Morgenthau was unsure. The disaster was “just unexplainable,” he answered, tormented. The Japanese “walked in just as easily as they [the Germans] did in Norway.” At least “they didn’t do it in the Philippines,” where it was expected. “Let Stimson take the credit for that,” Morgenthau remarked, not comprehending how devastating had been the destruction of MacArthur’s air force planes, on the ground, as in Hawaii—but with nine hours’ warning. He shook his white head; “all the explanations I have heard,” he puzzled aloud, “just don’t make sense.” Hawaii was supposed to be “impregnable. I mean that has been sold to us,” the Treasury secretary lamented. “They haven’t learned anything here. They have the whole Fleet in one place—the whole fleet in this little Pearl Harbor base. The whole Fleet was there.” And if, at the cabinet and congressional leaders’ meeting, Secretary Knox had been distraught over the damage to the Pacific fleet, so had Secretary Stimson been over his precious army air forces. “He kept mumbling that all the planes were in one place,” Morgenthau recounted to his staff.89 How an entire Japanese fleet could sneak in, approach within a hundred or two hundred miles, as the President had described, and then make off, without being seen—let alone caught—was beyond the seventy-four-year-old. “Was it a terrible shock to the President?” asked his wife, who had come to take him home. To which Morgenthau could only sigh: “Must be—must be.”90
The assistant secretary of state, Adolf Berle, noted in his diary: “It was a bad day all around; and if there is anyone I would not like to be, it is Chief of Naval Intelligence.”91
Another candidate was, however, the devastated commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, Admiral Kimmel—who earlier that day had been hit by a spent bullet that crashed through the window of his operations room overlooking Pearl Harbor and ended on his chest, tarnishing his spotless white uniform. As Admiral Kimmel confided to his communications director, Commander Maurice Curts: “It would have been merciful, had it killed me.”92
“His reaction to any event was always to be calm,” the First Lady later described the President’s temperament. Instead of getting agitated, he would batten down his hatches, emotionally. “If it was something that was bad, he just became almost like an iceberg.”93
It had always been so, but now, late on the night of the Pearl Harbor attack, the President had trouble repressing his emotions. After the members of Congress left the White House, only Cordell Hull, the secretary of state, remained. They were joined by Sumner Welles—who arrived with yet another draft declaration of war “which the President did not like,” Hopkins noted that night, “although Hull pressed very strongly that he use it.”94
It was Hull’s third attempt. “Hull’s message,” Hopkins noted, “was a long-winded dissertation on the history of Japanese relations leading up to the blow this morning. The President was very patient with them and I think in order to get them out of the room perhaps led them to believe he would give serious consideration to their draft. Waiters brought in beer and sandwiches, and at 12.30 the President cleared everybody out and said he was going to bed.”95
Whatever his intentions, the President’s living nightmare was not quite over. He had asked his son James, a liaison officer on the staff of Colonel William Donovan, to bring his boss to the White House. Known as “Wild Bill,” Donovan was Roosevelt’s recently handpicked chief of foreign intelligence, under the cover title “coordinator of information” (COI). For his part, however, Donovan had not been listening to his information; like half of America that Sunday, it seemed, he’d been watching a ball game—in Donovan’s case in New York City’s Polo Grounds (capacity fifty-four thousand)—when summoned to the White House.
The President had also decided to ask CBS reporter Edward R. Murrow, who with his wife had dined with Eleanor that night (a meal of scrambled eggs and pudding, served by the First Lady), to stay and speak with him privately, too.
When the two visitors thus finally went into the President’s study, shortly after midnight, the extra chairs for the members of Congress were still out, and the President was still eating his sandwich along with a bottle of beer, alone at his desk.
“Gray with fatigue,” the President gave his visitors a frank account of the past weeks—and past hours. His chiefs of staff had sent multiple warnings to all U.S. bases in the Pacific and Far East, yet, as he put it, “They caught our ships like lame ducks! Lame ducks, Bill. We told them, at Pearl Harbor and everywhere else, to have the lookouts manned,” Donovan later recalled the President’s words. “But they still took us by surprise.”96 Murrow, for his part, remembered how appalled the President was by the destruction of U.S. airplanes. “Several times the President pounded his fist on the table, as he told of the American planes that had been destroyed ‘on the ground, by God, on the ground!’” As Murrow remembered, the very “idea seemed to hurt him.”97
Given both Murrow’s and Donovan’s work in London, following the German invasion of the West, the President wanted to know from them, firsthand, whether they thought the people of the United States would rally in the same way the British had during the Blitz. Both men stated that they thought Americans would.
With that assurance, at 1:00 A.M. the President finally called it a day—the longest day of his life.
3
Hitler’s Gamble
THE CAPITAL OF the United States buzzed with rumor, dread, and disbelief.
“The news of the shocking extent of the casualties and the damage to capital ships spread rapidly through Washington,” Robert Sherwood, the President’s speechwriter, later chronicled—even though the press were encouraged not to print the numbers of casualties, nor the extent of the destruction at Pearl Harbor. “The jittery conduct of some of our most eminent Government officials was downright disgraceful. They were telephoning the White House, shouting that the President must tell the people the full extent of this unmitigated disaster—that our nation had gone back to Valley Forge—that our West Coast was now indefensible and we must prepare to establish our battle lines in the Rocky Mountains or on the left bank of the Mississippi or God knows where.” Sherwood wondered for a while whether Hitler might even be right: “that our democracy had become decadent and soft, that we could talk big, but there were too many of us who simply did not know how to stand up under punishment.”1
Ignoring such hysteria and riding in an open car, as if to his inauguration, the President was driven to Capitol Hill late in the morning of December 8, 1941, and insisted he walk rather than be wheeled to the podium for the joint session. Congressmen and senators rose to their feet, giving him a standing ovation. Holding the lectern, facing a battery of microphones broadcasting his words to the world, the President delivered his address, beginning with the words: “Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.”
The speech—which included mention of the further Japanese attacks that had taken place in Malaya, Hong Kong, Guam, and the Philippine Islands—was a tour de force. Even Sherwood, who had not had a hand in the address, was amazed. There was, he later wrote, none of Winston Churchill’s “eloquent defiance in this speech. There was certainly no trace of Hitler’s hysterical bombast. And there was no doubt in the minds of the American people of Roosevelt’s confidence. I do not think there was another occasion in his life when he was so completely representative of the whole people.”2
The speech lasted only six minutes: six minutes that, in a way no one could ever have quite predicted, changed the world. “No matter how long it may take us to overcome the premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory,” the President closed. “I believe that I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost but will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us.
“Hostilities exist. There is no
blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger.
“With confidence in our armed forces—with the unbounding determination of our people—we will gain the inevitable triumph—so help us God.” And with that, the President asked Congress to declare that, “since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.”3
War, then, had come to the United States—war with Japan, not with Germany.
Ignoring this, within hours of hearing of the Pearl Harbor disaster, Winston S. Churchill decided he should travel to Washington to see President Roosevelt—Churchill informing the head of state in England, King George VI, as well as his own staff and colleagues, that he would meet with the President of the United States again, in person, so they could coordinate the “whole plan of Anglo-American defence and attack.”4 When cautioned by Admiral Pound, the First Sea Lord, that he must be careful not to be too assertive, given that the United States was not yet at war with Germany, the Prime Minister reacted “with a wicked leer in his eye,” as Pound recalled.
“Oh! That was the way we talked to her while we were wooing her,” Churchill quipped; “now that she is in the harem we talk to her quite differently!”5
In actuality Churchill was much more diplomatic. “Would it not be wise for us to have another conference?” he suggested cautiously in a cable to the President. “We could review the whole war plan in the light of reality and new facts, as well as the problems of production and distribution,” he explained. “I could if desired start from here in a day or two, and come by warship to Baltimore or Annapolis. Voyage would take about eight days and I would arrange to stay a week so that everything important could be settled between us.” He would bring, he added ominously, however, his three chiefs of staff and their staffs, just as he had done at the Newfoundland meeting. “Please let me know at earliest what you feel about this.”6
Given the date of his cable—December 9, 1941—and the fact that Hitler still appeared not to have made up his mind whether to declare war on the United States, the President felt this was jumping the gun, literally as well as metaphorically. President Roosevelt “was pretty sure that Germany and Italy would declare war almost immediately,” the British ambassador, Lord Halifax, noted, however, in his secret diary, having called on the President before lunch.7 But a visit planned by Churchill, when no German declaration of war against America had yet been made? Lord Halifax was not a little embarrassed by his prime minister’s importuning.
The President, Halifax reported back to London, “was genuinely pleased at the idea of another meeting, and very grateful, I think for the suggestion at this particular moment.” However, “publicity could not be avoided”—which would endanger Churchill’s safety—and the President “thought it far too big a risk to take unless there is no other alternative.”8
“I had a slight feeling,” Halifax added—employing convoluted English that bespoke his discomfort in having to warn his own prime minister—“that with all these quite genuine anxieties went a certain feeling, the strength of which I could not exactly assess, that he was not quite 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. I wouldn’t overstate it,” he apologized, “but I think it was definitely in his mind from something he said at the beginning before he switched on to laying the main weight of his argument on to security.”9
The majority of Americans, the diplomat meant, still did not see the attack on Pearl Harbor as a casus belli against Hitler—however much the Prime Minister yearned for U.S. help in that struggle. “I seem to be conscious,” Halifax added, voicing his own concern as ambassador in Washington, “of a still lingering distinction in some quarters of the public mind between war with Japan and war with Germany.”10
This was putting the matter mildly. All eyes in America, and public fury, were directed toward Japan—not Germany.
Halifax’s cautionary tone was confirmed the next day, December 10, 1941, when in the U.S. Senate the outspoken isolationist Hiram Johnson “stopped another hearing upon another AEF”—the American Expeditionary Force that the President wished to prepare for service overseas. Senator Johnson’s adamant and unrepentant feeling was, as he explained to his son at the time, “we ought not to prepare an expeditionary force for Europe.”11
Nothing the President could say would stop Churchill from coming, however. As to the date for such get-together with the Prime Minister, Lord Halifax reported that President Roosevelt “did pretty well satisfy me that it was almost physically impossible for him to make it earlier” than after the New Year. “He feels he cannot go away immediately with a possible crystallisation of the position vis-à-vis Germany very close.”12
Besides, the British ambassador pointed out, the President had a raft of legislative and executive matters to attend to in the wake of war with Japan; “he is preparing large appropriation demands on Congress. On all this side of it he really is the only person that can pull all the strands together.” Given Churchill’s dual role as prime minister and minister of defense, making him Britain’s quasi commander-in-chief, Churchill would, Halifax was sure, be understanding, and tame his impetuosity. “You will easily judge his difficulties arising from the immediate position on the defence side. Then he has to prepare in the last two weeks of this month the next annual budget, and also his annual message to Congress, which he will deliver on either the third or the fifth of January.” Nevertheless, Halifax didn’t want the Prime Minister to feel that he, as ambassador, had been remiss in personally communicating to the President Churchill’s urgent request for a conference. “I pressed him as hard as I could about the importance of your meeting as quickly as it could be managed, and I don’t think that he was other than perfectly genuine about the reasons that made an earlier date than he gave impracticable.” Finally, in mitigation of his failure, Halifax added: “They are terribly shaken here, as you can well suppose, and fully realize that they have been caught napping. I think they realise too what it means.”13
Churchill was furious to be balked. Halifax was, as he later put it, “a man compounded of charm. He is no coward,” he allowed, “no gentleman is, but there is something,” he noted, “that runs through him like a yellow streak; grovel, grovel, grovel. Grovel to the Indians [Halifax had been viceroy of India in 1926–31], grovel to the Germans, grovel to the Americans.”14
Churchill’s remark was nasty, but not unmerited. Halifax’s role as Neville Chamberlain’s foreign secretary had been execrable, and now he was thwarting the wishes of his own prime minister, who wished to come immediately to Washington to direct the next phase of the war against Hitler—who had, however, still not declared war on the United States.
Churchill groaned. He’d sent Halifax to Washington in January 1941 in large part to get rid of a rival—Lord Halifax having been King George VI’s preferred choice when Chamberlain resigned in May 1940. He was, moreover, still Churchill’s “heir apparent,” were Churchill to be forced to resign by continuing British failures on the field of battle. Of this, Lord Halifax—an aristocrat and snob from his bald head and withered arm to his toes—was well aware. “I have never liked Americans,” Halifax had confided before leaving London. “In the mass I have always found them dreadful.”15 “In the end we had to go,” his wife, Lady Halifax, later lamented, “and I don’t think I have ever felt more miserable.”16
In the months since he’d arrived, however, Halifax had found himself entranced by Roosevelt’s graciousness toward him. In comparison with Churchill, the President seemed most charming—yet with a steely underlay, the hidden hand of a strong presidential will. It was clear that, beneath all the politeness with which Roosevelt received Halifax at the White House to discuss Churchill’s request, he had no wish to see t
he Prime Minister at this point, or to allow such a visit to become publicly known before the New Year, lest remaining isolationists cry foul and claim the President was conspiring to go to war with Germany, just at the moment when all attention should be paid to the war that Japan had begun against America in the Pacific. The response that the President drafted to be sent to the Prime Minister on December 10, 1941, was thus negative.
“In August,” the President pointed out, thinking back to their Atlantic Charter meeting off Newfoundland, “it was easy to agree on obvious main items—Russian aid, Near East aid and new form Atlantic convoy—but I question whether situation in Pacific area is yet clear enough to make determination of that decisive character. Delay of even a couple of weeks might be advantageous”—a point he reiterated, given the time necessary in order to get “a clearer picture” of the situation in the Pacific. “I suggest we defer decision on your visit for one week. Situation ought to be much clearer then.”17
Since the message sounded so circular—repetitive and somewhat negative in tone for a new ally—Roosevelt withheld it for several hours.
It was just as well. A report now came through that rocked the President at the White House, when his naval aide, Captain Beardall, brought it to him in his study. And stunned the Prime Minister, at his annex apartment next to 10 Downing Street in London.
“We got the bad news about the Prince of Wales and the Repulse,” Lord Halifax jotted in his diary. “This is very bad, especially following after Hawaii.”18
Britain’s only real naval fleet in Southeast Asia, the battleships HMS Repulse and Prince of Wales—the very ship on whose deck the President and his military advisers had sung such rousing Christian hymns in August—were reported sunk, with great loss of life.
The Mantle of Command Page 11