In the Time of the Americans

by David Fromkin

  Because of design changes, production of the B-17 “flying fortress” came to a halt during the summer; only one bomber was turned out in July. There were also design problems with naval vessels coming out of the docks. New-product development was not yet completed for many of the weapons systems; wrinkles had not yet been ironed out; smooth mass-production assembly lines were not in operation.

  So the President had to choose who was to get the scarce supplies—and decided to restrict the expansion of the American army in order to be able to send its equipment to the Soviet Union. He was placing a very heavy bet on Russia’s ability to survive—and giving high priority to keeping Japan from attacking her.

  JAPAN WAS AN ALLY of Germany and Italy by the terms of an Axis Pact reached in the autumn of 1940, in which the two European dictatorships recognized Japan’s right to dominate “Greater East Asia.” When she was on the verge of invading the British homeland, Germany encouraged Japan to attack the British empire in Asia and the Pacific. Minimizing the risk that the United States might then come to Britain’s aid, Hitler promised (April 4, 1941) that if America did intervene, Germany would declare war on her. But after invading Russia, Germany changed the order of her priorities. Hitler instead tried to persuade Japan to attack Russia, while FDR focused his attention on keeping Japan from doing so.

  For most of the twentieth century, the United States and Japan had been at odds. At issue was the question of China, whose independence and territorial integrity America wished to see respected, and whose markets America wished to see open to all. The quarrel intensified in 1931 with Japan’s invasion of northern China—Manchuria—and in 1937 with Japan’s attack on China proper. It heightened in July 1941 when Japan occupied French Indochina. Washington responded by freezing Japanese assets and by imposing a complex payments scheme that in effect rationed raw materials and oil sold to Japan. It was in the nature of an embargo, but was intended to be less than total.

  With no raw materials of her own, Japan was vulnerable to a cutoff of supplies, especially oil. The question was how she would react to it. Roosevelt told Ickes that “the Japs are having a real drag-down and knockout fight among themselves …” as to whether to attack north (i.e., Russia), south (i.e., Britain), or not at all. He said that “it is terribly important … for us to help to keep peace in the Pacific” because “I simply have not got enough Navy to go around.…” To have to send ships to the Pacific would weaken chances for America to win the battle of the Atlantic.

  U.S. policy took high risks in hopes of high rewards. If Japan backed down, Roosevelt, at no cost, would liberate both the Soviet Union and the United States from the threat of a two-front war. The risk was that embargoing Japan would instead drive her to fight, in which case the two-front war would not merely occur but would occur at the very worst time.

  Why not hold off from pressuring Japan? That was the strategy Walter Lippmann urged in 1940. He wrote that a conflict with Japan “must be avoided at all cost.… Japan cannot threaten the independence of any state in this hemisphere … whereas a victorious Germany can and will. For this reason it seems to me self-evident that we must find a basis of compromise with the Japanese.…”

  Yet when Japan occupied Indochina in July 1941, he favored an embargo: “economic paralysis” might check Japanese imperialism, he wrote. Stimson, who had considered imposing sanctions even in the 1931 crisis, said that history showed that if America took a firm stand, Japan would back down. Chiang Kai-shek, China’s leader, told FDR that sanctions would bring Japan to the peace table. A historian of the period has written that “Morgenthau, Ickes, Stanley K. Hornbeck, the State Department’s most senior Far Eastern advisor, congressional leaders, and, according to an opinion poll, 75 percent of the American public agreed.”

  But Roosevelt’s military chiefs feared that the embargo, far from bringing Japan to the peace table, risked igniting a war in the Pacific—which the United States could not afford for the time being. They seemed to be saying that in the spring of 1942 FDR could do whatever he liked in regard to Japan, but not now.

  The intelligence and war plans division of the army sent a memorandum November 1, 1941, to Marshall stating that “a primary objective of our policy should be to avoid a two-front war.…” America should avoid the risk of war with Japan now, “which would lessen the main effort against Germany. With Germany defeated, the Far Eastern situation can be readily retrieved.”

  The navy, too, worried that the administration’s policies might bring about a war against Japan prematurely. Admiral Stark initiated several meetings at which he and General Marshall warned the President and the State Department that America would not be ready to fight Japan until spring, and that war in the Pacific therefore had to be avoided at least until then. Stark and Marshall reiterated this point in a memorandum to the President November 5.

  The chief of staff explained it to the press, too. Seven Washington correspondents were called by the War Department early the morning of November 15 to attend a secret conference with General Marshall at 10:15 a.m. The seven consisted of representatives of the three wire services, AP, UP, and INS; of two newspapers, The New York Times and the Herald Tribune; and of two weekly newsmagazines, Time and Newsweek. According to notes of the meeting: “The U.S. is on the brink of war with the Japanese, said the General. Our position is highly favorable in this respect: We have access to a leak in all the information they are receiving.…” As a result the United States was aware that Japan did not know how powerful the U.S. position in the Philippines had become.

  By spring the United States would have so strong a bomber fleet in the Philippines that the American air force could destroy Japan. Marshall said that in the spring this information would be quietly leaked to the Japanese so that they could back down without losing face in public “and war might be averted. The last thing the U.S. wants is a war with Japanese which would divide our strength.”

  Marshall said that “if war with the Japanese does come, we’ll fight mercilessly. Flying fortresses will be dispatched immediately to set the paper cities of Japan on fire.” Marshall showed maps of Japanese bases throughout the Pacific, and explained that U.S. aircraft would destroy them all. “Our aim is to blanket the whole area with air power. Our own fleet, meanwhile, will remain out of range of Japanese air power, at Hawaii.”

  But this assumed that the American aircraft were in place. A problem would arise if the Japanese attacked before the Americans were ready, which is to say, before winter. “The danger period,” Marshall warned, “is the first ten days of December.”

  DURING THE DANGER PERIOD before the United States was militarily prepared, America would continue to supply Japan with oil and other strategic supplies, but only in limited quantities: that was the compromise on which FDR settled. He would keep the Japanese under pressure so as to exert a restraining influence, without exerting so much pressure as to drive them into doing something rash.

  In part because an oil shortage in the United States led to a domestic outcry that drove FDR to ban most exports, and in part because the newly appointed assistant secretary of state for economic affairs, Dean Acheson, zealously used bureaucratic obstructionism to prevent Japanese applications from being approved, the supply of oil to Japan was in fact cut off totally. By the time FDR realized what Acheson had done, he seems to have felt that it was too late to back down: he had to stay with the policy of placing a total embargo on oil shipments to Japan, or else risk seeming to appease her.

  Ambassador Grew had warned Roosevelt repeatedly that “if we once start sanctions against Japan we must see them through to the end, and the end may conceivably be war.” There were those who said that Japan, knowing the United States to be so much more powerful than herself, never would start a war because it would be suicidal. But Grew, in a cable to the State Department on November 3, warned that Japanese culture and thinking were quite different from America’s, and that the Japanese would make an “all-out, do-or-die” effort to break out
of economic strangulation “even to the point of risking national hara-kiri rather than yield to pressure from abroad.”

  The United States had deciphered one of the Japanese diplomatic codes, and routinely intercepted and often could read Japanese cables (a source of information the American government called “MAGIC”). From these it seemed there was much activity by Japanese officials in 1941 focused on the unwillingness of the Roosevelt administration to permit Japanese expansion to continue unchecked.

  But in the autumn of 1941, American military leaders believed the immediate future to be brighter than it was. Even Marshall had become infected with the excessive enthusiasm for the B-17 bomber that the others felt, and shared the belief that within months the Japanese military machine would be defenseless against it. Then, too, the recall of sixty-one-year-old Douglas MacArthur to active duty excited optimism. The lavishly paid field marshal of the Philippines, with his sense of theater and sense of destiny, was once again a working general in the United States Army, given three stars and command of the United States Army forces in the Far East. It was not yet evident what years of Oriental adulation, indolence, and luxury had done to him.

  MacArthur being MacArthur, he insisted that long-standing plans to abandon the Philippines in the event of war be changed. He proposed (as had his former aide Eisenhower, now with the Third Army in San Antonio) to gamble everything on stopping invaders of the 7,100 islands on the beaches—and Marshall approved. MacArthur expected the Japanese to invade in April 1942 with a limited number of troops, and he counted on his new B-17s to sink the fleet ferrying them to the attack. Neither MacArthur nor his fellow generals then knew, among other things, what difficulty a B-17 would have in trying to bomb a moving vessel.

  The important thing, FDR’s military chiefs kept telling him, was to stall the Japanese—to arrive at some temporary understanding with them, or at any rate to keep alive their hopes that negotiations might succeed. They had to be kept from attacking in 1941.

  IN 1941 three-quarters of Japan’s foreign trade and nine-tenths of her oil supplies had been cut off by the United States, Britain, and the Dutch East Indies. Japanese military leaders advised that their country’s economy would collapse by spring. The military machine would be paralyzed. For lack of fuel, ships would not be able to leave port, airplanes would not be able to fly, tanks would grind to a halt. The country’s existence was at stake. A decision was reached by the government’s ministers at an imperial conference November 5: Japan would go to war if the embargo were not lifted by November 25 or if diplomacy had not succeeded by December 1.

  From MAGIC and other sources, FDR learned in November 1941 that Japan would move south (rather than north against Russia), that the move somehow would involve the United States, and that the Japanese were working according to a timetable that required the United States to lift its embargo by November 25.

  Roosevelt was pulled by his military advisers to yield to Japan for the moment. But he was coaxed the other way by the need to reassure those who were fighting for the American cause. China was in dire straits. The battle of the Atlantic was being lost; the German U-boat fleet tripled in size in 1941, and as Stimson learned, the navy was “thoroughly scared about their inability to stamp out the sub menace.” In Russia the Germans had made a supreme effort: Guderian’s panzers were in the suburbs of Moscow and poised to encircle the capital city. FDR told Morgenthau November 26 that the situation in the Soviet Union was “awful” and that Moscow was “falling.”

  If America were seen to back down in the face of Japanese threats at that moment—with Allied fortunes, forces, and nerves all stretched to breaking point—might it not deprive the Allies of that last ounce of faith that kept them fighting? For FDR knew that a belief that the United States soon would come to the rescue sustained the leaders as well as the peoples who held out against the Axis powers; an act of appeasement might weaken that belief.

  Whether for that reason or another, the President refused to make concessions to Japan, however temporary. He did not know that at dawn November 26, Tokyo time, a Japanese naval striking force had begun the long voyage that would lead it to the Hawaiian Islands, but he did know that time was running out. He was aware that his decision to stand firm meant that Japan would attack—somewhere, and soon.

  He had been advised that the United States would have to enter the war against Germany sometime; “Stimson and Marshall feel that we can’t win without getting into the war but they have no idea how that is going to be accomplished,” Hopkins noted. FDR was understood by many to say that he could bring the country into the war only if Germany would attack. He then dared her to attack by sending his fleets to sink German U-boats, but the Germans did not rise to the provocation.

  Of course, he realized that in a sense it was too soon to enter the war against Germany. Until American production was sufficient to supply his own forces as well as Russia’s and Britain’s, the common cause was better served by staying out of it. And it would be best to overcome Germany before engaging in conflict against Japan.

  War with Japan in 1941 would be a war at the wrong time against the wrong country. But it was the only war the other side was willing to start; if Hitler honored his reiterated pledge to side with Japan, it could become the right war: the war FDR knew America was destined to fight.

  IT WAS A NOVEMBER EVENING in Washington. The dinner party was at the home of wealthy socialite Cissy Patterson, owner of the Washington Times Herald. As so often happened that year, the evening turned into an argument about the war. Senator Burton Wheeler, a Montana Republican who had opposed American participation in the Great War and had stood for isolationism for decades, attacked his fellow guest Undersecretary of the Navy James Forrestal. Wheeler said that war would bring misery to the country, and that the electorate would punish Roosevelt’s supporters if they brought America into it.

  As the evening went on, each of the guests was called upon to take a stand. One of the youngest, twenty-four-year-old Ensign John F. Kennedy, said that he had been an isolationist, but that his opinion was changing. He did not have to explain that it might be awkward for a son of Joe Kennedy’s to admit to such a shift, which in effect meant that he had gone over to the other side.

  Forrestal made it easier for the young sailor; he said that he had been an isolationist, too. But he had come to the conclusion “that America must be the dominant power of the 20th century.” Kennedy would record in his notes that Forrestal, speaking of Hitler, said: “We would have to fight him some day—it was best to take him on now, while we had allies.”

  THE WAR AND NAVY DEPARTMENTS put all American Pacific commands on alert November 24. Cordell Hull reported that negotiations with the Japanese in Washington had come to an impasse; the Pacific commands were warned that it was possible the Japanese might launch a surprise attack, perhaps on Guam or the Philippines.

  On November 27, with news arriving of vast Japanese convoys on the move, Stimson cabled an additional alert to MacArthur, telling him, however, that in case of war “THE UNITED STATES DESIRED THAT JAPAN COMMIT THE FIRST OVERT ACT.”

  President Roosevelt met with Hull, Stimson, Knox, and his two service chiefs, General Marshall and Admiral Stark, on Sunday, November 30. FDR told them he believed that Japan might attack as soon as the next day (Monday, December 1), “for the Japanese are notorious for making an attack without warning. The question is how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.”

  Yet December 1 came and went, with no Japanese attack. So did December 2.

  Unseen, unheard, undetected, on December 3 the Japanese striking force en route to Hawaii crossed the international date line on an unfrequented course on which it could expect to remain unobserved and to encounter no traffic.

  All attention was focused on Japanese armies and fleets visibly on the move in Southeast Asia and in the far western Pacific. Where were they headed? American and British observers could on
ly guess: Thailand, perhaps, or Borneo or Malaya. Marshall was certain it was the Philippines.

  ON DECEMBER 4, Robert McCormick’s fervently isolationist Chicago Tribune, in an effort to prove the administration was planning to enter the European conflict, printed the complete secret mobilization plans prepared by the U.S. Army and Navy for use in event of war. It was curious: only a quarter of a century before, McCormick had published stories proving that America was shockingly unprepared for war on the basis of secret information leaked to him by his then friend Navy Assistant Secretary Franklin Roosevelt.

  IN WASHINGTON, at 9:30 in the evening on Saturday, December 6, an assistant to the White House naval aide handed FDR a long cable, just decoded by MAGIC. It was a message from Tokyo to the Japanese ambassador to the United States. It instructed him to break off negotiations. The President was quick to grasp its implications: “This means war,” he told Hopkins, who agreed. Hopkins said he wished the country did not have to wait for Japan to attack at a time and place of her own choosing; it was too bad the United States could not strike the first blow. “No, we can’t do that,” said Roosevelt. “We are a democracy and a peaceful people.”

  Where would the Japanese attack? Roosevelt and Hopkins both mentioned countries in the vicinity of Japanese military bases in Indochina. For some time past, the President had worried aloud to Hopkins that Japan might invade British and Dutch possessions but not American ones, so as to make it politically difficult for him to commit America to the common defense effort.

  The following morning, Sunday, December 7, Roosevelt reread the Japanese message and discussed it with Hull, Knox, and Stimson, and took a less alarmist view of what it meant. Of course, it showed that negotiations were stalled. But it did not necessarily mean war—though Stimson noted that “Hull is very certain that the Japs are planning some deviltry and we are all wondering when the blow will strike.”