was made difficult by the close relationship that nation had maintained with the
United States since its independence in the wake of the First World War. While
these moves did not possess any immediate military significance, they portrayed all
of these nations as calculating their interests and chances in postwar treaties. 2
German troops had swept victoriously through the Balkans in spring 1941.
This did not end Serbia’s participation in violent battles against the invader. Heavy
fighting was reported in the Morava Valley south of Belgrade and across the Dan-
ube lowlands east of the Serbian capital. The Chetniks, under Serbian general
Draja Mikhailovitch, counterattacked a German army column in the mountains
above Unice, destroying nine tanks and three armored cars at the same time and
forcing the Germans to retreat eastward to the Morava. Meanwhile, a Chetnik
unit attacked another German motorized column west of Nish in South Serbia,
breaking it up and wiping out a German infantry battalion. The German response
was to bring up Bulgarian and Italian divisions to harry the Serbs and reinforce
the heavily pressed German forces. 3
118 Last Week at Peace: December 1–6, 1941
In North Africa, the Germans launched triple attacks upon El Duda, southeast
of Tobruk, where its British garrison remained under siege. The attackers were
reported to have suffered heavy losses that were also claimed for air strikes. These,
it was speculated, might be a prelude to a new British offensive. 4
Meanwhile violence flared up in Paris where a German major was shot and
wounded in the Latin Quarter and another was attacked near Versailles. Naturally
this led to German repression and a search for the assailants. 5
The Threat of War: Immediate Danger
Speculation was rampant across the Far East. In Singapore it was thought that
Japan’s next move would be in Thailand, but attacks on Malaya or the Philip-
pines were not ruled out. Observers took note of a recent military buildup in
southern Indo-China, where Japanese forces were estimated at 80,000. The same
reports cited motorized landing craft and long-distance bombers based in south-
ern Indo-China. Some thought, or perhaps hoped, that the Japanese would gain
control of Thailand by peaceful means, a prospect heightened by the arrival of
the British Far Eastern Fleet at Singapore. They believed Japan’s task might be
easier if it were enshrouded in a veil of claimed legality. 6
America’s Role: Secret Maneuvers, Continuing Negotiations
As the Japanese f leet secretly moved into position for the final attack on Pearl
Harbor, Tomokazu Hori, spokesman for the Cabinet Information Board, lofted
professions of peace and friendship. He assured the attendees at a press confer-
ence that negotiations would continue. More than that, they would continue
with sincerity in the search for a common formula to resolve the situation in the
Pacific. “If there is no sincerity,” he piously pronounced, “there would be no
need to continue the negotiations.” 7
Hori professed amazement at American misunderstanding of Japan’s Far East-
ern policy. He denied Secretary of State Hull’s charges that Japan’s policy was one
of force, conquest, and military despotism. Admitting that conditions in China
were not “normal,” he called attention to former Prime Minister Konoye’s state-
ment in which he had disclaimed any territorial ambitions and any indemnities.
These principles he said were incorporated in the basic treaty with the Nanking
regime (Japan’s puppet).
President Roosevelt had asked for an explanation of the number of Japanese
troops in Indo-China. In response, Hori claimed that the Japanese troops were
there with the consent of Vichy. If Vichy found no fault, it was not within the
province of any other power to complain.
The Japan Times Advertiser , a Foreign Office organ, characterized Hull’s policy as
“scarcely statesmanlike,” and as an attempt to put responsibility for any breakdown
in negotiations upon Japan. The paper pushed back against certain foundational
aspects of American policy. It pointed to the Monroe Doctrine proscribing Euro-
pean interference in the affairs of the Western Hemisphere and claimed for Japan
a similar doctrine in the Western Pacific. It cited President Roosevelt’s call for
Saturday, December 6, 1941 119
freedom of all nations to choose their own forms of government without interfer-
ence by outsiders. This was an ironic attempt to characterize Japanese aggression
in China and elsewhere as freedom of choice for the victims of that aggression. Far
from being based upon force, The Advertiser claimed that the bases of Oriental business were compromise and adjustment, but it warned that Japan would apply force
when confronted with force. Characterizing Hull’s principles as “obscurant,” The
Advertiser lauded Japan’s principles as of the “highest human order.” It hoped that: The American and British people will now use their inf luence on Mr.
Hull to make some practical efforts at agreement with Japan on pacific
principles instead of appealing to publicity for the purpose of discrediting
the one nation that is seriously trying to avoid war. 8
Count Kentaro Kaneko was an elder statesman, a Harvard-educated privy
counselor. He proposed a commission of respectable and trustworthy representa-
tives from the highest political, economic, and diplomatic circles of both nations to
meet either in Japan or in the United States. Such a commission, he said, had been
useful in settling disputes such as those concerning the Saint Lawrence River. 9
*
The Japan Institute had been established in New York three years before to
advance understanding of Japanese culture and to promote Japanese studies in
U.S. schools and universities. The Institute was now to be closed and its director,
FIGURE 10.1 Japanese schoolchildren pledging allegiance in San Francisco.
Photo by Dorothea Lange. Courtesy of National Archives, photo 536053, DWDNS-210-G-A78.
120 Last Week at Peace: December 1–6, 1941
Tamon Mayeda, and his staff would be leaving in the middle of the month.
The announcement was accompanied by expressions of regret and the hope of
return “to continue our contribution to the promotion of human kinship in
those higher realms, of thought, of culture, and of spirit to which great task we
shall always be devoted.” Meanwhile the Japanese Consulate General in Rock-
efeller Center was busy making arrangements for Japanese nationals to return to
Japan and for twenty-five Americans to return from Tokyo. 10
America’s Role: Sizing up the Enemy
The New York Times addressed reports of discussions between Germany and
China looking to a truce that might serve the interests of the Axis. Such a “settle-
ment,” The Times thought, would be temporary, only so long as Japan solidified
her gains to the disadvantage of China. This The Times saw as “Machiavellian,”
pronouncing that the United States could not preach idealism in foreign rela-
tions but use the tactics of the Axis in order to gain its ends. Along that road lay
disaster.
Such a policy, to put it plainly, would be double-dealing. Th
e British people
were induced to swallow a pill at Munich sugarcoated with a promise of peace in
our time; the American people might not take so kindly to such an event in China.
Our government has made it perfectly clear to Japan that our policy in
the East is based on treaties made in good faith and unswerving loyalty to
China. On those principles we stand. 11
Amid the alarms and excursions of the imminence of war in the Far East, one
figure remained serene and confident. Lt. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, commander
of U.S. forces in the Far East, had been a colorful, self-promoting youthful gen-
eral in the First World War. He had risen to become the Army’s Chief of Staff
in the 1930s and gained notoriety in the so-called Battle of Anacostia, where
troops under his command attempted to eject the forlorn remnants of the Bonus
Army from their makeshift quarters. Of his assignment to the Philippines he later
remarked that it had been Mars’s last gift to an old warrior. In a special report to
the Los Angeles Times , reporter Walter Robb characterized MacArthur as being as well prepared as a commander could be in the event of Japanese attacks in a war
against the United States. MacArthur, Robb said, was a firm believer in the offen-
sive and in the time-worn cliché that a good offense is the best defense. And that
offense would come through the air. That arm, Robb opined, was a long one that
could sweep to and over Japan with ease, returning to its insular bases. It could
cover the South China Sea in search of the enemy’s fleet and could safeguard the
area between Guam and the Philippines in collaboration with Dutch air forces in
the East Indies and British forces in Malaya and Hong Kong. Robb declared that
these air forces could be based in the Philippines in a campaign not involving the
millions of men and the quantities of materiel seen on Germany’s Eastern Front.
Instead it would rely on a fleet supported by air power.
Saturday, December 6, 1941 121
*
A far more cautious view was evinced by Mrs. Vanya Oakes, a Bostonian who had
spent the last ten years in China and who had written for The United Press , The North American Newspaper Alliance , and The Christian Science Monitor . Her blunt assessment: in a war between the United States and Japan, Japan would be no pushover. She
found this an opinion widely held among U.S. naval officers and well-informed
civilians, both British and American, in China. But she also cited the contrary
opinion held by many Americans in the Philippines, and all too commonly in the
United States as well, that the latter could “clean up the Japanese in no time.”
“It is my opinion,” Ms. Oakes said, “that the American people are gravely under-
estimating the strength of the Japanese.” She called the Japanese Navy an unknown
factor but said there was “plenty of it” and it had the geographical advantage of
bases at home and in mandated islands and territories dangerously close to the Phil-
ippines. She warned against scoffing at Japanese air power, which under German
tutelage had improved greatly in the past year. The Japanese had no intention, she
thought, of backing down. Japan’s problems with its campaign in China and its
economic troubles at home would not be resolved by doing nothing.
Japan, she concluded, had nothing to lose and possibly everything to gain by
attacking. While the rest of her analysis was shrewd and on the mark, history has
shown that Japan indeed had everything to lose and lost it. But in describing the
state of mind of the Japanese commanders, her opinion has been proved as sage
as the rest of her analysis. 12
*
In the nation’s capital, newspapermen stood impatiently by while the President
had his second cup of coffee with a weary Secretary of State Hull. When the
President emerged after a half hour, he was described as looking “very snappy”
in a new green tweed suit. A master of the press conference, the President was
polite. The assembled correspondents found him mildly affable and to their dis-
appointment “completely uncommunicative.” The President was playing his
cards close to the vest. 13
America’s Role: Irresponsible Disclosure
Wars raged across the world and in every quarter America’s vital interests were
at stake. Yet the Chicago Tribune , quoting Representative William P. Lamberton, Republican of Kansas, called its story about a huge drafted army and expeditionary force “the biggest issue before this nation.” The response was not limited to
Representative Lamberton but, according to the Tribune , a storm over the plan
raged in the House. The administration pushed back promptly. Secretary of War
Henry L. Stimson called the story “wanting in loyalty and patriotism” in a state-
ment approved in advance by the President.
Secretary Stimson’s remarks were at variance with the position taken by the
President’s press secretary, Stephen T. Early, who declined to follow the lead of
what the
Tribune called “Eastern pro-war newspapers” into an attack on the
122 Last Week at Peace: December 1–6, 1941
Tribune . He defended the Tribune ’s right to freedom of the press, although the government would want to investigate responsibility for the leak. The President, too,
at his press conference, had declined to discuss the story.
A parallel story appeared in The London Daily Mail . Correspondent Don Iddon
described President Roosevelt’s plan—launched at his August meeting with Prime
Minister Churchill—for a victory program costing between $120 and $150 bil-
lion to defeat Germany, at the same time revolutionizing America’s industry and
way of life. It was, he said, a program that envisioned standardizing industrial
equipment among the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union in order to
produce the arms necessary to defeat Germany. If the program assumed a large
expeditionary force in continental Europe, it did not state whether Americans
would form a part of that force.
The Tribune was pleased to report Iddon’s conclusion that the President’s “secret war plan” had been “established beyond all doubt.” “It had,” Iddon said, “startled the
whole country.” Leading interventionists promptly demanded a thorough investiga-
tion. But the Tribune conceded that most people understood it was the government’s duty to prepare war plans in the hope that they would never be put into effect. 14
On its editorial pages the Tribune sturdily supported what it believed to be its news scoop. It dismissed the premise that the plan it reported was merely one of
numerous hypotheticals. It stated the war aim of the United States was “to sweep
the Nazis off the earth,” which would require a ten-million-man army and a
five-million-man expeditionary force. The President had not told the American
people about these armies needed to conquer Nazi Germany. But the Tribune had.
It had given the American people the information that the President had kept
shrouded in silence. The Tribune had made the President’s intent clear: to conscript ten million men for war and to send five million abroad to fight. 15
Calling the Tribune “shameless,” The Oregonian saw only the preparation by the government of plans for a variety of threatening or outright hostile situations.
If it was the President’s
conviction that his country might find itself at war with
Germany after Russia and Britain had been defeated, then it was his obligation
to prepare appropriate plans. In a slashing attack on the Tribune , it found that if treachery existed, it wasn’t in the formulation of the plan but in the Tribune ’s irresponsible disclosure of it.
To The Oregonian that was nothing new. The Tribune , it observed, throughout this crisis had been a sad cross for the self-respecting press of the country to bear, shamelessly coloring its news to its own purposes. And with the rest of the press adher-
ing strictly to self-censorship where military secrets were concerned, the Tribune
had rounded out its bad record with its particularly offensive revelation of what it
reported to be the most secret information concerning our possible high strategy. 16
The Los Angeles Times response was pithier but to the same point: both Col.
Stimson and Col. R. R. McCormick, the Tribune ’s publisher, should calm down. 17
*
The response of the business world was not in all respects what one might
have expected. President H. W. Prentis, Jr., told the National Association of
Saturday, December 6, 1941 123
Manufacturers that the Bill of Rights was and had been for the past six years
under steady attack. And yet, in the face of the loss of cherished liberties, many
were afraid to take a public stand that might make them targets of the tax col-
lector, the factory inspector, the Wage and Hour Administration, the National
Labor Relations Board and congressional investigative committees.
Germany and Russia, he said, had constitutions stating myriad rights that in
actual practice were simply nonexistent. He found the same tendency in the
United States where, he claimed, liberties were being denied through the exten-
sion of executive power, the abdication of a servile Congress and the tyranny of
administrative law, all compounded by the reluctance of the courts to review the
action of executive agencies. Prentis then cited the Declaration of Independence:
“he has erected a multitude of new offices and sent hither swarms of officers to
harass our people. . . .”
In these offenses his audience could readily find the stuff of the New Deal.
After so stem-winding an anti-New-Deal tirade, it is surprising to find Prentis in
Crucible of a Generation Page 20