Pearl Harbor: From Infamy To Greatness

by Craig Nelson

  Joseph Grew wrote Secretary Hull on September 12 that the military and nationalist elements in Japan saw in Europe’s turmoil a “golden opportunity” to create an empire in Asia, as Germany’s many victories, “like strong wine,” had gone to their heads. Others in Tokyo believed it likely that Germany would never conquer Great Britain; that the union of London and Washington would turn out to be a formidable force; and that if Germany succeeded in taking over all of Europe, it might next turn its eyes toward Asia. Grew continued that, if the Japanese military felt that American commercial embargoes kept it from victory, its “do or die” temperament would lead to some form of retaliation, probably some sudden strike by the navy or army, possibly without either knowledge or permission from Tokyo. Japan’s imperial ambitions, he concluded, were a clear threat to American interests in Asia and the Pacific.

  It was a significant threat. The Japanese had a two-foot-long, oxygen-powered torpedo that could travel twenty-four miles and was twice as effective in speed, in distance, in targeting, and in explosive power as anything American-made. Their Zero fighter, which could take off from a carrier and reach 330 mph while maneuvering the currents like a raptor, was outfitted with two machine guns and two twenty-millimeter cannon and was dramatically superior to any fighter that America then produced. In the plane’s premier engagement on September 13, 1940, thirteen Zeros took down twenty-seven Chinese flying Russian-built Polikarpov I-15 and I-16 fighters . . . in thirty minutes . . . without a single Japanese loss.

  Years of economic hardship and political gamesmanship had meanwhile left American defenses in decay. America’s top field commanders were all veterans of the 1898 Spanish-American War. The average recruit—there were only 243,500 of them in 1940—was issued a Springfield rifle, designed in 1903. Many of their uniforms were Great War leftovers smelling of mothballs along with tin hats and puttees—canvas strips for wrapping around the tops of shoes to keep them dry. As late as October 27, 1941, Time magazine reported, “The worst example of the [Army Ordnance Department’s] doodling in the peacetime years is the U.S. soldier’s steel helmet. Knowing full well that the helmet exposed the wearer’s neck to shell fragments and was also uncomfortable, Ordnance delayed adoption of a better helmet. Today, 20 years later, with a crackerjack design in its pocket, Ordnance is delayed in getting production because it can’t get enough manganese steel to make it.”

  • • •

  On September 23, 1940, the die was cast. Japanese troops invaded what are today the nations of Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Indonesia, and what were then the resource-rich Southeast Asian colonies of Europe. Japan now controlled British Malaya’s acres of rubber plantations, French Indochina’s sinuous veins of tin, and most important, the Dutch East Indies’ bounteous cache of oil. Washington’s hawks saw their worst fears confirmed: Japan had turned into Germany’s criminal little brother, treating the Chinese as the Germans were treating the Jews, rampaging across a continent with no regard to international law. Even civilian life in Japan seemed to be following in the Nazis’ footsteps, with that autumn’s mandatory creation of neighborhood associations, which trained civilians to defend the nation in case of direct attack, helped fight fires, organized patriotic rallies, and distributed rationed items. The Special Higher Police, which brutally attacked thought crimes, had informers in each of these groups.

  Joseph Grew: “I reported to the State Department that our Japanese contacts, sources of information, were falling away simply because they were being very carefully watched by the secret police and most of them did not dare come to the Embassy any more, they did not dare meet me outside, and even when I went to the Tokyo Club, which was sort of a neutral meeting ground for Japanese and foreigners, I found the Japanese I knew would quietly slip away into other rooms or corners. They just did not want to be seen talking to me; they did not dare. Therefore, it was extremely difficult, under those circumstances, for us to keep in touch with everything that was going on there.”

  Four days after the invasion of Southeast Asia on September 27, Japanese foreign minister Yosuke Matsuoka arrived in Berlin to thunderous drumrolls, cries of “Heil Hitler! Heil Matsuoka!,” and the Swastika and Rising Sun waving side by side in unison. After signing the Tripartite Pact with Hitler’s eager representatives, Matsuoka was next received in Rome by Mussolini and Pope Pius XII, with Matsuoka telling the pope, “Of all the world’s statesmen, there is nobody before or after me who understands and loves Christianity as much as I do.” Il Duce insisted that the Japanese must have a clear focus on their mutual enemies, and enemy number one would now be the United States.

  Both Hitler and Matsuoka hoped the treaty would frighten America from interfering with their global conquests, as the Tripartite Pact’s central tenet was that Japan, Germany, and Italy would aid each other if attacked “by a power not already engaged in war.”

  For years, the Imperial Japanese Army had supported an alliance with Hitler, who was seen as being both unbeatable and an ally who might make Joseph Stalin think twice about meddling against Japan in China. But Japanese admirals, including Yamamoto, worried that officially joining the Axis would trigger war with Britain and the United States. “Our opposition to the alliance was like desperately paddling against the rapids only a few hundred yards upstream from the Niagara Falls,” Admiral Yonai later explained. When asked whether he would have opposed the treaty if he’d still been minister of the navy or prime minister, he replied, “Of course, but we would have been assassinated.” The alliance so worried Hirohito he uncharacteristically made his personal opinion known. As he pressed his seal of acquiescence into the pact with the Nazis, the emperor darkly told Prime Minister Konoye, “You must, therefore, share with me the joys and sorrows that will follow.”

  After signing a neutrality agreement with Moscow the following spring, a triumphant Foreign Minister Matsuoka was waiting to board the first-class car of the Trans-Siberian Railway’s Red Arrow when who came out of the fog to bid him adieu but Stalin and Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov. It was an immense honor, as Stalin almost never appeared in public and had found himself at his last encounter with Matsuoka on the receiving end of his typical lecture on the benefits and perils of communism. With his farewell, Stalin explained, “You see, I am an Asian. I am from Georgia! We are brothers, so we must work together!” On the ride home, plied generously with vodka and caviar, Matsuoka explained to his staff that “he would make puppets of Hitler and Stalin” and wrote poems “full of subtle twists of thought.” “To shake hands with Germany is a temporary excuse to shake hands with the Soviet Union,” he told his secretary. “But that handshaking with the Soviet Union is also nothing more than an excuse to shake hands with the United States,” meaning the strength of Japan’s new alliance would force Washington into a more conciliatory posture. Sumner Welles, among other American and British leaders, said only one word described the Soviet-Japanese treaty: “sinister.”

  On October 16, 1940, every American man of at least five feet in height and 105 pounds in weight with fixable vision, but no VD, hernias, or flat feet, appeared before one of the nation’s sixty-five hundred Selective Service boards to receive urine tests, a cursory medical inspection, and a one-minute psychiatric exam—“flies spread disease, so keep yours buttoned” was one admonition—and then registered for the first peacetime draft in US history. Anyone under the age of forty had to march, in full equipment, for at least twenty-five miles and be able to complete an obstacle course with a rifle and a thirty-pound pack: assaulting an eight-foot wall, shimmying down a ten-foot pole, jumping across flaming trenches, crawling through water mains, climbing one rope and then swinging on another across a ditch, and swinging hand-over-hand on a rope ladder—in less than 3.5 minutes. On October 29, a blindfolded Secretary of War Henry Stimson fished numbers out of a ten-gallon glass bowl. The first was handed to President Roosevelt, who announced, by radio, number 158. The 6,175 draftees holding number 158 immediately received Selective Service telegrams tha
t began, “Greetings.”II

  On the night of November 11–12, 1940, Britain’s Royal Navy launched twenty-one obsolete Fairey TSR Swordfish biplane torpedo and dive-bombers from the carrier HMS Illustrious to attack Italy’s fleet, then anchored in the shallow Mediterranean harbor of Taranto. The British lost two planes, with two men dead, and two taken prisoner. The Fascists lost thirty-two men and three battleships, nearly half of its capital fleet, and had to sail to Naples to avoid another devastating assault, giving the British the upper hand in Mediterranean naval power. The night’s victor, Admiral Andrew Cunningham, concluded, “Taranto, and the night of November 11–12, 1940, should be remembered for ever as having shown once and for all that in the Fleet Air Arm the Navy has its most devastating weapon.”

  Learning of this great triumph, on November 22, CNO Stark recommended to then-CINCPAC (Commander in Chief, Pacific Command) James Richardson that antitorpedo nets be installed in Pearl Harbor. Richardson replied, “Torpedo nets within the harbor are neither necessary nor practicable,” reasoning that “ships, at present, are not moored within torpedo range of the entrance.” After the war, Richardson admitted, “I had not considered that it was likely that the fleet would be attacked by a carrier raid,” ignoring the great naval lesson of Taranto. When Henry Stimson mentioned torpedo nets to Richardson’s replacement, Husband Kimmel, Kimmel also demurred, saying, “It would restrict boat traffic by narrowing the channel.”

  Those in Washington had good reason to be concerned by Taranto. An assistant naval attaché in Germany, Lieutenant Commander Takeshi Naito, flew to the site to make a report, as did a Japanese naval mission. The lead pilot against Pearl Harbor, Mitsuo Fuchida, later said, “The most difficult problem was torpedo launching in shallow water. We learned from when the British navy attacked the Italian fleet at Taranto.”

  Taranto came as such a surprise that CNO Stark, for one, couldn’t stop reflecting on its implications, especially in regard to Hawaii. He assigned Rear Admiral Walter Ansel to do a study and then on January 24 cabled War Secretary Stimson and Hawaii’s Kimmel, Short, and Rear Admiral Claude Bloch on the conclusions:

  The security of the U.S. Pacific Fleet while in Pearl Harbor, and of the Pearl Harbor Naval Base itself, has been under renewed study by the Navy Department and forces afloat for the past several weeks. This reexamination has been, in part, prompted by the increased gravity of the situation with respect to Japan, and by reports from abroad of successful bombing and torpedo plane attacks on ships while in bases. If war eventuates with Japan, it is believed easily possible that hostilities would be initiated by a surprise attack upon the Fleet or the Naval Base at Pearl Harbor.

  In my opinion, the inherent possibilities of a major disaster to the fleet or naval base warrant taking every step, as rapidly as can be done, that will increase the joint readiness of the Army and Navy to withstand a raid of the character mentioned above.

  The dangers envisaged in their order of importance and probability are considered to be:

  (1) Air bombing attack.

  (2) Air torpedo plane attack.

  (3) Sabotage.

  (4) Submarine attack.

  (5) Mining.

  (6) Bombardment by gun fire. . . .

  Originally believing the United States would battle one enemy at a time, the American War Department’s War Plans Division had designed “color plans”—Japan was orange; England was red—but the rise of the Axis powers made it clear that the army and the navy would have to fight on multiple fronts at once. Five “Rainbow” plans were drafted, and with the fall of France, it became clear that if Britain was lost, the United States would need to fight Germany, Italy, and Japan on its own—a dark and terrifying prospect. Stark submitted a memo to the president on November 12, 1940, extending an earlier Rainbow plan of military operations, setting forth a series of options—

  A. Defend the western hemisphere.

  B. Go on the offensive in the Pacific against Japan while remaining on the defensive in the Atlantic.

  C. Fight equally committed in both the Atlantic and the Pacific.

  D. Go on the offensive in the Atlantic (against Germany and Italy) while remaining on the defensive in the Pacific.

  —and recommending the last. Known as Plan D (or Plan Dog), the memo would crystallize the “Europe first” leanings of both Stark and the army’s chief of staff, George Marshall, which held that America must help England in any way possible, giving priority to the Atlantic in the escalating global conflict. The most powerful Republicans in FDR’s cabinet, Henry Stimson and Frank Knox (who had been a Rough Rider with FDR’s cousin Theodore), aggressively concurred on pursuing a muscular foreign policy that included fully supporting Churchill. A fundamental belief of Henry Stimson’s was that the world would be dramatically improved if the United States were a global superpower, and the efforts he oversaw as FDR’s secretary of war would make that dream come true. Roosevelt, meanwhile, believed in Plan Dog wholeheartedly, saying, “If Great Britain goes down, all of us in the Americas would be living at the point of a gun.”

  Even those without knowledge of Plan Dog pondered, how could the United States defend itself on two oceans at once? The prospect seemed overwhelming, and insurmountable. On December 14, 1940, Ambassador Grew wrote the president:

  DEAR FRANK:

  About Japan and all her works. It seems to me to be increasingly clear that we are bound to have a showdown some day, and the principal question at issue is whether it is to our advantage to have that showdown sooner or to have it later. . . . After eight years of effort to build up something permanently constructive in American-Japanese relations, I find that diplomacy has been defeated by trends and forces utterly beyond its control, and that our work has been swept away as if by a typhoon, with little or nothing remaining to show for it. Japan has become openly and unashamedly one of the predatory nations and part of a system which aims to wreck about everything that the United States stand for. . . . It is important constantly to bear in mind the fact that if we take measures “short of war” with no real intention to carry those measures to their final conclusion if necessary, such lack of intention will be all too obvious to the Japanese, who will proceed undeterred, and even with greater incentive, on their way. Only if they become certain that we mean to fight if called upon to do so will our preliminary measures stand some chance of proving effective and of removing the necessity for war.

  • • •

  At the start of 1941, rumors of war began to circulate in Japan’s diplomatic community. A book published in Tokyo predicting war between Japan and the United States and analyzing its course—the winner: Japan—sold fifty-three thousand copies in its first month on sale. At the same time that the United States began recalling her consulate staff’s families, Japan replaced her American ambassador with onetime foreign minister Admiral Kichisaburo Nomura. In fact an attempt to improve the relationship since Nomura had gotten to know Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt while serving as a naval attaché in Washington. In the telling of the drama of Pearl Harbor, it has been common for Americans to portray Nomura as either a dupe of the warmongers or as a duplicitous agent who knew full well of the attack, and for the Japanese to portray him as an incompetent stooge. Instead, Admiral Nomura was as honorable, and as unlucky, as Messrs. Kimmel and Short.

  At six feet, the Japanese admiral was strikingly tall, but that wasn’t his only distinguishing physical feature. On April 29, 1932, Chinese rebels had thrown a bomb into the middle of attendees at a ceremony in Shanghai, leaving him with a limp, and destroying his right eye.

  Originally, Nomura refused his orders to Washington, reasoning that “it is impossible to rectify diplomatic relations between Japan and the United States by trying to juggle both Germany and the United States at the same time, I could not accomplish any purpose were I to go to the United States.” But Nomura came to believe that his country needed a steadying hand to avoid war, so he departed for the United States on Janu
ary 23. On his layover in San Francisco, Nomura met with American naval intelligence officer Ellis Zacharias who had been stationed in Tokyo in the 1920s and ’30s, where he became friendly with both Nomura and Yamamoto. In what Zacharias remembered as an “amazingly frank” conversation, Nomura said he was fearful of how power in Japan had been concentrated in the war extremists, who were pushing to battle the United States. The admiral felt this conflict was becoming both inevitable and, for Japan, suicidal.

  The year before, Zacharias had been told by a confidential informant that the Japanese were planning an October 17 surprise attack against the American naval base in San Pedro, California. The threat did not come true, but that information combined with Nomura’s revelations convinced Zacharias that Japan would go to war with America, a war that would begin with a sneak attack.

  At the end of March 1941, Zacharias warned Hawaii’s Admiral Kimmel that Japan “would begin with an air attack on our fleet on a weekend and probably on a Sunday morning; the attack would be for the purpose of disabling four battleships.” Zacharias predicted carrier-based planes would arrive from the north of Oahu to take advantage of the prevailing winds, preceded by submarine patrols. Kimmel asked what should be done to make sure this didn’t happen, and Zacharias said, “The only possible way of doing it would be to have a daily patrol out to five hundred miles” for surveillance. When Kimmel said he didn’t have the men or the planes to do that, Zacharias said, “Well, Admiral, you better get them because that is what is coming.”