Pearl Harbor Betrayed

by Michael Gannon

  Following the White House meeting, Stimson returned to his office in the Munitions Building, sometime before 4:30 P.M., where G-2 (Army Intelligence) handed him a sighting report that five Japanese divisions had come down from Shantung and Shansi in China to the port of Shanghai, where they had embarked on ships (thirty, forty, fifty?), the first formations of which were seen steaming south of Formosa along the China coast. At 4:30, Stimson called Hull to inform him, and sent a copy of the report to Roosevelt. When Stimson resumed his diary the next day, the twenty-sixth, he related a 9:20 A.M. telephone conversation with Hull, who “had about made up his mind not to give (make) the propositions [State’s modus vivendi] that Knox and I passed on the other day to the Japanese but to kick the whole thing over—to tell them that he has no other proposition at all.” After digesting that stunning volte-face from Hull, Stimson called the President to ask his reaction to the Japanese troop movements southward toward Indo-China. When the secretary learned that Roosevelt had not received the message, he relayed it to him over the phone. “He [Roosevelt] fairly blew up,” Stimson recorded, “—jumped up into the air, so to speak, and said … that that changed the whole situation because it was an evidence of bad faith on the part of the Japanese.”69

  On the same day, Hull sent a memorandum for the President recommending that “at this time I call in the Japanese Ambassadors and hand to them a copy of the comprehensive basic proposal for a general peaceful settlement [Ten-Point Program] and at the same time withhold the modus vivendi proposal.” What reasons did Hull give for this astonishing overnight reversal in American policy, so detrimental on its face to the interests of Stark and Marshall? He gave three in the memorandum: (1) the opposition to the modus vivendi by the Chinese government; (2) the “half-hearted support” given to it by the British, Dutch, and Australians; and (3) the American public’s expected opposition to it. He now recommended against the truce proposal, he wrote, “without in any way departing from my views about the wisdom and the benefit of this step [modus vivendi] to all of the countries opposed to the aggressor nations.” On its face, this last clause reads like the statement of a man who either has used the abandonment of the modus vivendi as an occasion for expressing his pride in having attempted such a creative alternative or has lost the courage of his convictions or has had his mind changed by someone superior to him, who could only have been the President. Unfortunately for the third notion, the only firsthand, direct, and contemporary evidence we have is the memorandum in which Hull recommends the change to Roosevelt. For conspiracy theorists, a possible riposte would be to allege that Roosevelt made the decision to abandon the modus vivendi and ordered Hull to counterfeit a memorandum that would give the White House cover. It is unlikely that the strict moralist Hull would ever have participated in such a fabrication. But there are second- and thirdhand sources that revisionists have seized on for alleging that it was Roosevelt, not Hull (who consistently took personal responsibility for the decision), who held back the modus vivendi.70 While their use may not convince orthodox historians who rely on original documents of proven provenance for understanding and explaining core historical moments, once- and twice-removed sources have the virtue at least of reminding one that history is not always tidy. The single thing that one can say with certainty in the present case is that Hull’s language in the memorandum was ambivalent.

  In his statement to the JCC in November 1945, Hull emphasized that he had abandoned the modus vivendi because: (1) the chance of the Japanese accepting the proposal was remote; (2) American opinion would have opposed the supplying of even limited quantities of oil to Japan; and (3) there was serious risk that Chinese morale and resistance would collapse if the truce document was presented. It is interesting that neither in his memorandum nor in his statement did Hull mention the report of Japanese troop movements southward as a factor in his decision. Nor did he consult with Stark or Marshall about his decision, before presenting the Japanese emissaries with the red meat of the Ten-Point Program. Ironically, on the same 26 November the two service chiefs signed another memorandum to the President stating that “the most essential thing now … is to gain time.”71

  Were there other factors perhaps at play in Hull’s decision? Two possibilities come to mind. The first was the error-filled influence of his principal adviser on Far Eastern Affairs, Stanley Hornbeck, who had consistently mistaken Japanese intentions and had grossly underestimated Japanese military capabilities. As a purveyor of faulty information, the uncommonly purblind doctor was to Hull what Kelly Turner was to Stark. On 31 October he had advised Hull: “Japan is today a weakened and comparatively weak power, and … would not for long be a formidable menace to the United States or Great Britain, or, if engaged in war with the United States, would not be a formidable opponent.”72 Hornbeck urged the secretary to take a firm stand against the Japanese, arguing that Japan earnestly wanted to avoid a fight with the United States, and that, if pushed into one, would be defeated quickly and easily. An example of Hornbeck’s perspicacity is provided by a memorandum he addressed to Hull on 27 November, eleven days before the Japanese attack:

  Were it a matter of placing bets, the undersigned would give odds of five to one that the United States and Japan will not be at “war” on or before December 15…; would wager three to one that the United States and Japan will not be at “war” on or before the 15th of January…; would wager even money that the United States and Japan will not be at “war” on or before March 1.73

  It is unknown how much of a factor the fatuous Dr. Hornbeck was in the November decisions taken by Hull, but it may have been considerable. Too, we find reports of Hull’s general “weariness” and “grimness” during the same period.74 Along with burnout went a good deal of exasperation. Assistant Secretary of State Adolf A. Berle, Jr., recorded in his diary for 1 December: “Promptly this morning I went in to see the Secretary. He was alone and unhappy. He said that everybody was trying to run foreign policy: Stimson, who felt bitterly about the Far East; Knox; and pretty much everyone else. ‘They all came at me with knives and hatchets,’ he said.”75 Hull’s biographer Julius W. Pratt attributed the secretary’s decision to forgo a truce and to lay out instead the strongest possible terms for a settlement to a righteous belief in the positions he had taken for four years, and now was determined to see stated for the record, in Japan as well as in his own country. Pratt concluded that his decision taken on the overnight of 25–26 November “was a petulant one by a tired and angry old man.”76

  Roosevelt approved Hull’s decision, for what precise reasons it is not clear, other than that he had trusted Hull all along to manage the Japanese crisis while his and the American public’s attention was fixed on Europe and the Atlantic. And, as historian Herbert Feis observed, Roosevelt probably recognized that, for what the American modus vivendi offered, the Japanese “would not have recalled the expeditions then heading south and west.”77 Accordingly, at 5:00 P.M. on the twenty-sixth, after Hull called Nomura and Kurusu to his apartment at the Wardman Park, the secretary handed them his Ten-Point “comprehensive basic proposal.” This constituted the formal American reply to their modus vivendi document of six days before. No doubt both men blanched to read, among other terms, the raw, uncompromising language of points three and four:

  3. The Government of Japan will withdraw all military, naval, air and police forces from China and from Indo-China.

  4. The Government of the United States and the Government of Japan will not support—militarily, politically, economically—any government or regime in China other than the National Government of the Republic of China with capital temporarily at Chungking.78

  When transmission of this document reached Tokyo, Foreign Minister Togo testified after the war, “The reaction of all of us [in the cabinet] was, I think, the same. Ignoring all past progress and areas of agreement in the negotiations, the United States had served upon us what we viewed as an ultimatum containing demands far in excess of the strongest positions t
heretofore taken.”79

  Thus, a second chance for a delay of hostilities was lost. Each power’s final note had been interpreted by the other as an ultimatum. There would not be a third chance.

  On the next morning, the twenty-seventh, Secretary Hull said to War Secretary Stimson, “I have washed my hands of it [the standoff] and it is now in the hands of you and Knox—the Army and the Navy.”80

  Neither Kimmel nor Short was advised.

  By that same morning, the Japanese Navy’s Pearl Harbor Striking Force, Kido Butai, was under steam, two days at sea, on an eastward course of 095 degrees. Destination: Hawaii.

  SIX

  WAR WARNINGS

  And we are here as on a darkling plain

  Swept with confused alarms …

  Matthew Arnold,

  “Dover Beach”

  Upon receipt of the news that Secretary Hull had spurned the Japanese truce overture, Secretaries Stimson and Knox directed their respective chiefs of war plans to prepare warnings of imminent hostilities for transmission to all American commands. The sending of such messages was precipitated by Stimson, who invited Knox and Stark to join him and General Gerow, chief of the Army War Plans Division (Marshall being away observing maneuvers in North Carolina), in his office at the Munitions Building. Since this was the same day, 27 November, when the latest memorandum from Marshall and Stark asking for more time reached the White House, it is not surprising to read in Stimson’s diary entry for that day that Gerow and Stark pressed the same issue in the meeting. “I said,” Stimson recorded, “that I was glad to have time but I didn’t want it at any cost of humility on the part of the United States or of reopening the thing which would show a weakness on our part.”1

  Stimson then reported to the group that, earlier that morning, he had discussed the Pacific situation with the President by telephone, and that he had recommended to the President that General MacArthur, “who was in the forefront of the threatened area,” should be alerted to the diplomatic standoff. MacArthur had already received war warnings of various sorts, but now was the time, Stimson urged the President, to send him “a more definite warning,” which he also called “a final alert”—one that “it would not be necessary to repeat … over and over again during the ensuing days.”2 There is no firm evidence for concluding that it was the finality of the Ten-Point note that prompted Stimson to make this recommendation; it seems more likely that it was the known (through Magic) extended deadline of the twenty-ninth, two days hence, when Japan would go on automatic, that drove the secretary’s initiative. The President approved his recommendation and directed that such a message putting the Philippines “on the qui vive for any attack” be sent.

  Accordingly, Gerow produced warning language that he and Marshall had drafted the previous day, before Marshall’s departure. On its basis, with Stark’s help, Gerow fashioned a final version. Stimson called Hull for an exact statement about the status of negotiations, and Hull’s reply was incorporated in the first sentence of the message. Although the drafting of operational messages was a function of uniformed staff, Stimson thought himself justified—since he had been the one instructed to send the message—in making his own contribution, which was the insertion in the second sentence of the words: BUT HOSTILE ACTION POSSIBLE AT ANY MOMENT. It was decided by the drafting group that the same message sent to MacArthur should be wired to three other Army commanding officers of theaters or outposts, viz: the Hawaiian Department; the Western Defense Command, at the Presidio in San Francisco; and the Caribbean Defense Command, at Quarry Heights, Canal Zone, Panama, except that those three radiograms should include an extra sentence, reading: BUT THESE MEASURES SHOULD BE CARRIED OUT SO AS NOT COMMA REPEAT NOT COMMA TO ALARM CIVILIAN POPULATION OR DISCLOSE INTENT. As Stimson explained before the JCC in March 1946, “In Hawaii, because of the large numbers of Japanese inhabitants, it was felt desirable to issue a special warning so that nothing would be done, unless necessary to the defense, to alarm the civil population and thus possibly to precipitate an incident and give the Japanese an excuse to go to war and the chance to say that we had committed the first overt act.”3 Unfortunately for General Short in Hawaii, this addition was a sentence too far. And the words alert or final alert were not used. The ultimate form of the radiogram sent to Short read:

  SECRET

  PRIORITY NOVEMBER NOVEMBER 27, 1941

  NO. 472

  COMMANDING GENERAL, HAWAIIAN DEPARTMENT, FORT SHAFTER, T.H. NEGOTIATIONS WITH JAPAN APPEAR TO BE TERMINATED TO ALL PRACTICAL PURPOSES WITH ONLY THE BAREST POSSIBILITIES THAT THE JAPANESE GOVERNMENT MIGHT COME BACK AND OFFER TO CONTINUE PERIOD JAPANESE FUTURE ACTION UNPREDICTABLE BUT HOSTILE ACTION POSSIBLE AT ANY MOMENT PERIOD IF HOSTILITIES CANNOT COMMA REPEAT CANNOT COMMA BE AVOIDED THE UNITED DESIRES THAT JAPAN COMMIT THE FIRST OVERT ACT PERIOD THIS POLICY SHOULD NOT COMMA REPEAT NOT COMMA BE CONSTRUED AS RESTRICTING YOU TO A COURSE OF ACTION THAT MIGHT JEOPARDIZE YOUR DEFENSE PERIOD PRIOR TO HOSTILE JAPANESE ACTION YOU ARE DIRECTED TO UNDERTAKE SUCH RECONNAISSANCE AND OTHER MEASURES AS YOU DEEM NECESSARY BUT THESE MEASURES SHOULD BE CARRIED OUT SO AS NOT COMMA REPEAT NOT COMMA TO ALARM CIVIL POPULATION OR DISCLOSE INTENT PERIOD REPORT MEASURES TAKEN PERIOD SHOULD HOSTILITIES OCCUR YOU WILL CARRY OUT THE TASKS ASSIGNED IN RAINBOW FIVE SO FAR AS THEY PERTAIN TO JAPAN PERIOD LIMIT DISSEMINATION OF THIS HIGHLY SECRET INFORMATION TO MINIMUM ESSENTIAL OFFICERS.

  MARSHALL4

  The message’s path on the twenty-seventh can be tracked as follows: it was received in the War Department [WD] code room for encryption at 6:00 P.M. Washington time (12:30 P.M. Hawaii time); filed in the WD signal center at 6:11 P.M. Washington time (12:41 P.M. Hawaii time); received in the Hawaiian Department signal center at 6:46 P.M. Washington time (1:16 P.M. Hawaii time); decrypted in Hawaii at 7:52 P.M. Washington time (2:22 P.M. Hawaii time); and was placed in the hands of Chief of Staff Colonel Walter C. Phillips, who presented it to General Short about 2:30 P.M. Hawaii time. Short talked it over with Phillips and, after “a very few minutes,” decided to place the Hawaiian Department on No. 1 Alert. The alert was in effect thirty minutes later. He imposed a heavy guard around all military installations as well as vital civilian structures such as power stations, highway bridges, and telephone exchanges. At 5:40 P.M. Hawaii time, Short had an acknowledgement encrypted for transmission to Washington. The wire was received in the WD code room at 5:57 A.M. on the twenty-eighth, Washington time. Its passage thereafter through the War Department will be considered below. Short’s reply in its entirety, addressed to “Chief of Staff,” read as follows:

  NO. 959

  REPORT DEPARTMENT ALERTED TO PREVENT SABOTAGE PERIOD LIAISON WITH NAVY REURAD [with reference to your radiogram] FOUR SEVEN TWO TWENTY SEVENTH

  SHORT5

  On the same day, Short’s chief intelligence (G-2) officer, Lt. Colonel Kendall J. Fielder, was sent a sabotage/espionage message, No. 473, by Brigadier General Sherman Miles, assistant chief of staff, G-2, in the War Department. It read:

  JAPANESE NEGOTIATIONS HAVE COME TO PRACTICAL STALEMATE STOP HOSTILITIES MAY ENSUE STOP SUBVERSIVE ACTIVITIES MAY BE EXPECTED STOP INFORM COMMANDING GENERAL AND CHIEF OF STAFF ONLY

  MILES6

  Fielder showed the message to Short and Phillips about the same time that the No. 1 Alert was ordered. Then, on the following day, the twenty-eighth, Short personally received two more sabotage alerts from Washington. The first (No. 482), from the adjudant general, Major General Emory S. Adams, urged “that you initiate forthwith all additional measures necessary to provide for protection of your establishments comma property comma and equipment against sabotage comma protection of your personnel against subversive propaganda and protection of all activities against espionage stop.” But Adams added the caution that Short should not take actions that were illegal or that violated civil rights.7 The second message (No. 484), from Major General Henry H. Arnold, commander in chief of the Army Air Forces, and marked for the attention of Major General Frederick L. Martin, commander of the Hawaiian A
ir Force, repeated the substance of Adams’s message.8

  Since the Marshall warning message (No. 472) made no mention of a possible Japanese military strike at Hawaii, Short considered the message’s phrase “hostile Japanese action” to mean, in his case, sabotage and uprisings. With three warnings of such activities, Short concluded both that the greatest danger facing his command was internal and not external, and that the three latest messages, all sent after the receipt of his No. 959 acknowledgment of No. 472, confirmed the appropriateness of the alert he had ordered.9 Alert No. 1 was defined as “a defense against acts of sabotage and uprisings within the islands, with no threat from without.”10 It was the lowest of three levels of alert in the Hawaiian Department. Short sent a copy of the 27 November warning from Marshall to his Navy opposite number, Admiral Bloch, and advised him that the Army had gone on Alert No. 1. This caused some misinterpretation in Bloch’s headquarters, as well as in Kimmel’s, where, because the maximum Navy state of alert was Condition I, just the reverse of Short’s No. 1, everyone seemed to understand that Short had declared an all-out alert. Short’s all-out, or No. 3, required “the occupation of all field positions by all units, prepared for maximum defense of Oahu and the Army installations on outlying islands.”11 Not surprisingly, when Kimmel’s intelligence officer Lieutenant Commander Edwin T. Layton looked out his window on the evening of the twenty-seventh and saw Army trucks moving, troops marching, and, he thought, weapons being deployed, “I presumed that they were going into full condition of readiness, including the emplacement of anti-aircraft and other mobile weapons around Pearl Harbor and other important points on Oahu.”12 But those movements were to protect installations and equipment against ground sabotage. When, in the JCC proceedings of 23 January 1946, Short was asked why Kimmel and Bloch were under the misapprehension that the Alert No. 1 meant all-out alert instead of alert against sabotage only, he snapped: “The only way I can account for that would be poor staff work on the part of the staff of the Fourteenth Naval District.… We had furnished them with ten copies of our staff operating procedure, which somebody in that naval staff must have dug into and known what it meant.” Apparently, it did not occur to anyone on either Bloch’s or Kimmel’s staffs to ask a Hawaiian Department staff member what the Army was doing during its alert. And Kimmel admitted in 1944 that “I did not inquire into the particular details.”13