by I. F. Stone
The army and navy wanted more time, but we had already been stalling and appeasing the Japanese for ten years. The price asked for more time was so large that it would have benefited Japan more than the United States. The refusal to pay that price undoubtedly precipitated the long-prepared Japanese attack, and we were poorly prepared for war. But the real point involved in the Pearl Harbor inquiry was whether that disaster need necessarily have happened. And one test of the army-navy plea for more time is what use the armed services made of the time they did have. The services regarded the ten-point proposal as a virtual ultimatum to Japan, and since they so regarded the proposal they were under obligation to take steps immediately for war. But their record, as disclosed in the army and navy inquiries and in the earlier Roberts report, is one of unpardonable negligence and appalling stupidity. We would have had to fight a defensive war for months in any case, but we need not have lost our Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor and our air force at Manila in two quick, crushing surprise attacks. For the facts disclosed indicate that it was not a lack of knowledge but sheer stodgy unimaginative bureaucratic complacency at Washington, Pearl Harbor, and Manila which made the Japanese blitz possible.
In the first place, the joint army-navy defense plan for Hawaii signed on April 9, 1941, was, as the army board said, “prophetic in its accuracy.” It was based on the assumption that the Japs would attack without warning, and the men who drew up that plan accurately forecast every basic detail of what happened at Pearl Harbor: the time of day, the type of task force used by the Japanese, the form the attack would take, even the fact that it might be preceded (as it actually was) by a single submarine foray in the harbor just before the big blow. The only trouble is that this army-navy defense agreement was neither implemented nor taken seriously by the military-naval command in Washington and in Hawaii. In the second place, President Roosevelt told the heads of the army and navy at a White House conference on November 25, the day before the ten-point proposal, to expect a surprise attack “perhaps as soon as next Monday,” which was December 1. In the third place, from the time of that White House conference until December 7, “the record shows” (says the army report) “that from informers and other sources the War Department had complete and detailed information of Japanese intentions.” Finally, at 9 o’clock on the morning of December 7, the War and Navy Departments were tipped off (four hours before the attack) that the Japanese would present an ultimatum or declaration of war at 1 P.M. Washington time. And a Commander Kramer in the navy was quick to point out that 1 P.M. Washington time would be dawn at Pearl Harbor, the very time at which our war plans predicted a surprise attack there.
General Marshall as Chief of Staff and Admiral Stark as Chief of Naval Operations failed to see to it that proper defense measures were taken at Pearl Harbor between November 25 and December 7. And they failed to react quickly enough to the advance knowledge that they had on the morning of Pearl Harbor. Stark didn’t think the information was worth passing on and Marshall sent it to General Short by commercial cable when faster means of communication were available. The last warning left Washington 22 minutes before the attack and did not arrive until several hours after the attacking force had departed. Marshall could have telephoned Short, but his excuse was that he was expecting an attack on the Philippines rather than in Hawaii and telephoned MacArthur instead. This throws additional light on MacArthur’s extraordinary incompetence as a commander at that juncture. For despite the pleas of subordinates to disperse his planes, MacArthur left them on the ground at Clark Field outside Manila, where almost his entire air force was destroyed by the Japanese ten hours after their attack on Pearl Harbor. MacArthur was more culpable than Kimmel and Short, and it is scandalous that there should never have been an investigation of his bungling in the Philippines.
Our military-naval command acted with indecent sedateness. Lacking daring itself, it did not expect daring from the Japanese. Even now, when we know how meticulously and minutely (and, let us confess, brilliantly) the Japanese planned their attacks, we still find the Army Board of Inquiry talking nonsense about “the Oriental mind” and attributing the Pearl Harbor blitz to “the violent and uncivilized reasoning of the Japanese.” Our military-naval command did not keep abreast of new developments in warfare, notably the use of torpedoes from planes in shallow water. This was how the Japs did most of their damage at Pearl Harbor, and naval intelligence warned of this possibility months in advance. Our military-naval command underestimated the intelligence of the Japanese and they made the equally crucial mistake of underestimating the loyalty of our Japanese-American population. For it was the latter error which led General Short to institute the alert against sabotage instead of the alert against attack from without. Under this type of alert planes were parked wing to wing and unable to get off the ground in less than four hours. The attack on Pearl Harbor took only three, and most of the planes were destroyed.
Perhaps the crowning example of military stupidity is in the revelation that while our army’s mobile anti-aircraft artillery was in state of instant readiness, it had no ammunition. The ammunition was in a crater a mile away. General Short and Ordnance had rejected pleas for artillery shells several days earlier on the ground that “they didn’t want to issue any of the clean ammunition, let it get out and get dirty, and have to take it back in later on and renovate it.” The slogan of the Pearl Harbor high command seems to have been, “Praise the Lord, but don’t muss the ammunition.”
The End of the War
How eloquently and thoughtfully Stone takes the long view here, showing what the end of the war might mean if only humanity chooses to absorb fully its terrible lessons.
. . .
August 12, 1945
MORE TERRIFYING THAN THE ATOMIC BOMB is the casual way we all seem to be taking the end of the war. It has been clear since Friday morning that there would be a Japanese surrender within a matter of a few days, if not a few hours. But the news seemed to stir extraordinarily little excitement. The finish of a World Series evokes more talk at the lunch counters.
In part this is because, as before V-E Day, there was no clear-cut announcement. Victory, expected and discounted, is no longer news. In part, this phlegmatic response may reflect the fact that people are punch-drunk on horror and sensation. Imagination has been dulled by the demands made upon it.
The cables indicate that this is not true in those countries where the war has been experienced directly. In London, Paris, and Chungking, news of the Japanese surrender offer sent rejoicing crowds pouring into the streets. There the end of the war was the end of something people had themselves felt, seen, heard, and suffered—not a distant drama played out in the headlines.
I do not feel like writing the standard editorial today in the face of all the agony the last few years have seen. Terrible things have been done to human bodies and to human minds. I think of the picture of the Chinese baby crying alone in the ruins of Nanking. I think of the German woman who said all this would not have happened if those damned British had only surrendered in 1940. And I think of the American airman who came back from dropping an atomic bomb over Nagasaki to report that the results were “good.”
I am worried by the casualness with which we in America are greeting the peace, because this failure of the imagination does not bode well for the future. I wrote down “The most terrible war in human history is coming to an end,” and scratched it out because I felt that to most people who read it the words would have but a pallid reality, and seem only another editorial cliché.
This is terrifying because the task of preventing another world war is a difficult one. If people do not achieve some vivid conception of what hell has reigned in parts of Europe and Asia during the past decade or so, how can one expect them to think hard enough and act firmly enough to prevent it from happening again?
Since 1931, when peace began to crumble in Manchuria, there has been war, civil war and world war, at an increasingly furious tempo: from those first shoot
ings in Mukden and the first beatings in Dachau to the bombing of Shanghai and the civil war in Spain, from the first blitz on Poland to the use of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What a vista of blood and cruelty!
But not blood and cruelty alone. As in some gigantic symphony played on human hearts for the delectation of a mightier race, agony has blended with a beaten-down but irrepressible, mounting, and finally victorious heroism and aspiration. These are only gaudy words to us. We and our orators have rung the changes on democracy and freedom until the words have grown shabby and nauseating. But to certain men the war’s ending comes as the end of a struggle against fascism begun long before war was declared, fought in the underground hideaways of Japan, Italy, and Germany, in occupied China and in Spain, in the Vienna working-class suburbs and in the Warsaw ghetto, humbly and obscurely but as bitterly as on the broader battlefields.
Those who understand that this was in truth, for all its contradictions and compromises, a war against fascism, a successful war against fascism, a war that is slowly but surely letting loose the forces of freedom the world over, cannot take the end of the war casually. One of the reasons for the apathetic reaction to victory in our own country is that so few felt and understand this. To too many of us the war was a kind of horrible accident, disrupting families and lives for no good reason; a distant quarrel, into which we were somehow drawn.
One cannot understand what one has not suffered. How many of us are thankful that our own country was spared, that our children did not jump from their beds as the warning air-raid sirens screamed in the nights, that we did not huddle with our families in the subways, that our daughters were not shipped into slavery and our mothers sealed into death cars for the extermination camps, that our cities are not gutted by bombs, our children’s faces pinched by hunger?
I know that if a Gallup poll taker came among us tomorrow 99 percent of us would vote for a permanent peace. And I know that this feeling is not to be lightly dismissed; it has already had its effect in concrete steps toward peace such as the ratification by the Senate of the United Nations Charter. But preventing war is not that easy.
Some of the causes of this war went deeper than any enemy men or movements. They were not removed by the death of Hitler and they will not be removed by the execution of Japanese generals. Some of these causes lie in our own minds and hearts as well as in those of our defeated enemies.
A small group of scientists can unlock the secrets of uranium and leap into the future. But it is harder to break a prejudice than an atom. Hundreds of millions of men the world over must take thought, must take time off from workday cares to perform a far more difficult task than that involved in the mastery of U 235 if peace is to be preserved, if the new horizons of science are not merely to provide a new and immense stage for destruction. They must shake loose from ancient nationalist egotisms; the world has grown too small for them. They must grope forward past cherished preconceptions to a better-organized society in which all men may be assured of their daily bread; the world cannot afford a renewal of the economic insecurity in which war and fascism grew, and can grow again.
I wish it were possible to throw on some gigantic screen for all to see some fraction of the suffering, the treachery, the sacrifice, and the courage of the past decade. For how are we in America to fulfill our responsibility to the dead and to the future, to our less fortunate allies and to our children’s children, if we do not feel a little of this so deeply in our bones that we will be unswervingly determined that it shall never happen again?
Organization for Peace . . .
Or Against the Soviet Union?
Stone sees the seeds of the Cold War being sown even before the conclusion of the fight against the Axis.
. . .
May 4, 1945
IT IS VERY DIFFICULT at a conference of this kind to see the forest for the trees, to disentangle the realities from the rhetoric, but I think I am beginning to get my bearings.
I am inclined to believe that what is going on here becomes a good deal clearer if one keeps in mind that action is proceeding on two planes. On one, the formal and public plane, a final draft is being prepared for a world security organization. On the other, the informal and private plane, quite a different tendency is at work.
That tendency, which is very strong, if not dominant, in the American delegation, is to regard the United Nations Conference on International Organization as a conference for the organization of an anti-Soviet bloc.
This is not my own opinion alone. It is the opinion privately held by some of the most astute newspapermen here, irrespective of their own political orientation. In my own case, this opinion is the net product of my own estimate of the basic forces at work, of conference gossip, and of an attempt to find some pattern into which all the diverse pieces will fit.
But I did not set this down on paper until I found confirmation in trustworthy official American quarters I may not here identify. I can only say that among the younger and more progressive men attached to the American delegation there is increasing apprehension over the extent to which the conference begins to take on the aspects of an attempt by our delegation to build an anti-Soviet world coalition.
The maintenance of the unity of the powers as a first essential of world peace is a principle to which everyone agrees. But whenever one sets out to explore some specific problem, the future of Germany, the fate of the Rhineland and Ruhr, the course of the Far Eastern war and the settlement which will emerge from it, one finds this principle forgotten.
One finds, instead, that the main question in the minds of many State, War, and Navy Department officials, and too many members of the American delegation, is the balance of forces between the USA and the USSR, an implied assumption that war between them is inevitable and that it is our job to maneuver for as strong a position as possible in anticipation of that conflict.
This dangerous belief that war between the two remaining great powers of the earth, the USA and the USSR, is inevitable—a belief which can make it so—has diverse roots.
The defeat of Germany has upset the world balance of power. The strength of the Soviet Union has both surprised and frightened many leading figures in the War and Navy Departments; the bureaucracy of both tends to be either politically naive or socially reactionary.
The divergencies of outlook between a great Communist power, dominated by a one-party dictatorship and a still revolutionary mentality, and a capitalist democracy like our own are very great, and it will take much forbearance and good will to bridge them. There is less forbearance and good will visible since Roosevelt’s death.
I think we must also recognize that there is no alternative between the achievement of full employment in America by peaceful means and new imperialist adventures and war. This is recognized by the progressives among the technical staffs and consultants of the American delegation, who fear a tendency—an almost unconscious and organic tendency—to find a way out of a new postwar unemployment crisis by armed conflict instead of the peaceful, but painful, process of adjusting our economy to full employment.
American progressives must keep in mind that however “correct” the attitude of the Soviets and however conservative the policies Moscow may impose on Communist parties abroad to conciliate capitalist opinion, the contrast between full employment in the USSR and a new unemployment crisis after the war in the USA would be explosive. Many people fear the impact of so socially dangerous a contrast, but, while some of us conclude from it the necessity of a full-employment program, others may think the contrast would best be avoided by an attempt to destroy the USSR. I do not believe that anyone would advocate this publicly, and very few would even admit it to themselves. Yet there is a natural drift in that direction in some circles.
I do not set this down to be alarmist; I do not think such a conflict is at all inevitable. But I think it time that people became aware of this dangerous undertow and took steps to counteract it lest we wake up one day to find that we
have permitted our representatives here to lay the foundations for a third world war—a war against the Soviet Union—while going through the motions of establishing a stable peace.
That is a rough way to put it. It by no means does justice either to the motives or the actions of many members of the American delegation, but I am convinced that it provides a true picture of what is developing here.
As early as April 26, Walter Lippmann noted a tendency to assume “that because Germany is prostrate, the German problem is no longer the paramount problem of the world.” He found this reflected in “the fact that the main preoccupation of so many here has been not Germany, but the Soviet Union.” And he warned that our relations with the USSR would become hopeless “if we yield at all to those who, to say it flatly, are thinking of the international organization as a means of policing the Soviet Union.”