Pearl Harbor: From Infamy To Greatness

by Craig Nelson

  This self-absorbed and belligerent fervor coincided with the unique status of the armed forces within the Japanese government. Instead of serving under the civilian legislature or prime minister, the army and navy reported directly to the emperor in what was called “the independence of the supreme command.” During audiences at the Imperial Palace between admirals, generals, and the emperor, to keep defense of the nation free from the taint of politics, the prime minister and other members of the civilian government, and even Hirohito’s own political adviser, Lord Privy Seal Koichi Kido, were not invited, except for rare and momentous occasions. The armed forces’ civilian leaders were, meanwhile, chosen by the minister of war, the inspector general for training, and the general staff chief, giving the military effective control of the civilian cabinet—by withdrawing their ministers, they could bring down a government and force a new prime minster into office, one who needed their approval to form a new cabinet. This essentially led to a system of two governments, military and civilian, each with its own foreign policy.

  Within the military, the army and the navy were always at odds with each other, their struggles creating further chaos. From 1937 to 1941, the only significant opposition to a rampage across Asia by the Imperial Japanese Army was found not in the civilian leadership, but in the Imperial Japanese Navy. That service would try until the very last to keep the country out of an ever-expanding global war.

  Japan, then, had the appearance of a civilian government, but it was a de facto military dictatorship. Yet, unlike the smooth governance offered by other fascists, all of this resulted in anarchy. In the fourteen years of the Great East Asia War—from 1931’s Manchurian Incident, to 1945’s unconditional surrender—Japan was led by fifteen different prime ministers. This wasn’t just a fascistic and chaotic government; it was one so marred by threats of domestic violence that even the revered emperor regularly feared his assassination. One simple explanation for Pearl Harbor, then, is the great difficulty American leaders had in crafting an effective defense strategy against an enemy that had lost its mind.

  • • •

  After an eleven-day sojourn aboard Vincent Astor’s yacht, President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt made a brief speech in Miami, Florida, on February 15, 1933, and then met with the visiting mayor of Chicago, Anton Cermak. There was the crack of a rifle. Cermak fell. The Secret Service reflexively began speeding the convertible away, but Roosevelt made them stop and turn around, insisting they carry Cermak to the hospital. “Tony, keep quiet—don’t move. It won’t hurt you if you keep quiet,” Roosevelt said, cradling the dying man.

  That night, the Secret Service drove Roosevelt back to Astor’s yacht. Waiting for him was speechwriter Raymond Moley, who remembered expecting to see some reaction in a human being who’d just survived an assassination attempt and who had held a dying man in his arms. But there was nothing—“not so much as the twitching of a muscle, the mopping of a brow, or even the hint of a false gaiety—to indicate that it wasn’t any other evening in any other place. Roosevelt was simply himself—easy, confident, poised, to all appearances, unmoved.”

  That same year, Mein Kampf was published in the United States, and FDR, like Inoue, was shocked to see how edited the translation was from the German, writing on the flyleaf, “A wholly false view of what Hitler really is or says. The German original would make a different story.” He told his State Department, “Hitler is a madman and his counselors, some of whom I personally know, are even madder than he is.” One of Hitler’s closest friends, Nazi philosopher Alfred Rosenberg, had recently commented on how much he would enjoy seeing, from the train window on his journey from Berlin to the North Sea, a Jew’s head atop each telephone pole.

  As the 1930s ended, American defense forces were notably meager and her military technology out-of-date, since the nation was still broke. When FDR won his first election to the Oval Office, the unemployment rate was 25 percent. By March 4 and his inauguration, thirty-eight states had closed their banks, and the remaining ten were moving to follow suit. During a period when the president judged one-third of the nation as “ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,” the US Army totaled 185,000 men, smaller than the defenses of Sweden, or even Switzerland, and the world was shrinking in two ways at once. Just as Japan had once felt itself encircled by Western colonies, so now the United States felt surrounded by fascist imperialists.

  The month after Mussolini’s forces invaded Ethiopia in October of 1935, Pan American Airways’ China Clipper—a Martin M-130 flying boat decked out as a hotel lobby, with stuffed armchairs and elaborate meals—lifted from the waters of San Francisco on its maiden voyage on November 22. It puddle-jumped for nearly sixty hours across the new bases that Pan Am’s founder, Juan Trippe, had built for it—Pearl Harbor’s Middle Loch; Midway; Wake; Guam—before berthing in the Philippine capital of Manila on the island of Luzon on the twenty-ninth. Pearl Harbor; Midway; Wake; Guam; Luzon—these were America’s links to Asia and Australia, sea routes established by New England whaling schooners, and now, air routes created by Pan Am. They would in five years to come be the route of victory in MacArthur and Nimitz’s Pacific theater, and of revenge for Pearl Harbor. The regular passenger and mail service the Clipper provided, though, informed those with foresight how little their oceans now protected the United States.

  Over one hundred Pan Am employees would die in World War II.

  • • •

  In 1938, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto instituted a Japanese navy training program that was so rigorous, it begat a motto: “Death in training is a hero’s death.” By 1939, however, he was so publicly known as being in favor of Washington and against Berlin that guards outside his residence weren’t enough; naval minister Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai promoted him to commander in chief, Combined Fleet, and sent him to sea duty. Far from Tokyo, he was protected from assassination.

  By the middle of 1939, Japan controlled five northeastern Chinese provinces as well as China’s Pacific coast, but as Cordell Hull had foretold, military conquest, instead of civilian trade and treaty, had significant costs. The solution to the Japanese was as it had been to the Nazis: more conquest.

  In July, Hirohito gave the go-ahead for the army to invade Britain’s Asian colonies, but refused to approve of a Tripartite alliance with Germany and Italy even though his brother Prince Chichibu had campaigned for it ardently. The emperor believed the army was using the threat of America and England as a smoke screen to divert the Japanese public from its Chinese quagmire, and refused to accommodate it. The Chinese, meanwhile, told the Western press that Japanese colonial representatives ran “opium governments,” since for all the talk of coprosperity spheres, that turned out to be their colonies’ principal revenue stream.

  As the Japanese army took over the nation’s government, so it took over her culture. Toy shops sold out of miniature tanks and soldiers; boys’ clothing included helmets, rifles, bugles, antiaircraft guns, and howitzers. One common children’s game was to tie a bag of logs to your back to simulate the human bombers who went on suicide missions. The story is told of a 1930s youngster bursting into tears when faced with dissecting a frog. His teacher screamed, “Why are you crying about one lousy frog? When you grow up, you’ll have to kill one hundred, two hundred Chinks!”

  After Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and war was declared by France and Great Britain, on February 9, 1940, President Roosevelt sent his State Department favorite, Undersecretary Sumner Welles, to Berlin, London, Rome, and Paris, hoping to negotiate a peace for Europe. In Rome, though many of Italy’s leaders fervently hoped to avoid war, Mussolini refused to consider any negotiations with Welles, and in Berlin, after being assaulted by a two-hour lecture from German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, Welles concluded, “The man is saturated with hate for England.”

  On March 1, Welles met Hitler. The Führer was fretful that the Americans might convince Mussolini to stay out of the conflict, so Welles bluffed, reporting that he and Il Duce ha
d a “long, constructive, and helpful” conversation, with Mussolini agreeing “there was still a possibility of bringing about a firm and lasting peace.” Hitler in a fury insisted the fault lay with Paris and London, that there would indeed be peace . . . after fascists ruled the whole of Europe.

  Even with twenty-twenty hindsight, it is difficult to comprehend the fury and speed of the Nazi blitzkriegs. On April 9, 1940, German troops conquered Denmark and, a few weeks later, Norway. On May 10, 1940, they began their assaults on Belgium, the Netherlands, and France, all of which surrendered in thirty-eight days. The US public had been so hostile to Americans fighting another European war that Washington legislators had almost annually passed “neutrality” laws. But the fall of France provoked a sea change. In May 1940, 35 percent of Americans favored supporting the Allies; by August, 60 percent did, enabling FDR to get through Congress a nearly tenfold increase in the War Department’s budget.

  Nazi foreign minister von Ribbentrop on May 22 informed Tokyo that Hitler “was not interested in the problem of the Netherlands East Indies,” meaning that the territory was free for Japan to invade. In June, Japan told the conquered French to give her permission to post a military base in Vichy Indochina (today’s Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos); told the Netherlands East Indies (today’s Indonesia) to guarantee her a flow of raw materials; and said that if Britain did not remove its troops from Shanghai and close the borders between China, Burma (today’s Myanmar), and Hong Kong, there would be war.

  An Imperial Japanese Army war plan drafted soon after included building air bases in Indochina and Thailand and attacks on the Netherlands East Indies, Hong Kong, and Malay, but “war with America was to be avoided as much as possible . . . although preparations must proceed in anticipation of a probable military clash.” Those preparations included Combined Fleet Commander Yamamoto, now fifty-six years of age with a crew cut gone silver, saying to one of his lieutenants, “I wonder if an aerial attack can’t be made on Pearl Harbor.” The following year he would begin plans for Operation Hawaii, also known as Operation Z.

  For all its outward show of military force, Japan was so internally chaotic that political assassinations were an open topic of conversation. Prime Minister Yonai created a plan to save the emperor aboard a battleship if the Imperial Palace was attacked. These fears escalated when it was discovered that, in the first days of July, members of the secret police plotted to murder anyone who championed friendship with Britain and the United States, including Prime Minister Yonai and Lord Privy Seal Kido. The traitors were discovered and captured; the army and police acted as they should—but it was another grave turn of events.

  On July 16, the army brought down Yonai’s government, and Prince Fumimaro Konoye returned as prime minister. During his prior reign, each time the world learned of new Japanese war atrocities, Konoye would offer his deepest lamentations and then do nothing to stop the carnage. Lean and mustachioed, with a driving need to keep everyone happy, Konoye came from a lineage as lofty as Franklin Roosevelt’s as he was a Japanese prince descended from one of the country’s four noble clans whose daughters served as royal concubines from whom all emperors were birthed. The prince was notorious for his extremely picky eating habits. Arriving at a lavish dinner offering the choicest of raw fish, a geisha would follow him to the table with a bowl of boiling water. She would, piece by piece, shabu-shabu the sushi, then use her chopsticks to place the food into the prince’s mouth. Also, like Roosevelt, Konoye enjoyed talking directly to his citizens over the radio, which was convenient as he was president of the nation’s leading broadcaster, NHK, and his sonorous voice—a melancholy tenor—was captivating.

  Konoye’s new cabinet included at least two avowed foes of the Anglo-Saxons, Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka and War Minister Hideki Tojo. In the face of Japan’s continued military rumblings, while Joseph Grew and Sumner Welles urged moderation, Chief of Naval Operations Harold Stark, Navy Secretary Frank Knox, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, and War Secretary Henry Stimson urged FDR to take the hardest possible line with Tokyo.

  The president found an answer from the other side of the world. In October 1937, the US Asiatic Fleet commander, Admiral Harry Yarnell, had written a letter to his superiors pointing out Japan’s reliance on imports, a letter that eventually made its way to the White House. The admiral suggested that the United States, Britain, France, the Netherlands, and the Soviet Union cut off all trade with Japan, battling the Asian fascists with commerce instead of troops. The idea reminded FDR of when America used a similar technique against Tripoli in the Barbary Wars, the subject of an article he’d published in Asia magazine in 1923, an article he had hoped at the time would strengthen ties between Tokyo and Washington.

  Yarnell’s logic was so convincing that it begat a new foreign policy, the thinking that, with its oil, iron, and other material exports, the United States was providing Japan with the materials it needed to subjugate the Chinese and, in time, the whole of East Asia. In 1938, the State Department announced its vigorous opposition to the sale of American-manufactured aeronautical equipment to nations employing airplanes to attack innocent civilians and, in 1939, extended this “moral embargo” to production methods for aviation-grade gasoline.

  The Japanese immediately noticed, even the new commander in chief of the Combined Fleet, the navy’s highest-ranking seagoing officer, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, living aboard flagship Nagato, anchored in Hiroshima Bay next to the military port of Kure. Yamamoto wrote Vice Admiral Shigetaro Shimada in September 1939 that, as Japan imported most of its oil and steel from the Anglo-Saxons, losing them as allies was foolish, especially since “there is no chance of winning a war with the United States for some time to come.”

  Ambassador Grew, meanwhile, foresaw the unintended consequences of economic weaponry in October: “In both my talks with the President I brought up clearly my view that if we want to start sanctions against Japan we must see them through to the end, and the end may conceivably be war. I also said that if we cut off Japanese supplies of oil and that if Japan then finds that she cannot obtain sufficient oil from other commercial sources to ensure national security, she will in all probability send her fleet down to take the Dutch East Indies.”

  Roosevelt didn’t listen to Grew’s cautions; instead in January 1940, he ordered Hull to inform Japan that the United States would now withhold key petroleum exports since “so many countries were engaged in fighting in various parts of the world . . . that my Government felt that it should undertake to conserve quite a number of commodities and products in order to be able better to defend itself in case it should be attacked,” as the secretary phrased it. Hull would later tell the American public that the Japanese “have in a large number of instances resorted to bombing and machine-gunning of civilians from the air at places near which there were no military establishments or organizations. Furthermore, the use of incendiary bombs has inflicted appalling losses on civilian populations. Japanese air attacks in many instances have been of a nature and apparent plan which can be comprehended only as constituting deliberate attempts to terrorize unarmed populations.”

  In the spring of 1940, Grew wrote Hull that three Japanese groups were now arguing over their country’s future. One wanted to negotiate with the Kremlin to divvy up China; another wanted to join Hitler and battle Churchill; the third wanted to negotiate a peace with the Anglo-Saxons and end the war in East Asia. The latter was the weakest group and needed help, so Grew proposed that he be allowed to tell the government that, as soon as Japan made clear steps to begin a withdrawal of military forces from China, America would grant it economic benefits.

  Hull on June 4 vetoed this. Instead, on July 18, 1940, Stimson and Knox had dinner with representatives of Britain and Australia, Stimson noting in their conversation, “We now had an opportunity under the new legislation of stopping the supplies of oil to Japan.” The group decided that the United States should halt petroleum exports, with Britain and the United States buying up a
ny surplus; the Dutch should destroy their East Indies oil wells; and a bombing campaign would stop production at Germany’s synthetic-oil plants. Without fuel for their war machines, the rampaging fascists would be stopped in their tracks. At a White House meeting of Stimson, Knox, and Welles the next day, Stimson remembered, “The president . . . finally came to the conclusion that the only way out of the difficulties of the world was [limiting export of] the supply of fuel to carry on the war.”

  On July 25, 1940, FDR announced that scrap metal and oil exports would be subject to license, and that same day, navy chief Harold Stark and army chief George Marshall warned Admiral Kimmel and General Short in Hawaii of the embargo, but added that they “do not anticipate immediate hostile reaction by Japan through the use of military means but you are furnished this information in order that you may take appropriate precautionary measures against possible eventualities.” Washington informed Tokyo the next day that it would also terminate their Treaty of Commerce and Navigation, meaning that in six months at its expiry, additional controls and limits would be placed on Japan’s American imports. The hawks in FDR’s cabinet—Stimson, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., and Harold Ickes—wanted to halt the export of all petroleum products to Japan, but the president, mindful of the Nazi’s Atlantic U-boat patrols, said that might trigger “the wrong war in the wrong ocean at the wrong time.” His aviation and iron embargoes, though, would allow him to “slip the noose around Japan’s neck, and give it a jerk now and then.”

  The government-dominated press in Japan reacted vehemently. “It seems inevitable,” reported Tokyo’s biggest daily paper, Asahi Shimbun, “that a collision should occur between Japan, determined to establish a sphere of interest in East Asia . . . and the United States, which is determined to meddle in affairs on the other side of a vast ocean.” Yamamoto wrote Shimada that the Konoye government’s “action in showing surprise now at America’s economic pressure and fuming and complaining against it reminds me of the aimless account of a schoolboy which has no more consistent motive than the immediate need or whim of the moment” and warned Prime Minister Konoye, “If you tell me that it is necessary that we fight, then, in the first six months to a year of war against the U.S. and England I will run wild, and I will show you an uninterrupted succession of victories; I must also tell you that, should the war be prolonged for two or three years, I have no confidence in our ultimate victory. . . . I hope at best you’ll make every effort to avoid war with America.”