Pearl Harbor: From Infamy To Greatness

by Craig Nelson

  On October 16 at 4:00 p.m., Marquis Koichi Kido received a call from Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoye, saying that he had all of the letters needed to abandon his government, which Kido called a “great surprise.” An hour later Konoye appeared at the palace, and Hirohito accepted his resignation.

  In time, Joseph Grew would be convinced that the Pacific war could have been avoided entirely if Konoye and Roosevelt had met in Alaska, thinking that, when Japanese hard-liners saw their emperor supporting the prime minister’s negotiations with the Americans, they would feel honor-bound to accept the terms of a treaty. Most of FDR’s cabinet, however, were too conscious of the Japanese militarists’ history of ignoring their country’s moderates to pursue whatever aggressive actions they wanted to share Grew’s regrets.

  The fall of the second Konoye government, engineered by Hideki Tojo, meant that Hideki Tojo himself was no longer army minister. On October 17 he was packing up his things to move out of the official residence when the phone rang; Hirohito was summoning him to immediately appear at the palace. As he got ready to leave, Military Affairs Bureau section chief Kenryo Sato warned, “Minister, you cornered Prince Konoye. . . . You said you would quit the post of army minister if a troop withdrawal from China was mentioned. That’s why His Majesty is about to admonish you.”

  “I dare not argue with His Imperial Majesty,” Tojo replied. “Whatever he says is final.”

  At their five o’clock meeting Hirohito said that he was appointing a new prime minister of Japan: Hideki Tojo. The general was so astonished he could not even speak the traditional humbled response of “Let me please have a little time to accept the command,” so the emperor had to step in and offer him such time.

  What seems in retrospect as the worst decision of Hirohito’s reign made a great deal of sense at that moment. There had been two candidates: the navy’s Oikawa and the army’s Tojo. Since the army had started this crisis, Kido thought the army should resolve it, and reinforced this idea by informing Tojo immediately after the appointment that “It is the emperor’s wish that in formulating the nation’s policy, you would not be a slave to the September sixth imperial resolution. You must consider both domestic and external situations, deeply and broadly. The emperor wishes you to take a cautious approach.”

  Konoye thought the appointment made sense in that Tojo was famously devoted to the emperor, and if Hirohito encouraged him to peace, he might obey an imperial directive . . . he might in fact be willing to take that jump from the balcony, into peace. The emperor didn’t want a member of the imperial family serving as prime minister if war began, ruling out Konoye or the other leading royal candidate, Prince Naruhiko Higashikuni. Finally, Hirohito had a strategic move in mind, inspired by a Chinese proverb: “One must enter the tiger’s den in order to catch his cubs.” By “civilianizing” Hideki Tojo, the army’s most powerful and staunchest chieftain, Hirohito and Kido hoped the service’s warmongering fascists could be brought under control. The Imperial Japanese Army, which had always operated as the power behind the throne, sidestepping the ultimate responsibility, would now have to face the consequences of its belligerent intransigence.

  The next morning, Japan’s newest prime minister was visited by the man who least thought he should be Japan’s newest prime minister. Prince Kinmochi Saionji was the last surviving genro—one of modern Japan’s founding fathers—and Saionji sternly informed Tojo, “I have three things to say to you. One, you must not make Japan into a police state. Two, you must hurry to make peace with China. Three, you must see to the success of the US-Japan negotiations.” Tojo, a man of much action and not much contemplation, believed his remarkable character had brought him the prime ministry and also believed he did not need guidance from anyone. “Mr. Saionji, thank you for your advice,” he replied. “I shall have my secretary contact you from now on.”

  When Americans in 1941 imagined “funny little” Japanese men, they imagined someone like Tojo, who was five feet two inches tall, weighed about 110 pounds, and wore enormous tortoiseshell spectacles. Tenth in his class at Ichigawa’s Imperial Japanese Army Academy, by 1937 he was chief of the famously rampaging Kwantung Army, and eventually the Kempeitai—the secret police. While war minister, he had a book of conduct published and issued to every recruit, Instructions for the Battlefield. One instruction was particularly notorious: “Do not suffer the shame of being captured alive.” Cold, flinty, disciplined, petty, easily offended, strong of conviction, autocratic, and a lover of vengeance, Tojo took his nationalist beliefs seriously, commonly remarking, “A soldier serves the emperor twenty-four hours a day. Even eating is part of his duty, so that one can better serve him.”

  On October 16, Nagumo’s chief of staff received a letter from his retired housekeeper. She told him of a lovely dream she’d had the night before, that Japanese submarines had attacked Pearl Harbor and achieved a great victory. Kusaka knew this was a bright omen. On that same day at 2:00 p.m. in Washington, FDR canceled his cabinet meeting to confer for two hours with Stimson, Marshall, Knox, Stark, Hull, and Hopkins in the wake of the Konoye government’s collapse. They expected, as Stimson remembered, that Tojo would be “much more anti-American” than Konoye and noted, “The Japanese Navy is beginning to talk almost as radically as the Japanese Army, and so we face the delicate question of the diplomatic fencing to be done so as to make sure that Japan was put into the wrong and made the first bad move—overt move. . . . If war did come, it was important . . . that we should not be placed in the position of firing the first shot, if this could be done without sacrificing our safety, but that Japan should appear in her true role as the real aggressor.”

  Harold Stark wrote to all of his commanders including Husband Kimmel that day: “The resignation of the Japanese Cabinet has created a grave situation. If a new Cabinet is formed it will probably be strongly nationalistic and anti-American. If the Konoye Cabinet remains the effect will be that it will operate under a new mandate which will not include rapprochement with the US. In either case hostilities between Japan and Russia are a strong possibility. Since the US and Britain are held responsible by Japan for her present desperate situation there is also a possibility that Japan may attack these two powers. In view of these possibilities you will take due precautions including such preparatory deployments as will not disclose strategic intention nor constitute provocative actions against Japan.”

  The next day, Stark sent Kimmel a follow-up, “Personally I do not believe the Japs are going to sail into us and the message I sent you merely stated the ‘possibility’; in fact I tempered the message handed to me considerably. Perhaps I am wrong, but I hope not. In any case after long pow-wows in the White House it was felt we should be on guard at least until something indicates the trend.” This “on the one hand; on the other hand” style of cable from the chief of naval operations would in essence paralyze the commander in chief, Pacific Fleet. Yet, if Stark’s mixed messages confused Kimmel’s sense of mission, the admiral never asked for clarification.

  After Tojo announced his cabinet, Ambassador Nomura cabled the new foreign minister, Shigenori Togo, “I am firmly convinced that I should retire from office along with the resignation of the previous Cabinet. From the first, the Secretary of State recognized my sincerity but it has been his judgment that I have no influence in Tokyo. So is the President’s opinion, I hear. . . . I am now, so to speak, the skeleton of a dead horse. It is too much for me to lead a sham existence, cheating others as well as myself. I do not mean to run away from the battlefield, but I believe that this is the course I should take as a public man.” Togo replied with his “hope that you will see fit to sacrifice all of your own personal wishes and remain in your post.” If many Japanese were willing to die for their country, the ambassador to Washington was willing to do something perhaps even more difficult: be humiliated.

  In mid-October, Japanese naval planners estimated that their forces outnumbered that of their foes in the Pacific, but said that in two years’ time, the
industrial power of the United States would change that equation and if Japan wanted to attack, it needed to strike now. The Imperial Japanese Navy’s general staff then decided that Operation Number One needed more carrier support, and that of the six flattops assigned to strike Pearl Harbor, the second carrier division’s three ships would have to be reassigned. The second’s leader, Tamon Yamaguchi, was so enraged at this decision he told Nagumo, “If you have made a mistake, I will kill you!” On the eighteenth Kuroshima flew to Tokyo to tell Tomioka that the Combined Fleet needed “clarification” on whether the Pearl Harbor attack was approved—if it was approved, it required six carriers to be victorious—and that Yamamoto needed his decision immediately. When Tomioka and Vice Admiral Shigeru Fukudome refused to change their minds, Kuroshima said that Yamamoto was certain that the all-important Operation Number One would fail unless the Japanese navy annihilated America’s Pacific Fleet, as it was a “dagger pointed at Japan’s heart.”

  When Tomioka and Fukudome then remained intransigent, the captain announced, “Admiral Yamamoto insists that his plan be adopted. I am authorized to state that if it is not, then the commander in chief of the Combined Fleet can no longer be held responsible for the security of the Empire. In that case he will have no alternative but to resign, and with him his entire staff.” Faced again with losing Yamamoto, even though he felt queasy about Operation Z’s prospects, Nagano reversed course, concluding, “If he has that much confidence, it’s better to let Yamamoto go ahead.” A compromise was reached: if the nation declared war, and if the carriers were returned to the Southern Operation as soon as possible after their mission was completed, Yamamoto could attack Pearl Harbor just as he’d envisaged. Shigeru Fukudome: “If this seems strange, it must be remembered that Yamamoto’s position and influence in the Japanese navy were unique. He was in truth a leviathan among men.” Many officers in Tokyo at this moment still held on to the hope that if Togo won by diplomacy, or the emperor intervened and the war was called off, the navy could keep its ships, its planes, and its Admiral Yamamoto.

  • • •

  From aboard his flagship Pennsylvania in Pearl Harbor, Admiral Husband Kimmel sent a memo on October 14 to all of his Pacific commanders, which included:

  The security of the Fleet, operating and based in the Hawaiian Area, is predicated at present, on two assumptions:

  (a) That no responsible foreign power will provoke war, under present existing conditions, by attack on the Fleet or Base, but that irresponsible and misguided nationals of such powers may attempt

  (1) sabotage, on ships based in Pearl Harbor, from small craft.

  (2) to block the entrance to Pearl Harbor by sinking an obstruction in the Channel.

  (3) to lay magnetic or other mines in the approaches to Pearl Harbor.

  (b) That a declaration of war may be preceded by;

  (1) a surprise attack on ships in Pearl Harbor,

  (2) a surprise submarine attack on ships in operating area,

  (3) a combination of these two. . . .

  The next day, Roosevelt sent Churchill a cable that included the detail that Hull’s negotiations had given the Allies “two months of respite in the Far East.”

  On October 17, the commander of the Fourteenth Naval District in Hawaii, Rear Admiral Claude Bloch, having just received an obsolete gunboat, Sacramento, which had “no batteries to speak of, with which the vessel could fight, and no speed with which she can run,” reminded Washington of Pearl Harbor’s deficiencies. He required “a number of small, fast craft [with] listening gear and depth charges” and two squadrons of reconnaissance planes. His letter’s conclusion: “Nearly all of the failures of the British have been caused by what may be expressed in the cliché ‘too little and too late.’ It is hoped that we may profit from their errors.”

  At that moment, the Washington Post asked Navy Secretary Knox if the Philippines could be defended. He exploded, “We can defend anything!”

  Admiral Yamamoto wrote a letter to Navy Minister Shimada on October 24, a week after threatening to resign over not striking Hawaii, that included, “I have recently heard that there are some elements in the general staff who argue that, since the air operation to be carried out immediately upon outbreak of war was after all nothing more than a secondary operation in which the chance of success was about fifty-fifty, the use of the entire air force in such a venture was too risky to merit consideration. But even more risky and illogical, it seems to me, is the idea of going to war against America, Britain, and China following four years of exhausting operations in China and with the possibility of fighting Russia also to be kept in mind and having, moreover, to sustain ourselves unassisted for ten years or more in a protracted war over an area several times more vast than the European war theater. If, in the face of such odds, we decide to go to war—or rather, are forced to do so by the trend of events—I, as the authority responsible for the fleet, can see little hope of success in any ordinary strategy. . . . I fear with trepidation that the only thing that can save the situation now is the imperial decision.” Yamamoto was holding on to the thin hope that Hirohito would order Tojo into peace, while at the same time Yamamoto’s threats to resign were forcing the navy to draft its war plan for Hirohito’s approval; naval secretary Nagano presented it to the emperor at the palace that third week of October.

  During the last week of October in Honolulu, Japanese consul chief Kita handed agent Takeo Yoshikawa a ripped piece of paper, $14,000 in cash, and orders to meet a man at a Lanikai beach house on October 25. A German appeared at that meeting, with his own piece of paper, whose torn edge matched Yoshikawa’s.

  The man, Bernard Julius Otto Kuehn, was a Nazi sleeper agent sent to Hawaii in 1935 by Joseph Goebbels; the Japanese had hired Kuehn to supplement and, in time, replace Yoshikawa. Kuehn had detailed information on American military operations, which he’d acquired by being friendly with local officers, as well as through his stepdaughter, Susie Ruth, who ran a beauty parlor specializing in Pearl Harbor’s wives and daughters. On December 2 he brought the Japanese embassy a plan of codes and signals that could be seen by offshore Axis submarines:

  Meaning

  Signal

  Battleship divisions

  Preparing to sortie including scouts and screening units

  1

  A number of carriers

  Preparing to sortie

  2

  Battleship divisions

  All departed between 1st and 3rd

  3

  Carriers

  Several departed between 1st and 3rd

  4

  Carriers

  All departed between 1st and 3rd

  5

  Battleship divisions

  All departed between 4th and 6th

  6

  Carriers

  Several departed between 4th and 6th

  7

  Carriers

  All departed between 4th and 6th

  8

  Lanikai Beach House will show lights during the night as follows to

  signal:

  One light between 8:00 and 9:00 p.m.

  1

  One light between 9:00 and 10:00 p.m.

  2

  One light between 10:00 and 11:00 p.m.

  3

  One light between 11:00 and 12:00 p.m.

  4

  Two lights between 12:00 and 1:00 a.m.

  5

  Two lights between 1:00 and 2:00 a.m.

  6

  Two lights between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m.

  7

  Two lights between 3:00 and 4:00 a.m.

  8

  Want ads:

  A. Chinese rug, etc., for sale, apply P.O. Box 1476 indicates signal 3 or 6.

  B. A complete chicken farm, etc., apply as above, indicates signal 4 or 7.

  C. Beauty operator wanted, etc. —same—indicates signal 5 or 8.

  By that autumn of 1941 as, moment by moment, a Japanese strike loomed in the Pacific, the Germans we
re repeatedly attacking the United States on the other side of the world. Two American-owned merchant ships, the Sessa and Montana, had been sunk by Nazi submarines while ferrying cargo to Iceland; Steel Seafarer, a US ship traveling to Suez, was bombed in the Red Sea by German pilots; USS destroyer Greer was attacked by a Nazi sub while carrying mail across the Atlantic; and on Friday, October 17, USS destroyer Kearny was torpedoed in the North Atlantic by another Nazi submarine, killing eleven American sailors. When Roosevelt took to the radio ten days after, he said that while the United States was doing all she could to avoid foreign wars, Hitler was trying to frighten Americans out of the oceans, which was an “absurd and insulting suggestion.” The president declared, “History has recorded who fired the first shot.”

  One merchant sailor recalled a trip out of the Gulf of Mexico: “A Nazi tin fish chased us for three days. We never seen a patrol boat or a plane the whole time. Saw one destroyer going hell-bent for election into Charleston one afternoon about dusk, but we all figured she was trying to get safe home before dark when the subs come out. We was carrying fifty thousand barrels of Oklahoma crude and fifty thousand of high-test gasoline. I thought we’d get it any minute. Man, those nights were killers! . . . with the zigzagging and the sub alarms and the lying there in your bunk, scared stiff and waiting . . . You sleep with your clothes on. Well, I don’t exactly mean sleep. You lie in bed with your clothes on. . . . You try to light a cigarette if your hand don’t shake too much. Not that you’re scared of course. Oh, noooh!”

  John Walsh was a wiper on the tanker Empire when she was sunk off the coast of Florida: “I was asleep when the torpedoes hit us—three of them. A torpedo connects with one of those tankers and it’s just like lighting a match to cellophane. I rushed up on deck and helped get one of the lifeboats over the side. I saw our captain on a life raft. He and some of the other men were on it. The current was sucking them into the burning oil around the tanker. I last saw the captain going into a sheet of orange flame. Some of the fellows said he screamed. . . . Monroe Reynolds was with me for a while. His eyes were burned. He was screaming that he was going blind. The last time I saw him, he jumped into the fiery water. That was his finish, I guess.”