Americans had little appreciation for a society steeped in a tradition of extreme nationalism, reinforced through indoctrination in its public education system and replete with military training of children from the time they could walk.4 Nor did most westerners even begin to grasp Bushido, the Japanese warrior code that demanded death over the “loss of face.” It simply did not register on Main Street, U.S.A., that Japan might pose a genuine threat to U.S. security. Quite the contrary, in February 1941, Time publisher Henry Luce declared the dawning of the “American Century,” reflecting the views of probably a majority of Americans.
Americans may have misjudged their enemy, but the delusion in Japan was worse. Withdrawing from Indochina and China, to them, was simply an unacceptable loss of honor. Therefore, by mid-1941, Japan’s civilian and military leadership had settled on a course of war with the United States. Most agreed, however, that Japan’s only hope of victory was a massive all-Asian offensive with a key surprise strike at the U.S. Navy’s main Pacific base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, with simultaneous attacks in the American-held Philippine islands, British Singapore, and Hong Kong. Never in human history had military forces undertaken such sweeping and ambitious operations, let alone attempted such strikes simultaneously. Most astounding of all, not only did Japan make the attempt to swallow all of Asia in a single gulp, she came within a hair of succeeding.
Time Line
Sept. 1939:
Hitler invades Poland, and World War II begins in Europe
1940:
Germany defeats French and British forces in France; France surrenders and is occupied; Norway occupied; Battle of Britain
Dec.7,1941:
Japan attacks Pearl Harbor
1942:
United States and Britain invade North Africa; Jimmy Doolittle bombs Tokyo (February); Battles of Coral Sea (May) and Midway (June)
1943:
Allies begin bombing Europe, defeat the Afrika Korps at the battle of Kasserine Pass (February), and invade Sicily and Italy (July)
1944:
Invasion of France (June sixth); Paris liberated (August); Battle of the Bulge (December); invasion of the Philippines and Battle of Leyte Gulf (October)
1945:
Germany surrenders (May); landings on Iwo Jima and Okinawa (March-June); Trinity test of atomic bomb (July); atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (August sixth and ninth); Japan surrenders (August twelfth)
1946:
“Iron Curtain” speech by Winston Churchill, Cold War begins
1947:
Marshall Plan, North Atlantic Treaty Organization founded
Back Door to War?
Hitler’s quick conquest of France in 1940 put French possessions in the Far East up for grabs. After Vichy France permitted the Japanese to build airfields in northern Indochina, the United States passed the Export Control Act (July 1940), restricting sales of arms and other materials to Japan. Over time, scrap iron, gasoline, and other products were added to the strategic embargo. The Japanese warlords spoke of a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, a term they used to describe an Asia dominated by the Japanese Empire. The fly in the ointment remained oil, since Japan had no domestic oil reserves. This made the empire fully dependent on foreign energy sources, a fact that had shaped Japan’s war planning.
In September 1940, Tokyo made a colossal blunder by signing the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy, mainly as a way to acquire British Far Eastern possessions that would be available if Hitler conquered Britain. Japan’s dalliance with Germany had run both hot and cold, but now the Japanese threw in their lot with the Nazis. In the eyes of many westerners, this confirmed that the Japanese warlords were no different from Hitler or Mussolini. The alliance albatross hung around Japan’s neck for the entire war. Hitler hoped to lure Japan into opening a second front in Siberia against the Soviets, but Japan, remembering the ill-fated land campaign of 1904, instead planned to move south for oil. To eliminate interference from the Russians, Japan signed a nonaggression pact with the Soviets in April 1941.
The nonaggression pact freed Japanese troops in Manchuria to move south, whereupon Japan announced its intention to control all of Indochina. Roosevelt had had enough. He restricted all exports of oil to Japan and froze Japanese assets in the United States, which had the effect of choking off Japanese credit and making it nearly impossible for Japan to buy imported oil from other countries.
Freezing Japan’s assets left the empire with a two-year supply of oil under peacetime conditions, but less than a year’s worth of “war oil” because the consumption of fuel by carriers, battleships, and aircraft would rapidly deplete Japan’s reserves. Thus, FDR’s efforts to coerce Japan into withdrawing from Indochina had the opposite effect and certainly increased pressure to go to war. However, notions that Roosevelt provoked Japan are absurd. Japan was already on a timetable for war. Even before the embargo, “Japan was trading at a rate, and with trade deficits, which ensured that she would have exhausted her gold and foreign currency reserves some time in early spring 1942.”5 Put another way, with or without the frozen assets, Japan faced national bankruptcy in mid-1942, making the “crisis entirely of Japan’s own making.”6 Equally important, based on shipbuilding ratios then in place, the imperial navy was in a once-in-a-lifetime position of strength relative to the Americans. (Even without combat losses, by 1944, the imperial navy would have fallen to 30 percent of U.S. naval strength, which, as a result of the Two-Ocean Naval Expansion Act of 1940, would include enough vessels to render the Japanese naval forces “nothing more than an impotent irrelevance, wholly deprived of any prospect of giving battle with any hope of success.”)7
Contrary to the back-door-to-war theories of the Roosevelt haters, Japan’s warlords had all but committed themselves to a conflict with the United States in January 1941, well before the freezing of the assets. Moreover, there is some question as to how badly the embargo hurt Japan: from July 1940 to April 1941, when petroleum supposedly was locked up, American oil companies sold 9.2 million barrels of crude to Japan, and permits were approved for 2 million additional barrels. It is hard to argue that under such circumstances the United States was squeezing the Japanese economy to death.8
Additional warning signs came from American code breakers, who in December 1940 deciphered the Japanese diplomatic code, called Purple. This allowed the United States to read Japan’s mail for over a year. From these intercepts it was clear that Japan intended to expand to the southwest (Singapore, a British possession), the south (the Philippines), the east (striking at Pearl Harbor), or all three. A final, failed negotiation included an offer to resume full trade with Japan in return for her withdrawal from China, after which the imperial fleets raised anchor, placing the 7th Fleet at Pearl Harbor in the center of Yamamoto’s crosshairs.
“A Date Which Will Live in Infamy”
Japanese strategists began planning an air attack on the U.S. naval base in Hawaii in the summer of 1941. Japanese preparations for the Pearl Harbor strike comprised only one third of the overall military operation, which included two simultaneous invasions of the Philippines and Malaysia. Any one of the three prongs of attack would have been a major military undertaking—especially for a small island nation with limited resources—but coordination of all three spoke volumes about Japan’s delusion and her desperation. The goal of the ambitious strategy was for no less than a knockout blow aimed at all the remaining allied powers in Asia except for India and Australia. Despite the interception of Japanese messages, no one had dreamed that this small island nation, which had never won a major war against European powers, could execute three separate military operations spanning thousands of miles and engaging two of the most powerful nations on earth as well as nearly a dozen regional military forces.
Western intelligence did know that Japanese troops and fleets were on the move somewhere. But where? Most trackers had them headed south, toward Singapore, which led to some complacency at Pearl Harbor, where Admiral Husband Kimme
l and General Walter Short shared responsibilities for the defense of the Hawaiian Islands. The officers had never worked out an effective division of command authority and had failed to schedule appropriate air reconnaissance. Despite repeated war warnings, Kimmel and Short had never put the fleet or airfields on full alert. As a result, American ships were sitting ducks on December seventh.
Japan attacked methodically and with deadly efficiency. Bombers, torpedo planes, dive bombers—all covered by Mitsubishi Zero fighter planes—took out American air power, then hit the battleships on “battleship row,” sinking or severely damaging every one. The worst casualty, the USS Arizona, went down in ten minutes with a thousand sailors. Few ships of any sort escaped damage of some type. Even civilian quarters suffered collateral damage from the attack, including large numbers hit by American antiaircraft rounds that fell back to earth.9
Despite the phenomenal success of the attack, Yamamoto did not achieve total victory because three key targets, the American aircraft carriers, had been out on maneuvers. Going in, Yamamoto had expected to lose 30 percent of his entire force—ships included—yet he lost nothing larger than a midget sub and only a handful of aircraft. In a critical error of judgment, Yamamoto took his winnings and left the table without the carriers. Although unforeseen at the time, all the battleships except the Arizona would be salvaged and returned to action during the war. More important, by leaving the oil storage facilities undamaged, Yamamoto allowed U.S. forces to continue to operate out of Hawaii and not San Diego or San Francisco. The attack at Pearl Harbor had indeed been a crushing defeat for the United States, but the price at which the Japanese acquired their victory could not be measured in ships or men. An outraged American public had been galvanized and united.
* * *
Did Roosevelt Have Advance Knowledge About the Pearl Harbor Attack?
Even as the last smoke billowed from the sinking or capsized ships in Hawaii, many people were asking how the United States could have been so unprepared. Historian Charles Tansill suggested that the debacle could only have occurred with Franklin Roosevelt’s foreknowledge. Clearly, if a president in possession of advance warning had allowed hundreds of sailors and soldiers to die in a surprise attack, it would have constituted high treason. Why would any chief executive permit such a strike?
In his famous book, Back Door to War (1952), Tansill accused Roosevelt of allowing a Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor to provide the United States with the motivation and justification to enter the war against Hitler in Europe. A number of historians and writers added to the Tansill thesis over the years, but little new evidence was produced until the 1980s, when John Toland published Infamy, wherein he claimed to have located a navy witness who, while on duty in San Francisco, received transmissions locating the Japanese carriers and forwarded the information to Washington.
Adding to Toland’s revelations, a “Notes and Documents” piece in the American Historical Review disclosed that the FBI had acquired information from an Axis double agent named Duskow Popov (“Tricycle”), who had information on a microdot about the attack.10 Although Toland and others maintained that Popov’s documents included a detailed plan of the Japanese air attack, it did no such thing. Tricycle’s data dealt almost exclusively with buildings and installations, but had nothing on ships, aircraft, scouting patterns, or any of the rather important items that one would expect from a “detailed plan.”11
In 1981, Asian historian Gordon Prange published At Dawn We Slept; following his death, his students Donald Goldstein and Katherine Dillon completed his work with new Pearl Harbor claims in Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History. The authors found Toland’s mystery sailor, Robert Ogg, who emphatically rejected Toland’s assertion that he had said he had intercepted massive Japanese radio traffic. Meanwhile, documents acquired from Japanese archives raised a more serious problem for the conspiracy theorists because they proved the Japanese fleet had been under strict radio silence during the attack voyage to Pearl Harbor.
The controversy refused to go away. In 1999, Robert B. Stinnett’s Day of Deceit revived the argument that Roosevelt had prior knowledge of the attack with important new code-breaking information. But the crucial pieces of “evidence” that Stinnett employed often proved the opposite of what he claimed. He used precise intelligence terms—code breaking, interception, translation, analysis—interchangeably, which produced massive errors: an intercepted document is not necessarily broken, and if intercepted and broken, it may not be translated, and if intercepted, broken, and translated, it may not be analyzed for days, weeks, or even years. Some of the intercepts in November 1941 were indeed broken, but not translated or analyzed until…1945!
The entire argument of the revisionists hinges on the notion that FDR couldn’t get into the war with Germany without a pretext. But Roosevelt had already had ample cause, if he’d wanted it, to ask for a declaration of war against Germany. Nazi U-boats had sunk American ships, killed American sailors, and in all ways shown themselves hostile. Against a nation that had declared war on Mexico over a handful of cavalry troopers or that had declared war on Spain for the questionable destruction of a single ship, Germany had long since crossed the line needed for a declaration of war. Despite the isolationist elements in Congress, it is entirely possible that FDR could have asked for a declaration of war after the sinking of the Reuben James or other such attacks. Certainly the U-boats were not going to stop, and it was only a matter of time before more Americans died. Pearl Harbor was a tragedy, but not a conspiracy.
* * *
Sources: Charles Beard, President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1948); Walter Millis, This Is Pearl! (New York: William Morrow, 1947); Charles C. Tansill, Back Door to War (Chicago: Regnery, 1952); Gordon W. Prange with Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon, At Dawn We Slept (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981); John Toland, Infamy (New York: Doubleday, 1982); Dusko Popov, Spy/Counterspy (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1974); Harry Elmer Barnes, “Pearl Harbor After a Quarter of a Century,” Left and Right, IV (1968); Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1962); Robert B. Stinnett, Day of Deceit (New York: Free Press, 2000).
On December eighth, Roosevelt, appearing before the jointly assembled House and Senate, called December 7, 1941, a “date which will live in infamy” as he asked Congress for a declaration of war against Japan. Four days later Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. With a declaration of war only against Japan, it appeared to some isolationists that it still might be possible to avoid entering the war in Europe. Hitler refused to oblige them and rushed headlong at the United States and the USSR simultaneously.
Indeed, Hitler, at the recommendation of his foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, had no intention of allowing the United States to get its declaration of war in ahead of his own. “A great power does not allow itself to be declared war upon,” Ribbentrop purportedly said. “It declares war on others.”12 War with Germany had been far closer than many isolationists imagined: in May 1941, the Nazis sank the freighter Robin Moor, prompting Roosevelt to extend American neutral waters to Iceland and allow American warships to escort U.S. merchantmen farther out to sea. A few months later, German vessels attacked the USS Greer; and in October 1941 they torpedoed the destroyer Kearney, which managed to make it back to port. The House of Representatives voted the next day to arm American merchant ships. Then, on Halloween, Germans sank the destroyer Reuben James, killing 115 Americans. At that point, the United States would have been fully justified by international law in declaring war on Germany and her allies, but Roosevelt was still unconvinced that the American public would support him. Yet even if Japan had not bombed Pearl Harbor, it is inconceivable that tensions with Nazi Germany would have subsided. Rather, more casualties and direct German attacks would have provoked the United States into declaring war on the Axis powers anyway.
Congress had consistently failed to appreciate the danger
posed by both the Nazi regime and the perception of U.S. weakness propagated in the Japanese mind by Hitler’s repeated incursions. Americans came to war with Hitler reluctantly and only as a last resort. At no time prior to Pearl Harbor did anywhere close to a majority of citizens think the events in Europe sufficiently threatened U.S. national interests. Roosevelt, on the other hand, recognized both the moral evil of Hitler and the near-term threat to American security posed by Nazi Germany. However, he nevertheless refused to sacrifice his personal popularity to lead the United States into the war sooner, knowing full well it would come eventually—and at a higher cost.
Had the United States deliberately and forcefully entered the war in Europe earlier, on its own timetable, perhaps some of Hitler’s strategic victories (and, possibly, much of the Holocaust) might have been avoided. For example, American aircraft would have already been in England by 1940, meaning that the Battle of Britain would not have been close. Moreover, a European buildup almost certainly would have brought the Pacific military forces into a higher stage of alert. And, most important, an American presence well before 1942 might have been just enough to force Hitler into scrapping the German invasion of Russia.
Isolationist critics from the Right have argued that American entry in Europe was needless even after Pearl Harbor and that the Soviets had all but won the war by the time the United States got involved in any significant way.13 This view not only distorts battlefield realities—the Eastern Front was not decided completely until after Kursk in 1943—but it also ignores the fact that American aid may have tipped the balance for the Soviets between 1942 and 1944. Moreover, it should be noted that Stalin offered to negotiate with Hitler in December 1942, a full year after Pearl Harbor, and again in the summer of 1943—hardly the act of a man confident of victory on the field. Stalin was as suspicious of Churchill and Roosevelt as he was of Hitler, and he feared that the Anglo-American powers would encourage a Nazi-Soviet war of exhaustion.14 Certainly the Soviets wore out the Wehrmacht in the east, and they absorbed a disproportionate amount of Nazi resources in some areas, especially men and tanks. But those contributions have to be seen in the context of the entire conflict, and not just in the battles on the Eastern Front. When the bigger picture is revealed, it is clear the U.S. economy won the war.
A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror Page 98
