it wasn’t to be. Such are the exigencies of Fate.”
He went on in that regard for a while, man proposes but God disposes and et cetera. It looked like Hart was right; some say he was a military genius and maybe their right, but at the same time the man was a mystic.
The Man Himself
The mighty oak or the bamboo, which would you rather be in a high wind?
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If you read the books in my series (Tom O'Brien: OSS Agent) you will note that although I regard FDR as an inspirational leader who led us through the Depression and the war, I also believe he was capable of deception and outright treachery to accomplish his political goals. He made an art form out of compartmentalizing information and creating leadership in his political and military leadership. And like all presidents, sometimes he was just wrong.
I do agree with you that FDR wanted us in the war in Europe and continued to provoke the Axis powers to evoke a response he could use to overcome the isolationist forces resisting involvement, but I will have to do some more reading on the material you set out to agree he specifically knew the attack on Pearl Harbor was imminent.