Pearl Harbor: From Infamy To Greatness

by Craig Nelson

  Five decades after December 7 and eight years before 9/11, Central Intelligence Agency analyst A. R. Northridge summarized these attitudes in a September 22, 1993, Pearl Harbor report: “It seems clear to me that we failed to foresee the Japanese assault largely because we were influenced by a faulty stereotype of what was an adversary nation. Today, progress in the arts of weaponry and technical intelligence collection make unlikely another Pearl Harbor kind of surprise attack, but the faulty stereotypes that can lead to grave miscalculation of an adversary’s capability and intent remain with us, almost as a human condition. . . . What sort of people did Americans, at the time of Pearl Harbor, believe the Japanese to be, and what did they believe about Japanese intentions toward themselves? . . . ‘The Japanese people, given the conflicts of interest between us, will quite likely—or maybe only possibly—do us a mischief if they can; but they lack the capacity to harm us seriously, and they know that this is so. On the other hand, they are so cultivated and mannerly that it really is, after all, inconceivable that they would even try to harm us.’ ”

  The Japanese, meanwhile, shared this cultural and racial blindness. As historian Donald Goldstein described it, while Americans viewed the Japanese as “at a lower order of the human evolution, the Japanese saw the Americans ironically almost in the same light. To the Japanese, the Americans were not pure. Their view was what they saw in the motion pictures. The Americans to them were gangsters and bums and prostitutes.” The Japanese also believed the United States was a nation governed of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich. Colonel Masanobu Tsuji, the member of the Control Faction who will plan his country’s astounding 1941 military assault on Southeast Asia (including Pearl Harbor), Operation Number One, assumed, like many of his fellow officers, that the Great East Asia War would end quickly with Japan’s victory: “Our candid ideas at the time were that the Americans, being merchants, would not continue for long with an unprofitable war.”

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  For thirteen years, American leaders met for cocktails each twilight at the White House’s library office, the drinks made badly by Roosevelt himself from a wet bar on wheels. This second-floor room next to the elevator included a card table for FDR’s solitaire game of Miss Milligin, shelves for his stamp collection, and practically a museum’s-worth collection of paintings and carvings of schooners, steamboats, dreadnoughts, and barques. The conversation was limited to good jokes, great stories, and the latest gossip about everyone from Sonja Henie to Shirley Temple, since during the day that same room was the meeting ground for the men and women who ran the United States during what was likely its grimmest era.

  Along with secretary of war Henry Stimson and presidential aide Harry Hopkins, the men who met daily in the White House library office included Roosevelt’s military aide and appointments secretary, General Edwin “Pa” Watson; secretary of the navy Frank Knox; the chief of naval operations, Admiral Harold “Betty” Stark; the commander in chief of the US Fleet, Admiral Ernest J. “Ernie” King; the army air corps chief of staff, General Henry “Hap” Arnold; and the army chief of staff, General George Catlett Marshall. A more disparate band of headstrong individuals could only be found in the cabinet of Abraham Lincoln. While Roosevelt was constantly laughing and joking, waving his cigarette holder, his favorite reaction “I love it! I love it!,” Marshall was notoriously humorless. Stimson said that listening to FDR “was very much like chasing a vagrant beam of sunshine around an empty room,” while Marshall’s conversation was marked by austerity and a need to cut to the quick. “Unsmiling and unbending, the tall, ramrod-straight general [Marshall], formal in manner and manners, was disciplined and organized, and was offended aesthetically by his commander in chief [Roosevelt], who was none of these things,” noted biographer David Fromkin. “And he refused to laugh at the president’s jokes.”

  On July 12, 1937, Roosevelt’s secretary of state, Cordell Hull, lectured Japan’s ambassador to Washington, Hiroshi Saito, that war was futile—as it damaged both the victor and the vanquished—so a first-class power such as Saito’s could afford to exercise self-restraint while emphasizing trade and business, the keys to peace and prosperity, and one of Hull’s Eight Pillars of Peace, a compilation he considered as significant as the Ten Commandments. Hull asked Saito if instead of squabbling over provinces in China, Japan would partner with the United States in leading the Pacific to a stable future of peace and prosperity through a program of amity similar to the Declaration of Principles of Inter-American Solidarity and Cooperation, which the nations of North and South America had negotiated at Buenos Aires in December 1936.

  Secretary Hull was a log-cabin-born, sixty-nine-year-old Tennessee mountaineer who had been a circuit court judge, a congressman, and a senator, but though he’d spent decades in Washington and developed the hair of an éminence grise, he wasn’t highly regarded; his plodding and his earnestness produced the nickname Parson Hull. Within the cabinet chain of command, Hull found himself repeatedly undercut by Roosevelt’s playing favorites with Undersecretary Sumner Welles, and since the president was focused on Europe and considered Japan a sideshow—if Roosevelt bears any responsibility for Pearl Harbor, it is through this failing—the secretary was stuck in the thickets of Asian diplomacy. Hull also had a speech impediment, which amused his boss. “If Cordell says, ‘Oh, Chwist,’ I’m going to scream,” FDR told Frances Perkins. “I can’t stand profanity with a lisp.”

  At times stubborn, willful, thin-skinned, and hot tempered, the American secretary of state conducting negotiations with Japan believed that Japanese cultural politeness bordered on criminal hypocrisy. Hull referred to Tokyo’s envoys as “pissants” and described his Japanese counterpart, Foreign Minister Matsuoka, “as crooked as a bundle of fishhooks.” Even so, Secretary Hull worked tirelessly and patiently trying to achieve a peaceful accord with Japan’s fascists in order to, at the least, keep the United States out of any overseas conflict until her army and navy were ready to fight.

  Instead of following Hull’s suggestion on friendship, in August 1937 Japanese troops invaded Shanghai. Chinese resistance was strong, and it took four months for the Imperial Japanese Army to triumph. The Japanese then burned the town of Sung-chiang to the ground, killing 100,000 civilians, and slaughtered nearly the whole 350,000 population of ancient Suzhou on November 19. “Smoldering ruins and deserted streets present an eerie spectacle, the only living creatures being dogs unnaturally fattened by feasting on corpses,” Manchester’s Guardian reported.

  Surging up the Yangtze River, the Imperial Japanese Army was by the second week of December assaulting Chiang’s capital, Nanking. As the Chinese abandoned their homes and the last of the Americans were extricated from the city by embassy staff, the American gunboat Panay waited at anchor in Nanking harbor to escort the last of the US consulate to safety. After the evacuees boarded on December 11, Panay sailed upriver to avoid the barrage of gunfire.I

  On December 12, Japanese pilots were ordered to attack “any and all ships” in the river above Nanking. Knowing Panay was there, the aviators asked for confirmation of the order. It was confirmed. For twenty minutes, the Japanese bombed and strafed the American gunboat, injuring the captain and several others. Finally Panay was abandoned, as were two of her accompanying tanker barges. Survivors reported that the Japanese even strafed the reeds along the riverbanks where they were swimming to shore.

  The crew and embassy staff were cared for by local Chinese for two days until they could be taken aboard HMS Ladybird and USS Oahu. The final tally was three dead, with an additional forty-three sailors and five civilians wounded. Instead of any military retaliation, though, the United States requested the Japanese pay $2.2 million in reparations and make “a formally recorded expression of regret, an undertaking to make complete and comprehensive indemnifications; and an assurance that definite and specific steps have been taken which will insure that hereafter American nationals, interests and property in China will not be subjected to attack by Jap
anese armed forces or unlawful interference by any Japanese authorities or forces.” The US State Department explained, “The overwhelming endorsement given by the people of the United States to the manner in which the Panay incident was settled attested to their earnest desire to keep the United States out of war.”

  When the Nationalist capital fell on December 13, 1937, fifty thousand Japanese soldiers took control of a metropolis of half a million. Posters were tacked on street corners: TRUST OUR JAPANESE ARMY—THEY WILL PROTECT AND FEED YOU. Going neighborhood by neighborhood, the conquerors eased Chinese civilians into surrender and divided them up into groups of around 150. The new commander in chief of the Nanking area army was a prince, Lieutenant General Yasuhiko Asaka, given the job by his nephew Hirohito. His order: “Kill all captives.”

  Historian Iris Chang: “The Japanese would take any men they found as prisoners, neglect to give them water or food for days, but promise them food and work. After days of such treatment, the Japanese would bind the wrists of their victims securely with wire or rope and herd them out to some isolated area. The men, too tired or dehydrated to rebel, went out eagerly, thinking they would be fed. By the time they saw the machine guns, or the blooded swords and bayonets wielded by waiting soldiers, or the massive graves, heaped and reeking with the bodies of the men who had preceded them, it was already too late to escape.”

  Kuomintang forces fled to inland Chongqing, and Japanese soldiers rampaged through the streets of Nanking for months on end in what became known as Nanjing Datusha—the Rape of Nanking—killing somewhere between 260,000 and 350,000 civilians . . . the exact number is still unknown. Japanese military correspondents reported back to their Tokyo readers, “One by one the prisoners fell down to the outside of the wall. Blood splattered everywhere. The chilling atmosphere made one’s hair stand on end and limbs tremble with fear. I stood there at a total loss and did not know what to do. . . . There was the dark silhouette of a mountain made of dead bodies. About fifty to one hundred people were toiling there, dragging bodies from the mountain of corpses and throwing them into the Yangtze River. The bodies dripped blood, some of them still alive and moaning weakly, their limbs twitching. . . . After a while, the coolies had done their job of dragging corpses and the soldiers lined them up along the river. Rat-tat-tat machine-gun fire could be heard. The coolies fell backwards into the river and were swallowed by the raging currents. . . . Those in the first row were beheaded, those in the second row were forced to dump the severed bodies into the river before they themselves were beheaded. The killing went on nonstop, from morning until night. . . . I’ve seen piled-up bodies in the Great Quake in Tokyo, but nothing compared to this.”

  A Japanese veteran of Nanking, Hakudo Nagatomi, remembered the details: “Few know that soldiers impaled babies on bayonets and tossed them still alive into pots of boiling water. They gang-raped women from the ages of twelve to eighty and then killed them when they could no longer satisfy sexual requirements. I beheaded people, starved them to death, burned them, and buried them alive, over two hundred in all. It is terrible that I could turn into an animal and do these things. There are really no words to explain what I was doing. I was truly a devil. . . . Soldiers would force one group of Chinese captives to dig a grave, a second group to bury the first, and then a third group to bury the second, and so on. . . . One method of entertainment was to drive mobs of Chinese to the top stories or roofs of buildings, tear down the stairs, and set the bottom floors on fire. . . . Another form of amusement involved dousing victims with fuel, shooting them, and watching them explode into flame. . . . Many women in their eighties were raped to death. . . . Chinese witnesses saw Japanese rape girls under ten years of age in the streets and then slash them in half by sword. In some cases, the Japanese sliced open the vaginas of preteen girls in order to ravish them more effectively. . . . After gang rape, Japanese soldiers sometimes slashed open the bellies of pregnant women and ripped out the fetuses for amusement. . . . The Japanese raped a barber’s wife and then stuck a firecracker in her vagina. It blew up and killed her.”

  Beyond raping somewhere between twenty thousand to eighty thousand women, the Japanese disemboweled them, cut off their breasts, tried to see how deeply they could punch their way inside their vaginas, had fathers rape daughters and sons rape mothers while the rest of the family watched, nailed women to walls, carved organs out of the bodies, hung women from hooks by their tongues, and buried young men up to their waists for the sport of unleashing German shepherd attack dogs to tear them apart. Raping a virgin, some believed, made you stronger; carrying a packet of their pubic hair could protect you from injury. After raping, Nagatomi remembered, “We always stabbed and killed them. Because dead bodies don’t talk. . . . Perhaps when we were raping her, we looked at her as a woman, but when we killed her, we just thought of her as something like a pig.” In time the Imperial Japanese Army would establish “comfort houses,” or brothels, stocked by captured Taiwanese, Korean, and Chinese women, who were referred to as “public toilets.”

  An anonymous soldier remembered, “I personally severed more than forty heads. Today, I no longer remember each of them well. It might sound extreme, but I can almost say that if more than two weeks went by without my taking a head, I didn’t feel right. Physically, I needed to be refreshed. I would go to the stockade and bring someone out, one who looked as if he wouldn’t live long. I’d do it on the riverbank, by the regimental headquarters, or by the side of the road. . . . A good sword could cause a head to drop with just an easy motion. But even I sometimes botched the job. . . . Sometimes I’d hit the shoulder. Once a lung popped out, almost like a balloon. I was shocked. All I could do was hit the base of the neck with my full strength. Blood spurted out. Arteries were cut, you see. The man fell immediately, but it wasn’t a water faucet, so it soon stopped. Looking at that, I felt ecstasy. . . . It was almost like being addicted to murder. When I met people, I often looked at their necks and made a judgment. Is this an easy neck, or hard to cut?”

  While the Japanese military and her civilian government would frequently give speeches promoting their policy of “Asia for Asians,” the Rape of Nanking would instead turn out to be one element in a cavalcade of gruesome Japanese war crimes against Asians. Starting in 1937, the Imperial Japanese Army began using chemical weapons on the Chinese, escalating to lewisite, phosgene, chlorine, and nausea red gases in 1938, and then mustard gas in 1939. Over the ensuing decade, the Japanese army built and staffed a “water purification unit” outside the Manchurian city of Harbin, which was in fact a testing ground for bacterial warfare, using prisoners as living guinea pigs to be infected with bubonic plague, pneumonia, epidemic hemorrhagic fever, typhoid, and syphilis. Founded by an army medical lieutenant general, Shiro Ishii, it was known as Unit 731.

  Where did this barbarism come from? One Asian scholar, Robert Edgerton, believes that Japanese soldiers were once among the world’s finest, but their attitudes changed in the 1930s. Bushido, their military code of honor inherited from the samurai, was now interpreted as meaning no soldier would be held accountable for crimes committed against an enemy. Many found guidance from Tsunetomo Yamamoto’s eighteenth-century Book of the Samurai: “Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one’s body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears, and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from a thousand-foot cliff, dying of disease, or committing seppuku [suicide by disembowelment] at the death of one’s master. And every day without fail one should consider himself as dead.”

  The Imperial Japanese Army had allied with Britain in the Great War, but it felt shabbily treated by the armistice and decided afterward to send its officers for training to Berlin instead of London. Aligning with a German spirit, the Army Ministry’s September 1, 1934, pamphlet Kokubo no hongi to sono kyoka no te
isho (On the Essence and Improvement of National Defense) began with inspiring words from Prussian general Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz: “War is the father of creation and the mother of civilization.” The IJA also adopted the peculiar German innovation that midlevel staff officers should hold the key role in forming military policy, reaching decisions, and preparing documents for their commanders to sign. Decisions rose up from lieutenants known as the bakuryo—“officers behind the curtains”—instead of down from generals. By the late 1930s, the two most influential bakuryo were the chief of the Army General Staff’s Operations Division, Shinichi Tanaka, and a section chief in the Navy Ministry’s Military Affairs Bureau, Shingo “Wild Shot” Ishikawa. Tanaka was so ardent in his convictions that he became Japan’s squeaky-wheel leader in setting military policy, while by the end of 1940, Wild Shot had become the head of the Arms Division and could boast, “I am the one who brought Japan to the war course.”

  These Japanese lieutenants, wholly in control of their nation’s army, had spent most of their lives isolated from civilian society and came to believe they had unique talents as heirs to the samurai warrior tradition, a tradition that emphasized immediate and resolute action. They developed a self-confidence far beyond their achievements as well as a belligerence that ignored the opinions of those outside their clique. They were also distinct in the samurai thinking that, should soldiers be inspired by patriotism and the need for action that would enrich all Japan—gekokujo, insubordination in service to the nation—it was their right to move forward and do whatever needed to be done, regardless of their commanding officers, their standing orders, or their country’s civilian leaders. The bakuryo system produced a fighting force that lurched from decision to decision instead of following a coherent long-term strategy.