The Mantle of Command

by Nigel Hamilton

  In the meantime, the Japanese ambassador, one of his aides at the embassy later recalled, “peeked into the office where the typing was being done, hurrying the men.”21 It was no use, however; they simply could not get the fourteen-part official note ready in time for 1:00 P.M. presentation to the U.S. State Department. The Japanese government’s whole scheme—to hand over the official note only twenty minutes before the arrival of their warplanes over America’s moored Pacific Fleet in Battleship Row in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, thus leaving the Americans virtually no time to defend themselves—would be ruined.

  Flustered, Ambassador Nomura telephoned Secretary Hull’s office a few minutes after the 1:00 P.M. deadline, asking for a brief extension of the audience he had requested, to 1:45 P.M.22 This the secretary of state, knowing what was in the note but not knowing what specific “deviltry” it portended, granted, after calling the President.

  A guest at an official dinner the previous night, Mrs. Charles Hamlin, had noticed that Mr. Roosevelt “looked very worn . . . and after the meat course he was excused and wheeled away. He had an extremely stern expression.”23 Given the incoming decrypts and approaching winds of war, this was understandable. But the following morning the President’s physician, Admiral McIntire, did not think the President unduly stressed, given the circumstances—indeed it was one of Franklin Roosevelt’s most attractive traits, he reflected, that the President seldom showed irritation, though his humor could be sharp. He certainly took his medicine—the clearing of his nostrils and sinus ducts—like a man. He seemed more resigned than tense as he waited for news from Secretary Hull of Ambassador Nomura’s visit.

  Roosevelt had reason to be resigned, rather than nervous. He had spent the last several years as president trying to preserve America’s stature as a neutral nation in a world of dictators and competing military empires—while holding off a phalanx of isolationists at home, headed by Senator Burton K. Wheeler and Colonel Lindbergh, opposed to anything but defense of the homeland. Like an expert juggler, Roosevelt had managed this feat without committing the United States to war—a destructive social behavior he had come to despise since his experience in World War I, when he was still young and at the height of his physical and mental energies.

  Roosevelt’s character in the intervening years had certainly changed; as president he had become more opaque and manipulative, yet more compassionate, too. He rather liked Admiral Nomura, whom he’d known during the last war; despite the Magic decrypts he was reading, the President remained certain the ambassador, like the Emperor, was now but a pawn of the militarists in the Japanese government, headed by Admiral Hideki Tojo. Fortunately for the United States, the President felt sure, America was not only more economically powerful than Japan, but cleverer, too. The Magic decrypts were giving the U.S. a huge advantage, making it possible not only to read the mind of the Japanese militocracy, but their diplomatic instructions, several hours before they were read by the intended recipients. By steadying the hand of gung-ho American interventionists at home—including most members of his cabinet—and sending strict instructions to commanders in the Pacific and Far East not to provoke any kind of incident that could lead the Japanese to declare war as a response (“If hostilities cannot repeat cannot be avoided, the United States desires that Japan commit the first act,” Admiral Stark had signaled in a war-warning to his fleet commanders on November 28),24 the President had, it seemed, forced the Japanese government to make the first military move. In that way—the same way in which he had forced Winston Churchill to agree to the Atlantic Charter in August, before there could be any question of a U.S. alliance with Britain—America would be in the right, morally speaking, if war came.

  So confident was the President in holding to this position of moral superiority that when the Chinese ambassador came to see him, as scheduled, in his study at 12:30 that day, Roosevelt had shown him the text of his personal appeal to Emperor Hirohito, dispatched the previous evening. “I got him there; that was a fine, telling phrase,” FDR congratulated himself on his language. (The Chinese ambassador, Hu Shih, had a PhD in philosophy, and was an expert on linguistics, being credited with developing a Chinese vernacular.) “That will be fine for the record,” he’d added, knowing he’d done everything possible to avoid war, short of appeasement.25

  For the record? Responding to Dr. Shih’s curious look, the President had explained: “If I do not hear from the Mikado by Monday evening, that is, Tuesday morning in Tokyo, I plan to publish my letter to the Mikado with my own comments. There is only one thing that can save the situation and avoid war, and that is for the Mikado to exercise his prerogative”—and cancel Japan’s war preparations. “If he does not,” the President went on, “there is no averting war. I think that something nasty will develop in Burma, or the Dutch East Indies, or possibly even in the Philippines.” Referring to the impending visit of the Japanese ambassadors to the State Department, he remarked: “Now these fellows are rushing to get an answer to Secretary Hull’s most recent notes; in fact, I have just been told that those fellows have asked for an appointment to see Secretary Hull this noon. They have something very nasty under way.”26

  The President was thus still thinking as a president—not as a commander in chief. His meeting with the Chinese ambassador ended after forty minutes, at 1:10 P.M.

  Hearing from Secretary Hull that the Japanese ambassadorial visit had been delayed for almost an hour, the President then summoned Harry Hopkins, his adviser, and the two men ate a sandwich at his desk in the Oval Study on the second floor of the private residence of the White House, looking out over the National Mall, the Washington Monument, and the Lincoln Memorial.

  According to Hopkins’s account, written later that evening, the two men talked of “things far removed from war.”27

  Half an hour passed. The telephone rang. The President picked it up himself, expecting it to be Mr. Hull at the State Department, announcing the delayed arrival of the Japanese ambassadors.

  It wasn’t.

  It was Mr. Frank Knox, the secretary of the navy, phoning from his office in the Navy Department on the Mall.28 He was there with the chief of naval operations, Admiral Stark, and Stark’s chief of war plans, Rear Admiral Turner. They had urgent news. The Navy Department in California had just monitored an emergency radio message being broadcast in Honolulu: “Air raid Pearl Harbor. This is no drill.”29

  Pearl Harbor?

  Harry Hopkins questioned the veracity of the telephoned report. Not because he disbelieved news of a Japanese attack, but because he found it difficult to believe—despite the decoding of the Japanese note—that the Japanese would be so stupid as to target a primary American territory, instead of starting with the invasion of British and Dutch colonial possessions in Southeast Asia, as Washington expected.

  That scenario—attacks by the Japanese on Burma, Singapore, Siam, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, without going to war with the United States—had been the President’s constant dilemma over the past four months. For the plain political reality in America was: if the Japanese were clever, and attacked only British and Dutch territories in the Far East, Congress could not be counted on to declare war on Japan—leaving the Japanese to “pick off” any country it wished in Southeast Asia, much as Hitler had done in Europe.

  It now seemed clear that it had been Japan’s intention to attack the United States straight away, judging by the Magic decrypts of their communications to their ambassadors that morning. But Pearl Harbor, thousands of miles from Malaya and the Philippines? Would the Japanese dare strike at America’s primary military and naval base in the Pacific, with ample U.S. fighter planes covering the islands, and bombers able to attack approaching Japanese warships from multiple Hawaiian airfields? Surely, Hopkins argued, it must be a mistake.

  Pearl Harbor, Hopkins pointed out to the President, was six thousand miles away from the Japanese invasion fleet that the U.S. military was currently tracking off Cambodia Point. Not only was Hawaii an American isla
nd archipelago, but the impregnable headquarters—army, naval, and air—of the powerful U.S. Pacific Fleet: a fleet of aircraft carriers, battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and submarines, dominating the entire Central Pacific, together with U.S. bombers, patrol planes, fighter aircraft, radar! It seemed ridiculous. And yet . . .

  Hopkins noted Roosevelt’s pained expression.

  Roosevelt had sailed almost since he could walk; had been assistant secretary of the United States Navy for nearly eight years, from 1913 to 1920. He had devoured the works of America’s greatest naval strategist, Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan. Though he had never served as a commissioned officer, Roosevelt knew the navy forwards and backwards—in fact, he felt so committed to it that he had even asked to leave his post as assistant secretary and be permitted to join the service as an ordinary seaman in 1918, as the United States turned the tide of World War I in Europe. To his chagrin the U.S. Navy had by then—thanks in part to him—half a million sailors in its ranks, and had not needed a father of five, aged thirty-six—however able a seaman.

  Assistant Navy Secretary Franklin D. Roosevelt’s aggressive spirit and sheer energy had nevertheless become legendary in President Wilson’s administration—his driving enthusiasm leading, among other achievements, to the laying of an innovative two-hundred-mile-long mine barrier in 1918, all the way from Scotland to Norway across the North Sea, to inhibit German submarines from getting into the Atlantic (or back if they succeeded).30 Moreover, he was still so much a navy man that his army chief of staff once asked if, as president, he would mind not referring to the navy as “us” and the army as “they.”31

  More to the point: President Roosevelt had himself visited Hawaii in the summer of 1934, in his second year in the White House, aboard the new heavy cruiser USS Houston. There he’d been greeted by a crowd of some sixty thousand residents. He’d toured both Big Island and Oahu—the first U.S. president ever to do so. He’d witnessed a military review by some fifteen thousand U.S. troops—the largest ever on the islands. No less than a hundred army and navy planes had performed a fly-past—forming the letters “FR” in the sky. Joseph Poindexter (since 1934 the governor of the territory) had wined and dined Roosevelt at Washington Place, in Honolulu. “Concerning Hawaii as the American outpost of the Pacific,” a reporter at the Honolulu Star Bulletin had written, “the president is anxious to confer with the heads of the military units first hand to determine for himself the defense needs here. His visit may later lead to an increase in the size of the army and navy posts. As the time approaches for the release [independence] of the Philippines, the president desires full preparedness information regarding the bulwark in the Pacific.”32

  Departing from the Hawaiian Islands, the President had congratulated “the efficiency and fine spirit of the Army and Navy forces of which I am Commander-in-Chief.” These American forces constituted “an integral part of our national defense, and I stress the word ‘defense.’ They must ever be considered an instrument of continuing peace,” he’d emphasized, “for our Nation’s policy seeks peace and does not look to imperialistic aims.”33

  Little had changed, from President Roosevelt’s point of view, in the intervening seven years. Except that America’s “bulwark” in the Pacific had increasingly become a thorn in Japan’s side—not least because the British and Dutch, as well as Australia and New Zealand, so utterly depended on American naval and air power in the Pacific as a deterrent to Japanese expansion. Should the Japanese seek to redefine their war in Asia, Pearl Harbor would doubtless offer a tempting target—much as Russia’s Port Arthur had done in the run-up to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5. Then, too, the Japanese had launched a preemptive, sneak attack to trap the enemy’s most powerful battleships in a seemingly inviolable harbor, before war was even declared, and to destroy it in situ. Ironically, the name of the defending admiral, in 1904, had been Stark . . .

  Looking at Hopkins, the President now shook his head. Harry “the Hop” Hopkins might be skeptical, but the President felt in his very bones the news was right; it was Hopkins who was wrong. An air raid on Pearl Harbor it could well be—the Fort Sumter of World War II.

  Belatedly, all too belatedly, in the early afternoon of Sunday, December 7, 1941, the pieces of the puzzle began to come together in Roosevelt’s mind: in particular, the whereabouts of the fleet of Japanese aircraft carriers that had left port in Japan on November 26, and which had thereafter kept radio silence—a fleet whose whereabouts were currently unknown to American military and naval intelligence.

  The President’s immediate intuition, as well as his naval experience, thus told him what Hopkins, his closest civilian adviser, could not credit.

  No, the President contradicted Hopkins. This was “just the kind of unexpected thing the Japanese would do.”34 A warrior nation defined by its history and culture, the Japanese had no qualms or reticence on moral grounds. If they were to embrace world war rather than a negotiated settlement, would it not make sense for them to strike preemptively at the very heart of America’s Pacific defense?

  What exactly President Franklin Roosevelt should do was unclear, however—just as Joseph Stalin had been unsure, on the morning of June 22, 1941, how to react when unconfirmed reports reached the Kremlin that Hitler’s vast 180-division army had attacked Russia across the German frontier, aiming for Leningrad and Moscow.

  Stalin had done nothing. In fact, in his suspicious wisdom, the Russian leader had rejected President Roosevelt’s repeated warnings of impending German invasion in the long weeks prior to the Nazi invasion, dismissing them as an attempt by the capitalist Western nations to sow discord between the two signatories to the Hitler-Stalin Pact, who’d promised not to attack one another. Stalin had refused to credit first reports of the invasion. (It was even said he’d ordered his men to literally shoot the messenger, a German deserter.) And this barely five months before . . .

  President Roosevelt’s own case was different—yet bore uncomfortable similarities. It was true that the President, in contrast to Stalin, had heeded all intelligence warnings he’d gotten via Magic decrypts; it was true that, on his specific authority, all U.S. forces in the Pacific, the Philippines, and the Far East, including Hawaii, had been on war alert since November 27. But there were other aspects of the story that were more tellingly similar—such as the matter of supposed deterrence.

  Fearing Nazi attack, despite the nonaggression pact he’d signed with Hitler in 1939, Stalin had accelerated Soviet arms production as he became more concerned about the Führer’s intentions. In fact Stalin had even invited German officers to inspect Russian Ilyushin aircraft and manufacturing plants in Moscow, Rybinsk, Perm, and other cities as far as the Urals, to convince the Germans that they would be making a big mistake in attacking the Soviet Union—Artem Mikoyan (brother of the foreign minister) warning the Germans they had been “shown everything we have and are capable of. Anyone attacking us will be smashed by us.”35 Stalin had, meanwhile, bent over backwards not to give Hitler a casus belli—instructing Russian forces on the border with the Third Reich not to do anything provocative. Like Roosevelt, Stalin had even rejected the notion of a preemptive attack on Hitler’s massing armies in Poland.36 Worse still, four days before the German attack, Stalin had turned down General Georgy Zhukov’s request for an official order that would put Russian forces on the border on full alert. “Do you want a war as you are not sufficiently decorated or your rank is not high enough?” Stalin had ridiculed the request. “It’s all Timoshenko’s work. He ought to be shot,” Stalin had remarked to his Politburo colleagues—dismissing the Russian defense minister’s protest that the Soviet Union’s forces, in the pursuit of deterrence, were now neither prepared to attack nor to defend. “Timoshenko is a fine man, with a big head,” Stalin had mocked his adviser, “but apparently a small brain”—illustrating how small by showing his own thumb. “Germany on her own will never fight Russia,” he’d declared in one of the greatest mispredictions of the twentieth century. Afte
r he’d walked out of the meeting, he “stuck his pock-marked face” back around the door and in a loud voice sneered: “If you’re going to provoke the Germans on the frontier by moving troops there without our permission, then heads will roll, mark my words.”37

  President Roosevelt was nowhere near as coarse as his Russian counterpart—yet the fact was, his “deterrent” posturing had proved just as vain as Stalin’s. By compelling the Japanese to fire the first shot, yet refusing to allow U.S. forces to take preemptive action—indeed almost inviting a “midnight” Japanese attack by forbidding anything that could be construed as a hostile or threatening act in the Pacific and North Pacific—had not the President, like Russia’s leader, doomed his forces to receive the first blow?

  How big a blow was it, though? More reports of the air attack on Pearl Harbor came in over succeeding minutes. They seemed genuine—indicating the start of hostilities, rather than a feint to draw American attention away from the South China Sea.

  Still the Japanese ambassadors failed to arrive at the State Department, however. What did that mean?

  Mr. Hull, the secretary of state, wished to cancel the meeting with Admiral Nomura altogether, he told the President by phone at 2:00 P.M., but at 2:05 the President ordered Hull to “receive their reply formally and coolly and bow them out”38—i.e., pretend he did not already know the details of the message they were bringing him, or that Pearl Harbor had already been bombed. That way, Japanese perfidy—continuing the ritual of negotiation, while embarking on a sneak attack—would be all the more unmistakable, once the President announced it.

  The secretary of state assured the President he would do so. Yet far from quietly receiving the Japanese ambassadors, Hull lambasted them when they finally entered his office, at 2:20 P.M. “In all my fifty years of public life,” he told Admiral Nomura and his assistant ambassador, Saburo Kurusu—who were made to remain standing while the secretary read through their fourteen-point note, in English—“I have never seen a document that was more crowded with infamous falsehoods and distortions—infamous falsehoods and distortions on a scale so huge that I never imagined until today that any Government on this planet was capable of uttering them.”39