What happened? Four years later, with the war won and Congress investigating the catastrophe over which Kimmel and Short had presided, the question was still unanswered. That the commanding officers had failed was evident enough, but why? Part of the answer may lie in the fact that Americans, for complex reasons that included racial chauvinism, had never taken the Japanese people seriously. They were such funny little men, with their thick spectacles, buck teeth, and bowlegs. Everyone knew America might go to war with them, but no one believed it. It was both inevitable and out of the question. On August 11 Time reported that “the Navy is fairly well off with its… own defenses”; on November 24 it declared that official Washington felt the chances “were nine-to-ten that Japan and the U.S. would go to war”; and in its December 8 issue, which was on the presses when the base on Oahu was going up in flames, Time reflected the general confidence: “From Rangoon to Honolulu, every man was at battle stations.”
Every Japanese was at battle stations, and troop formations were poised to strike at Manila, Hong Kong, Malaya. Months of planning and rehearsal had gone into this coordinated effort. Secrecy had been perfect; no word of the offensive, not even a rumor, had reached foreign agents. And yet, in the end, the Japs bungled it. They had outfoxed themselves. The crux of their diplomatic maneuver had been to declare war on the United States and then bomb Pearl Harbor, before the dazed Americans could respond. In the 1970s, after a quarter-century of undeclared hostilities, this may seem too fine a point, but in 1941 most great powers did not make war until the declaration had been made. To do otherwise was considered treacherous.
The schedule drawn up in Tokyo required the two Japanese envoys in Washington to telephone Hull at 10:20 A.M. on December 7 and ask for a 1 P.M. appointment. Tokyo was cabling a fourteen-point message to its Washington embassy, the last part of which contained a carefully worded end of diplomatic relations—in effect a war declaration. Twenty minutes after Hull had the document, the carrier-borne warplanes would swarm over Pearl Harbor. At 10:20 A.M. Nomura obediently arranged the appointment—and then made a dreadful discovery. Yesterday, when he left his embassy, his decoders had been working on the long document. Now, to his horror, he learned that the decoders had quit work early Saturday and would need two or three hours to finish. It was nearly 11 A.M. They were fighting the clock, and they couldn’t beat it.
At 12:32 P.M. Eastern Standard Time (7:02 A.M. in Hawaii) a radar operator on Oahu reported the imminent arrival of a large force of aircraft. His superior officer told him to forget it, that the blips were probably U.S. planes coming from the mainland. At 1:20 P.M. Washington time the attack on Pearl Harbor began. At 1:48 P.M. the Navy’s traffic chief was called to the Washington-Honolulu circuit by an alert to stand by for an urgent message from the Honolulu operator. At 1:50 it came in:
NPM 1516
Z ØF2 183Ø ØF3 ØF4 Ø2FØ 0
FROM: CINCPAC
ACTION: CINCLANT CINCAF OPNAV
AIR RAID ON PEARL HARBOR THIS IS NOT A DRILL
Nomura and Kurusu reached the old State, War and Navy Building at 2:05 P.M., and they were a sorry sight. For three hours they had been struggling with codes and hunting and pecking on typewriters. The message was marred by typographical errors, but they hadn’t had time for another draft. As they entered the building, Hull’s phone rang. It was the President. He quickly gave his Secretary of State the few scraps of information which had come in, confirming what they already knew from Signal Corps decoding. Meet Nomura and Kurusu, Roosevelt ordered Hull; don’t mention Pearl Harbor, and then icily bow them out.
The Japanese envoys were ushered into his office at 2:21 P.M. Nomura held out the translation and said apologetically, “I was instructed to hand this reply to you at 1:00 P.M.”
His voice trembling with anger, Hull said, “Why should it be handed to me at 1 P.M.?”
“I do not know why,” said Nomura.1
Glancing at the translation, Hull said bitterly, “I must say that in all my conversations with you during the last nine months I have never uttered one word of untruth…. In all my fifty years of public service I have never seen a document that was more crowded with infamous falsehoods and distortions—infamous falsehoods and distortions on a scale so huge that I never imagined until today that any government on this planet was capable of uttering them.”
Nomura moved to speak; Hull dismissed him with a curt nod toward the door.
Moments later Associated Press tickers chimed in the country’s newsrooms:
FLASH
WASHINGTON—WHITE HOUSE SAYS JAPS ATTACK PEARL HARBOR
222PES
Curiously, only one network interrupted a program for the start of the war. Len Sterling, staff announcer for the Mutual Broadcasting System, broke into a professional football game between the Dodgers and the Giants at the Polo Grounds. NBC and CBS continued with a Sammy Kaye serenade and a program of studio music; both networks had scheduled news broadcasts at 2:30, and they decided to let their listeners wait until then. Meanwhile, more was coming in:
BULLETIN
WASHINGTON, DEC. 7 (AP) PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT SAID IN A STATEMENT TODAY THAT THE JAPANESE HAD ATTACKED PEARL HARBOR, HAWAII, FROM THE AIR.
THE ATTACK OF THE JAPANESE ALSO WAS MADE ON ALL NAVAL AND MILITARY “ACTIVITIES” ON THE ISLAND OF OAHU.
THE PRESIDENT’S BRIEF STATEMENT WAS READ TO REPORTERS BY STEPHEN EARLY, PRESIDENTIAL SECRETARY. NO FURTHER DETAILS WERE GIVEN IMMEDIATELY.
AT THE TIME OF THE WHITE HOUSE ANNOUNCEMENT, THE JAPANESE AMBASSADORS KICHISABURO NOMURA AND SABURO KURUSU, WERE AT THE STATE DEPARTMENT.
FLASH
WASHINGTON—SECOND AIR ATTACK REPORTED ON ARMY AND NAVY BASES IN MANILA.
The second flash was a rumor; the Philippines were to have a day’s grace—though when the Jap Zeros did arrive, they found that MacArthur, like Short, had huddled his planes together, and in the middle of Clark Field they were gutted just as easily. The radio networks, having canceled all scheduled programs, were now putting everything they could get on the air, including some canards.
Millions of Americans first learned of the attack when they turned on their radios to hear the CBS broadcast of the New York Philharmonic concert at 3 P.M., and one of them was Rear Admiral Chester Nimitz. He was waiting for his set to warm up; at the announcer’s first phrase (“Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor today”), Nimitz was up and away—to replace, it subsequently developed, Pearl’s unfortunate Admiral Kimmel. Simultaneously a telephone rang at Fort Sam Houston, arousing Brigadier General Eisenhower. His wife heard him say, “Yes? When? I’ll be right down,” and then he was running for the door, dressing as he went and calling over his shoulder to her that he was on his way to headquarters and didn’t know when he would be back.
Inevitably, some reactions were odd. Len Sterling, who had interrupted WHN’s account of the football game at the Polo Grounds, was being hounded by calls from infuriated fans who wanted to know what was happening on the field. The same was true in Phoenix, where people were phoning the Arizona Republic to say irritably, “Have you got any score on the game between the Chicago Bears and the Cardinals? Aren’t you getting anything besides that war stuff?” In Denver a KFEL religious program was canceled; a caller wanted to know whether the station considered war news more important than the gospel. A girl in Palm Springs said, “Everybody knew it was going to happen, so why spoil a perfectly good Sunday afternoon worrying about it?” In New Jersey an elderly man cackled, “Ha! You got me on that Martian stunt; I had a hunch you’d try it again.” A reporter asked Senator Nye his reaction. The senator, who perhaps could hear the bell of political oblivion tolling in the distance, growled, “Sounds terribly fishy to me.”
But Senator Wheeler caught the national mood: “The only thing to do now is to lick hell out of them.” So divided had the country been before this Sunday that President Roosevelt, at a White House lunch the week before, said he doubted he could get a declaration of war out of Congress if the Japs invad
ed the Philippines. Now the country was united as it had never been. The sneak attack, the presence of two Japanese ambassadors in Washington pretending to negotiate peace, and an old distrust of what some still called the Yellow Peril combined to transform the war into a crusade against treacherous Orientals.
***
“No!” the President had gasped when the Secretary of the Navy telephoned him the news. Like Knox, Roosevelt had thought that the first blow would fall on the Philippines. No American officer, including General Marshall, had expected a carrier strike on Hawaii now, because Hirohito’s crack divisions were in Indochina, ready to jump off for Malaya, Singapore, and the oil fields of the Netherlands East Indies. Pearl Harbor wasn’t anywhere near this corridor of advance. Pearl was a logical target in war games, but in the context of the December 1941 strategic picture it seemed almost irrelevant. Now they saw the bitter truth. The enemy had decided to win in a stroke by sinking the Navy. Except for the American aircraft carriers, which had been at sea, Tokyo had made a good job of it. All eight battleships had been knocked out, with the three cruisers and many destroyers. The United States no longer had a Pacific Fleet.
After calling Hull, the President of the United States did nothing for eighteen minutes. He may have been praying, or planning, or merely adjusting to the new situation. He sat perfectly still. Then he looked up and personally dictated the first news bulletin. He was composed, and so, to a remarkable degree, was the capital. There were exceptions; some zealous superpatriot chopped down one of the Japanese cherry trees around the tidal basin, Civil Defense Director Fiorello La Guardia was racing around in a sirening police cruiser yelling “Calm! Calm! Calm”—and announcing over the radio, “We are not out of the danger zone by any means”—while a crowd gathered across the street from the Japanese embassy watching the smoke of burning diplomatic papers rise from the chimney and looking, as one woman said, like “a lynch mob I once saw in Valdosta, Georgia.”
There was no necktie party at the embassy, La Guardia collected himself, the rest of the cherry trees remained intact, and the President was working swiftly and efficiently. He called in the cabinet, talked to Churchill on the transatlantic phone, briefed the congressional leadership, ordered guards around defense plants, advised Hull to keep South American governments informed, and reviewed the Army’s troop dispositions with Marshall. Ed Murrow, who had heard the news while golfing on the Burning Tree course, had assumed their dinner engagement would be canceled, but Mrs. Roosevelt called Janet Murrow and said, “We all have to eat. Come anyway.”
They ate, though the President’s chair was empty. The Executive Mansion’s lovely oval study had abruptly become the commander in chief’s general headquarters. While Sumner Welles stood by, Roosevelt dictated tomorrow’s war message, and from time to time, when a door was opened, his resonant voice could be heard in the hall: “Yesterday comma December seventh comma nineteen forty-one dash a date which will live in infamy dash the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan period. Paragraph The United States was at peace with that nation and comma at the solicitation of Japan comma was still in conversation with that government and its Emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace….”
Murrow thought he ought to go, but several times the First Lady left the table, and she always returned with a message from the President: he wanted Murrow to stay. At 11 P.M. Janet went home. It was a half-hour after midnight when Roosevelt, obviously exhausted, invited the commentator to share a tray of sandwiches and beer. He took Murrow into his confidence, described the damage at Pearl, and told him that every member of the administration responsible for defense—himself, Knox, Stimson—was incredulous. They just couldn’t understand how a major military base could have been so vulnerable, could have suffered such losses. He was still stunned, still angry.
“Our planes were destroyed on the ground!” he said again and again, pounding his fist on the table. “On the ground!”
***
Across Pennsylvania Avenue, in Lafayette Park, anonymous Washingtonians stood in a dense mass that evening. Some were singing “God Bless America,” but most of them stared up at the White House in silence. There wasn’t much to see. The Executive Mansion was dark; the great light over the north portico was unlit for the first time in memory. Already Henrietta Nesbitt, the mansion’s housekeeper, was taking measurements for blackout curtains. West Executive Avenue had been closed to traffic; it passed too near the President’s office. In the White House basement engineers were chalking off the entry for a tunnel which would pass beneath East Executive Avenue and enter the old vaults under the Treasury Building—the safest shelter in Washington if the capital should be bombed.
Secretary Morgenthau had ordered the White House guard doubled. On the roof of the old State, War and Navy Building, over the room where Hull had confronted the wretched Japanese envoys, soldiers worked in the dark siting antiaircraft guns, and the fifth floor of the old structure was being transformed into a barracks for the troops who would man the guns. At the time none of these precautions seemed extravagant.
Downstairs Marshall was leaving. A presidential adviser asked him about conflicting rumors from Hawaii. Every war has its rumors, the general said, and sometimes it was impossible for anyone to distinguish between myth and reality. He explained: “We’re now in the fog of battle.”
In Chicago a newsstand was mobbed by people trying to buy Tribune extras. In passing, a stocky woman said to a stranger, “What’s this?” He replied, “We’re at war, lady, for crying out loud.” She said, “Well, what do you know. Who with?” The anecdote enjoyed a brief vogue during the next few days, and was usually worth a chuckle. Actually the question was highly relevant. The President was committed to an Atlantic first strategy. When Churchill phoned him that afternoon and asked “Mr. President, what’s this about Japan?” Roosevelt replied that yes, it was true: “They have attacked us at Pearl Harbor. We are all in the same boat now.” But were they? The nation’s shock and anger were directed at the Japanese. The outrage at Pearl couldn’t be blamed on Nazis. Emotional as the Congress was, it would probably balk at involvement in a two-front war. Even if it went along with war declarations against the European Axis, the country would be divided again, and morale, now so high, would dive.
Luckily for the Allied cause, Adolf Hitler was no longer entirely rational. He had begun to crack under the strain of the Russian campaign. Increasingly he was given to uncontrollable rages and decisions guided by intuition—by what he called his “artistic” side. On December 8 he left his Wolfsschanze headquarters in East Prussia and hurried back to Berlin by train; the Japanese were invoking the Tripartite Pact. Hitler could have ignored Tokyo. It wouldn’t be the first solemn pledge he had made and then broken, and the nature of the Pearl attack could have been called an extenuating circumstance; the text of the treaty bound Germany and Italy to assist Japan only in case of an attack on Japan itself. If the Führer turned his back on Tokyo he could scarcely have been punished. Japan and Germany were on opposite sides of the globe, with the Soviet Union between them.
So his advisers argued. With the exception of Ribbentrop, who vacillated, the men around Hitler begged him not to add the United States to his long list of anti-Nazi belligerents while he chose this, of all times, to recall a verbal commitment he had made to Hirohito’s foreign minister: “If Japan should go to war with the United States, Germany, for her part, would immediately take the necessary steps at once.” He argued, “if we don’t stand on the side of Japan, the pact is politically dead.” The Nazi leadership was unconvinced. The debate raged day and night between December 8 and December 11—an anxious time in Tokyo—and then Hitler conceded that his true motive was vengeance. Frustrated by the endless steppes of Russia, he had been seething more and more over the behavior of American destroyers in the Atlantic. In short, Roosevelt’s accelerating provocations had driven the Führer to the end of his tether after all. Ac
cording to the Nuremberg documents, Hitler said that the “chief reason” for opening formal hostilities “is that the United States is already shooting against our ships. They have been a forceful factor in this war and through their actions have already created a situation of war.” Thereupon he proclaimed a state of war against America. Mussolini followed suit—by now he was entirely the Führer’s creature—and suddenly Roosevelt’s problem was solved. Congress had no choice; it reciprocated later that same Thursday. Dean Acheson, who thought Hitler was acting with “colossal folly,” later wrote, “At last Our enemies, with unparalleled stupidity, resolved our dilemmas, clarified our doubts and uncertainties, and united our people for the long, hard course that the national interest required.”
II
SACRIFICE AND TRANSFORMATION
1941–1950
NINE
Counterattack
“The Jap,” as MacArthur called the enemy—nearly everyone else called Japanese “Nips,” short for “Dai Nippon,” the Japanese word for their homeland—may have been the most underrated infantry weapon in history. On parade he resembled a poorly wrapped parcel of brown paper—soiled, crumpled, and threatening to come apart. His leggings were sloppy, his blouse bulged, his trousers were baggy, and his bandy legs were ridiculously short. The image was deceptive, but illusions die hard; even after the ax fell at Pearl, Admiral William F. Halsey Jr. predicted Japan would be crushed by 1943, and at home jukeboxes rasped, “Goodbye, Mama, I’m off to Yokohama,” and “I’m gonna slap a dirty little Jap.” Any barhop could tell you: America had been winning battles since 1775, and had never lost a war.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 39
