by Craig Nelson
The general’s staff worked with FBI agents to find and capture enemy operators. Honolulu policemen immediately raided the Japanese embassy on Nuuanu Avenue to find the staff burning papers. By the following day, 482 German, Japanese, and Italian suspects were in custody at the detention camp on Sand (previously Quarantine) Island.
Consul Nagai Kita and his employees were confined to quarters for ten days, then sent to Phoenix for interrogation. Under oath, Takeo Yoshikawa insisted his various outings were merely those of a tourist. In August 1942 during one of the thirty-three prisoner exchanges between Rome, Tokyo, and Washington, Yoshikawa returned to Japan aboard Swedish ship Gripsholm, where he continued working for naval intelligence. When he retired and asked for a pension, he was told, “You must be one kind of child to think that we will ever acknowledge your activities in Honolulu. The government of Japan never spied on anyone.” At least Yoshikawa could tell himself, “In truth, if only for a moment in time, I held history in the palm of my hand.”
A similar chain of events happened to journalist Masuo Kato in Washington, DC. Kato was outside the Japanese embassy when “I smelled acrid smoke. Overhead, above the embassy roof, white puffs were curling upward in the calm air. I hastened back to warn the Embassy staff that something was burning. They laughed at me. The smoke was from the papers that were being burned before the American authorities should arrive to take over.”
Kato was taken into custody and shipped to Hot Springs, Virginia, to be interned with other enemy aliens: “There were about two hundred or three hundred of us in internment there, including Germans and Italians as well as Japanese. We realized that in some respects we were quite well off. We could take a hot shower every day. Daily newspapers were delivered to us, and we were free to listen to the radio as much as we liked. We were permitted to write letters and receive them without limitation, subject to censorship. When we inquired about using the golf course, we were told that there were a number of people in the district [of Hot Springs] obsessed with a desire to shoot Japanese on sight, and therefore golfing might come under the heading of hazardous occupations.”
Two of Kato’s fellow detainees were Japan’s now-disgraced ambassadors, Kichisaburo Nomura and Saburo Kurusu. “That old man,” Kurusu said of Secretary Hull, “had no wish to go to war with Japan. He did his utmost to preserve peace. The trouble is, both the United States and Japan were just like two children. Diplomatically they are not mature. The United States has always had a theoretical and academic approach, and Japan knows nothing of diplomacy. Japan’s diplomats have never been allowed free exercise of their own judgment. If we had negotiated with England, things could have developed in an entirely different way. Now the two children are playing foolish war games.” He was keenly aware that, just as the name Quisling had come to mean “traitor,” so his own had been used to coin a new slang term: the double Kurusu.
Kato remembered that “Nomura was himself bitter about the position in which he had been placed by the Pearl Harbor attack. ‘I am just like a living dead man,’ he told me once during one of our frequent strolls on the hotel grounds. So far as he was concerned, he had failed in his mission, and there was very little left in life.”
Oahu’s Shuncho-Ro teahouse, meanwhile, made famous as a hotbed of espionage by Takeo Yoshikawa, changed its name to Natsunoya and today provides Japanese tourists with romantic details on where their famous spy did his business. One detail the teahouse omits is that, even with a good pair of binoculars, Pearl Harbor is too far away to be accurately observed from its infamous terrace.
• • •
By 2:25 p.m. on December 7 in Washington—less than half an hour after the secretary of the navy first told the president the news—UPI had a bulletin out on its wire service, and CBS news was getting reports from Hawaii affiliate KGMB. Just after 3:00 p.m., Stimson, Marshall, Knox, Hull, Hopkins, Grace Tully, Steve Early, and White House doctor Ross McIntyre, seated in a circle of leather couches and tufted club chairs, met with the president in his Oval Study. Roosevelt unleashed a torrent of questions at Stimson, Marshall, and Knox to find out just how the Gibraltar of the Pacific was so clueless and unprepared. Even facing the chief executive’s wrath, “the conference met in not too tense an atmosphere,” Hopkins noted, “because I think that all of us believed that . . . sooner or later we were bound to be in the war and that Japan had given us an opportunity.”
Their main focus was trying to determine where Japan would strike next. FDR admitted he was worried about the Panama Canal. He was also concerned that American citizens would be demoralized if they knew the full extent of the devastation. He ordered naval intelligence to listen in on radio broadcasts and telephone calls from Hawaii and cut short anyone discussing details of the attack.
The group then discussed Roosevelt’s message to Congress, when he would officially inform the American people of what had happened and call for a declaration of war. Cordell Hull urged an elaborate and extensively detailed explanation of the events leading up to the attack, and how wholly innocent the United States was in the face of Japan’s treachery. Roosevelt preferred a simple and direct message, something similar to his radio chats, which he wrote while imagining an intimate group of Americans sitting with him before a fireplace.
Steve Early announced that Roosevelt had decided that the press would be handled by the White House, not the War Department. Early’s office set the first Pearl Harbor casualty estimate as 104 dead and 300 wounded and did not update those numbers as the day progressed. When reporters said their sources were reporting the damage as far more severe, FDR advised that publishing the worst of the news would only aid the enemy.
The American response as shown in the press was steady and consistent. New York Times: “a military clique in Tokyo whose powers of self-deception now rise to a state of sublime insanity.” Philadelphia Inquirer: “Army jingoes in Tokyo threw reason to the winds and went berserk in an insane adventure that for fatalistic abandon is unsurpassed in the history of the world.” Los Angeles Times: “The act of a mad dog.” Chicago Tribune: “An insane clique of Japanese militarists who apparently see the desperate conduct into which they lead their country as the only thing that can prolong their power.” New York Herald Tribune: “Since the clash now appears to have been inevitable, its occurrence brings with it a sense of relief. The air is clear. Americans can get down to their task with old controversies forgotten.” Chicago Daily News: “Thanks now to Japan, the deep division of opinion that has rent and paralyzed our country will swiftly yield. It cannot be otherwise.”
“My greatest fear was that a Nazi undercover agent or saboteur might be willing to sacrifice his own life if he could assassinate our president,” Secret Service chief Frank Wilson said. “I immediately decided to intensify to a high degree the protection extended to him.” That afternoon, Wilson began to arm the roofs of the White House and other nearby federal buildings with snipers. Wilson’s boss, Treasury Secretary Morgenthau, wanted a hundred soldiers patrolling the White House grounds and ordered a Treasury vault turned into a bomb shelter, with a 761-foot tunnel connecting it to the White House.
At 9:00 p.m. in England (4:00 p.m. in Washington), Roosevelt’s special envoy to Britain, Averell Harriman, along with his wife, Marie, and American ambassador Gil Winant, were eating dinner with Winston Churchill at the British prime minister’s residence Chequers. The meal over, Churchill lifted the lid of his radio, a present from Harry Hopkins (which, like a music box, powered on when you opened its top), to hear the BBC’s nightly news. The lead story: “President Roosevelt has announced that the Japanese have bombed the Hawaiian base of the United States fleet at Pearl Harbor.”
The British did not yet know that their own Malaya and Hong Kong were being invaded, but even so, Churchill gruffly announced, “We will declare war on Japan!” Winant pointed out that one should not “declare war on a radio announcement” and recommended first hearing directly from the White House.
The PM headed to the ph
one. “Mr. President, what’s this about Japan?” Churchill asked.
“It’s quite true,” Roosevelt said. “They have attacked us at Pearl Harbor. We are all in the same boat now.”
“To have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy,” Churchill later wrote. “I do not pretend to have measured accurately the martial might of Japan, but at this very moment I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all! . . . Hitler’s fate was sealed. Mussolini’s fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to powder. . . . Being saturated and satiated with emotion and sensation, I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.”
Adolf Hitler thought the attack meant the United States would turn its back on Europe to fight in Asia and announced that it was “the turning point! We can’t lose the war at all. We now have an ally which has never been conquered in three thousand years.” Mussolini proclaimed that it would be easy to win a war against “a country of Negroes and Jews,” especially considering that “never in history has a people been ruled by a paralytic. There have been bald kings, fat kings, handsome kings, and even stupid ones, but never a king who when he wants to go to the toilet or to dinner must be assisted by other men.”
At 4:50 p.m. in Washington, the president asked Grace Tully to take dictation and began, “Yesterday comma December 7 comma 1941 dash a day which will live in world history dash the United States of America was simultaneously and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.” Tully later noted, “The entire message ran under five hundred words . . . a cold-blooded indictment of Japanese treachery and aggression . . . delivered to me without hesitation, interruption, or second thoughts.” She read back this first draft, and FDR replaced world history with infamy and simultaneously with suddenly.
At 6:30 p.m., First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt began her Sunday NBC radio broadcast, offering steadying words of encouragement to 45 million American listeners:
“I am speaking to you at a very serious moment in our history. The cabinet is convening and the leaders in Congress are meeting with the president. The State Department and army and navy officials have been with the president all afternoon. In fact, the Japanese ambassador was talking to the president at the very time that Japan’s airships were bombing our citizens in Hawaii and the Philippines and sinking one of our transports loaded with lumber on its way to Hawaii. By tomorrow morning the members of Congress will have a full report and be ready for action.
“In the meantime, we the people are already prepared for action. For months now the knowledge that something of this kind might happen has been hanging over our heads, and yet it seemed impossible to believe, impossible to drop the everyday things of life and feel that there was only one thing which was important—preparation to meet an enemy no matter where he struck. That is all over now and there is no more uncertainty.
“We know what we have to face and we know that we are ready to face it.
“I should like to say just a word to the women in the country tonight. I have a boy at sea on a destroyer, for all I know he may be on his way to the Pacific. Two of my children are in coast cities on the Pacific. Many of you all over the country have boys in the services who will now be called upon to go into action. You have friends and families in what has suddenly become a danger zone. You cannot escape anxiety. You cannot escape a clutch of fear at your heart, and yet I hope that the certainty of what we have to meet will make you rise above these fears.
“We must go about our daily business more determined than ever to do the ordinary things as well as we can, and when we find a way to do anything more in our communities to help others, to build morale, to give a feeling of security, we must do it. Whatever is asked of us I am sure we can accomplish it. We are the free and unconquerable people of the United States of America.
“To the young people of the nation, I must speak a word tonight. You are going to have a great opportunity. There will be high moments in which your strength and your ability will be tested. I have faith in you. I feel as though I was standing upon a rock and that rock is my faith in my fellow citizens.”
Her radio audience knew well that Eleanor had her heart in what she said. The Roosevelt’s son James was a marine; his brothers Franklin Jr. and John were in the navy; and Elliott was in the Army Air Corps. In the space of a year, all four would be in combat, and Roosevelt would become the only wartime president in American history besides Abraham Lincoln with children in the service.
• • •
Back at the Ford Island cave, the families were finally allowed to leave around noon. Mary Ann Ramsey went to the marine barracks, where the sixteen-year-old did all she could to give comfort to dying men. Around the neighborhood, marines were taking down all the signs identifying the homes of officers, since it was assumed that when enemy troops invaded, military leaders would be targeted for assassination. The Zubers found a dead Japanese man in their yard. The little girl Joan wanted to kick the corpse.
The only water they had to drink was scooped out of the swimming pool and boiled.
Many in the military’s upper echelons who weren’t assigned quarters on Ford Island lived in suburbs terraced into the hills above Pearl Harbor, and their wives and children ended up watching the attack from their living-room windows or front yards. Mrs. Arthur Gardiner and her two children joined some other families hiding in a ravine behind the junior officers’ quarters. Mrs. Gardiner had brought along a blanket, a can of orange juice, a butcher knife, and the book Pinocchio. Reading the book to the children was interrupted at times by the roar of planes overhead, and the sound of crashes and explosions. Then, some cane workers came running toward them. Fearing these were Japanese invaders, Mrs. Gardiner picked up the butcher knife to defend her children. But the Japanese Americans, seeing the Caucasians, ran off, terrified that they themselves were going to die.
• • •
Eight hours after Fuchida broadcast his To Ra To Ra To Ra message, Japanese radios played the solemn notes of the national anthem, meaning an important announcement was coming. Moments later, the oddly lilting voice of Premier Tojo read an Imperial rescript:
“We by grace of heaven, Emperor of Japan . . . hereby declare war on the United States of America and the British Empire. The men and officers of Our army and navy shall do their utmost in prosecuting the war. . . . The entire nation with a united will shall mobilize their total strength so that nothing will miscarry in the attainment of Our war aims.
“It has been truly unavoidable and far from Our wishes that Our Empire had now been brought to cross swords with America and Britain. . . . These two powers, inducing other countries to follow suit, increased military preparations on all sides of Our Empire to challenge us. They have obstructed by every means Our peaceful commerce and finally resorted to a direct severance of economic relations, menacing gravely the existence of Our Empire. . . . They have intensified economic and military pressure to compel thereby Our Empire to submission. This trend of affairs would, if left unchecked, not only nullify Our Empire’s efforts of many years for the sake of stabilization of East Asia but also endanger the very existence of Our nation. . . . Our Empire for its existence and self-defense has no other recourse but to appeal to arms and to crush every obstacle in its path.
The reverent citizens of Japan then heard the strains of the song “Umi Yukaba,” which included the chorus:
Across the sea,
Corpses in the water;
Across the mountain,
Corpses heaped upon the field;
I shall die only for the Emperor,
I shall never look back.
• • •
The White House cabinet met again at eight that night, according to Frances Perkins’s notes: “Number of maps up. President sitting at his desk with his back to the wall. Frank Knox sitting close to him and showing him something. . . . It was obvious to me that Roosevelt was having a dreadful time just
accepting the idea that the navy could be caught unaware.” The president was still angry and disturbed at the American military response, asking Knox twice, “Find out, for God’s sake, why the ships were tied up in rows.”
According to Attorney General Francis Biddle, the president called this the most significant cabinet meeting since 1861 and the birth of the American Civil War, and that there was “no question but that the Japanese had been told by the Germans a few weeks ago that they were winning the war and that they would soon dominate Africa as well as Europe. They were going to isolate England and were also going to completely dominate the situation in the Far East. The Japs had been told if they wanted to be cut in on the spoils, they would have to come in the war now.” Roosevelt said he was certain that the attack was engineered by the Nazis, and Henry Stimson said these details should be in the speech to Congress, and that war should be declared on both Japan and Germany. FDR said he could save such details for his radio speech two days later, on the tenth.
Cabinet members were disturbed to learn that, after all the warnings sent to Hawaii, surveillance had been minimal. Also, they couldn’t understand why so few officers were aboard their ships, with so much of the leadership in the crisis having passed to such junior men. Perkins: “We just got scraps of information, an episode here and there. We got a picture of total confusion. Nobody knew where the planes had come from. Why didn’t our patrols find out? . . . We had all been trained to think of the US as invincible, and now we were faced with the fact that our navy had cracked.”
That night, Franklin Roosevelt ate dinner at his Oval Study desk, with Grace Tully and Harry Hopkins eating from folding tray tables. While serving their meal, White House butler Alonzo Fields remembered the president, still very much in shock, saying, “My God, how did it happen? I will go down in disgrace.” Hopkins gave him a line to add to his speech: “With confidence in our armed forces—with the unbounding determination of our people—we will gain the inevitable triumph—so help us God.”