Kimmel knew that, from this day, he would wear the coveted four stars of fleet command on his shoulder boards. But for how long? His new rank of admiral was a designated rank that went with the office, not with the officer. If relieved, he would revert to his permanent lower grade. This first-ever change of fleet command ceremony to take place at Pearl Harbor was not an occasion for vainglory. Realism, even humility, were the uniform of the day. What had happened to Richardson, for whatever reason, could also happen to him.41
After a formal luncheon attended by the two principals, and members of their staffs, incoming and outgoing, Kimmel repaired to his flag cabin in the Pennsylvania, where his communications officer handed him a dispatch from CNO Admiral Stark. It informed him of the contents of a telegram sent on 27 January by U.S. Ambassador Joseph C. Grew in Tokyo to the State Department. A member of Grew’s embassy staff, first secretary Edward S. Crocker, had been advised by the Peruvian minister, Ricardo Rivera-Schreiber, of a rumor circulating in Tokyo to the effect that, in the event of broken relations between Japan and the United States, the Japanese fleet intended to make a full-scale surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. The dispatch concluded:
The Division of Naval Intelligence places no credence in these rumors. Furthermore, based on known data regarding the present disposition and employment of Japanese naval and army forces, no move against Pearl Harbor appears imminent or planned for in the foreseeable [sic] future.42
On 5 February Kimmel received from the Navy Department a copy of a letter drafted by Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, the fifty-five-year-old, six-foot, lantern-jawed director of war plans (OP-12). Called “Terrible Turner” by coworkers for his alleged overbearing ego and stormy temper, the newly minted flag officer had sometimes insightful (and more often very wrong) estimates of Japanese intentions and capabilities. His letter draft was for the use of Secretary Knox and was addressed to Secretary of War Stimson. Stark approved the draft, and Knox signed and mailed it on 24 January.
Turner and his War Plans staff clearly had been impressed by what a single British carrier, HMS Illustrious, had accomplished in a nighttime raid against the Italian naval base at Taranto on the night of the previous 12 November. Flying twenty-one antiquated, fabric-covered, open-cockpit, biplane Swordfish bombers—ten to drop flares and bomb dockyards, and ten to release torpedoes against warships at anchor—the Fleet Air Arm pilots disabled three battleships, the new Littorio and two of the older Giulio Cesare class. Knox’s letter read in part:
The security of the U.S. Pacific Fleet while in Pearl Harbor, and of the Pearl Harbor Naval Base itself, has been under renewed study by the Navy Department and forces afloat for the past several weeks. This reexamination has been, in part, prompted by the increased gravity of the situation with respect to Japan, and by reports from abroad of successful bombing and torpedo plane attacks on ships while in bases. If war eventuates with Japan, it is believed easily possible that hostilities would be initiated by a surprise attack upon the Fleet or the Naval Base at Pearl Harbor.
In my opinion, the inherent possibilities of a major disaster to the fleet or naval base warrant taking every step, as rapidly as can be done, that will increase the joint readiness of the Army and Navy to withstand a raid of the character mentioned above.43
It may be assumed that this text caught Admiral Kimmel’s full attention.
FOUR
THE BREWING STORM
All the seas, everywhere,
are brothers one to another.
Why then do the winds and waves of strife
rage so violently through the world?
Japanese Emperor Mutsuhito,
Meiji the Great (1867–1912)
China was always the sticking point. During the fateful years 1937–1941, all diplomatic efforts by the United States and Japan to resolve mounting dangers of war between the two powers turned on Japan’s continued aggressive presence in China—the “China Incident,” as the war was called in Japan. Throughout the four years since 7 July 1937, when Japanese Army troops marched across the Marco Polo Bridge west of Peking, every major diplomatic note exchanged between Washington and Tokyo had the assault on China as its text or subtext. In unmistakable language, the U.S. State Department condemned the Japanese incursion and called the world’s attention to its violation of the first paragraph of Article I of the Nine-Power Treaty of Washington, signed by Japan on 6 February 1922, which read: “The Contracting Powers, other than China, agree: (I) to respect the sovereignty, the independence, and the territorial and administrative integrity of China.”1 But beyond announcing, on 16 July 1937, a list of nonaggression principles that it hoped all nations in the Far East would observe, the United States did nothing substantive to stop the aggression—even to mediate, as China asked Washington to do. U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull drew back from direct engagement on the advice of his chief of the Division of Far Eastern Affairs (FE) (becoming later in the same year Advisor on Political Relations [FE]), Dr. Stanley K. Hornbeck, who believed that “any step that might be taken by this Government toward action ‘in a mediatory capacity’ would (at this moment) be premature and ill-advised; would be likely to aggravate rather than to ameliorate the situation.”2 The noninterventionism proposed by Hornbeck would form the basis of Hull’s policy throughout the remainder of the decade.
Other nations, too, claiming that they lacked appropriate authority and means, drew back from engagement: Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. And so the march of Japanese soldiers proceeded unchecked through the central Chinese provinces amid mounting stories, both verified and unverified, of Japanese atrocities committed against helpless civilians, including the stunning act of genocide inflicted on the residents of Nanking in December 1937.3 In the same month, Japanese bomber aircraft and naval units on the Yangtze River attacked and sank the U.S. Navy gunboat Panay, causing two deaths and leaving fifty sailors and passengers wounded. There was a brief excitement in the American press, and some pugnacious posturing in the Department of the Navy, but the crisis passed thanks to adroit action by U.S. Ambassador to Japan Joseph C. Grew and an apology sent to Washington from the Japanese Foreign Ministry.
By 1939, with Hull still pursuing a cautionary course, the American public was becoming increasingly offended by Japanese behavior in China. One reason was expanded coverage of the war in the press by correspondents sympathetic to China, who represented the Associated Press, United Press, International News Service, The New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the Chicago Tribune, and The Christian Science Monitor. Another and equally effective force in turning American opinion against Japanese militarism was the informal collection of “China hands”—Foreign Service veterans and Christian missionaries both active and retired who had worked in China and now expressed their heartsickness at what was happening to the Chinese people. The missionaries were particularly effective in rallying support for China, since as a body they were greatly respected by the American people for being well-educated, devout, self-sacrificing men and women who had no obvious ideological bias. Their letters, articles, and lectures spread word of Japanese atrocities committed against the most innocent of people, including children. They reported that, because it was known that Japanese soldiers had the locations marked on their maps, the Japanese were deliberately bombing American churches, hospitals, colleges, and schools, most of which had the American flag painted on their roofs. The most dangerous place to be in an air raid, they said, was an American mission. Furthermore, they warned that Japan seemed bent on destroying Chinese culture and on brutally reducing the country to a vassal state.
Notable among the lecturers was the congregational medical missionary, and later congressman, Dr. Walter Henry Judd, who during the period 1939–1941 delivered some fourteen hundred lectures across the United States about China’s travail. An article by him in the February 1941 Reader’s Digest, “Let’s Stop Arming Japan,” cited a recent Gallup Poll which found that 82 percent of the A
merican people favored ending all exports of war materials to Japan.4 No doubt the missionaries’ efforts contributed to that arousal of the American conscience. Sympathy increased for the Chinese Nationalist leader Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, who was battling both the Japanese and the Communists of Mao Tse-tung. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens gave scant Depression-era dollars to China Relief. And children found gory pictures of Japanese war-making on cards accompanying their bubble gum.
Against that background spines stiffened all over Washington. Already, in July 1939, the U.S. government had renounced the 1911 Treaty of Commerce with Japan, thus opening up the possibility of applying economic pressure on Tokyo. Henry Morgenthau, Jr., secretary of the Treasury, who had long wanted to give aid to China but had been obstructed from doing so by Hornbeck, on the grounds that it would provoke Japan “prematurely,” recounted how, when visiting State in December 1939 to solicit Hull’s support for an embargo on sales of molybdenum (a metallic element used to toughen alloy steels) to Japan, Hull, who was still committed to “the precept of inaction,” summoned an adviser from the Far Eastern Division for an opinion. That adviser favored the embargo. “He then sent for Dr. Hornbeck,” Morgenthau recorded later, “and again I almost fell out of my chair when Hornbeck agreed that this ought to be done. He said, ‘As a matter of fact, we are working on several other ways to put the screws on the Japanese and this is just what we ought to do.’”5
Not everyone was on the same page, however, in that December. Ambassador Grew in Tokyo was convinced that Japan would never yield to economic pressure. On the first day of the month, he cabled State that no sanctions contemplated in Washington would cause Japan to give up her conquests in China. She would rather fight, and she had the warrior instinct to fight to the death. “On one issue [Japanese] opinion can be definitely said to be unanimous: the so-called New Order in East Asia has come to stay.… The minimum interpretation envisages permanent Japanese control of Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, and North China.”6 But Grew’s apparent resignation to events was operating outside the American groundswell. Indeed, as one of his Foreign Service officers, John K. Emmerson, wrote later, “Sad as it is to contemplate over the perspective of the intervening years, the Embassy did not play a crucial role in the unfolding Japanese-American drama.”7 The major players on the U.S. side were Hull and Hornbeck at State; Morgenthau at Treasury; a Cabinet hawk, Harold Ickes, secretary of the Interior, who controlled petroleum reserves; and, to a lesser degree, because his gaze was always fixed across the Atlantic, President Roosevelt.
The Morgenthau-Hornbeck rapprochement led to Roosevelt signing, on 25 July 1940, a proclamation ending the sale to Japan of all petroleum, petroleum products, and scrap metals; but, two days later, owing to fervent objections from Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles, a Europeanist who opposed even the risk of a distracting war with Japan, the embargo, as the press called it, was watered down to a ban on aviation gas and No. 1 heavy melting iron and steel scrap.8 However weakened, the first sanctions were in place.
In Japan the reaction was swift and predictable. The government directed its ambassador in Washington, Kensuke Horinouchi, to make urgent inquiries about the cutoff. This Kensuke did, meeting with Welles at State. The under secretary explained, first, that the controls were being applied only because of his country’s own fuel requirements. (There was some justification for this statement, since, at the time, Japan was making huge purchases of U.S. aviation grade gasoline, and the commanding general of the IX Corps, based at San Francisco, reported that, within six to nine months, Army Air Corps and U.S. Navy aircraft would be short of fuel if the purchases continued.) But Welles surely dissembled when he went on to say that the cutoff was not directed at Japan or at any other specific foreign country.9 During the month that followed, Tokyo transmitted three formal notes of protest. All were rejected. The State Department took the occasion to point out Japanese actions that were damaging to American rights and interests in China. No one stepped back from what historian Herbert Feis called “our first firm counteraction.” The U.S. position was hardening. And Roosevelt himself was emboldened to consider how he might further ratchet up the penalties.
On 24 September, elements of the Japanese Army marched into northern French Indo-China, having compelled the defeatist Vichy government to render no resistance. This first overt, in-your-face act of aggression since China in 1937 was a sign to Washington that Japan was determined, despite Washington’s first sanctions, to continue her expansionist policies. Roosevelt required no time at all—two days—now that he had the confidence that came from knowing that the British Royal Air Force had earlier that month defeated the German Luftwaffe in the skies over England, to employ the ratchet effect. In reproof of the Japanese seizure, this time all grades of iron and steel scrap were embargoed. At the same time, Roosevelt arranged for a highly publicized loan to the Kuomintang government of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek at Chunking. In Tokyo the penalty was expected, and without question it hurt, but Japan had decided that with her access to iron ore from conquered territories, as well as from Malaya, she could ride it out.
Hard on the heels of the Indo-China incursion, on 27 September Japan signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy, in the first article of which Japan “recognizes and respects the leadership of Germany and Italy in the establishment of a new order in Europe.” The second article states that “Germany and Italy recognize and respect the leadership of Japan in the establishment of a new order in Greater East Asia.” In the third article the Axis nations, as they came to be called, pledged to come to the aid of one another “when one of the three Contracting Parties is attacked by a power at present not involved in the European War or in the Sino-Japanese Conflict.” That unnamed but unmistakably inferred power was the United States. Less unmistakable were several phrases in the document, which were noted and commented on when a copy reached Washington. What, for example, was intended by “new order”? What geography precisely made up “Greater East Asia”? And if Germany attacked the United States, instead of the obverse, was Japan then obligated by this language to join Germany in war? Even the Japanese government, it turned out later, was not clear about the precise meanings of the articles it signed, and had had the principal role in drafting.
The German alliance had long been sought by extremist elements of the Japanese Army, since any German conquests in western Europe would free up the colonies of those subjugated nations in Southeast Asia for Japanese absorption. It should be noted, moreover, that the Army dominated all decision making at the higher reaches of Japanese polity, and had for some time. In the preceding July, Army firebrands brought down the government of Prime Minister Yonai Mitsumasa, a moderate who had tried to conciliate the American government, without success. All such peaceful efforts were doomed to failure, as German diplomats acknowledged in 1945, “because Japan, far from restoring the sovereignty and integrity of China, only asked for recognition of the situation she had established in China, in open violation of existing treaties.”10 On those terms, realistically, the Yonai Cabinet should never have expected to exact a consenting treaty from the United States. And so it seemed to the General Staff of the Army, which had a history of intervening in matters of state. On 16 July it compelled its cabinet representative, Minister of War General Hata Shuroku, to resign. Under the peculiar procedures of the cabinet, that action precipitated the resignation of the entire cabinet.
The General Staffs of the Army and Navy held unusually strong and independent positions under the Prussian-style Meiji Constitution adopted in the late nineteenth century. The central institutions of government were an Imperial House, the Diet (legislative assembly), and the cabinet headed by a prime minister. The Emperor, since 1926 Hirohito, was head of state and supreme commander of the Army and Navy. He was assisted by a lord privy seal as political secretary and adviser. But operational control of the services fell to the chiefs of the General Staffs, who made up the Supreme Command. Subject th
eoretically to the Emperor, the Supreme Command acted outside the administrative authority of the cabinet, including that of its Army and Navy minister members. Military strategies, plans, and operations were the sole prerogative of the chiefs of staff, and they need not to be disclosed to anyone save the Emperor, to whom they had direct access.
The Army and Navy ministers served on the cabinet at the pleasure of the Chiefs. At any time, a chief of staff could withdraw a minister, and, by not appointing a replacement, bring down the government. It was a power frequently employed. In November 1937, following the start of the China Incident, the Emperor and chiefs of staff created what was called Imperial General Headquarters for coordinating military affairs. And, later, the headquarters and the cabinet developed a liaison conference system to keep both entities informed. That liaison, under various names, would last throughout World War Two. On occasion of grave national decisions, the liaison personnel, sitting as an Imperial conference, would confirm policies already decided on in the presence of the Emperor and lord privy seal, in order solely to invest them with unimpeachable prestige and authority. As a rule, the Emperor would not speak during those proceedings. The distillate of this system of governing was that Japan had, first, a cabinet entrusted with powers to administer domestic and foreign policy but lacking control of, and sometimes even knowledge of, military operations; second, a military that was so independent of governmental, or civilian, control it was a law unto itself; and third, a head of state who sanctioned the decisions made.11
On 22 July, a new cabinet was formed under another moderate prime minister, Prince Konoye Fumimaro, who had served in the position before (1937–39), when the Army launched its operations in China, and who this time, concerned about Army domination of the cabinet, was reluctant to reassume the premiership—but he did, finally, out of sense of duty to prevent, if he could, war with the United States and Britain. Choice of the General Staff for war minister in the cabinet was General Tojo Hideki, a narrow-minded leader (called “Razor Brain”) of the Army firebrands, and reason enough for Konoye to reconsider his agreement to serve a second term. Konoye, who proved to be a weak person in a strong position, made an injudicious choice for foreign minister when he selected Matsuoka Yosuke, a graduate of the University of Oregon, who, widely known for his egocentrism and ranting, mercurial behavior, was hardly the definition of a diplomat, one who “sits in silence, watching the world with his ears.”12 Stimson, who was Secretary of State at the time, would remember Matsuoka from the latter’s abrupt behavior in dismissing American and British objections to Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931, and from his insolent conduct while leading the Japanese delegation out of the League of Nations in 1933.
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