Smoke obscured vision as scorched shells cooked off, steam boilers exploded, and the harbor was swathed in thick, oily smoke. Men—ants scurrying over steel giants—swarmed in all directions, sprinting to action stations, diving for cover, swimming through blazing water, saving themselves. Sacrificing themselves.11
•
Walking the halls of the Munitions Building, the old lawyer was feeling his age. It had been a week of conferences, memoranda, cabinet meetings, and telephone calls, and the tired statesman with the shock of white hair ached for a rest. If he could shake loose from Washington, get away to his home on Long Island, he thought, he could catch up on some sorely needed sleep.12
But he wasn’t about to shake loose from Washington, or get home to Long Island, or catch up on his sleep. Things had gone from bad to worse—much worse—over the last twelve days. The president had rejected Japan’s last offer, and intercepted cables from Tokyo implied the Emperor’s diplomats were about to break off negotiations. The question on everyone’s mind was not whether Japan would fight, but when and where.13
So Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, Wall Street’s old Republican stalwart, would await his leader’s call.
On the morning of December 7, Stimson’s thoughts turned to a draft message President Roosevelt would deliver to Congress on the crumbling picture in the Far East. The president also wished to discuss Tokyo’s latest intercepted message, which seemed to herald a rupture in diplomatic relations.
Buckling his worn leather briefcase, Secretary Stimson made the six-block walk to the old State, War, and Navy Building next door to the White House. There he and Navy Secretary Frank Knox were ushered into the austere office of Secretary of State Cordell Hull, a colorful old-line liberal from middle Tennessee.
Stimson, Knox, and Hull were convinced that the Japanese were up to something. They mulled over what the president should tell Congress, but given the high stakes and ambiguity of Japan’s position, they reached few solid conclusions. The “War Cabinet,” as Stimson liked to call the group, broke up and went their separate ways. Stimson went home to lunch.
The clock’s hands had swept past the lunch hour when Stimson peered over his reading glasses at an approaching aide. There was phone call from the president, the aide said.
Stimson walked to the phone and picked up the receiver.
“Have you heard the news?” an excited voice asked.
“Well, I have heard the telegrams which have been coming in about the Japanese advances in the Gulf of Siam.”
“Oh, no, I don’t mean that,” said Franklin Roosevelt, his voice rising. “They have attacked Hawaii! They are now bombing Hawaii!”14
•
The second wave flew in from the east and tightened up for the attack run. Battleship Row was in flames, but the pilots who swarmed over the burning ships meant to leave nothing alive. Diving, climbing, pitching, and banking, they sent bombs and bullets flying in every direction.
The battleships Maryland, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania belched clouds of black smoke, their hulls and structures a mangled mess. The wounded Nevada, her boilers churning, managed to slip her cables and limp past Arizona’s sinking corpse.
As she pulled forward, Nevada drew the attention of some Val dive-bombers, which dipped their noses and dropped like ravenous hawks. Six bombs found their marks. Explosions rocked the battleship’s forestructure and bridge, and men were torn to shreds as flames drove back her fire crews. She steered hard to port and two tugs crashed into her side, heaving the shattered ship toward the relative safety of the beach.15
•
As the cruiser Augusta swayed on a gentle tide at Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay, her wiry fleet commander, Ernest J. King, settled down for his afternoon nap.
The admiral, known for his short temper, was recovering from another of his recent trips to Washington—visits to educate policy makers about strategy and U-boats and the limits of American naval power. “Hell, I’ve got to go down to Washington again to straighten out those dumb bastards once more,” he would tell his staff, without a hint of irony.16
When he leaned his thin frame over Augusta’s bridge window, Ernie King looked every inch a fighting admiral. His nose was sharp as a corvette’s bow. He had a bald forehead that resembled a destroyer’s round turret, and his quick brown eyes squinted over a quicker tongue. Dressed in a blue jacket with gold braid, a cigarette resting between his fingers, the admiral was Jove, Mars, and Neptune to every man in his fleet.
King had worked at his desk all morning, then lunched with his chief of staff. He usually took a siesta in his finely appointed cabin, but on this day he had not slept long before a marine knocked on his hatch. When King answered, the marine handed him a note.
He read the message. Of course it could happen. He had done it himself three years earlier in a fleet exercise, when he launched a surprise carrier raid on Pearl. That time the umpires told him he had blown Wheeler and Hickam fields to hell. It looked like the umpires were right.
The next day King told his aide to pack his bags for another trip to Washington. Those dumb bastards were going to need help.17
•
The death rattles of Utah, Arizona, and Oklahoma mingled with howls from West Virginia, Nevada, and California. Near their scorched hulks lay the smaller ships: cruisers, destroyers, tugs in various states of disrepair, all smothered in wind-whipped smoke.
Zeros buzzed like mosquitoes over the wreckage of Hickam, Bellows, Kaneohe, Ford, and Wheeler fields, strafing targets of opportunity and pouncing on the few Hawks that managed to get airborne. The Emperor’s pilots beamed as they saw the prostrate hulks of capital ships and neat lines of smashed American planes.
After two hours of carnage, the sword returned to its sheath. The Zeros banked north, covering the triumphant retreat of dive- and torpedo bombers, and the second wave disappeared into the western sky.
On ground and water, amid flaming seas, among the smoke, the oily stench, the groan of melting steel, lay the bodies of 2,402 dead and dying men. Another 1,247 lay scattered about the harbor, on stretchers, grass, or pavement, as nurses and medics fought to save them.18
•
Roosevelt’s large hands closed around a typed memorandum, the first of many he would receive that day. In a few efficient sentences, the note described a scene of devastation: Oklahoma capsized, Tennessee burning, minelayer Oglala possibly lost. Airfields smashed. Planes gone.
He squinted at the paper, then wrote down the date and time it arrived on his desk.19
Franklin Roosevelt’s handsome face took on a gossamer calm that afternoon as the world rushed into his study. While two desk telephones clanged like alarm bells, news flooded in on waves of messengers, each phone slip or memo more agonizing than the last. The surface fleet was burning on the water. The air fleet was burning on the ground. Casualty counts could not be verified for some time, but the death toll would be appalling. The battleship Arizona—into which a young Frank Roosevelt had hammered the ceremonial first bolt in 1914—lay beneath Pearl’s choppy waves, her steel hull now a tomb for hundreds of silenced sailors.20
In a cyclone of conversations, phone calls, jostling couriers, advisers and cabinet ministers, Roosevelt sat at his cluttered desk, a cigarette between his fingers. He spoke in a voice that remained steady and controlled, and he gave clear, unhurried instructions to his lieutenants: Send for Marshall and Stark. Assemble the cabinet. Execute standing orders for war. Freeze Japanese assets. Place all munitions factories under guard.21
As his blue eyes watched the ghastly picture unfold, Roosevelt remained grave, shaken but businesslike. He made none of his usual small talk as he organized message slips into neat little piles on his desk. He called for his secretary, Grace Tully, and took a deep drag on a cigarette as she walked in with her stenographer’s pad.
“Sit down, Grace,” he said. “I’m going bef
ore Congress tomorrow.”
He began dictating a rough draft of his message to Congress, to the American people, to the world.
“Yesterday, comma, December 7, 1941, comma, a date that will live in world history . . .”22
• • •
That evening, Roosevelt met with his cabinet in the second-floor study as the leadership of the House and Senate began gathering outside his door. His eyes had lost their sparkle, his humor was gone, and his jaw showed none of the confident, angular jut the world had known these past nine years. Through pursed lips he narrated the day’s events. It was, he said, the “most serious meeting of the cabinet since the spring of 1861.”
Describing the scene of destruction, Roosevelt’s famous voice halted. The nation’s great communicator could scarcely force himself to utter the words—words confessing a disaster that had fallen on his watch. Perhaps seven out of eight battleships had been lost, and many men had died that day.
Cabinet secretaries who hadn’t heard the full report were dumbfounded. Those who knew listened in mortified silence. His emotions getting the better of him, Roosevelt twice stopped in mid-thought to bark at his navy secretary, “Find out, for God’s sake, why the ships were tied up in rows!”
A red-faced Knox shot back, “That’s the way they berth them!”
Roosevelt ended the meeting, then nodded to his study door, where the leadership of Congress awaited. Powerful men standing outside that door would demand to know what went wrong. And the American people, standing behind them, would demand to know how their president would avenge the dead of Pearl Harbor.23
PART ONE
Bringing the War Home
1940–1941
It is a terrible thing to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead—and find no one there.
—FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT
ONE
“NEW POWERS OF DESTRUCTION”
May 1940
THE WARM, CLUTTERED STUDY ON THE SECOND FLOOR WAS THE CENTER OF Franklin Roosevelt’s world. As White House staff flitted about, straightening up, polishing, and tending the first family’s living quarters, the president dominated the oval-shaped room. Stamp books lay on small tables, sailing ship paintings vied with old maps for wall space, and knickknacks crowded the desks and mantelpiece of the “Oval Study.” It was Roosevelt’s office, parlor and sanctuary.
For a man confined to a wheelchair—for whom going up or down a flight of stairs was a three-man project—the Oval Study was, in a sense, the cerebral cortex of the U.S. government. The famous Oval Office in the adjacent West Wing served as the president’s formal workplace, a setting for important meetings, press conferences, photo opportunities and diplomatic chats. But in the upstairs study, with its nautical theme and view of the Washington Monument, Franklin Roosevelt felt free to unwind over drinks, gossip with friends, and chart America’s course.
On the evening of May 9, 1940, as Washington’s spring warmth ebbed, Roosevelt was relaxing in his sanctum when an aide announced an urgent telephone call from Europe. Handset pressed to his ear, Roosevelt listened intently as Ambassador John Cudahy described German bombers swarming over the Dutch, Belgian, Luxembourg, and French skies. German paratroopers were blanketing airfields and fortresses. The Belgian king called up his reservists, the Grand Duke of Luxembourg fled to France, and the French army was bracing for blitzkrieg.1
Roosevelt had hoped the Nazi tide would break against the Anglo-French levee that stretched from the English Channel to the Swiss border. But the Germans sliced through the Allied lines with their armored spearheads, and the Luftwaffe rained death from above.
Hanging up the phone, Roosevelt leaned back in his seat and considered the possibilities: What if the Germans were thrown back? What if France collapsed? What if, as in the previous war, a long, bloody stalemate gripped Europe? Each scenario implied a dozen political calculations, only a few of which Roosevelt could see clearly from his upstairs study in safe, isolated America.2
At 2:40 a.m., his calculations exhausted, Roosevelt turned in for the night. His powerful arms shifted his frame into an armless wheelchair, and a handsome black valet named George Fields wheeled the president into his bedroom.3
• • •
FDR awoke five hours later to his usual morning routine: a bath and shave, then back to bed for breakfast. As he sat in his pajamas, a baggy sweater pulled over the top, he munched on toast and eggs—about the only thing Mrs. Nesbitt cooked properly—and devoured the New York Times, Herald Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Washington Post, and Washington Herald.
The sum of those sources confirmed the disaster Cudahy described the night before. Bombs smashed French fortresses. German panzers clanked toward Paris, and the battle for Western Europe was joined.4
At two p.m., a valet wheeled Roosevelt into the neoclassical Cabinet Room to face a tense collection of ministers. Seated around the long wooden table were Vice President Henry Wallace, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, Attorney General Robert Jackson, Commerce Secretary Harry Hopkins, and his war and navy secretaries, Harry Woodring and Charles Edison.
Little business was normally accomplished in Roosevelt’s cabinet meetings. Part social hour, part pep rally, they were filled with presidential anecdotes, musings, and a smattering of departmental reports that none of the other secretaries cared about. Interior’s Harold Ickes described to his diary one cabinet meeting in which the stern Secretary Perkins delivered a twenty-minute discourse on labor relations:
As usual, only the President listened to her. Harry Hopkins wrote me a note. . . . Bob Jackson was nodding from time to time and at intervals he and Morgenthau were joking about something. Hull sat with the air of an early Christian martyr, with his hands folded, looking at the edge of the table without seeing it or anything else. . . . As usual, I studiously avoided being caught by Perkins’ basilisk eye. Henry Wallace was contemplating the ceiling.5
But this day was different. Talk centered on military questions, which should have been the province of Secretaries Woodring and Edison. But the afternoon’s discussion was dominated by the enigmatic secretary of commerce.6
• • •
Harry Lloyd Hopkins was America’s most unlikely-looking vice-regent. Balding, toothy, and wrapped around an emaciated frame that barely supported his weight, the native of Sioux City, Iowa, looked like some rumpled nebbish who had wandered off a White House tour group. He had cut his teeth heading local welfare agencies when he was drawn into the spinning orbit of Franklin Roosevelt, first as Governor Roosevelt’s emergency relief director, then as the free-spending head of the Works Progress Administration during the New Deal’s heyday, and finally, as secretary of commerce.
Harry Hopkins had no training as a diplomat, economist or military strategist, but he possessed a razor-sharp mind and uncanny judgment that friends admired and foes despised. FDR had even considered him as a potential successor to the presidency, a praetorian who could be trusted to safeguard the holy tenets of the New Deal.7
If Hopkins had a weakness—aside from horse races, late-night drinking, and bare-knuckle politics—it was his health. In 1937 a massive tumor had forced doctors to remove three-quarters of his stomach. His eviscerated body could barely digest fats and proteins, and doctors gave him four months to live. Harry lived, but his remarkable spark left him, often for months at a stretch, and one journalist likened him to “an ill-fed horse at the end of a hard day.”8
In Roosevelt’s kingdom, titles were deceptive. He gave Hopkins the Commerce Department because the strain of the WPA job overtook his physical stamina. Later, when Commerce proved too arduous, FDR made him “special assistant to the President,” an undefined role advising his liege on matters ranging from bomber production and legislation to screenings of White House movies.
At FDR’s request, Hop
kins moved into the second floor of the White House. His proximity to the president, along with his loyalty and keen instincts, made him a formidable power broker at 1600 Pennsylvania. “The extraordinary fact,” wrote speechwriter Bob Sherwood, “was that the second most important individual in the United States Government during the most critical period of the world’s greatest war had no legitimate official position nor even any desk of his own except a card table in his bedroom. However, the bedroom was in the White House.”9
• • •
That May afternoon, Hopkins sat in the Cabinet Room, glass-eyed and inert as Madame Perkins droned. But when Roosevelt invited the Commerce Department to have its say, the rumpled corpse in the gray suit sprang to life.
Rubber, Hopkins announced. Rubber and tin would be the keys to the next war. Rubber went into military hardware ranging from bomber tires to intravenous bags, gas masks to tank treads. It was a vital strategic asset, and 90 percent of it came from colonies of two nations Hitler invaded—French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies. The United States could smelt its own steel; it could buy bauxite from Africa and refine its own oil. But the humble rubber tree had become America’s Achilles’ heel.
Words and statistics tumbled out as Harry outlined problem and solution. A private company, funded by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, would quietly buy up a year’s supply of rubber, tin, and other strategic materials. Overt government purchases would augment the stockpile. America would buy what it needed to arm itself and the democracies—assuming it had time.10
While Hopkins rattled off the details of his materials stockpile campaign, a bulletin arrived from London: British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had just stepped down, and Winston Churchill, Britain’s First Lord of the Admiralty, would probably be asked to form the new government.
American Warlords Page 2
