Another local report was filed, this one by Frank Tremaine via the United Press: “Flash—Pearl Harbor under aerial attack. Tremaine.” His initial dispatch was sent via cable to UP offices in San Francisco and Manila. Subsequently, he filed additional reports as his wife, Kay, sent them along.90
A newlywed couple, Wallace Holman and Rosalie Shimek, had been married the day before in Baltimore and spent their honeymoon in New York City at the Roosevelt Hotel where that evening they listened to Guy Lombardo perform at the hotel. The next day they were strolling along a street in New York, startled as furious shopkeepers began throwing out anything that bore the brand “Made in Japan.” No one knew where Pearl Harbor was, including the couple, and one merchant told them it was “off New Jersey.”91 But all knew America had been attacked by Japan. A little boy, Gerald Eckert, in Rochester, New York, heard about an attack on Pearl, but wondered why the Japanese were attacking the old lady down the street whose name was Pearl.92
Rumors mixed easily with reports. One said the Japanese fleet, having blasted the navy out of the water at Pearl Harbor, was now steaming north to the Aleutian Islands to attack military outposts there. Yet another said that American ships were in hot pursuit of the Japanese fleet now heading for its home waters.
In Washington, the formerly sleepy town quickly began to take on a war atmosphere, as pedestrians huddled around cars to listen to the radio, citizens called newspaper offices, hungry for details, and others called to inquire about the location of air-raid shelters. “The shrill voices of newsboys calling war extras broke the ordinary Sabbath evening calm.”93 In bold type, the Washington Post’s Extra edition boomed, “U.S. AT WAR! JAPAN BOMBS HAWAII, MANILA.”94
As soon as Roosevelt had been notified by Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, he summoned his press secretary, Stephen T. Early, who then called together the White House press corps to make an official announcement at 2:22 p.m., Eastern time.95 “The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor from the air and all naval and military activities on the Island of Oahu, principal American base in the Hawaiian Islands,” said Early, reading from a statement given to him by the president. Early responded to the first question, “So far as we know, they came without warning.”96
Some 150 tense reporters were in attendance then, and throughout the day. The White House became the country’s hub for information on unfolding events. Roosevelt remained in his private library in the second-floor residence, taking reports and meeting with staff, including his “two secretaries, Marvin McIntyre and Maj. Gen. Edwin S. Watson.”97 The president “ordered war bulletins released at the White House as rapidly as they were received. A sentence or two was added to the story of the surprise attack every few minutes for several hours.”98
Early called press conferences all throughout the afternoon, and reporters ran back and forth from their cubbyholes to the press secretary’s office, writing fresh copy or issuing radio broadcasts with each new announcement.99 As each new development was ready to be announced, a secret Service man would stroll across the hall and remark, ‘Press Conference!’ setting off a stampede for Early’s desk.”100 Telegraph boys rushed about.
At each press conference, Early would attempt to elaborate on the coordinated and unfolding attacks by the Japanese throughout the Pacific. In case no one missed the duplicity by the Japanese, he said,
So far as is known, the attacks on Hawaii and Manila were made wholly without warning when both nations were at peace, and were delivered within an hour or so of the time that the Japanese ambassador and the special envoy, Kurusu, had gone to the State Department and handed to the Secretary of State Japan’s reply to the Secretary’s memorandum of November 26. As soon as the information of the attacks . . . was received by the War and Navy Departments it was flashed immediately to the President at the White House. Thereupon and immediately the President directed the Army and Navy to execute all previously prepared orders looking to the defense of the United States. The President is now with the Secretary of War and the Secretary of the Navy. Steps are being taken to advise the congressional leaders.101
At 3:18 p.m. Early’s personal secretary told the reporters the attacks were apparently still under way. Halfway through the afternoon, Early appeared to retract the story that Manila had been bombed but later retracted the retraction.102
Unfortunately, there was no plan for the defense of the United States. The navy in the Pacific was either obliterated or scattered, and the Army Air Corps in Oahu had simply been annihilated. A second wave of 171 planes then hit Hawaii. And then another round of news came, this time confirming the worst fears: “Admiral C. Bloch, commandant in Hawaii had reported ‘heavy damage’ to the islands, with ‘heavy loss of life.’”103
As the second wave continued the attack on Pearl Harbor, the governor of Hawaii John Poindexter, was on the phone with Roosevelt.104 A bomb went off in front of the governor’s mansion at Washington Place, killing a man. Another detonated close to the offices of the Honolulu Advertiser. A woman was killed when the Waikiki section of Honolulu was bombed.105Poindexter had been appointed territorial governor by FDR, but within a few months, he would be replaced by a military government in Hawaii.
Early or his secretary, Miss Ruthjane Rumelt, held press conferences at 2:22, 3:18, 3:22, 3:33, 3:57, 4:45, 6:00, 6:08, and 6:24. It was 3:33 when he announced that a Japanese sub seven hundred miles off of California had fired on a transport, crippling it. It was 3:57 when he announced the emergency meeting with the cabinet and congressional leaders. At 6:00 p.m., he announced that another over-flight of Japanese planes was preparing yet again to hit Pearl Harbor. He later had to retract it, saying that the White House and the War Department were attempting to separate fact from rumor, but because they had not been able to reach the commanders of the navy and army in Hawaii, “[t]he President is, therefore, disposed to believe, and is rather hopeful that the . . . report is erroneous.” At 6:08, he reported that unidentified planes had been spotted over Guam. At 6:24, he announced Guam had been attacked.106
While the news buzzed, other issues needed to be addressed. One of the first people FDR met with after his phone call from Knox was Charles Fahy, solicitor general of the United States. The two met “to discuss what steps were to be taken against Japanese aliens in the United States.”107 The same question was being considered and answered in other quarters as well. According to one story datelined Norfolk, Virginia, the director of public safety there, Col. Charles B. Borland, “immediately ordered the arrest of all Japanese nationals in this strategic naval center” as soon as he’d heard of the attack.108
On the streets of America, strangers were talking to strangers, and some compared the atmosphere of hotel and movie lobbies, restaurants and clubs to that of London during the German blitz two years earlier. “Something of the strange psychological phenomenon . . . Folks wanted to be together. A sense of comradeship . . . was apparent.”109 Americans across the country attending Sunday movie matinees were surprised to see the film stopped, the managers walk out on stage, and news reports read to them of the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Pedestrians lined Pennsylvania Avenue and the streets on both sides of the White House, including West Executive Avenue between the State Department and the Executive Mansion, but Secret Service agents and police officers later closed the perimeter around the area. As night fell, the crowd moved across the street to Lafayette Park. “Some stood on the running boards of the cars. Some climbed the stone abutments of the iron fences. Some stood in the middle of the thoroughfare. Some held their children on their shoulders. But all kept quiet and all looked at the lighted windows, with no eyes for anything else.” A visitor from Colorado, Dorothy Quine, was in the crowd. “I can’t understand it when Kurusu is here talking about peace,” she said.110
At the Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines Service Club in Washington, a sign was posted: “All Servicemen Are Due in Camp at Reveille Tomorrow. Signed, Secretary of War.” The servicemen, like everybody else, were stunned a
t the attacks and yet cocky too. “The men at the club last night were generally grim and confident of a quick American victory.”111
The military ordered all personnel into uniform, immediately. Many military men had been working in “civvies” instead of their uniforms at their defense jobs for years to avoid making the town look “militaristic.” That would all change.
Then an oddly worded paragraph appeared in an AP story: “There was a disposition in some quarters here to wonder whether the attacks had not been ordered by the Japanese military authorities because they feared the President’s direct negotiations with the Emperor might lead to an about-face in Japanese policy and the consequent loss of face by the present ruling factions in Japan.”112 The reporter and their source(s) seemed to be trying to pin the blame for the surprise attack on President Roosevelt because he reached out to Hirohito the night before.
Vice President Henry Wallace was in New York, but he caught the first available plane back to Washington and he arrived at 6:00 p.m. that evening. Wallace went directly to the White House where he and the cabinet met alone with FDR, beginning at 6:40 p.m. Wallace then attended the second meeting that included members of Congress. He still had time to make his near daily visit to the White House physician at 5:50 and was, according to records, there for over an hour.113
Earlier, he’d met alone with the Solicitor General of the United States, Charley Fahey. Fahey’s capacity was to act as the lead attorney for the country, and presumably FDR wanted to discuss the legalities of declaring war against another nation.114
As members of Congress and the cabinet arrived that night at the White House, the crowds outside cheered. The first to arrive was a now former isolationist, Senator Hiram Johnson of California, smoking a cigar, saying nothing.115 Longtime internationalists gloated, if under their breaths. “What a sight. The great isolationist . . . All the ghosts of isolationism stalk with him, all the beliefs that the United States could stay out of war if it made no attack,” penned Richard Strout, famed writer for the Christian Science Monitor.116
Roosevelt had been in meetings off and on for a reported ten hours from the time the White House had first learned of the attack. It was in these meetings that he received a report from Gen. Douglas MacArthur that Japanese planes were also over Luzon and that they had bombed several American airfields in the Philippines.117 “Upon being advised of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, Lieut. Gen. Douglas MacArthur . . . placed his entire command on the alert.”118 But the planes at Clark Field remained parked wingtip to wingtip, and many were easily destroyed by the Japanese.
MacArthur told reporters there would be no censorship in the Philippines, as was instituted in Hawaii, and announced he would hold press conferences every half hour. He told reporters that his commanders were already making preparations for the internment of Japanese nationals and captured Japanese soldiers. “We are calm and confident,” the general said.119
During the Japanese attack on Manila, Don Bell broadcast live from a bunker crammed with army personnel. Calmly, Bell said, “Perhaps ladies and gentlemen, you can hear the sound of those Japanese bombers again. Apparently the raid is not over yet.”120
In meetings with FDR were Henry Stimson, Cordell Hull, other members of the cabinet and Congress, as well as Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall. “The president reviewed for them all information received . . . and gave them also other information not yet verified and which at the time had to be classified as rumor. The President told them of doubtless very heavy losses sustained by the Navy and also large losses sustained by the Army on the Island of Oahu.”121 At 9:15, the navy issued a press release, announcing it had no information on casualties in the Pacific.122
Roosevelt took a break from the afternoon meetings and began dictating his remarks to Grace Tully, his personal secretary, to deliver to Congress the next day.
In his landmark book White House Ghosts, Robert Schlesinger described the scene. “Shortly before 5 pm . . . Roosevelt summoned Grace Tully to his study. Reports had been coming in from a smoldering Pearl Harbor all afternoon and the president finally had a moment to reflect on the speech he would give the next day to Congress and the nation. Tully found him behind his desk. Two or three piles of notes were neatly stacked in front of him and he was lighting a cigarette. ‘Sit down Grace. I’m going before Congress tomorrow. I’d like to dictate my message. It will be short.’ He took a long drag from his cigarette.”123
The president had dinner at around 7:30 that evening.124 His son, James, dined with him. At 8:30, he met once again with high government officials “in the second-floor red-room study”125 and gave it to them right between the eyes. “FDR told the Cabinet and congressional leaders the full scope of the disaster—battleships sunk, planes destroyed. . . . He said it would be very difficult to mount a retaliatory attack on Japan and that the way ahead was long. He said it was very unpleasant to be a war president, according to a diary account of the meeting written that evening by Agriculture Secretary Claude Wickard.”126 Wickard noted, “The Secretary of the Navy has lost his air of bravado. Secretary Stimson was very sober.” FDR also indicated that while he did want to speak to Congress the next day, he was not sure he would ask for a declaration of war. At one point, Senator Tom Connally “exploded,” storming, “Where were our forces—asleep?”127 When they departed, FDR took a nap and then awoke to work again on his remarks. Then, “in the small hours, he went to bed, slept for five hours.”128 As the officials left the White House, Richard Strout said, “They won’t talk. They went in grim, they came out glum.”
It was announced that evening the president would speak to a joint session of Congress and the American people the next day, the eighth, at 12:30 (EST). Eleanor Roosevelt was surprised at how “serene” her husband was. “I think it was steadying to know finally that the die had been cast.”129
One of the last persons to see Roosevelt that evening was William “Wild Bill” Donovan, who led the Office of Strategic Services. He’d become a late and trusted advisor to the president, and not part of the original “Brain Trust” around Roosevelt. Donovan was respected, in part, for having won the Congressional Medal of Honor in the Great War.130 Roosevelt also saw Edward R. Murrow late that evening, shortly after midnight before he retired for the evening at 12:30 a.m.131
The lights of the Navy Department glared all night, burning the midnight oil, and one officer said the reports on the commercial airwaves were “surprisingly close” to the official reports. Like other military men, naval officers had not worked in uniform for a long time, preferring to blend into the culture of Washington by dressing like ordinary civilians. Now, one quipped of uniforms coming out of storage, “There’ll be the worst smell of mothballs around here tomorrow.”132
Cots were brought into the Munitions Building, where the army was also working all night, including Secretary of War Stimson. They, too, were deluged with phone calls asking about loved ones in Hawaii and around the Pacific. The army, like everyone else in the government, had no answers to give them. The Munitions Building was surrounded by machine guns.
The crowd in Lafayette Park remained late into the night of December 7 and began singing “God Bless America.”133 Wickard memorialized how calm FDR was and how impressed he was of the president. “As I drive home, I could not refrain from wondering at the fates that caused me to be present at one of the most important conferences in the history of this nation.”134
Japanese prime minister Hideki Tojo went on state radio and told the Japanese people, “I hereby promise you that Japan will win final victory” and reminded them that in 2,600 years, they had never lost a war.135 On the other hand, they had never actually declared war on an enemy before engaging in an attack on them either.
The Japanese propaganda agency, Domei, announced at 6:00 a.m., Tokyo time, that “naval operations are progressing off Hawaii, with at least one Japanese aircraft carrier in action against Pearl Harbor.”136
Tojo met with the Japanese
cabinet one hour later, and after that short meeting, U.S. ambassador Joseph Grew and British ambassador Sir Robert Leslie Craigie were “summoned” to an audience with the foreign minister, Shigenori, to give them Japan’s formal reply to Cordell Hull’s missive of November 26. The reply rejected Hull’s four points for peace in the Pacific.137 Over at the Japanese embassy at 2514 Massachusetts Avenue NW in Washington, reporters and curious onlookers watched the bonfire on the back lawn, as diplomats and officials burned thousands of documents. “Members of the Embassy staff . . . burned their code books in an outside fire behind the Embassy. . . . Newspaper men watched while the Japanese secrets were fed into the crackling flames.”138
A crowd of about a thousand watched from the sidewalk, occasionally booing or taunting Japanese officials as they entered the compound, but no violence took place as some in the White House feared. Several young men yelled, “That’s democracy for you! They kill us and we protect them.” Another screamed, “We ought to kill them instead of guarding them.”139
Several deliverymen knocked on the door in vain. Finally, a note was posted on the door to the embassy, though it was in Japanese. It said, “If you have business here, please use the side entrance.”140 But no one was allowed to leave, including the Irish maid, who wept to police that she had six children and a husband at home to feed. “With a noticeable brogue,” she implored the Secret Service agents to let her go, but to no avail.141
“Police were assigned to guard the Japanese, German and Italian Embassies,” but the Japanese had already taken precautions and hired “30 private detectives for the same job.”142 The State Department was already making plans for the safe passage of Japanese embassy officials to Tokyo, but it was not clear yet if the Japanese government was making the same provisions for their American counterparts.
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