At morning’s end Eleanor Roosevelt had a party of thirty guests—friends, relatives, and people to whom she owed invitations—to lunch in the Blue Room of the White House. The President begged off, pleading a cold and a headache. Roosevelt and Hopkins took lunch at the President’s desk.
After lunch—at 1:40 p.m.—the telephone rang. It was Navy Secretary Knox. He told the President that the navy had picked up an air raid alarm from its base at Pearl Harbor, outside Honolulu, on the island of Oahu in Hawaii, and that it was not a drill. “No!” said Roosevelt.
Hopkins said it must be a mistake; Japan would not attack in Hawaii. FDR disagreed; it was what Japan would do precisely because nobody expected it.
Hopkins and Roosevelt did nothing for the next twenty minutes or so, while the President thought things through. Then FDR phoned Hull, who was scheduled to receive Japan’s envoys—at their request—to accept a message they said they wished to deliver. FDR told Hull to hear them out icily, but to volunteer no information of the attack.
As the navy had not told the army, FDR called Stimson, who thought the President was talking about a Japanese attack in the Gulf of Siam. “Oh, no,” said the President, “I don’t mean that. They are attacking Hawaii. They are now bombing Hawaii.”
At 2:20 FDR received a phone call from Admiral Stark, who supplied the first details of the attack. At 2:30 Roosevelt called in his press secretary and dictated a news release. A half hour later he dictated a further press release.
At 3:00 the President met with Hull, Stimson, Knox, Stark, and Marshall. Even before the attack it had been their view that the United States had to get into the European war, and that the Japanese had supplied the opportunity. But they agreed that the war would be long and serious.
Phone calls kept coming in. FDR’s friend Henry Morgenthau phoned from a New York City hotel. His chauffeur had just driven him and his family back from a two-hour Sunday lunch at Voisin, a luxurious French restaurant only a few blocks away. As Treasury secretary, he had an official Coast Guard twin-engine airplane at his disposal with which to return to the capital. Morgenthau put so much heroic self-dramatization into the tones with which he said “Sir, I have just heard the news.… I’ll fly right back to Washington” that Roosevelt teased: “Be careful you don’t get shot down, Henry.”
In midafternoon, U.S. Ambassador John Winant in London phoned the White House and put Churchill on the line. “Mr. President, what’s this I hear about Japan?” the prime minister asked. “It’s quite true,” said Roosevelt. “They have attacked us at Pearl Harbor. We are all in the same boat now.”
Edward R. Murrow’s wife, Janet, called to say that she assumed the White House dinner to which she and her husband were invited that night was to be canceled. No, said Eleanor Roosevelt, who took the call, “We still have to eat. We still want you to come.”
Crowds gathered outside the White House to watch the famous figures arrive. When the Murrows arrived for dinner at eight, they had to make their way through throngs inside as well as out. In the family dining room Mrs. Roosevelt served them and a few friends and relatives scrambled eggs, milk, and pudding.
FDR ate in his study, where he received a stream of visitors. Beer and sandwiches were served to the politicians and officials who circulated through the corridors of the President’s mansion. At 8:20 the first cabinet member arrived—Jesse Jones, the secretary of commerce—followed by Vice President Wallace, then the others, with Navy’s Knox last of all.
The Murrows rose to leave after dinner, but although Mrs. Murrow returned to their hotel, he stayed on when Mrs. Roosevelt asked him to wait to see the President. Seated on a bench in the hallway, he watched the cabinet members go to their meeting with FDR and Hopkins in the Oval Office with “amazement and anger” on their faces.
Roosevelt asked Knox to brief the cabinet, some of whose members knew little about what had happened.* He then read out loud the draft of a message to Congress—which, except for a sentence suggested by Hopkins, he had written himself—asking for a declaration of war. Welles and Hull had a draft of their own, which was long and detailed; humoring them, FDR promised to consider it. Somebody suggested tying in Germany to his war message, but the President ruled that out: he did not have evidence of German collusion in the Japanese attack.
After the cabinet concluded, Roosevelt met with congressional leaders, with whom he agreed on a time for him to address a joint session of the House and the Senate the following day, December 8. They decided to schedule his speech for shortly after noon. He did not say what he was going to tell the two houses of Congress when he spoke to them, nor did he inform them that he was going to ask for a declaration of war.
About a half hour after midnight, the President sent everyone home to bed.
FEW MILITARY DEBACLES seem more difficult to understand or can have been so exhaustively studied as the American failure to anticipate an attack on Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt wanted Germany or, if that were not possible, Japan to attack somewhere in the world, but not to do significant damage: sinking an American merchant vessel on the high seas might have accomplished his goal. The last thing in the world that America’s big-navy President wanted was to lose his battleship fleet at the outset of a war.
Warnings were ignored or misunderstood—but by everyone, not just the country’s military and civilian leaders. If there was a plot to leave the country open to attack, all Americans were party to it. Claims that FDR—and therefore, necessarily, Stimson, Knox, Marshall, and Stark—deliberately allowed the assault to happen are ridiculous for many reasons, but not least because they fail to come to grips with the fact that an almost willful refusal to recognize that the Japanese really were attacking can be found at every level of the armed forces, down to the lowliest. At Pearl Harbor, the approaching Japanese armada was sighted by radar; but the soldier who reported it was told to forget it—that it must be American forces the radar was picking up. From one end of the Pacific to the other, the story was the same: either nobody was on duty, or the person on duty saw a blip on the screen, awakened a lieutenant to report it, and was told to disregard it by the lieutenant, who then rolled over and went back to sleep.
“Living in a different world”: that, it will be remembered, was a British military appreciation of the American military at the Atlantic Conference. The Americans engaged in drills, exercises, and war games. Young American soldiers and sailors never had responded to a military alert that was real—which was why on December 7 their reaction was to turn off the alarm and go back to sleep. They were peacetime people with peacetime priorities. They arrived late, left early, and took off weekends.
A vivid illustration of the mentality that led to Pearl Harbor was provided in the Philippines the following day. Word of the Japanese attack had been received. MacArthur knew that the Japanese had destroyed the American airplanes in Hawaii lined up in a row on the ground; orders had been received by MacArthur’s air commander from the chief of the army air force in Washington to disperse all U.S. planes at Clark and other fields so that the same thing would not happen in the Philippines.
Yet nine hours after MacArthur learned of the Pearl Harbor attack, his airplanes—including the large fleet of B-17s that were supposed to win the Pacific war for America—were still lined up neatly at Clark and the other fields, as though intended for Japanese target practice. With no experience of warfare with modern weapons, MacArthur had not provided for enough fighter protection for his bombers, nor for antiaircraft defenses for his airfields, nor for adequate radar.
When a lone American radar operator at Iba Field, eighty-five miles from Manila, picked up the blip on the screen that was the Japanese armada of 200 warplanes en route to the Philippine airfields, warnings were sent to Clark by teletype, radio, and telephone. The teletype message did not get through because the teletypist at Clark was out to lunch. The radio went out of commission—perhaps jammed by the Japanese, perhaps in need of repair. The telephone call went through, however. The lieutenan
t at Clark who answered it took the message and promised to pass the word of the impending attack “at the earliest opportunity,” but in the end did not tell anyone. Perhaps he had heard alarms before and nothing had happened. In the real world, his real world, airplanes did not rain down bombs that exploded. Nor did anyone fire live ammunition—at Americans. Those were things that happened only in the movies.
When Marshall heard the news that MacArthur had allowed his air fleet, too, to be destroyed on the ground, hours after having been told of Pearl Harbor—after having been warned, and after having been explicitly told by Washington to disperse the planes—he could hardly believe it. But when scholars after the war studied the story of the road to Pearl Harbor, they found it difficult to understand Marshall’s behavior, either. How had he allowed himself to fall asleep at the wheel? Why had he not seen that the attack on Hawaii was coming? Why had he not put America’s armed forces on a proper alert?
In part it was because Marshall and his top commanders believed that a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was impossible: that the American fortress on Oahu was invulnerable, and that the range of Japanese weapons capability did not extend that far. In part it may have been a racist belief that the Japanese could not pose a real threat to white people, that they were “natives” who could be defeated easily. Then, too, there was a cry-wolf aspect to the ominous signs Marshall detected that Japan would strike soon; the United States had received so many warnings of attacks on so many places in Asia and the Pacific for so long that it could not give credence to, or respond to, them all. A constraint on the Roosevelt administration was that it did not want to go on a military alert so sudden, conspicuous, or alarming that isolationist senators could charge that Roosevelt was provoking an enemy attack. Even without that constraint, it might not have been possible for Washington on a moment’s notice to wake up America’s dormant armed forces. A peacetime army rarely knows how to go on an effective alert; soldiers and their weapons usually have to undergo the test of combat to learn how to function properly and to correct the inevitable flaws in performance.
But above all, what seems to have been responsible for the mental blackout of Americans as the Japanese moved to attack was an enormous failure of the imagination. Americans could not believe that a country overseas ever would attack American territory. The Atlantic and the Pacific, policed by the Royal Navy, always had shielded the United States. Americans took the shield for granted; most were unaware why it was there, and therefore gave no thought to the possibility that it might be there no longer.
In 1853–54 American warships commanded by Mrs. Joseph Grew’s great-granduncle Matthew Perry forced Japan to come out of its secure isolation to take part in the affairs of the rest of the world. Japanese warplanes performed the same service for the United States in 1941.
A FAIR INDICATION of the state of mind of civilian America on December 7 was provided, as many have remarked, at Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C., where the local football team, the Redskins, played its final game of the season against the Philadelphia Eagles. Messages kept arriving for journalists, military personnel, and government officials telling them of the Japanese attack and calling them out of the stands and to their stations. But the sellout crowd refused to be distracted from the game.
The stadium management would not announce the Japanese attack over the public address system, a decision approved by the owner of the Redskins, who explained that Pearl Harbor was not sports news. The Washington bureau chief of INS sent an employee to the White House to cover the war story while he himself remained at the stadium to watch the end of the game. The Washington Post headline the following day was “WAR’S OUTBREAK IS DEEP SECRET TO 27,702 REDSKIN GAME FANS.”
ON DECEMBER 8, Americans began to take precautions.
The news of Pearl Harbor brought the Archibald MacLeishes rushing back from the Dean Achesons’ country home in Maryland, where the two couples had spent the weekend. As librarian of Congress, MacLeish had prepared a contingency plan that he began putting into effect. To the invulnerable vaults of Fort Knox, Kentucky, he shipped for safekeeping the icons of the American political faith: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Gutenberg Bible, and the Magna Carta.
At the White House, it struck the Secret Service that the President now needed extra protection against assassination. He was scheduled to address Congress after noon; early in the morning Mike Reilly, the Secret Service chief, began looking for a bulletproof limousine in which to drive him there. Federal regulations prevented the government from buying any automobile that expensive, but Reilly got hold of an armored limousine the Treasury had seized from Chicago gangster chieftain Al Capone when convicting him. Reilly washed it, oiled it, filled it up with gas, and brought it around to the White House to transport the President.
“I hope Mr. Capone won’t mind,” said FDR. Woodrow Wilson had been the first President to ride to his inauguration in an automobile; now his successor was the first to ride in an armored car. America was moving rapidly into the twentieth century.
The President had asked Wilson’s widow to accompany Mrs. Roosevelt to the joint session of Congress assembling to hear him that day. Shortly after noon Eleanor Roosevelt seated herself next to Edith Galt Wilson in the White House gallery in the chambers of the House of Representatives.
Roosevelt entered, was greeted by loud applause, and spoke—unlike Wilson in 1917, out of whose shadow he was walking—with calculated brevity and understatement. He branded December 7 a date that “will live in infamy” and asked for a declaration of war against Japan. He did not show his concern that Germany now might pull back from the brink—an unnecessary concern, as it turned out, for within days Hitler kept his word to Japan: Germany declared war on the United States. So did Italy.
The ancient Romans had a deity named Janus whom they depicted as having opposite heads, looking both backward and forward at the same time. Like him, the President looked back: in bringing the two First Ladies together in the gallery on that historic occasion, stressing unity and continuity, he evoked the spirits of Eleanor’s uncle and of Edith’s husband, the presiding geniuses under whom he and his generation had served their apprenticeships in world affairs. It was in making their way between the strongly contrasting views and instincts of those two powerful antagonists that he and his peers had achieved their intellectual formation and had tried to answer for themselves the question of what role the United States should play in the world outside the Western Hemisphere.
Like Janus, too, the President looked forward. Under his leadership, the country was plunging into a war to be fought against great odds and on an unprecedented scale. At stake was nothing less than all the future of the human race. As their first blunderings at Pearl Harbor and in the Philippines had shown, Americans were embarking in waters they had not yet fathomed. Children of TR but also of Woodrow Wilson; products of the Great War, the roaring jazz age, and the Great Depression; they were now, however incomplete their education, called upon to leave schooling behind and to take the field.
Janus, who took his name from the entrance door, was the god of beginnings. As FDR’s Americans set out upon their voyage into the unknown, the god must have given them his most especial blessing.
* Some 190 Japanese carrier-based aircraft had attacked, followed by a second wave of 170; 2,403 Americans were killed and 1,178 were wounded. Eight battleships and ten other ships were destroyed or seriously damaged, and almost all American military aircraft on the island of Oahu—some 347 in all—were destroyed. Only the aircraft carriers, which happened to be at sea, escaped damage.
CODA
A BRIEF TOUR OF THE AMERICAN AGE
50
THE MAGNIFICENT COUNTRY
THE INDUSTRIAL EXPRESSWAY was built in 1942. The road stretched from Detroit to the new bomber factory at Willow Run, Michigan, some thirty miles away. On it, workers, raw materials, and component parts were brought from the city to the industrial wor
ks. As a British commentator recently observed, “By 1943 (when Willow Run was turning out a B-24 bomber every hour) the expressway was an artery of what was then almost certainly the world’s greatest centre of high-technology manufacturing.… Germany was being defeated by Detroit. The engines of the Red Army’s tanks were made in Michigan.”
The road became a symbol of America’s awesome productive capacity. It was one element that went to make up the picture the world had of the United States in the 1940s. Another was the bountifulness of American agriculture. Above all, there was the country’s apparently inexhaustible supplies of raw materials and money.
The abundance was allied to generosity. Fixed forever in the photo album of twentieth-century memories are the shots of American soldiers—GIs—giving candy bars and chewing gum to Europe’s deprived children.
Compared especially with the emaciated children in the photos, the GIs were big. A healthy diet had made them tall, but they were big people, too, in other than the physical sense. They had a bigness of spirit. While Europeans focused on their own narrow interests and were splintered into classes and clans separated by blood feuds, Americans pictured themselves—and were pictured by others—as people who rose above differences and divisions and thought in terms not just of their own village or pasture or river valley, but of the globe itself.
Nobody better embodied their liberality and greatness than did their President. FDR infused wartime America with his own carefree and forward-looking spirit. When he announced production goals for aircraft or tanks that experts derided as absurdly high, he did so because he knew that Americans would rise to a daunting challenge—and would enjoy doing so. They liked to feel that nothing was beyond them.
In the Time of the Americans Page 58
