If the secretary of state hoped thereby to shame Admiral Nomura and Mr. Kurusu in their oriental treachery, however, it was to prove short-lived schadenfreude—for Pearl Harbor was under devastating Japanese air and undersea attack as they spoke. In fact, at 2:00 P.M. the President had anxiously called his secretary of war, Henry Stimson, who’d gone home to his mansion outside Washington for lunch. “Have you heard the news?” Roosevelt had asked. Incredibly, the secretary had still heard nothing. “They have attacked Hawaii,” the President told him. “They are now bombing Hawaii!”
“Well that was an excitement indeed,” Stimson jotted in his diary.40 Excitement soon turned to horror, however. Less than half an hour later, according to Hopkins’s memorandum that night, Admiral Stark, the CNO, called the President from his office at the Navy Department on the Mall. Not only could he officially confirm the aerial assault on Pearl Harbor, Hopkins recorded, but he had grave news. He stated, in Hopkins’s words, “that it was a very severe attack and that some damage had already been done to the fleet and that there was some loss of life.”41
“Some” damage to the fleet? “Some” loss of life?
Giving permission to Admiral Stark to execute War Plan 46—effectively authorizing U.S. forces to begin unrestricted submarine and naval war in the Far East and in the Pacific—the President immediately called his press secretary, Steve Early, at his home. “The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor from the air,” the President told him, “and all naval and military activities on the island of Oahu, the principal American base in the Hawaiian Islands. You had better tell the press right away.” He added (erroneously at this point) that “a second air-attack is reported on Manila air and naval bases.” Then he asked, almost innocently: “Have you any news?”
Early’s response was almost comical: “None to compare with what you have just given me, sir.”42 The press secretary immediately called the three main U.S. press agencies (AP, UP, and INS) via the White House telephone switchboard, and gave them, at 2:22 P.M., the President’s first statement: “The Japs have attacked Pearl Harbor, all military activities on Oahu Island. A second air-attack is reported on Manila air and naval bases.”43
In actuality, Manila itself had still not been attacked—but a second wave of bombers had descended on Pearl Harbor, and the island’s Hickam and Wheeler airfields, a full hour after the first assault. Newly developed shallow-water torpedoes had been used, with devastating results against almost no defensive action. As Admiral Stark reported, it was like a massacre of the innocents.
The conference of advisers that had been planned for 3:00 P.M. at the White House to discuss the President’s dilemma—whether, and how, to appeal to Congress for action, if Japan went ahead with an invasion of British or Dutch territories—was now redundant, as the President clarified, once his war council—or quasi war-cabinet, now—assembled in his office: Secretaries Hull, Knox, and Stimson, as well as General Marshall. (Admiral Stark remained at the Navy Department, communicating with Hawaii. General Arnold was at the time in California—unreachable, it was explained, as he was out shooting grouse!)
America was now effectively at war, even if war had not been declared—as the President acknowledged shortly after 3:00 P.M., when taking a call from the U.S. ambassador in England, John Winant. Winant was staying with Winston Churchill at the British prime minister’s official country residence, Chequers, together with Lend-Lease administrator Averell Harriman; they had just heard an announcement of the Japanese attack at the end of the nine o’clock BBC evening news.
Like Hopkins, Winston Churchill, suffering one of his periodic bouts of depression, had first failed to believe the news. “He didn’t have much to say throughout dinner and was immersed in his thoughts, with his head in his hands part of the time,” Harriman afterward recalled—the Prime Minister showing no sign of having understood when the BBC newscaster, Alvar Lidell, referred to reports of an air raid on Pearl Harbor.44 Churchill’s security chief, Commander Tommy Thompson, was equally at a loss, imagining the announcer had said “Pearl River”—wherever that was! Shocked to the core, Harriman and Winant, as Americans, had understood exactly the name of the location the BBC announcer had mentioned—yet as guests of the Prime Minister, they were unwilling to contradict Commander Thompson. It was only when the butler, Sawyers, entered, as in an Edwardian play, that the news was taken seriously. “It’s quite true,” the butler confirmed, “we heard it ourselves outside [i.e., in the servants’ quarters].”45
Winant later recalled how the dinner guests looked at each other “incredulously. Then Churchill jumped to his feet and started for the door with the announcement, ‘We shall declare war on Japan.’ There is nothing half-hearted or unpositive about Churchill,” Winant wrote, “—certainly not when he is on the move. Without ceremony I too left the table and followed him out of the room. ‘Good God,’ I said, ‘you can’t declare war on a radio announcement.’”46
Instead, Winant suggested that he himself should telephone the President to seek confirmation, which he promptly did—offering his sympathies, when told by the President that there had been significant loss of life, and ships sunk. He then passed the phone to Mr. Churchill, telling the President he would recognize the speaker by his voice.
“Mr. President, what’s this about Japan?” asked Churchill.
“It’s quite true,” the President confirmed. “They have attacked us at Pearl Harbor. We are all in the same boat now.”47
To the President, Mr. Churchill now announced that he wished to declare war immediately on Japan, as he’d told Winant. The President demurred.
They must take things calmly, Roosevelt declared, step by step. He himself would ask Congress for a declaration of war against Japan, the next morning. Churchill promised he would then ask Parliament for a similar declaration, which would “follow the President’s within the hour.”
Aware in part that he should not burden the President with more at this moment, Churchill rang off. His own mood, however, had shifted from depression to exultation. More than two years into the war, Britain was no longer alone! The United States would now protect British interests in the Far East, as well as safeguarding the sea-lanes to Australia and New Zealand!
All week the President had squirmed and struggled to avoid the Prime Minister’s appeals for a mutual commitment to go to war with Japan, if Japan attacked only British and Dutch territories. Now, however, the United States would be at war, and of its own volition: the world’s largest economy, untouched as yet by hostilities, bombing, or even blackouts. Even Churchill’s two American guests, not knowing the extent of the disaster suffered at Pearl Harbor, seemed “exalted,” Churchill later wrote, “—in fact they almost danced for joy,” he claimed.48
In Washington, the atmosphere among the war council members in the President’s Oval Study was very different, however. It was, as yet, “not too tense,” Hopkins summarized later that night,49 since the true extent of the destruction and casualties suffered at Pearl Harbor was, at 3:00 P.M., still unknown. All present agreed that hostilities had been bound to come to the United States sooner or later, and that this way the President, given his unwillingness to “fire the first shot,” would be exonerated in the court of public opinion, as well as history.
As the minutes ticked by, however—with fresh reports arriving of the damage inflicted by the second Japanese air attack on Pearl Harbor—the mood in the White House became less confident. It was clear this was not going to turn into an American victory, or even a brave performance in defense of the nation’s main Pacific base. Calls “kept coming in, indicating more and more damage to the fleet. The President handled the calls personally,” Hopkins noted, “on the telephone with whoever was giving the dispatches. Most of them came through the Navy.”50
The meeting soon broke up, as General Marshall wanted to return to his headquarters in the Munitions Building—saying he had already ordered General MacArthur to execute “all the necessary movement required in event
of an outbreak of hostilities with Japan,” including a U.S. air attack on Japanese installations on Taiwan.51
Grace Tully, the President’s secretary, had meantime arrived from her apartment on Connecticut Avenue; she recalled there was such “noise and confusion” and so many “calls on a telephone in the second floor hall” that she herself moved into the President’s bedroom, next to the Oval Study, and took them down in shorthand, then typed them for the President in a tiny office room next door. “The news was shattering,” she recalled. “I hope I shall never again experience the anguish and near hysteria of that afternoon”—“each report more terrible than the last, and I could hear the shocked unbelief in Admiral Stark’s voice as he talked to me. . . . The Boss [Roosevelt] maintained greater outward calm than anybody else but there was rage in his very calmness. With each new message he shook his head grimly and tightened the expression of his mouth.”52
There was good reason. Word from the U.S. Army Air Corps in Hawaii was just as terrible as from the Navy—its planes blitzed on the ground, before they had even been able to take off.
It was clear the U.S. Armed Forces at Pearl Harbor—forces the President had himself inspected seven years before as commander in chief, and which he had much reinforced since then—had been caught with their pants down.
As ever more humiliating news came through from Hawaii, President Roosevelt felt something of the same disbelief, even guilt, that had paralyzed Stalin the previous June, following the German invasion of Russia. With shock and near panic gripping those around him in the White House, however, the President did not dare show his feelings.
At the White House there was certainly embarrassment, even shame, at the ever-bleaker news coming from Hawaii—with inevitable questions arising as to how far the President was himself responsible for the catastrophe. Had he not insisted, against the advice of his war council, upon pursuing a meandering course of initial appeasement of Japan, followed by belated military posturing in pursuit of supposed deterrence and moral high grounding—all carried out in spite of intelligence decrypts pointing to hardening Japanese attitudes and, finally, ominous signs of imminent Japanese hostilities? Overruling his team, had not the President refused to order a preemptive American attack on Japanese forces clearly massing for a new invasion in Southeast Asia? Moreover, had he not discouraged the British from carrying out such a preemptive attack on the Japanese fleet approaching Singapore, when they were in a good position to do so?
Given Roosevelt’s character, and his absolute authority over the members of his cabinet, there was, however, no call for the President’s resignation—something that had never taken place in American history. Nor, to judge by FDR’s demeanor, did the President feel he should resign. He looked grave, but far from despair. In any event, there was simply no one who could take his place as chief executive—certainly not his vice president, Henry Wallace, the former secretary of agriculture.
Given the President’s role as commander in chief, though, how was it possible that the President’s military team had not foreseen such a sneak attack, over the months of increasing tension between Japan and the United States? How had the eventuality of an attack on Pearl Harbor not been taken seriously by Generals Marshall and Arnold and Admiral Stark?
Roosevelt had personally chosen and appointed them, as his professional chiefs of the U.S. Army, Army Air Forces, and Navy. Ironically, each one had considered the possibility, in the past, of such a sneak attack, and each had attempted, in his own feeble way, to guard against it. “Thinking out loud, should not Hawaii have some big bombers?” General Marshall had asked his operations and planning officers in the summer of 1940, more than a year before the Pearl Harbor debacle. “It is possible that opponents in the Pacific would be four fifths of the way to Hawaii before we knew they had moved. Would five or ten flying fortresses at Hawaii alter this picture?”53 For his part, Admiral Stark had written to Admiral Husband Kimmel, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, as recently as November 25, 1941, to say the Japanese naval forces were at sea and capable of a “surprise aggressive movement in any direction.”54 And General Arnold, on an inspection of air defenses in Hawaii as far back as September 1939, had noted the lack of a supreme commander to ensure integration of air, navy, and army forces on the islands, as well as the vulnerability of battleships moored in Pearl Harbor to aerial attack—as he’d openly remarked in a press conference on the West Coast.55 Moreover, on his visit to Britain during the Blitz in the spring of 1941 Arnold had been expressly shown (as he’d noted carefully in his diary) the way British aircraft were always kept dispersed on their airfields, to minimize damage from surprise attacks. Yet none of the U.S. chiefs had actually visited Pearl Harbor since then. Nor had they asked to see integrated plans or evidence of rehearsals for the defense of Hawaii if attacked by naval aircraft, launched from enemy flattops or carriers.
Pearl Harbor had, in sum, been considered inviolable: a vital way station in ferrying aircraft to defend the Philippines, and a platform to service the Pacific Fleet, but too far from Japan to be attacked itself, save by submarines, which could not get past the harbor boom, and would not be able to launch their torpedoes in such shallow water unseen, if they did—a fact that explained Admiral Kimmel’s failure to reverse his predecessor’s decision not to have antitorpedo nets lowered around his battleships. Thus, in their loyal concern to carry out the President’s policy of deterrence in the Far East by building up forces in the Philippines primarily for show, backed by the might of the Pacific Fleet at Hawaii, but with no intention of using such forces aggressively, the chiefs of staff had arguably failed their commander in chief and their country.
Whoever was to blame for Pearl Harbor’s unpreparedness for a sneak attack, the question now was what, as U.S. commander in chief, President Roosevelt could do about it.
Tragically, the Hawaiian Air Force—as the USAAF group in the islands was called—appeared to have been caught unarmed, literally: the planes’ gun breaches empty, and the aircraft standing huddled on the nearby airfields, wingtip to wingtip, to guard against possible sabotage by some of the 150,000 Japanese immigrants and Japanese American citizens living in the islands—a third of the entire population. As a result, the U.S. airplanes were effectively wiped out by Japanese attack planes and bombers, while not a single significant American warship survived the attack in Battleship Row without major damage—four of the eight battleships moored there being sunk. Moreover, there was still the possibility that the news from Hawaii would get even worse, if the Japanese mystery fleet were to catch the rest of Admiral Kimmel’s remaining Pacific Fleet warships out at sea, where his two aircraft carriers were returning from weekend maneuvers and nearing home. “Within the first hour,” Grace Tully later confessed, “it was evident that the Navy was dangerously crippled, that the Army and Air Force were not fully prepared to guarantee safety from further shattering setbacks in the Pacific. It was easy to speculate that a Jap invasion force might be following their air strike at Hawaii—or that the West Coast might be marked for similar assault.”56
Speculation mixed fact and fantasy. A telephone call by the President to Governor Poindexter in Honolulu was interrupted by the sounds of planes and antiaircraft fire in the background, suggesting a third Japanese air raid and causing the President to bark aloud to the people in his office: “My God, there’s another wave of Jap planes over Hawaii right this minute.”57 American gunners were, unfortunately, mistakenly firing at the few surviving U.S. planes that attempted to take off, either to seek combat or search for the invaders.
However exaggerated such alarums and panic, the stream of incoming reports, taken collectively, gave a growing indication that a veritable catastrophe had taken place in Hawaii: the destruction of virtually the entire American fleet moored at Pearl Harbor, as well as most of the U.S. Army Air Forces’ planes.
At times the President felt such disappointment with his chiefs of staff he would readily have fired them. (In contrast to the chief
of the decrypting department at the Navy Security Section, Commander Laurance Safford, who wanted to get his gun and “shoot Stark” for the admiral’s failure to warn Manila and Hawaii more urgently, given the early decrypting of the Japanese diplomatic note.)58
With whom could the President replace his chiefs of staff, though? Almost everything General Marshall, Admiral Stark, and General Arnold had done, or not done, to prepare America for combat in the Pacific and Far East had failed—miserably. But Secretaries Stimson and Knox—both of them Republicans—had not done much better. “Knox, whose Navy had suffered the worst damage, and Stimson were cross-examined closely on what had happened,” Grace Tully recalled, “on what might happen next and on what they could do to repair to some degree the disaster.”59 To which they responded: nothing.
Finally, in the “hysteria” at the White House, the President managed to collect his thoughts and focus on the address he would have to give to Congress the next day, requesting an official U.S. declaration of war on Japan. “Shortly before 5:00 o’clock the Boss called me to his study. He was alone, seated before his desk on which were two or three neat piles of information of the past two hours. The telephone was close by his hand,” Ms. Tully later described. “He was wearing a gray sack jacket and was lighting a cigarette as I entered the room. He took a deep drag and addressed me calmly.”60
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