Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (59 page)
Authors: Kenneth C. Davis
No question has tantalized historians of the wartime period more than this one: Did President Roosevelt know the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor, and did he deliberately allow the attack that took more than 2,000 American lives in order to draw America into the most deadly, destructive war in history?
There are two basic camps regarding FDR and America’s entry into the war. The first holds that FDR was preoccupied with the war in Europe and didn’t want war with Japan. American strategic thinking of the time, perhaps reflecting Anglo-Saxon racism about Japanese abilities, dismissed the Japanese military threat. War with Japan would sap American resources that should be directed toward the defeat of Germany. Supporting this camp is the large body of evidence of the American diplomatic attempts to forestall war with Japan.
The other camp holds that FDR viewed Japan—allied to the German-Italian Axis—as his entrée into the European war. This stand holds that FDR made a series of calculated provocations that pushed Japan into war with America. The ultimate conclusion to this view is that FDR knew of the imminent Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and not only failed to prevent it, but welcomed it as the turning point that would end isolationist obstruction of his war plans.
Neither view is seamless, and the reality may lie in some combination of the two, with such factors as human frailty, overconfidence on both sides, and the tensions of a world already at war thrown in. You might also cast a vote for historical inevitability. A clash between Japan and the United States and other Western nations over control of the economy and resources of the Far East and Pacific was bound to happen. A small island nation with limited resources but great ambitions, Japan had to reach out to control its destiny. That put the highly militarized and industrialized empire on a collision course with the Western nations that had established a colonial presence in the Pacific and Asia, and had their own plans for exploiting that part of the world.
With that in mind, certain facts remain. Japanese-American relations were bad in the 1930s, and worsened when the Japanese sank an American warship, the
Panay
, on the Yangtze River late in 1937, a clear violation of all treaties and an outright act of war. But America was not ready to go to war over a single ship. Attempting to influence the outcome of China’s struggle against Japan, Roosevelt loaned money to the Nationalists in China and began to ban exports to Japan of certain goods that eventually included gasoline, scrap iron, and oil.
Were these provocations to force Japan into war, or sensible reactions to Japanese aggression in China and elsewhere in Asia? The Japanese were intent on dominating the Asian world and proved themselves quite ruthless in achieving that goal. In Nanking, China, atrocities committed against the Chinese rank with the worst of human behavior. The people of Korea still bear historic grudges against the Japanese for the cruelty of their wartime rule, such as forced labor and the forced prostitution of thousands of Korean women as “comfort maidens” who were made to work in brothels servicing Japanese soldiers.
Historical opinion divides on this point. It is clear that moderation on either side might have prevailed. But in the United States, the secretary of state was demanding complete Japanese withdrawal from their territorial conquests. At the same time in Japan, hawkish militants led by General Hideki Tojo (1884–1948) had gained power. Moderation was tossed aside, and the two speeding engines continued on a runaway collision course.
By late in 1941, it was more than apparent that war was coming with Japan. American and foreign diplomats in Japan dispatched frequent warnings about the Japanese mood. Nearly a year before the Pearl Harbor attack, Joseph Grew, the U.S. ambassador in Tokyo, had wired a specific warning about rumors of an attack on Pearl Harbor. And more significantly, the Japanese diplomatic code had been broken by American intelligence. Almost all messages between Tokyo and its embassy in Washington were being intercepted and understood by Washington.
There is no longer any doubt that some Americans knew that “zero hour,” as the Japanese ambassador to Washington called the planned attack, was scheduled for December 7. They even knew it would come at Pearl Harbor. According to John Toland’s account of Pearl Harbor,
Infamy
, Americans had not only broken the Japanese code, but the Dutch had done so as well, and their warnings had been passed on to Washington. A British double agent code-named Tricycle had also sent explicit warnings to the United States.
Here is where human frailty and overconfidence, and even American racism, take over. Most American military planners expected a Japanese attack to come in the Philippines, America’s major base in the Pacific; the American naval fortifications at Pearl Harbor were believed to be too strong to attack, as well as too far away for the Japanese. The commanders there were more prepared for an attack by saboteurs, which explains why the battleships were packed together in the harbor, surrounded defensively by smaller vessels, and why planes were parked in neat rows in the middle of the airstrip at Hickam Field, ready to be blasted by Japanese bombing runs.
Many Americans, including Roosevelt, dismissed the Japanese as combat pilots because they were all presumed to be “nearsighted.” The excellence of their eyes and flying abilities came as an expensive surprise to the American military. There was also a sense that any attack on Pearl Harbor would be easily repulsed. Supremely overconfident, the Navy commanders on Pearl Harbor had been warned about the possibility of attack, but little was done to secure the island. The general impression, even back in Washington in the Navy secretary’s office, was that the Japanese would get a bad spanking, and America would still get the war it wanted in Europe.
In his history of espionage and presidential behavior,
For the President’s Eyes Only
, Christopher Andrew makes this case: “The ‘complete surprise’ of both Roosevelt and Churchill reflected a failure of imagination as well as of intelligence. It did not occur to either the president or the prime minister that the ‘little yellow men,’ as Churchill sometimes spoke of them and Roosevelt thought of them, were capable of such a feat of arms. When General Douglas MacArthur first heard the news of the attack by carrier-borne aircraft on Pearl Harbor, he insisted that the pilots must have been mercenaries.”
Regardless of whether or not the attack was invited and why specific warnings were ignored or disregarded, the complete devastation of the American forces at Pearl Harbor was totally unexpected. Even today, the tally of that attack is astonishing. Eighteen ships were sunk or seriously damaged, including eight battleships. Of these eight, six were later salvaged. Nearly two hundred airplanes were destroyed on the ground, and 2,403 people died that morning, nearly half of them aboard the battleship
Arizona
, which took a bomb down its smokestack and went to the bottom in minutes.
A day after the attack, Roosevelt delivered his war message to Congress. The long-running battle between isolationists and interventionists was over.
While the revisionists and conspiracy theorists persist, a convincing case for Roosevelt trying to avoid war with Japan has been made by many prominent historians. Among them are Joseph Persico, who wrote:
The revisionist theory requires a certain path of logic. First, FDR had to know that Pearl Harbor was going to be bombed. His secretaries of State, War and Navy either did not know or, if they did, they all lied and conspired in the deaths of twenty-four hundred Americans and the near-fatal destruction of the Pacific Fleet. . . . For FDR to fail to alert the defenders of an attack that he knew was coming, we must premise that the president had enlisted men of the stature of Stimson, Hull, Knox and Marshall in a treasonous conspiracy, or that he had a unique source of information on Japanese fleet movements unknown to anyone else in the government.
The eminent British military historian John Keegan is equally dismissive of the conspiracy notion. “These charges defy logic,” Keegan wrote in
The Second World War
. “Churchill certainly did not want war against Japan, which Britain was pitifully equipped to fight, but only American assistance in the fight against Hitler. . . . Roosevelt’s foreknowledge can be demonstrated to have been narrowly circumscribed. Although the American cryptanalysts had broken both the Japanese diplomatic cipher Purple and the naval cipher . . . such instructions did not include details of war plans.”
There is another issue, as Americans have learned since September 11, 2001, a new generation’s day of infamy. Having intelligence and using it well are two very different things. The left hand does not always know what the right is doing, as the FBI and CIA demonstrated in revealing the pieces of the puzzle they had before the terrorist attacks of September 11. But that does not suggest that their failure to see the whole puzzle complete leads to a conspiracy theory in which America wanted to create a war against Islam. While understanding the past can sometimes help understand the present, this may be one case in which knowing the present can help reconcile the mysteries of the past.
Must Read:
For an overview of the period leading up to Pearl Harbor and an account of the days surrounding the attack,
The Borrowed Years: 1938–1941, America on the Way to War
by Richard M. Ketchum; for the “Roosevelt knew” side,
Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor
by Robert B. Stinnet, an exhaustive collection of the information American intelligence had collected about the impending attack. There are several excellent books that address the other side. Among them are
For the President’s Eyes Only
by Christopher Andrew;
Roosevelt’s Secret War: FDR and World War II Espionage
by Joseph E. Persico.
A
MERICAN
V
OICES
From
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT’S
war message to Congress (December 8, 1941):
Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.
The United States was at peace with that nation and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its government and its emperor, looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific.
. . . The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. I regret to tell you that very many American lives have been lost. . . .
Y
esterday, the Japanese Government also launched an attack against Malaya.
Last night, Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong.
Last night, Japanese forces attacked Guam.
Last night, Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands.
Last night, the Japanese attacked Wake Island.
And this morning, the Japanese attacked Midway Island.
. . . No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people, in their righteous might, will win through to absolute victory.
1938
March 13
The Anschluss (annexation of Austria). German troops march into Austria to “preserve order.” Hitler declares Austria “reunited” with Germany.
September 30
The Munich Pact. The British and French allow Hitler to annex the Sudetenland, an area of Czechoslovakia with a largely German-speaking population. Through this policy of “appeasement,” British prime minister Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) believes that Germany will be satisfied and that there will be “peace in our time.” Winston Churchill, later first lord of the admiralty, thinks otherwise. “Britain and France had to choose between war and dishonor,” says the future prime minister. “They chose dishonor. They will have war.”
October 3
Hitler triumphantly enters the Sudetenland.
1939
March 14
After taking the Sudetenland, Germany invades the rest of Czechoslovakia.
April 1
The three-year-old Spanish Civil War ends with German- and Italian-supported Fascist victory. The United States recognizes the new government of General Francisco Franco (1892–1975).
April 7
Italy invades Albania, its small neighbor across the Adriatic Sea.
July 14
Reacting to growing international tension over Germany’s provocations in Europe, President Roosevelt asks Congress to repeal an arms embargo so that the United States can sell arms to England and other nonfascist countries.
September 1
Germany invades Poland. Claiming a Polish attack on German soldiers, Germany’s modernized forces overrun the small, unprepared, and outdated Polish army.
September 3
After Hitler ignores their demand for German withdrawal from Poland, Great Britain and France formally declare war on Germany. Twenty-eight Americans die aboard a British ship torpedoed by a German submarine, but Roosevelt proclaims American neutrality in the war. Five days later he declares a limited national emergency, giving him broad powers to act. A few weeks later he announces that all U.S. offshore waters and ports are closed to the submarines of the warring nations.
