The Mantle of Command

by Nigel Hamilton

  Mrs. Roosevelt’s explanation seemed, in retrospect, a trifle jejune—yet was closer to the mark on December 7, 1941, than even she, as First Lady, recognized. A veritable army of conspiracy theorists in subsequent decades would come to suspect the Commander in Chief of having received secret warning of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor via American, or even British, intelligence—and of having withheld it in order to embroil the United States in war, against the will of the American people.3 These were grave, posthumous charges—and they rested on undeniable truths. Had not the President received, late on the evening of December 6, 1941, decrypts of a top-secret Japanese signal from Tokyo to its imperial ambassador in Washington, suggesting that “peace” negotiations over U.S.-Japanese problems in Southeast Asia—where Japan had seized control of southern China and also Indochina—were coming to an end? Had not Roosevelt remarked to his White House assistant, Harry Hopkins, within the hearing of the young officer delivering the decrypt to the President, that “this means war”? Had not the President immediately sought to telephone the chief of naval operations (CNO) of the United States, to discuss that secret intelligence? And had not the President said that “it certainly looked as though the Japanese were terminating negotiations”?

  More tellingly still, had not the final fourteenth paragraph of the secret Japanese signal, decoded by American cryptographers early the next morning, been delivered to the President at 9:00 A.M. on Sunday, December 7, 1941, as he lay in bed having his breakfast, in the room next to his study? Had not the secretary of state, Mr. Cordell Hull, received the very same decrypt that morning, along with Mr. Henry Stimson and Mr. Frank Knox, the U.S. secretaries of war and of the navy, meeting together at the Munitions Building on the Mall? And had not Mr. Hull said to his colleagues he was “very certain that the Japs are planning some deviltry”4—for even as they read over the fourteenth paragraph of the formal diplomatic “note” that the Japanese ambassadors were being ordered to deliver, had not further decrypts been delivered by special messenger? Had not this Japanese cable from Tokyo instructed the ambassadors to present the formal government message, ending all efforts at diplomacy, to the “United States government (if possible to the secretary of state) at 1 P.M. on the 7th, your time”? Why that specific day and hour? Was not mention of an exact moment—lunchtime on a Sunday in Washington, D.C., but dawn of December 8 in the Philippines, and 6:30 A.M. in Hawaii—enough to ring a very loud bell in the minds of the top Roosevelt administration officials? And had not the very last decrypted postscript added a final instruction, to immediately destroy all secret documents and codebooks at the Japanese Embassy, which was then to shut down?

  What more warning did the government of the United States require, for heaven’s sakes? Why had decrypts of Purple communications by the U.S. Magic team (so called for their almost miraculous monitoring and deciphering of Japanese diplomatic radio signals) been denied to the naval and army-air commanders in chief in Hawaii? Why, in sum, had the President and his staff not warned the many thousands of brave U.S. servicemen—in the navy, the army, the air corps—who were to lose their lives a few hours later?

  It had, surely, to be a conspiracy, or so the army of conspiracy theorists would say. After all, how could the Japanese Imperial Navy’s First Air Fleet (a veritable armada of modern aircraft carriers—no less than six in number—and two battleships, three cruisers, nine destroyers, as well as eight fueling tankers and twenty-three submarines, totaling almost three dozen vessels) leave Hitokappu Bay in Japan and make its way across thirty-five hundred miles of the Pacific without U.S. detection? Surely the defense forces of the United States could not all have been asleep—especially when there was ample intelligence warning beforehand?

  The reality of “Pearl Harbor day”—the longest and worst day of President Roosevelt’s life—was somewhat different.

  On receiving a Magic decrypt of the “pilot” message and the first thirteen parts of the alarming but mysterious Japanese Purple signal being sent from the Japanese foreign minister, Mr. Shigenori Togo, to Ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura in Washington, D.C., at 10:00 P.M. on the night of December 6, 1941, the President had indeed tried to call Admiral Harold “Betty” Stark, his CNO, at Stark’s residence at the Naval Observatory in Georgetown.

  The admiral, the President was told, was out at the theater with his wife, attending a performance of Romberg’s popular operetta The Student Prince—famed for its rousing “Drinking Song.” It was thus only at 11:30 P.M. that the President had finally spoken to Betty, once the admiral had returned home and had had time himself to read the still-incomplete message. They had agreed, on the telephone, that the news the Japanese were ending peace negotiations looked bleak for America—the two men speculating on what would be contained in the final part of the communiqué, yet to come. A declaration of war with Britain and the Netherlands, whose oil fields the Japanese military were eyeing with impatient, predatory interest, now that the United States had cut off American oil exports following the Japanese invasion of Indochina earlier that summer? Or war, even, with the United States—beginning with an invasion of the Philippines?

  Over the past months the President had, as commander in chief, overridden the advice of Admiral Stark and deliberately augmented the U.S. fleet based at Pearl Harbor, at the very center of the Pacific. He had stationed another U.S. fleet at Manila, and—against the reluctance of General Marshall, the U.S. Army chief of staff—had ordered reinforcements of the most modern U.S. warplanes, ammunition, and troops to be sent out urgently to the Philippines as a deterrent against further Japanese predations in Southeast Asia.

  Clearly, as the latest decrypts of Japanese diplomatic signals and cumulative American secret intelligence reports were indicating, the President’s policy of deterrence had not worked. In fact the very opposite seemed to be the consequence. Like belated British and French rearmament in 1939, America’s end of appeasement and its more muscular approach toward Japanese military conquest in Southeast Asia appeared to be producing the contrary effect to the one intended: convincing the leaders of the Japanese militocracy that further “peace” negotiations with the Americans, posing as the guardians of tranquility in the Far East in order to get their way, were pointless. Only a preemptive Japanese attack, similar to Hitler’s assault on the West on May 10, 1940, could hope to defeat the United States before it reinforced its Far Eastern bases even further.

  Japanese militarists were not mistaken in fearing belated American rearmament. The simple fact was: given the output of the U.S. economy—which was estimated to be more than five times that of Japan—America could only get more powerful. A flight of thirteen of the latest long-range, almost indestructible B-17 Flying Fortress bombers and reconnaissance airplanes, for example, was that day taking off from San Francisco, bound for the Philippines, on the President’s orders. And a ship convoy carrying some twenty thousand U.S. troops and military equipment for the Philippines was due to leave San Francisco on December 8, on the President’s instructions. The United States was waking up after its long slumber in the Orient.

  Rather than continue diplomatic negotiations and allow a more powerful U.S. presence to be built in the Pacific, the Japanese were going to go to war—this was the incontrovertible conclusion of the initial decrypt. The first thirteen paragraphs of the intended Japanese note were dark and disappointing to the President and to his chief of naval operations, Admiral Stark. How much more potent would U.S. forces in the Pacific and Far East become as a deterrent, if only negotiations between the Japanese and U.S. governments could be dragged out still longer, they agreed. Yet the Japanese were not fools. They had done the sums—indeed, for weeks now American intelligence had tracked a vast fleet of warships and military troop transports assembling in Shanghai, then putting to sea. Clearly they were readying to invade somewhere in Southeast Asia, once they terminated negotiations.

  Increasingly fatalistic, the President had composed a final appeal for “peace” to Emperor Hirohito. D
espite the objection of his secretary of war, Roosevelt had dispatched it in a special personal telegram that was to be delivered by the U.S. ambassador in Tokyo on the evening of December 6 (December 7 in Japan)—a message the President had phrased with great care, so that if leaked or afterward published, it could be appreciated by all as a plea for peace, not war.5

  In the cable, the President of the United States had assured the Emperor of Japan that the U.S. had no thought of “invading Indo-China” if the Japanese, as the U.S. requested, withdrew its occupation troops. Nervousness about Japanese intentions was understandably rife across Southeast Asia, Roosevelt had pointed out. “None of the peoples” of the Philippines, the East Indies, Malaya, and Thailand could be expected to “sit indefinitely or permanently on a keg of dynamite,” he’d written. “I address myself to your Majesty . . . so that Your Majesty may, as I am doing, give thought in this indefinite emergency to ways of dispelling the dark clouds. I am confident that both of us, for the sake of the peoples not only of our own great countries but for the sake of humanity in neighboring territories, have a sacred duty to restore traditional amity and prevent further death and destruction.”6

  It was futile, of course. Unknown to the President, the Japanese foreign minister, Mr. Togo, did not even allow the U.S. ambassador, Joseph Grew, to take the cablegram to the Emperor’s palace, lest it upset Japanese war operations already in train.

  Togo’s reasoning was straightforward: as commander in chief of Japan’s Imperial Armed Forces, His Highness Emperor Hirohito had already been informed of Japanese invasion plans, and on December 3 had not only signed off on multipronged amphibious landings all across Southeast Asia—assaulting Malaya, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, and the Philippines—but a top-secret sneak attack on the main military base of the United States at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.7 As one Pearl Harbor historian would later note, “attempting to stop Operation Hawaii at this point would have been rather like commanding Niagara Falls to flow uphill.”8 All was set; once the senior Japanese naval commander, Admiral Yamamoto, obtained the signed imperial order to proceed, his chief of staff noted smugly that, at the very moment when the Japanese ambassador would be performing his appointed tasks in Washington, pretending to be continuing negotiations as part of the Japanese plot or charade, “the biggest hand will be at their throat in four days to come.”9

  Admiral Yamamoto’s chief of staff was not exaggerating. The surprise left hook at the American jugular at Pearl Harbor was designed not to win the war overnight, but to administer a savage first shock, ensuring that the Americans could not interfere with massive Japanese invasion forces about to strike across the whole of Southeast Asia, far to the north. The presence of those assault troopships could not be—and were not intended to be—concealed. Eight Japanese cruisers, thirty-five transport ships, and twenty destroyers had been observed and reported by the British Admiralty moving toward Kra on December 6, indicating an impending invasion of Singapore, Malaya, or Indonesia (Dutch East Indies)—or all three. And possibly the Philippines, too.

  The President had thus gone to bed at the White House, after midnight on December 6, with foreboding. He slept fitfully. Then, at 9:00 A.M. on the morning of December 7, he received from a U.S. naval intelligence courier, Lieutenant Schulz, the top-secret Magic decrypt containing the missing fourteenth paragraph of the Japanese government’s official “response” to Secretary Hull’s American message of November 26. Hull’s message had urged the Empire of Japan to unequivocally cease and desist in its military occupation of southern China and Indochina, in order that U.S.-Japanese relations could be put back upon a peaceful course. The final Japanese paragraph ended, the President noted, with bleak and ominous words. Since “efforts towards the establishment of peace through the creation of a New [Japanese] Order in Asia” had failed over the preceding weeks, the ambassadors were to inform the U.S. government, “it is impossible to reach an agreement through further negotiations.”

  So this was it. The decrypt was pretty much what the President had expected—it “looked as though the Japs are going to sever negotiations, break off negotiations” he remarked to his naval aide, Captain Beardall10—but it did not specifically indicate hostilities would result, or when or where they would take place. Hostilities, nevertheless, were clearly coming—the fleet of Japanese warships and transports openly poised to strike at British and Dutch territories in Southeast Asia, and perhaps the Philippines. Reading the first part of the Japanese message the night before, the President’s assistant, Harry Hopkins, had remarked: “since war was undoubtedly going to come at the convenience of the Japanese it was too bad that we could not strike the first blow and prevent any sort of surprise.”11

  “No, we can’t do that,” the President had retorted. “We are a democracy and a peaceful people”12—even if his cabinet, disappointed by continuous American appeasement of the Japanese military government, and sickened by reports of Japanese atrocities in the countries they had overrun, favored preemptive war. Roosevelt had overridden their advice—repeating the well-known story of President Lincoln, when he polled his own cabinet members on whether to go ahead with the Emancipation Proclamation. As the cabinet members all said no, Lincoln had summarized: “Seven nays and one aye, the ayes have it”!

  Asking, in the same vein, if they thought the country would back him if the United States were to attack the Japanese Navy preemptively, Roosevelt’s own cabinet members had voted unanimously yes. “The Nays have it,” Roosevelt had concluded the cabinet meeting—refusing to go down the preemptive route.13

  Despite mounting evidence of further Japanese aggression being prepared, then, the President had simply refused to budge. Not only did isolationists hold the whip hand in Congress and across the nation, he had reminded Hopkins, but preemptive military attack was not in America’s historical, moral vocabulary. Raising his voice, he’d claimed that the United States’ policy of nonaggression—of only responding if and when itself attacked—had over the centuries been to America’s advantage; “we have a good record,” he’d summed up14—despite his anxiety.

  The latest decrypt, however, was not the end of communications from Tokyo to its embassy in Washington, the President soon learned. A few minutes after 10:00 A.M. a courier arrived with more decrypts. These included instructions to deliver the entire fourteen-part message to the State Department that day at one o’clock, Washington time, precisely. The concluding part of the message thanked the dual Japanese ambassadors, Admiral Nomura and Mr. Kurusu, for their patient and devoted service to the Emperor—and ordered them to destroy, after reading the message, the cipher machine, all codes, and all secret documents remaining at the embassy.

  It was clear to President Roosevelt, as he read this, that Japan was going to war not simply with Britain and the Dutch, but with the United States also—and that war could start any time after 1:00 P.M.

  Understandably, then, the President forswore lunch with his wife and her thirty guests downstairs at the White House. After speaking on the telephone with his civilian war council—Secretaries Hull, Knox, and Simpson, who had seen the same decrypts, messengered to them at their meeting in the Munitions Building on the Mall—Roosevelt resigned himself to his doctor’s painful treatment of his sinus problem. “The damp weather, though mild that day, had made his sinus bad, which necessitated daily treatment of his nose,” Eleanor recalled. “I always worried about this constant treatment for I felt that while it might help temporarily, in the long run it must cause irritation.”15

  On the Magic decrypt delivery list, beginning with the President and the civilian secretaries of state, war, and the navy, there followed the names of the chiefs of staff of the U.S. Army and Navy—though not the Air Corps (recently renamed the United States Army Air Forces), as befitted its still-lowly status in the nation’s armed forces. The response of the chiefs of staff to the latest information, however, proved, in the light of history, as poor as that of their civilian masters. General Marshall, for rea
sons that remain unclear, later claimed not even to have received the decrypt of the first part of the Japanese note the night before; thus, when the missing fourteenth paragraph, followed by the instructions to the Japanese ambassadors about the 1:00 P.M. presentation and subsequent shutdown of the embassy, was hand-delivered to Marshall at his official residence at Fort Myer, the general was out riding and couldn’t be contacted. Only at 11:15 A.M. did General Marshall, once alerted, reach his office at the Munitions Building on the Mall. Since he had not seen the earlier, thirteen-part decrypt, it took him a further twenty-five minutes to read and digest the whole message—leading up to its ominous climax regarding destruction of codes, and time of delivery of the Japanese government note.

  Finally, at 11:40 A.M., the penny dropped. When General Marshall called Admiral Stark in his office at the Navy Department building next door, the admiral—who was under the mistaken impression there was a Magic decrypting office in Hawaii16—did not feel more Washington alerts than had already been sent would help naval commanders in the Philippines, Panama, Hawaii, and the West Coast.17

  Stark’s deputy must have questioned the wisdom of this, however, for Admiral Stark soon called back, and on second thought agreed to add his imprimatur to a cable General Marshall had drafted18—even though it threatened to reveal, if the Japanese intercepted the signal, Magic’s breaking of the Japanese secret code. Certainly neither officer dared use the “scrambler” telephone to contact the overseas commanders.19

  “The Japanese are presenting at 1 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, today, what amounts to an ultimatum,” Marshall’s cable disclosed to the recipient field commanders at midday—a presentation that was now only an hour away. “Also they are under orders to destroy their code machine immediately. Just what significance the hour set may have we do not know, but be on the alert accordingly.”20