December 1941
Page 24
There was never any evidence that Emperor Hirohito was aware of, or read, Franklin Roosevelt’s eleventh-hour plea to renew the talks between the two aggrieved nations. In fact, the Japanese government refused to acknowledge that they had even received it and, as with all diplomatic cables, it was supposed to be sent via the ambassador of record in a given country, in this case, Joseph Grew.73 On Saturday the sixth, Grew was listening to a broadcast radio, out of San Francisco. The signal was so strong it could be heard all the way to the American embassy in Tokyo. Grew was startled to hear a news report about an important message sent to Hirohito from the president, which had been released to the American media, but knew nothing about it himself. He told his staff that the radio transmission from the State Department may have been deliberately interfered with.74
Had Hirohito received FDR’s message the evening of December 6 and been moved by it, he certainly had it in his power to recall the fleet heading for Pearl Harbor. The Japanese people did not even know, for several hours after, of the attack by their country on American and British military forces. Around the time of the attack, a Tokyo radio station was broadcasting a lecture by a university professor on “Good Morals.”75
Two days later, the text of the message from FDR to the Japanese emperor on December 6, which was nothing but solicitous, respectful, and worried, was released by Washington. It spoke of the long friendship between the two countries. Grace Tully said it had been drafted by Cordell Hull himself.76
Of course, it was pure State Departmentese, flowery, fulsome, excessive, and effusive when a little more plain and blunt talk might have caught the attention of Tokyo. American presidents had fought for years with the stuff churned out by the striped-pants set at the State Department, and FDR was no exception. He knew when it was time to be solicitous and time to hit an opponent over the head with a two by four. Still, there was never any evidence that Hirohito ever saw the missive; he had the same problem as FDR: too many meddlesome bureaucrats.
Washington was bracing for both Japan and Germany to widen the war quickly. In the Pacific, commercial vessels were warned to be on the lookout for Japanese ships, and mines littered the sea routes and harbors. In the North Atlantic, officials were expecting the Germans to step up operations there. “Official observers in the capital expect the Japanese action to be followed by an all-out German attack in the Atlantic, with German submarines operating near the United States coasts.”77
The Optimists Club was appropriately meeting as scheduled at the Mayflower Hotel at 12:30 on December 9. They had much to consider.78 Almost forgotten for a moment in America was the war raging on the European and African continents, so focused were Americans on the new war in the Pacific, where thousands of Japanese troops were landing daily at Manila and Japanese planes were conducting an unremitting bombing raid. A CBS correspondent there said it was a “bad dream.” Midway Island was also still under attack as of the eighth, while Japanese radio was claiming they had taken Wake Island and Guam.79
Two days after the coordinated attack, the Axis power was still laying waste to the men and materiel of the American military. In Guam, a wire story said the Japanese had sunk the navy minesweeper Penguin, all 840 tons of her. There were survivors, but in the battle to take Guam, civilian employees of Pan-American Airways had been killed.80 Guam’s garrison was practically nonexistent, “virtually defenseless.”81 Guam had been discovered by Magellan in 1521, and under the Treaty of Paris ending the Spanish-American War in 1898, it became a U.S. possession.
An old American aircraft carrier, the Langley, was also rumored to have been attacked while in Philippine waters, but then it was later revealed that the ship had not been hit.82 Japanese forces, though, had apparently landed on the Philippine island of Lubang. It was reported the invading force was assisted by Japanese fishermen.83
Thailand had already surrendered.84 The Japanese were also prosecuting the war farther south, attacking Australian outposts, and had renewed their bombing of Singapore as well. Hong Kong was bombed twice on the eighth.85 Japanese civilians in Singapore “gathered in leading . . . hotels and geisha houses and indulged in boisterous drinking parties,” so excited at the looming Japanese bombing of the city.86
The newspapers were loaded with bad news from the Pacific. A foreign correspondent, Vincent Sheehan, who had just returned from the Far East, told an audience at Bryn Mawr College that America was staring at defeat. The United States, he said, will “have the greatest humiliation in its history” when the citizens learned of the “staggering number of . . . battleships lost” in the attack. “I’m telling you, responsible people in Washington expected last night that eastern cities would be bombed.” A report was circulating that Germany was planning to attack the United States without a formal declaration of war.87
The postmortems on December 7 were starting to roll in, and they were uniformly bad for the U.S. military and especially Adm. Husband E. Kimmel, commander of the Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, and Gen. Walter Short, in charge of the army forces stationed in Hawaii. The country needed scapegoats and unfortunately for these two men with exemplary careers, it would fall to them to eventually take the blame, though they had been as caught in the dark as much as anyone else in the military or the civilian government.
On December 7 and 8, the media attention focused on Kimmel was universally positive. The Baltimore Sun called him “two-fisted . . . a reputation of being one of the toughest in the service.” Kimmel, fifty-nine, had been appointed commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet on February 1, 1940. His commendable service record was there for all to see and no one in the hours after the attack said anything against him.88 At least publicly. But this would change rapidly. Within hours and with no evidence, Congressman John Dingell of Detroit took to the floor of the House and called for his court martial.89
Dingell “proposed to demand that court-martial proceedings be instituted against . . . Lt. Gen. Walter C. Short . . . Maj. Gen. H.H. Arnold . . . Maj. Gen. George Brett . . . and Admiral Husband Kimmel, commander of the Pacific fleet.”90
The halfcocked Dingell, after some vicious comments about the services, had to be reeled in and reprimanded by Congressman Alfred Lee Bulwinkle of North Carolina, who said, “It is the patriotic duty of every American, especially every congressman, to be guarded in his words in order not to give aid and comfort to the enemy.” Bulwinkle was met with applause on the House floor, in violation of decorum.91 Vague party lines were forming, with some Republicans defending Kimmel and some Democrats pummeling him.
But others in Congress were already asking navy personnel uncomfortable questions, including wanting them to “explain how Japanese penetrated Hawaiian defenses.”92 The House Naval Affairs Committee requested that Adm. Harold Stark, chief of Naval Operations and navy secretary Frank Knox appear before a hearing on the tenth to discuss what happened in the Pacific. Stories that a “large portion of the Pacific fleet has been wiped out” floated across the nation’s capital.93 Conspiracy theories began to circulate among isolationists that FDR had let the attack happen to bring America into the war. Although now debunked by the facts, those theories persist to the present day. FDR’s anguish at the attack seemed sincere enough; aides and confidants have since reported in their memoirs that the president pounded the table as he pored over Pearl Harbor damage assessments, agonizing over every loss, demanding to know how this could have happened to his beloved navy.
People wanted to know why planes were helplessly lined up wingtip to wingtip, making it easy for Japanese bombers and fighters to destroy en masse. Others wanted to know what had happened with the newfangled radar that had recently been installed on Oahu that was supposed to pick up large scale numbers of planes, or why the spotting stations failed to note the large numbers of Japanese planes, or how a flotilla of Japanese ships had crossed thousands of miles undetected.
Yet another postmortem delved into the psychology of attacking America on a Sunday, speculating it was a way in which to adve
rsely affect American morale. Plus, it was the optimum time in which to attack, as “the custom of the American military services to grant as much leave as possible on Sundays and rest at ease in barracks or aboard ship.”94
Some recounted the time of an earlier naval battle between the United States and Japan in 1863. An American sloop, the Wyoming, was approaching the coast of Japan. Three Japanese ships with superior firepower engaged the Wyoming, but due to the better marksmanship of the Americans, they won the contest.
Another take on the “Who shot John?” aspect of the new war came from the New York Times, a take more sympathetic to the Japanese point of view than the Grey Lady’s readers probably shared: “Throughout this year the crisis developed, with Japan always reaching out farther. The United States froze all Japanese credits in this country, cut off her supplies of oil, scrap iron and other war materials, and stopped buying Japanese silk. Britain and the Netherlands Indies followed suit. These economic measures were followed by military moves in which the country strengthened its forces in Hawaii, Manila and other Pacific bases, and the British sent a fleet to Singapore, with both countries shipping heavy strength in bombing planes to the Far East. As these measures tightened, Japan protested against economic strangulation and military encirclement.”95
The Japanese had also signed the Tripartite Pact with the Axis powers in September of 1940, had invaded Manchuria in 1931, invaded East China in 1937, quit the League of Nations in 1933, signed the anti-Comintern pact with the Third Reich, sunk an American naval ship on the Yangtze River in 1937, engaged in a military buildup, occupied French Indochina, and through her fascist government had become increasingly hostile to the West.
It was becoming increasingly clear why the Japanese had struck, or some so thought. In short, the Japanese saw the American and British military presences in the Pacific and the Far East as threats to the desires for an empire that exceeded the home islands of Japan. It was also becoming clear that Japan, in the twentieth century, had never troubled herself with actually declaring war before attacking an opponent. In 1904, her navy attacked the Russian Fleet at Port Arthur before war was declared. In 1931 she struck at Manchuria, in 1932 at Shanghai, and in 1937 at Peiping without warning.
The details of Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s meeting with Ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura and Special Envoy Saburo Kurusu of two days earlier were just beginning to be made clear to the American people, along with the documents they had handed him after Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor.
Hull, seventy, was a courtly gentleman, a career diplomat respected on both sides of the aisle for his acumen and calm demeanor. Not this time. The extraordinarily long “Memorandum” given Hull accused America of wanting war while Japan wanted “world peace.” The duplicity and revisionism was astonishing. The document stated, “Ever since [the] China affair broke out owing to the failure on the part of China to comprehend Japan’s true intentions . . .” In point of fact, Japan had invaded the sovereign country of China four years earlier, and in the process, had butchered thousands of innocent civilians. As far as the Chinese were concerned, there was no misunderstanding. They understood perfectly well what the Japanese military was up to. The Japanese accused Washington of “impractical principles” while applauding themselves for signing the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy in the interest of peace. They also criticized the United States for objecting “to settle international issues through military pressure” but rather attacked America for “pressure by economic power.” Hull’s frustration with Japan had been growing for months. Some afternoons he liked to relax over a game of croquet. But each time he hit his ball, he would yell “Japan” in frustration.97
Hull digested the long, mendacity-laden document and then exploded. “In all my 50 years of public service I have never seen a document that was more crowded with infamous falsehoods and distortions—infamous falsehoods and distortions on a scale so huge that I never imagined until today that any government on this planet was capable of uttering them.”98
That was during the day of December 7. That evening, around 6:00 p.m., he blasted the Japanese again for the “treacherous and utterly unprovoked attack upon the United States.”99
The details of the proposal Hull had made to the Japanese were also revealed; in exchange for withdrawal of their forces from China and Indochina and for signing a nonaggression pact with other Pacific powers, America would release frozen Japanese assets, sign a new trade agreement with the Japanese, and lift the trade embargo. The Japanese rejected the offer outright.100
And now eighty-eight years of an uneasy friendship that had existed between the two countries since Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Tokyo harbor in 1853 was over. Before that historic meeting, Japan had been under self-imposed isolation for more than two hundred years, turning away all would-be suitors. Perry’s hailed diplomacy was the beginning of an “Open Door Policy” and trade, and good relations had flourished between the two countries. When war broke out between Japan and Russia in 1904 (during which Japan also attacked without a declaration of war), America made favorable loans to Tokyo. And at the Portsmouth Peace Conference in 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt “was a strong factor in the favorable peace terms won by Japan.”101 Roosevelt later won the Nobel Peace Prize for his actions at Portsmouth.102
Along with Japanese nationals, German and Italian nationals came under greater government scrutiny. The Federal Bureau of Investigation announced the initial arrest of 350 “dangerous aliens,” including 300 Germans and 50 Italians “listed for arrest.”103 Police in the Canal Zone began to detain Italians and Germans along with Japanese nationals.104 In Alabama, seven individuals were deemed “dangerous aliens”; five Germans, one Italian, and one Japanese were arrested. The policy coming out of Washington was “that all aliens, especially Japanese, were under the strictest observation of government agents.”105
Francis Biddle, the attorney general, declared “hearing boards”106 would be arranged to consider the case of some Japanese picked up, but he also cautioned, “‘Even in the present emergency, there are persons of Japanese extraction whose loyalty is unquestioned;’ he added that it would therefore be ‘a serious mistake’ to take any action against these persons and asked State and local authorities not to take such action in their communities without consulting the Department of Justice.”107
The FBI disclosed that by the ninth, “700 to 1,000 Japs [had been] locked up as ‘dangerous to security.’” It was also revealed that 391 Japanese had been arrested in Hawaii, and 345 on the mainland had been arrested in the hours after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. They were placed in “temporary detention stations, principally on the West Coast.”108
The Home Office in London also declared it was arresting Japanese nationals, starting with the staff members of Domei, the government-owned propaganda agency. Going further, the British issued an order for “all Japanese over the age of 16” to “report as soon as possible to the nearest police station” and produce “their registration certificates.”109
In the United States, the Civil Aeronautics Authority ordered all commercial airlines to not allow Japanese nationals to purchase tickets or fly with them.110
In Los Angeles, as in every other major and minor city in America, efforts to deal with Japanese nationals accelerated. In that city alone, it was estimated there were some forty to fifty thousand Japanese. “A military quarantine was set up around Terminal Island, in Los Angeles Harbor, home of a large Japanese fishing fleet.” Traffic was prohibited from entering or leaving the island, and fishing boats were ordered back to their docks, where government officials took control.111 Maps, binoculars, and radios in the possession of Japanese were ordered confiscated. “Stop all Japanese” was the standing order.112
It was the same in San Francisco. The city instituted “a special squad of fifty extra policemen” to guard “the Japanese colony, which covers thirty-six square blocks and has about 7,000 residents. Agents of the FBI picked up a small grou
p for questioning.”113 But one New York Times story suggested the FBI initially had a plan to incarcerate all Japanese living in America.114
Because of the heavy concentration of war industries in California, combined with the large Japanese population, officials worried about the possibility of sabotage, and extra security was ordered around all plants. Mrs. Roosevelt had already jumped into the whole issue of how Japanese, Italian, and German Americans would be treated, saying, “She saw absolutely no reason why Japanese with ‘good’ records—meaning ‘no criminal nor anti-American record’—had anything to fear.” Biddle did say, however, that the mass arrests of Japanese citizens in the Canal Zone and Hawaii were inevitable.115
Though large numbers of Japanese were rounded up nationwide, the government said it was interested in only a small number of potential threats to American security among the thousands. “The alien census last year listed about 92,000 Japanese, 90 percent of who live on the West Coast, and for months the F. B. I. has been preparing a list of those to be picked up immediately in the event of war.” The Alien Census Act also provided for the fines, imprisonment, and deportation of any Japanese who failed to register. In 1941, Washington had far more powers to deal with Japanese than it did in 1917 to deal with Germans living in America.116