Jean Edward Smith

by FDR

  61. Numerous scholars have speculated about the missed opportunity. One of the best analyses is by F. C. Jones in his authoritative account of Japanese expansionism: Japan’s New Order in East Asia: Its Rise and Fall 182–183 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1954). Also see Feis, Road to Pearl Harbor 274–277.

  62. On August 14, 1941, just one month before the attempt on Konoye’s life, Baron Hiranuma, the minister for home affairs and an ardent advocate of peace with the United States, was severely injured in an assassination attempt. Grew, 2 Turbulent Era 1332.

  63. Langer and Gleason, Undeclared War 729.

  64. FDR to George VI; FDR to Churchill; both letters dated October 15, 2 F.D.R.: His Personal Letters 1223–1224, Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1950).

  65. 14 Pearl Harbor Attack 1402. Also see Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision 132–133 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1962).

  66. 16 Pearl Harbor Attack 2214 ff.; Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor 146–147.

  67. War Department to Short and MacArthur, October 20, 1941, quoted in Watson, Chief of Staff 496.

  68. Grew, Ten Years in Japan 470. Grew’s long cable of November 3, 1941, is paraphrased in Foreign Relations of the United States, 2 Japan 701–704, and reprinted in full in 14 Pearl Harbor Attack 1045–1057.

  69. Langer and Gleason, Undeclared War 852, quoting “Tojo Memorandum,” in Tokyo War Crimes Documents. Also see Feis, Road to Pearl Harbor 293.

  70. Togo to Nomura, November 4, 1941, quoted in Feis, Road to Pearl Harbor 296.

  71. Memo, Chief of Naval Operations and Chief of Staff for the President, November 5, 1941, 14 Pearl Harbor Attack 1061–1062.

  72. Frances Perkins interview, Columbia Oral History Project, Columbia University.

  73. Hull, 2 Memoirs 1058.

  74. Stimson diary (MS), November 7, 1941, quoted in Freidel, Rendezvous with Destiny 397.

  75. Heinrichs, Threshold of War 200. Also see Langer and Gleason, Undeclared War 865–867; Burns, Roosevelt: Soldier of Freedom 155.

  76. The text of the Japanese proposal (“Plan B”) is reprinted in Feis, Road to Pearl Harbor 309. Also see Foreign Relations of the United States, 2 Japan 755–756.

  77. Togo to Nomura, November 4, 1941, 12 Pearl Harbor Attack 92–93. Also see Langer and Gleason, Undeclared War 856.

  78. In his Memoirs Hull wrote that acceptance of the Japanese offer would have meant “condonement by the United States of Japan’s past aggressions … betrayal of China and Russia, and acceptance of the role of silent partner aiding and abetting Japan in her effort to create a Japanese hegemony over the western Pacific and eastern Asia … [The proposals] were of so preposterous a character that no responsible American official could ever have dreamed of accepting them.” 2 Memoirs 1069–1070.

  For a skeptical assessment of Hull’s ex post facto judgment, see Langer and Gleason, Undeclared War 880. The Japanese offer was only an interim, stopgap arrangement to provide further time to negotiate a long-term settlement.

  79. 14 Pearl Harbor Attack 1109. FDR’s note is also reprinted in Langer and Gleason, Undeclared War 872, and Freidel, Rendezvous with Destiny 398. Langer and Gleason date the note earlier than do others.

  80. Foreign Relations of the United States, 2 Japan 739 ff.

  81. Ickes, 3 Secret Diary 649–650.

  82. Gerow to Hull, November 21, 1941, 14 Pearl Harbor Attack 1103–1107.

  83. Togo to Nomura, November 22, 1941, 12 Pearl Harbor Attack 163–165.

  84. The classic revisionist argument is Charles A. Beard’s President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, especially 517–569 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1948). Also see Rear Admiral Edwin T. Layton, And I Was There: Pearl Harbor and Midway, Breaking the Secrets 198–207 (New York: William Morrow, 1985); William Henry Chamberlain, America’s Second Crusade 167–168 (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1950).

  85. Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy 307–308; Robert H. Ferrell, American Diplomacy 572–573; Gordon W. Prange, At Dawn We Slept 369; Thomas A. Bailey, A Diplomatic History of the United States 737 (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1964); Freidel, Rendezvous with Destiny 400; Gordon W. Prange, Donald M. Goldstein, and Katherine V. Dillon, Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History 177–193 (New York: Penguin Books, 1991).

  86. For Hull’s account, see Hull, 2 Memoirs 1081–1082 and the memorandum he dictated pertaining thereto at 14 Pearl Harbor Attack 1176–1177. Colonel Stimson’s account is in his diary entry of November 26, 1941. The most sustained critique of the accounts provided by Hull and Stimson is not in the works of radical and revisionist historians but in Langer and Gleason, Undeclared War 885 ff.—a work sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations.

  87. Ibid. 893.

  88. WSC to FDR, November 26, 1941, 1 Churchill & Roosevelt 277–278.

  89. Ickes, 3 Secret Diary 655. For Morgenthau’s opposition to negotiating with Japan, see Blum, 2 Morgenthau Diaries 389–391.

  90. On November 24, 1941, Admiral Stark warned Navy commanders in the Pacific, “There are very doubtful chances of a favorable outcome of negotiations with Japan. This situation coupled with statements of [Japanese] government and movement of their naval and military forces indicate in our opinion that a surprise aggressive movement in any direction, including an attack on the Philippines or Guam, is a possibility.… Utmost secrecy is necessary in order not to complicate an already tense situation or precipitate Japanese action.” Stark to CinC Asiatic Fleet and CinC Pacific Fleet, November 24, 1941, 14 Pearl Harbor Attack 1405.

  91. Stimson diary (MS), November 25, 1941.

  92. Ibid.

  93. The text of Hull’s “Ten Point Offer” is in Foreign Relations of the United States, 2 Japan 766–770. Also see Langer and Gleason, Undeclared War 896–897.

  94. Freidel, Rendezvous with Destiny 400.

  95. Stimson diary (MS), November 27, 1941; 11 Pearl Harbor Attack 5422 ff. When Hull met with his advisers on November 27, his hard-line stance was roundly applauded. Stanley Hornbeck, Hull’s senior Far East specialist, urged that the president tell the Army and Navy what to do rather than asking them. In a widely quoted memorandum of that date Hornbeck maintained that Japan would advance into Thailand or Yunnan but would avoid conflict with the United States. He bet 5 to 1 there would not be war by December 15; 3 to 1 there would be no war by January 15; and even money there would be no war by March 1. Such was the advice Hull received from his senior specialist. The Hornbeck memorandum is at 20 Pearl Harbor Attack 4487.

  96. Most scholars are incredulous that Hull acted, apparently with FDR’s approval, without informing the War Department and the Navy beforehand. “It was both bad strategy and careless administrative procedure for the civilian leaders of the Government to make the momentous decisions of November 26, 1941, without formal consultation with the responsible military leaders. The argument that by this date no practical difference could have been anticipated does not alter the seriousness of this breach of fundamental rules for achieving sound decisions of national security policy.” Langer and Gleason, Undeclared War 900.

  97. CNO to CinC Pac and CinC AF, November 27, 1941, 14 Pearl Harbor Attack 1406.

  98. Marshall to CG American forces in the Far East, ibid.

  99. Julius W. Pratt, 2 Cordell Hull 515 (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1964).

  100. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 515.

  101. Shigenori Togo, testimony, Tokyo War Crimes Documents, Document 2927.

  102. Nobutake Ike, Japan’s Decision for War: Records of the 1941 Policy Conferences 265, 283 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1967).

  103. SRN 115376, CinC Combined Fleet to Combined Fleet, December 2, 1941, 1500 hrs., Record Group 457, NSA, National Archives.

  104. Hiroyuki Agawa, The Reluctant Admiral: Yamamoto and the Imperial Navy 158 (Tokyo: Shincho Sha, 1966).

  105. Gordon W. Prange, interview with Capt. Watanabe, February 12, 1949, cited in P
range, At Dawn We Slept 13.

  106. Yamamoto to Admiral Koshiro Oikawa, January 7, 1941, quoted in ibid. 16–17.

  107. For the attack at Taranto, see Don Newton and A. Cecil Hampshire, Taranto (London: W. Kimber, 1959).

  108. The average depth at Pearl Harbor was forty feet. “We did not give aerial torpedoes a great deal of consideration for that reason,” said Admiral Kimmel. 33 Pearl Harbor Attack 1318. Ironically, the Japanese in their training sessions had been unable to penetrate protective torpedo nets, and their pilots were instructed to confine the Pearl Harbor attack to bombing only if they found the American fleet protected by netting. Prange, At Dawn We Slept 321.

  109. Ibid. 332–333.

  110. Ibid. 387, 373.

  111. Yamamoto to Hori, November 11, 1941, ibid. 340. Hori, commanding the submarine fleet, put to sea the next day.

  112. Ibid. 472.

  113. Ibid. 488.

  114. Watson, Chief of Staff: Prewar Plans and Preparations 511.

  115. Gordon W. Prange with Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon, Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History 460 (New York: Penguin, 1991). Kimmel’s remarks were made to Edward M. Morgan, chief counsel for the congressional Pearl Harbor investigation.

  116. Pearl Harbor Report 150–151. General Lucius D. Clay, then in Washington directing the nation’s emergency airport construction program (La Guardia, O’Hare, Los Angeles, National) said much the same. Attending a football game at Griffith Stadium on Sunday, December 7, with Commerce Secretary Jesse Jones, Clay was asked by Secretary Jones about the attack. “I immediately proved my great military expertise because I said, ‘The Japs would attack Guam or the Philippines, but Pearl Harbor is impregnable. I just can’t believe they would attack Pearl Harbor.’ ” Jean Edward Smith, Lucius D. Clay: An American Life 96 (New York: Henry Holt, 1990).

  117. According to the diary kept by Konoye, Yamamoto added, “I hope you will endeavor to avoid a Japanese-American war.” 2 Report of General MacArthur: Japanese Operations in the Southeast Pacific Area 33 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1966).

  118. Richard Ketcham, “Yesterday, December 7, 1941,” American Heritage 54 (November, 1989).

  119. Grace Tully, F.D.R.: My Boss 255 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949).

  120. Robert Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 431 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948).

  121. ER, interview with Professor Henry Graff, FDRL, quoted in Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Life 289 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).

  122. Winston S. Churchill, The Grand Alliance 605 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951).

  123. Ibid. 608–609.

  124. Tully, F.D.R.: My Boss 256. Hopkins’s sentence ran, “With confidence in our armed forces—with the unbounded determination of our people—we will gain the inevitable triumph—so help us God.” (“The most platitudinous in the speech,” according to Hopkins’s biographer Robert Sherwood. Roosevelt and Hopkins 436.)

  125. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 436–438.

  126. Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew 381 (New York: Harper & Row, 1946).

  127. Ickes, 3 Secret Diaries 662.

  128. Frances Perkins interview, Columbia Oral History Project.

  129. The congressional delegation was composed of Senate majority leader Alben Barkley and his Republican opposite, Charles McNary; Tom Connally of Texas, chairman of Foreign Relations; Warren Austin of Vermont, the ranking member of Military Affairs; and Hiram Johnson of California. From the House, Speaker Sam Rayburn, Minority Leader Joe Martin, and Majority Leader John McCormack, plus Sol Bloom of New York and Charles Eaton of New Jersey, the chairman and second-ranking member of Foreign Affairs.

  130. Stimson diary (MS), December 7, 1941.

  131. American Heritage 86, November 1989.

  132. Francis Biddle, In Brief Authority 206 (New York: Doubleday, 1948).

  133. Quoted in Prange, At Dawn We Slept 559.

  134. Alexander Kendrick, Prime Time: The Life of Edward R. Murrow 239–240 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965). That night Murrow paced his hotel room. “It’s the biggest story of my life,” he told his wife, Janet, “and I can’t make up my mind whether it’s my duty to tell it, or to forget it.” (FDR had not said “off the record.”) In the end, Murrow decided Roosevelt had been using him as a sounding board, thinking out loud, in full confidence. Though technically not bound to confidentiality, Murrow felt that in conscience he could not report the details of his meeting with the president.

  135. FDR to Congress, December 8, 1941, 10 Public Papers and Addresses 514–515.

  TWENTY-FOUR | Commander in Chief

  The epigraph is from Secretary Stimson’s diary entry of December 7, 1941, Stimson Papers, Yale University.

  1. Quoted in Hiroyuki Agawa, The Reluctant Admiral: Yamamoto and the Imperial Navy 282 (Tokyo: Shincho Sha, 1966).

  2. FDR, Fireside Address, December 9, 1941, 10 Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt 522–530, Samuel I. Rosenman, ed. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950).

  3. David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 527 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett, A War to Be Won 180–188 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).

  4. Quoted in John Keegan, The Second World War 240 (New York: Viking, 1989).

  5. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 566.

  6. FDR, Message to Congress, December 11, 1941, 10 Public Papers and Addresses 522.

  7. WSC to King George VI, December 8, 1941, 3 Churchill War Papers, 1941 1585, Martin Gilbert, ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993).

  8. Roosevelt’s remarks are in two cables drafted but not sent on December 10, 1941. Their contents were conveyed to Churchill in a subsequent telephone conversation that day. For texts, see Churchill and Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence 285–286, Warren F. Kimball, ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984).

  Separately, Lord Halifax, Britain’s ambassador in Washington, told Churchill, “He [Roosevelt] was not sure if your coming here might not be rather too strong medicine in the immediate future for some of his public opinion that he still feels he has to educate up to the complete conviction of the oneness of the struggle against both Germany and Japan.” Halifax to Churchill, December 9, 1941, Halifax Papers, Cambridge University.

  9. WSC to FDR, December 10, 1941, 3 Churchill & Roosevelt 284.

  10. FDR to WSC, December 10, 1941, ibid. 286–287.

  11. David Bercuson and Holger Herwig, One Christmas in Washington 125 (New York: Overlook Press, 2005).

  12. Doris Kearns Goodwin, interview with Alonzo Fields, cited in No Ordinary Time 302 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).

  13. Michael Reilly and William J. Slocum, Reilly of the White House 125 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1947).

  14. Lillian Rogers Parks, The Roosevelts: A Family in Turmoil 99 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1981). In addition to her father, Elliott, ER’s brother Hall died of acute alcoholism on September 25, 1941.

  15. Winston S. Churchill, The Grand Alliance 608 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950).

  16. Presidential Press Conference 794, December 23, 1941, 18 Complete Presidential Press Conferences of Franklin D. Roosevelt 387–388 (New York: Da Capo, 1972).

  17. Newsweek, January 5, 1942; Alistair Cooke’s comment was made to Curtis Roosevelt in October 1993. Quoted in Jon Meacham, Franklin and Winston 142–143 (New York: Random House, 2003).

  18. 6 Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 6536–6541, Robert Rhodes James, ed. (New York: Chelsea House, 1974).

  19. The Washington Post, December 27, 1941.

  20. In Ottawa on December 30, 1941, Churchill made his famous “some chicken, some neck” speech to the Canadian Parliament, mocking the words of French general Maxime Weygand, who in June 1940 had told his government that “In three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken.” “Some chicken!” Churchill told his Canadian listeners. “Some neck!” 6 Speeches of Winston Churchill 6541
–6547.

  At the invitation of Edward Stettinius, Churchill spent five days at Stettinius’s Pompano Beach oceanfront estate. He enjoyed splashing naked in the surf, “half submerged in the water like a hippopotamus in a swamp,” in the words of his doctor, Lord Moran. The Struggle for Survival: The Diaries of Lord Moran 22 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966).

  21. Robert Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 472–473 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948); Forrest C. Pogue, 2 George C. Marshall 285–287 (New York: Viking, 1966).

  22. For firsthand insight into the operation of the Munitions Assignment Board, see the comments of General Lucius D. Clay, the Army’s representative, in Jean Edward Smith, Lucius D. Clay: An American Life 134–139 (New York: Henry Holt, 1990).

  23. The text is most easily accessible in Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The War President 371–372 (New York: Random House, 2000). Also see 11 Public Papers and Addresses 3–4.

  24. For this comparison I am indebted to Isaiah Berlin, “Mr. Churchill,” Atlantic Monthly (September 1949).

  25. FDR, Address on the State of the Union, January 6, 1942, 11 Public Papers and Addresses 32–42.

  26. Stimson diary (MS), January 6, 1942. Yale University.

  27. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 273–274.

  28. Smith, Lucius D. Clay 119–126. The chart Clay prepared for the president is reproduced on page 125. A transcript of my interviews with General Clay, some one thousand pages, is on file at the Columbia Oral History Project at Columbia University. The tapes themselves are at the George C. Marshall Library at VMI in Lexington, Virginia, along with Clay’s papers.

  In place of the original 45,000 tanks, Roosevelt accepted the Army’s suggestion for 46,523 tracked vehicles (tanks, armored personal carriers, and self-propelled artillery), “of which 24,700 shall be tanks.” The president’s goal of 60,000 airplanes was reduced by 25 percent.

  29. Hoover to Biddle, February 1, 1942, quoted in Greg Robinson, By Order of the President 100 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). Also see Conrad Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt 721–722 (New York: PublicAffairs, 2003). Stilwell’s remark was made on December 19, 1941, in Los Angeles. See Richard N. Current, Secretary Stimson: A Study in Statecraft 193 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1942). Los Angeles Times, December 8, 1941; January 23, 1942. Francis Biddle, In Brief Authority 213 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1962).