Two events made the American entry into war nearly inevitable. First, in September 1940, after the Vichy French government signed its armistice with Germany, Japan knew that France could not—and Nazi Germany would not—protect the French possession of Indochina, and Japan was able to convince the Vichy regime to give it the right to station troops in Indochina. Then came Russia’s threatened collapse in 1941—and the prospect of Britain going it alone against the Axis. Those events convinced FDR that if war was coming against Japan, better sooner than later. He had increased trade sanctions against Japan in the spring and summer of 1941 and declared an oil embargo immediately after the Germans invaded Russia. Sales of scrap iron, airplanes, machine parts, and aviation gasoline were also all halted.87 All new oil exports to Japan ended in July, but by then the Japanese had already accepted the “southern strategy” of getting their oil from the Dutch East Indies by conquest. Acquiring this “Southern Resource Area,” as the Japanese called it, would necessarily involve war with Britain and the United States. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who commanded Japan’s Combined Fleet, gained permission to plan and train for an attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor in the spring of 1941 (although final permission from the emperor was not secured until November).88 Japan’s strides toward war took a leap in October; following the U.S. rejection of a Japanese plea for a summit, Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe resigned and General Hideki Tojo, the war minister and a strong proponent of war with America, was appointed in his place. Emperor Hirohito, anxious to reach a diplomatic solution, instructed Tojo to “go back to blank paper” for a new overture to the United States. The State Department contrasted Tojo’s new attempts at negotiations with Japan’s apparent relentless march toward Singapore, and blasted an alert out to all American Pacific bases: “BEST INTELLIGENCE SUGGESTS JAPAN MIGHT ATTACK RUSSIA OR BRITISH AND DUTCH COLONIES IN THE EAST INDIES.”89
Following the U-boat attacks in the Atlantic on the American destroyers Kearny and Reuben James—the latter sunk—America drifted very close to war despite a strong sentiment within the United States to avoid any foreign conflicts. Roosevelt’s generals had already identified Germany as the most serious threat but the Navy needed time to prepare for Japan if war came in the East as per War Plan Orange.90 However, through MAGIC, an American code-breaking project involving the Army’s Signals Intelligence Section and the Navy’s Communication Special Unit, the United States was reading the Japanese diplomatic code. With such superior intelligence, it was assumed the Japanese could be managed. FDR now learned that Ambassador Nomura had until November 15 to secure a settlement with the Americans, but received no indication of what the deadline portended. Ambassador Joseph Grew repeatedly warned that the Japanese were in a “Hara-kiri” mentality—indicating they would risk national suicide to attain their aims—but a Japanese former consul, Saburo Kurusu, was dispatched to Washington to present a two-part initiative for peace. This included a modus vivendi in which Japan would agree to halt all military operations in return for a million gallons of aviation fuel. Kurusu’s back-door overture was dead on arrival. Kichisaburo Nomura arrived with the formal modus vivendi on November 10, and Secretary of State Cordell Hull rejected it four days later. Less than a week after that, the Pearl Harbor strike force (kido butai) sailed for its organizational and supply rendezvous in the Kurile Islands. Tojo told the Imperial Conference that “Matters have reached the point where Japan must begin war with the United States,” and Operation Z (the Pearl Harbor attack) received final approval.
The Army welcomed such news. In the Confidential War Diaries compiled by the War Plans Section, an entry on November 29 recorded: “America as yet making absolutely no preparations for war. We are truly on the verge of achieving a blitzkrieg against the US that will outdo even the German blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union.”91
Great controversy has surrounded the actual attack on Pearl Harbor—and America’s shocking unpreparedness. Charges that “FDR knew” resurface decade after decade. Several facts are indisputable. First, the United States, through MAGIC’s decryption of both the “Purple” diplomatic codes and the Japanese naval code (JN-25b), simultaneously offered both clarity and confusion. The Japanese fleet (or fleets) were all on the move, but no one knew where. American fleet intelligence at Pearl Harbor, headed by Captain Edwin T. Layton, still thought the Combined Fleet was in the Inland Sea on December 2. When asked by Admiral Husband Kimmel, head of naval operations in Hawaii, if the Japanese “could be rounding Diamond Head and you wouldn’t know about it,” Layton replied, “I would hope they could be sighted before that.”92 The following day, Naval Intelligence in Washington learned that Japanese embassies had been ordered to destroy their codes, cipher machines, and sensitive documents—an unmistakable sign that war was imminent. Meanwhile, the carrier Lexington left Hawaii for Midway on December 5 to deliver Marine aircraft. The other two carriers based at Pearl Harbor, the Enterprise and Saratoga, were also not in port, the Enterprise having left on November 28 for Wake Island, and the Saratoga was in Puget Sound undergoing repairs. On December 2 Yamamoto received the order, “Climb Mount Nitaka”—code words to attack the American base.93 Although Japanese plans called for the destruction of the Navy yard and oil storage facilities, the grand design anticipated the war would be decided long before those facilities came into play. Critically, the Japanese failed to understand that if the oil storage facilities were destroyed, the U.S. Pacific Fleet would be compelled to retire to San Diego.
Yamamoto also intended to have a declaration of war precede the attack by thirty minutes. A draft memorandum surfaced in 1999, dated December 3, 1941, that showed a “vigorous debate” took place within the Japanese government over whether to inform the United States of the termination of negotiations, with the conclusion being to maintain a strong façade of negotiations. A December 7 diary entry noted “our deceptive diplomacy is steadily proceeding toward success.”94 Tokyo transmitted the “14-part message” to the Japanese Embassy in Washington—which was broken long before the diplomats actually delivered it—but it did not officially declare war. A declaration of war was printed in Japanese newspapers on the evening of December 8, but American officials did not see these until after the attack. Although the message was not officially delivered to Hull until after the attack started, notification a half hour before hostilities would have made little difference in Pearl Harbor’s readiness. In the end, the Japanese succeeded in a determined, complete surprise attack.95
In less than an hour, Japan had sunk or disabled virtually all of the battleships in Pearl Harbor, destroyed most of the aircraft on Oahu, and damaged or sunk dozens of other vessels. All but two of the battleships, the USS Arizona (later declared a national memorial and never raised) and the Oklahoma, saw action in the Pacific after substantial repairs. Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, who had directed the attack from his carriers, withdrew before launching a third strike on the oil facilities as per the original plan, and later suffered appropriate criticism for failing to use initiative to finish off the base. Nevertheless, the damage was profound, the shock, unmatched in American history (save, perhaps, Lincoln’s assassination), and the emotional response by Americans to a “sneak attack,” unprecedented. Roosevelt went to Congress the next day, calling December 7 a “date which will live in infamy,” and was given a war resolution against Japan. No event in American history, including the destruction of the battleship Maine or the siege of the Alamo, had filled Americans with the sense of righteous outrage they felt after Pearl Harbor. In the coming years, Japan would pay a heavy price for her “sneak attack.”
CHAPTER SIX
Canopy of Freedom
Time Line
1942: Japan conquers Philippines, Singapore, Indonesia, and Burma, and occupies Thailand; Doolittle Raid, Battle of Midway, Battle of Guadalcanal; Battle of Stalingrad; Battle of El Alamein; Operation Torch (Allied invasion of North Africa); Germany occupies remainder of France
1943: Americans advance in Solomons, New Guine
a; North Africa falls to United States, Britain; Battle of Kursk; Allied victory in Sicily; Italy invaded; Tarawa invaded
1944: United States captures Marianas, invades Philippines; Red Army destroys German Army Group Center, advances to near Warsaw; Romania surrenders; Greece liberated; Rome taken; D-Day (June 6); Paris liberated; Battle of Leyte Gulf; Battle of the Bulge (December)
1945: Iwo Jima captured; Berlin falls, Germany surrenders; atomic bomb tested; Battle of Okinawa; atomic bombs dropped; Japan surrenders
Roar of the Awakened Giant
Admiral Yamamoto never said the apocryphal words attributed to him in the film Tora! Tora! Tora! (“I fear we have awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve”), but he certainly believed it. Having lived in the United States from 1919 to 1921, then again as a naval attaché in 1926, he had seen America up close and knew the war would be decided by the end of 1942 for Japan—that either the Americans would quit and negotiate a settlement, or the Japanese Empire would be crushed. He believed this because the U.S. industrial potential dwarfed anything his own country could muster. Even Yamamoto, however, most likely underestimated the power of the American war machine when it got fully geared up.
The statistics of production for a war-engaged United States were nothing short of staggering. Ford alone outproduced all of Italy in total wartime goods during the war. Henry Kaiser’s shipbuilders, who constructed a “Liberty Ship” from scratch in 1942 in a mind-boggling four and a half days, turned out 1,400 warships and thousands of transport vessels. A single ammunition maker promised a billion bullets for defense. General Motors had 120 different wartime plants, with its subsidiaries such as Pontiac retooled to fabricate torpedoes, and Oldsmobile, 155 mm howitzers. American factories turned out 95,000 tanks, almost 300,000 aircraft, built 31 fleet and light aircraft carriers from scratch in six years (while the Japanese built only one new fleet carrier), and armed and equipped more than 16.5 million men in the armed forces, while still dedicating its best resources to build the atomic bomb.
Production did not occur by happenstance, or even because the United States simply possessed such capabilities. The United States, with a population of 150 million, put about 14 percent of its population into uniform, while the Germans drew out approximately 24 percent for military service. Germany exceeded total military personnel during the war (about 19.4 million men under arms, as opposed to the American total), but were only able to maintain a much smaller productive capacity by making extensive use of slave labor from occupied countries. The ceiling on what America chose to put in the field reflected the importance placed on keeping those forces supremely well supplied.1
Much has been said about how World War II introduced women into the American labor force, and “Rosie the Riveter” has become an iconic figure of the time. Actually, 25.2 percent of the labor force was already female in 1940, and it rose only to a high of 29.2 percent in 1944 before falling back to 27.8 percent in 1946.2 The general upward trend continued, however, reaching 29.6 percent in 1950 and by 1990 was in the mid-40-percent range. A major cultural change, however, involved the introduction of women into heavy manufacturing jobs like steel production where they hadn’t been before, but overall, the statistics do not show a huge influx of women into the workforce to replace men entering the armed forces. The massive increase in American production was due to its capitalist system, not to the first-time employment of women.
From the strategic level down, then, American performance was a testament to free enterprise, despite the fact that the customer was the government. FDR’s administration had harassed, investigated, and taxed entrepreneurs such as Henry J. Kaiser to the hilt during the New Deal, but when he was needed for the war effort, Kaiser found Roosevelt enthusiastic about dropping all restrictions, including price. Just build ships, Kaiser and others were told. The message was clear: whereas the New Deal had been an interesting experiment in social engineering, this was serious. This was war.
Liberal historians have often attempted to minimize the miracle of American capitalist production. Shortly after the war, John Morton Blum claimed government “supplied [Kaiser’s] capital, furnished his market, and guaranteed his solvency on the cost-plus formula—and so spared him the need for cost efficiency….”3 There are three serious flaws with such arguments. First, if government control was good, why did the more heavily government-controlled industries of the Axis powers fail to match American productivity—or, for that matter, even British productivity? Second, Kaiser, Andrew Jackson Higgins, and most of the other American production kings did achieve cost efficiency even though it was not required. Third, and perhaps most important, the old Hollywood maxim about films—you can have it good, cheap, or fast: pick two—applied to wartime industry. America needed weapons good and fast. Cost was no object, for if we failed at this, future debt would be irrelevant. Needless to say, the national debt soared.
In keeping with the failure to properly appreciate the role of the businessman in the American industrial tsunami, many skeptics point to the careers of people such as Howard Hughes and Preston Tucker. After the war, both Hughes and Tucker were hounded and persecuted by the government—Hughes for his monster wooden airplane, the “Spruce Goose” (the Hercules), and Tucker for his ultra-advanced “Tucker Torpedo” automobile. Neither of the machines proved cost-effective or practical; and both men faced trials or public hearings during which their visions were attacked. Hughes was charged with “war profiteering,” Tucker with mail fraud. Whereas during the war Tucker had made ball turrets for bombers, which earned him partial redemption in the eyes of the jury, Hughes had produced, as his only other wartime airplane, the twin-engine wooden XF-11 experimental spy plane that had malfunctioned with Hughes at the controls, plummeting to earth and crashing near the ninth hole of the Los Angeles Country Club. However, failure with the XF-11 had in a certain sense been as valuable as some of the most successful inventions of the war for discovering what “didn’t work.”
It was precisely individuals such as Hughes who gave the United States its critical—and unmatched—edge. For every Hughes whose idea did not pan out, there was a Kaiser or a Higgins. One could find this in a flexible system that encouraged risk, sparking inventors and innovators into new designs and concepts, so that the best weapons and processes could emerge. Nor was someone like Howard Hughes a mere war profiteer; a millionaire with an obsession for flying, Hughes had a deeply held faith in the performance and possibilities of wooden aircraft. Only in America could someone like Hughes have emerged, simultaneously vilified and admired. Born in 1905 in Texas to the inventor of the two-cone roller bit, which permitted drilling for oil in previously inaccessible spots, Howard inherited his father’s Hughes Tool Company. Contrary to popular belief, he did not squander the company’s money, nor was he entirely distant from the business, frequently making important design suggestions.
In creating Hughes Aircraft in Glendale, California, Hughes personalized aviation and set air speed records on both closed courses and nonstop transcontinental flights. Hughes’s love of aviation, for which he won numerous flying awards, and its glamour dovetailed with his entrance into filmmaking, where he made the classic flying movie Hell’s Angels (1930) after already turning out three Academy Award–nominated pictures. In 1928, Hughes won an Oscar for best director for his work on Two Arabian Knights. Personally involved in his film ventures, Hughes romanced many of the actresses he worked with. Throughout his dalliances, he never lost sight of the serious side of flying, and even insisted on piloting experimental aircraft himself, ultimately flying the XF-11 in 1946, when he crashed and sustained severe injuries.4
Capitalism is a continual churning in which the market sorts out the good from the bad. Wartime innovation was no different: in a climate where as many ideas as possible were needed under all manners of risk, the American system surpassed all others. Hughes, along with hundreds of others, typified a willingness to entertain new ideas, from any source at any level. When
Andrew Jackson Higgins, later called by Dwight D. Eisenhower “the man who won the war” because of his landing boats, fulfilled an order for the Marines of a light, fast, wooden landing craft, General Victor “Brute” Krulak noticed that the design could be greatly improved by adding a “spoonbill” or “tongue” that dropped down at the front, allowing troops to run directly onto the beach.5 Higgins, casting aside his ego and resentment of an officer telling him what to do, instantly improved the design. Higgins typified the American entrepreneur. A boat builder born in landlocked Nebraska, who had made his fortune by providing rum-runner boats during Prohibition, he spent the post-Prohibition years designing and racing some of the fastest craft in the world, including the famous Dixie Greyhound.6 His landing craft made possible all the invasions, which would have been infinitely more difficult and costly in human life without his contributions.
While the Left routinely touts the battlefield performance of the Russian T-34 tank as evidence of the superiority of a state-controlled system (forgetting that it was a chassis based on American Walter Christie’s design, lacked radio controls, and, after 1941, greatly outnumbered opposing German armor), the United States produced weapons and machinery of war the likes of which no other country even attempted. Germany had no need for ocean-going assault boats and landing craft, nor did the USSR. Who else produced carriers to match or even challenge the United States after 1942? (The Soviets built none.) All the cargo ships built during the war by the rest of the world combined did not rise to a small fraction of U.S. output, and Kaiser’s yards alone exceeded the total industrial output of the vast majority of nations. Germany had some superior weapons (never enough, however), but the United States had more, and without the hundreds of thousands of trucks and the many million tons of supplies sent by the United States to the Soviet Union, Russia’s defeat of Germany was nowhere near assured. On the contrary, it would have, without question, taken much longer and been far costlier. The B-29 had no equal, and the P-47 and P-51 were the best piston-driven fighters anywhere. Only the jet-propelled Me-262 could compete with the P-51 because of its speed, but the German plane crashed in accidents as often as it shot down an American fighter. No other country possessed a night fighter like the Black Widow, no one else possessed caterpillar tractors and bulldozers capable of turning jungle into an airstrip in twenty-four hours, and on and on.
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