Given American weakness in the Far East, Marshall hoped that Roosevelt could keep the peace with Japan. In a joint memo in early November, he and Stark reminded the president, “An unlimited offensive war should not be undertaken against Japan, since such a war would greatly weaken the combined effort in the Atlantic against Germany, the most dangerous enemy.” In light of America’s inability to wage a two-front war, they said, further Japanese thrusts into China, Thailand, or even the Soviet Union would not justify a U.S. declaration of war against Japan.6
Though loath to suggest foreign policy, Marshall privately felt that war with Japan must be avoided at almost all costs. On November 3 he privately told the Joint Board, “It appeared that the basis of the United States policy should be to make certain minor concessions which the Japanese could use in saving face.” He suggested that these concessions might include “a relaxation on oil restrictions or similar trade restrictions.”7
•
On November 4, Japan’s foreign minister gave Ambassador Nomura three weeks to conclude an agreement that would guarantee Japan a stable oil and steel supply from the United States. Japan, in turn, would evacuate troops from French Indochina and most of China. Manchuria, the Mongolian border region, and the southern Chinese island of Hainan would remain under Japanese control. Tokyo’s message warned, “This time we are showing the limit of our friendship; this time we are making our last possible bargain.”*8
Nomura doubted Japan’s concessions would be enough, for he knew China was Roosevelt’s great sticking point. Nomura cabled Tokyo, “For the sake of peace in the Pacific, the United States would not favor us at the sacrifice of China. Therefore the China problem might become the stumbling block to the pacification of the Pacific and as a result the possibility of the United States and Japan ever making up might vanish.”9
As Nomura wrote these words, he had no idea that the American high command was reading his dispatches. Cryptographers working on a top secret program named MAGIC intercepted and decoded traffic between Tokyo and its embassy as fast—sometimes faster—than Japanese embassy clerks. Two weeks later, American eavesdroppers were reading coded instructions to Nomura offering a six-month truce and reiterating Japan’s final timetable: “If within the next three or four days you can finish your conversations with the Americans; if the signing can be completed by the 29th (let me write it out for you—twenty-ninth) . . . if everything can be finished, we have decided to wait until that date. This time we mean it, that deadline absolutely cannot be changed. After that things are automatically going to happen.”10
Things did happen. With Marshall’s warnings ringing in his ears, Roosevelt told his counselors he would back off his demand for a complete withdrawal from China in favor of something less. But the distrustful Cordell Hull, seething over Japanese war preparations, opposed a softening of America’s line on China. Hull merely assured the Japanese ambassadors that he was giving their proposals “sympathetic study” and would get back to them in due course.
Will Rogers had once quipped that diplomacy is the art of saying “good doggie” until you can find a rock. Hull saw the Emperor picking up a rock, and he had no intention of giving Japan six months to get ready to throw it. In closed-door meetings, his lispy Tennessee drawl would explode in a cloud of curses about the low skunks of the Japanese race. (At one point Roosevelt whispered to Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, “If Cordell Hull says ‘Oh Cwist’ again I’m going to scream with laughter! I can’t stand profanity with a lisp.”)11
But neither Roosevelt nor his lieutenants were laughing when, on November 25, the Office of Naval Intelligence reported that the Japanese Navy, led by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, was massing ships off southern China. Just as Nomura’s instructions had forewarned, things were happening: the Japanese were about to lunge into Southeast Asia.12
Japan’s mobilization changed everything. Roosevelt, Stimson wrote, “fairly blew up—jumped in the air, so to speak, and said that he hadn’t seen [the naval reports] and that that changed the whole situation because it was evidence of bad faith on the part of the Japanese that while they were negotiating for an entire truce—an entire withdrawal—they would be sending this expedition down there to Indo-China.” It was such a hostile act that the president, he wrote, wondered aloud “how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.” 13
The next day Hull demanded a complete withdrawal of forces from Indochina and China. Though his message was phrased as a reply, the Tojo cabinet, unwilling to erase the conquests of nearly a decade, considered Hull’s proposal an ultimatum. Japan rejected it.14
Signs pointed to war, and that worried Marshall and Stark. On November 27 they sent Roosevelt a sober warning about Japan’s next moves. “Japan may attack: the Burma Road, Thailand, Malaya, the Netherlands East Indies, the Philippines, [or] the Russian Maritime Provinces,” they said. In light of U.S. weakness in the Pacific, they reiterated, “The most essential thing now from the United States viewpoint, is to gain time.”15
But time, like peace, was slipping away. A dispirited Hull saw nothing more that negotiations could do, and he consigned himself to the sidelines. He would play the diplomatic game out a few more days, but as Marshall and Stark were asking the president to buy them more time, Hull was telling Stimson, “I have washed my hands of it. It is now in the hands of you and Knox—the Army and the Navy.”16
•
Those hands were too weak to restrain Japan, and naval intelligence soon reported Japan’s main battle and transport fleets steaming around southern Indochina. Rounding the bend at Saigon meant they were heading to Thailand, Burma, or Malaya. Since the Philippines lay along their supply routes, Japan would also probably try to neutralize America’s garrison there with a secondary attack. If war broke out, MacArthur’s troops would bear the brunt of the storm.17
Stark’s intelligence men had been tracking Japan’s carrier fleet, a fast, mailed fist that the Japanese nicknamed Kido Butai, or “mobile force.” The Americans were unable to decipher the Japanese Navy’s operations code, designated JN-25, but Filipino listening stations indicated its carrier fleet was guarding Japan’s home waters—evidently in reserve to parry a U.S. counterattack.18
During Thanksgiving week, General Marshall was away from Washington, in North Carolina, observing the final phases of the Army’s 1941 maneuvers. In the general’s absence, a worried Henry Stimson sent a warning to Army commanders in Manila, Hawaii, Panama, and California. His message read:
NEGOTIATIONS WITH JAPAN APPEAR TO BE TERMINATED TO ALL PRACTICAL PURPOSES WITH ONLY THE BAREST POSSIBILITIES THAT THE JAPANESE GOVERNMENT MIGHT COME BACK AND OFFER TO CONTINUE. JAPANESE FUTURE ACTION UNPREDICTABLE BUT HOSTILE ACTION POSSIBLE AT ANY MOMENT. IF HOSTILITIES CANNOT, REPEAT CANNOT, BE AVOIDED THE UNITED STATES DESIRES THAT JAPAN COMMIT THE FIRST OVERT ACT. THIS POLICY SHOULD NOT, REPEAT NOT, BE CONSTRUED AS RESTRICTING YOU TO A COURSE OF ACTION THAT MIGHT JEOPARDIZE YOUR DEFENSE.19
The next day, Stimson carried his G-2 staff intelligence summary to the White House. He told Roosevelt that Japan was in position to hit the Philippines, Thailand, the Dutch East Indies, or Singapore, the powerful British fortress on the Malay Peninsula. Roosevelt read the report carefully and told Stimson he saw only three courses of action: he could do nothing, he could present Japan with yet another proposal, or he could declare war. Stimson said he could see only two options, for doing nothing was no longer an option. Roosevelt agreed.20
At the White House later that day, Roosevelt, Stimson, Marshall, Hull, Knox, and Stark discussed Japan’s next move. Roosevelt said he agreed with the G-2 assessment. Scanning his mental atlas of the world, Roosevelt suggested that Japan might have another target in mind: the Isthmus of Kra, the slim waist of the Malay Peninsula. Its capture, he pointed out, would threaten Singapore and cut the Burma Road, China’s main supply route.
“This,” thought
Stimson, “was a very good suggestion on his part and a very likely one.” He recorded the sobering discussion:
It was agreed that if the Japanese got into the Isthmus of Kra, the British would fight. It was also agreed that if the British fought, we would have to fight. And now it seems clear that if this expedition was allowed to round the southern point of Indo-China, this whole chain of disastrous events would be set on foot of going.21
•
FDR planned to attend Thanksgiving dinner at the one place, after Hyde Park, where his heart belonged: his infantile paralysis institute in Warm Springs, Georgia. He would not change those plans unless things took a turn for the worse. But to wring whatever time was left in a drying diplomatic sponge, he ordered Hull to tell Japan the United States would negotiate a new trade and raw materials agreement, and would unfreeze Japanese assets, in return for a complete withdrawal from China.
To Tokyo, withdrawal from China was as absurd as asking Washington to withdraw from the Philippines, and Roosevelt’s last-minute overture was dead on arrival. On the morning of November 29, Hull telephoned Roosevelt to say that the fragile talks could be broken at any moment. Roosevelt, his voice low and serious, told Hull to call him after dinner that evening. If there was no improvement, he would leave Warm Springs early and return to Washington.22
Roosevelt spent the day out of sorts. He listened absently to the Army-Navy football game, took a half-hour swim, and presided over Thanksgiving dinner in the dining hall with the center’s polio victims and staff. Over a finely trimmed gobbler and a table brimming with bowls of whipped potatoes, gravy, turnips, and pie, FDR somberly expressed his wish that all nations might have more to give thanks for at the end of 1942.
At nine o’clock that evening, Hull called back. He had just read an AP report of a speech that Tojo would deliver the next day. Tojo, the report said, would call upon the people of Asia to roll back U.S. and British “exploitation” of their homelands. The speech was the kind of fire-and-brimstone harangue that would make war inevitable, and Hull implored Roosevelt to return to Washington immediately.*23
Roosevelt, his face grave, told his aides to have the railway crew prepare the Presidential Special for an early return. Before leaving Warm Springs—twenty-six hours after he arrived—he bade a solemn good-bye to a small crowd of patients assembled in front of Georgia Hall. He closed his remarks by telling them, “This may be the last time I talk to you for a long time.”24
The Presidential Special chugged back to a capital in the fading twilight of peace. He made a last-ditch attempt to buy Stark and Marshall more time, but cables intercepted from Tokyo told him it was probably hopeless. One ordered Nomura’s staffers to destroy their coding equipment, while others referred to “final” deadlines to reach a settlement. Something was happening in the Imperial councils.25
American codebreakers deciphered Tokyo’s diplomatic instructions rapidly, but MAGIC was such a precious asset it could be entrusted to only a few individuals. Those few—overworked, understaffed, overcompartmentalized, and short of translators—were unable to perceive much beyond a general bellicosity in the tone of individual messages.
Meanwhile, the Kido Butai went very, very quiet. Its operation codes abruptly changed, blinding U.S. naval intelligence, and no one was certain where it was. By Friday, December 5, the best Secretary Knox could tell the president was, “We expect within the next week to get some indication of where they are going.”26
Unsure how much time was left in the hourglass, Roosevelt sent a personal appeal to Emperor Hirohito on the night of Saturday, December 6. In his letter, he asked the Emperor to withdraw his army from Indochina. None of the nations threatened by Japan, he pleaded, “can sit either indefinitely or permanently on a keg of dynamite.”27
• • •
The evening Roosevelt’s message to Hirohito went over the airwaves, MAGIC men in Washington intercepted a lengthy fourteen-part message from Japan’s Foreign Office to Nomura. The first thirteen parts were deciphered, translated, and circulated by special couriers to the president and the War, Navy, and State heads. FDR, Knox, and Stark received their copies of the thirteen parts that night—though for reasons no one could explain, General Marshall could not be found. His copy was locked in his office safe for the night.28
On the morning of Sunday, December 7, the last of the fourteen parts reached Washington. The final segment declared that attempts by Japan to resolve matters through negotiations were pointless. A follow-up message directed Ambassador Nomura to deliver all fourteen parts to the United States government at precisely one o’clock local time.
Marshall, called into the office after his Sunday morning horseback ride, talked over the message with his staff and prepared a warning to Army units in the Pacific. With Betty Stark’s permission, he directed it to the Navy as well. He fired off the message a little before noon and directed Colonel Rufus Bratton to find out how long delivery would take. After checking with the Signals Corps staff, Bratton told Marshall the message would be delivered within thirty minutes.29
Marshall wanted the message delivered quickly, but junior officers in Signals had to be circumspect, for Japan could not know the United States had broken its “impregnable” diplomatic code. The telephone would be the fastest method of getting the warning off to Manila, the Panama Canal, Hawaii, and the West Coast. But it would also be the least secure. Security, as always, took priority, so they sent the message by telegraph—Western Union—to the West Coast.30
• • •
As Marshall’s message buzzed over the telegraph wires, Japanese bombers, cruising through magnificent blue skies, came within sight of the lush slopes of Oahu.
PART TWO
A New Doctor
1942–1945
If you or I begin fighting at the very start of the war, what in the world will the public have to say about us? They won’t accept it for a minute. We can’t afford to fight.
—GENERAL MARSHALL TO ADMIRAL KING, MARCH 1942
THIRTEEN
KICKING OVER ANTHILLS
PEARL HARBOR WAS A SMOLDERING WRECK AS FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT STOOD behind the House chamber rostrum.
“Yesterday,” he began, “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.”
His low, cadenced voice reverberated through the chamber. Words like “unprovoked” and “dastardly” rang with controlled outrage, and in fewer than five hundred words he laid out the nation’s case against Japan. He asked Congress for a declaration of war.1
The response was nearly unanimous. Republicans, Democrats, and independents of every shade and hue demanded vengeance for the men lying beneath Oahu’s waves. In thirty-three minutes, the Senate and House passed resolutions declaring war against Japan, and the sole dissenting vote, by Montana pacifist Jeannette Rankin, was met with hisses from her colleagues.2
Leaders of opposition groups fell in line with their president. Herbert Hoover immediately declared his support for Roosevelt. John Lewis told the press, “When the nation is attacked, every American must rally to its support. . . . All other considerations are insignificant.” Even Charles Lindbergh, America’s most outspoken isolationist, called on his countrymen to line up behind their president.*3
Like the rest of the nation, Washington was transformed overnight. Men who had ridden buses in civilian suits turned up for work wearing Army and Navy uniforms. The president’s Secret Service detail, swelling from eleven men to seventy, drove Roosevelt to Congress in an armored Cadillac once owned by Al Capone. Gas masks were issued to the president and his staff, black curtains hung over White House windows to foil Japanese bombers, and fireplaces were extinguished. “The house was chill and silent, as though it had died,” recalled an old friend of Eleanor’s. “Even Fala did not bark.”4
• • •
/> With war a horrifying, bloody fact, FDR’s job was to keep the nation’s eye on the larger picture. While Germany remained, strategically speaking, the chief threat, to most of the public Japan was the aggressor. Japan had shed American blood at Pearl Harbor. Japan had sent Oklahoma and Arizona to the bottom. Sure, Germany had fired on American vessels at sea, but Roosevelt had never told them those incidents were grounds for war. It would be a hard sell to convince the public that Hitler was the greater villain.5
FDR reminded the American people that Germany was also their enemy. In a fireside chat two days after the Pearl Harbor attack, he spoke of America’s duty to “reinforce the other armies and navies and air forces fighting the Nazis” as well as the “warlords of Japan.”
That was the best he could do until, four thousand miles away, a cocky dictator in a double-breasted suit stepped to the Reichstag’s dais and denounced Roosevelt as the criminal offspring of Jewish influence and democratic ineptitude. Referring to the leaked Victory Plan, Hitler claimed that the United States planned to attack Germany in 1943. “This man alone was responsible for the Second World War,” Der Führer thundered. Germany, he declared, “considers herself to be at war with the United States, as from today.”6
Deep inside, Roosevelt breathed a sigh of relief. Hitler had given him what he needed most: an undeniable reason to fight Nazi Germany.
• • •
On December 15, Admiral King found himself sitting before Navy Secretary Knox. The secretary told King that he and Roosevelt had worked out some changes in the Navy’s command: Admiral Husband Kimmel, commander of the Pacific Fleet, would come home to face an investigation over the Pearl Harbor disaster. Admiral Chester Nimitz, the Navy’s personnel chief, would take Kimmel’s place. And the position of commander-in-chief, U.S. Fleet, or “CINCUS,” would go to Admiral Ernest J. King.7
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