Pearl Harbor Betrayed (49 page)

39
. Edward S. Miller,
War Plan Orange: The U.S. Strategy to Defeat Japan
(Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1991), p. 273. On the same date the small squadron at Manila in the Philippines was retitlted the Asiatic Fleet. See E. B. Potter,
Nimitiz
(Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1976), p. 5.

40
. Quoted in Eric Larrabee,
Commander-in-Chief: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, His Lieutenants, and Their War
(New York: Harper & Row, 1987), p. 155.

41
. Rear Admiral Kimmel's temporary designation as a four-star admiral was made under existing law, Act of May 22, 1917, 65th Cong., 1st Sess., Ch. 20, sec. 18, 40 Stat. 59, permitting the President to designate six officers as commanders of fleets or subdivisions thereof with the rank of admiral or vice admiral. When an officer of those designated ranks was detached from the command of a fleet or subdivision thereof, “he shall return to his regular rank in the list of officers of the Navy.” The office of CINCUS (hardly an appropriate-sounding acronym) meant that command of other fleets as well as his own would be exercised only when two or more fleets operated together, or when it became necessary to proscribe “uniform procedures or training standards for all forces afloat.” Theoretically, the title was to be rotated among the three fleet commanders, Pacific, Asiatic, Atlantic, but that chance never came.

The “custom of the service” had been for officers to serve as CINCUS for a tour of eighteen to twenty-four months. Thus, Admiral Claude C. Bloch held the command from January 1938 to January 1940 (24 months), Admiral Arthur J. Hepburn from June 1936 to January 1938 (18 months), and Admiral Joseph M. Reeves from June 1934 to June 1936 (24 months). Richardson assumed command on 6 January 1940. His career is described in James O. Richardson, as told to Vice Admiral George C. Dyer, USN (Ret.),
On the Treadmill to Pearl Harbor: The Memoirs of Admiral James O. Richardson, USN
(
Retired
) (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Navy, Naval History Division, 1973). Cf. B. Mitchell Simpson III,
Admiral Harold R. Stark: Architect of Victory, 1939–1945
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989), p. 54.

42
. PHA, Pt. 14, p. 1044.

43
. Ibid., Pt. 36, p. 368.

Chapter Four: The Brewing Storm

1
. The nine powers were the United States, Japan, the British Empire, France, the Netherlands, China, Portugal, Italy, and Belgium.

2
. Quoted in Akira Iriye, “The Role of the United States Embassy in Tokyo,” in Dorothy Borg and Shumpei Okamoto, eds.,
Pearl Harbor as History: Japanese-American Relations, 1931–1941
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), p. 116.

3
. Iris Chang,
The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II
(New York: Basic Books, 1997).

4
. Patricia Neils, ed.,
United States Attitudes and Policies Toward China: The Impact of American Missionaries
(Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 1990),
passim
. The same Gallup poll is cited in Morison,
Rising Sun,
p. 39, n. 8.

5
. Quoted in James C. Thompson, Jr., “The Role of the Department of State,” in Borg and Okamoto, eds.,
Pearl Harbor as History,
p. 99.

6
. Dispatch, Grew to State Department, 1 December 1939, cited in Herbert Feis,
The Road to Pearl Harbor: The Coming of the War Between the United States and Japan
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950), p. 43.

7
. Quoted in Iriye, “Embassy in Tokyo,” in
Pearl Harbor as History,
p. 125.

8
. Thompson, “Department of State,” ibid., pp. 99–101; cf. Feis,
Road to Pearl Harbor,
pp. 90–93. The President was given authority to control or end the exports of war material to Japan by the passage in Congress in June of “An Act to Expedite the Strengthening of the National Defense” (H.R.9850). The first sentence of Section IV reads: “Whenever the President determines that it is necessary in the interest of national defense to prohibit or curtail the exportation of any military equipment or munitions, or component parts thereof, or machinery, tools, or material or supplies necessary for the manufacture, servicing or operation thereof, he may by proclamation prohibit or curtail such exportation, except under such rules or regulation as he shall prescribe.” Ibid., p. 73. Hull had written on 22 May to the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs urging enactment of this legislation, which gave Roosevelt sweeping powers to embargo, which he would employ again in the months ahead.

9
. Ibid., pp. 92–93. Here, and for much of the account of the U.S. diplomatic measures taken against Japan that follows, the writer has relied on the work of Professor Feis.

10
. Quoted in Morison,
Rising Sun,
p. 42.

11
. Appendix 2, “The System of Government in Tokyo During the Years Preceding the Outbreak of War,” in Major General S. Woodburn Kirby, et al.,
The War Against Japan,
Vol. 1,
The Loss of Singapore
(London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1957), pp. 479–80.

12
. Attributed to Leon Samson, in Christopher Morley, ed.,
Familiar Quotations, John Bartlett
(Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1951), p. 999.

13
. Agawa,
Reluctant Admiral,
p. 189.

14
. Grew to Department of State, 12 September 1940, quoted in Feis,
Road to Pearl Harbor,
p. 102.

15
. Address at Teamsters Union Convention, Washington, D.C., 11 September 1940. Cited in ibid., p. 102. Roosevelt famously made an even stronger pledge in Boston, on 30 October, when he told an audience: “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” Ibid., p. 133.

16
. William L. O'Neill,
A Democracy at War: America's Fight at Home and Abroad in World War II
(New York: The Free Press, 1993), p. 27; and see pp. 10–26,
passim
.

17
.
The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935–1971,
Vol. 1.,
1935–1948
(New York: Random House, 1972). Poll of 22 January 1941, showing 68 percent of respondents in support of Lend-Lease, 26 percent disapproving, p. 261.

18
. Ibid., pp. 259, 274.

19
. Ibid., pp. 263, 268.

20
. Ibid., p. 276.

21
. Ibid.

22
. Ibid., pp. 208, 246.

23
. Ibid., pp. 266, 268.

24
. Ibid., p. 296. The same question was asked on 14 November, when the responses were 64 percent yes, 25 percent no, with 11 percent having no opinion.

25
. Ibid., p. 311.

26
. NARA, RG 80, PHLO, Box 29, Stark, Memorandum for the President, 11 February 1941, p. 2. In this memorandum Stark summed up in writing for the President's benefit the arguments he had made in person earlier.

27
. Ibid., Box 5, Stark to Kimmel, 10 February 1941, Narrative Statement of Evidence at Navy Pearl Harbor Investigations [hereafter Statement of Evidence], p. 260.

28
. Ibid.

29
. Ibid., Kimmel to Stark, 18 February 1941, p. 261.

30
. Ibid., Stark to Kimmel, 25 February 1941, p. 263.

31
. PHA, Pt. 16, p. 2163.

32
. Ibid., pp. 2163–64. The northwestern cruise would have been made by one aircraft carrier, a division of heavy cruisers, and one squadron of destroyers, with tankers as necessary, to Attu, Aleutian Islands, then to Petropavlovsk in Siberia for a three-day visit. The phrase “to say ‘Boo!'” is borrowed from Morison,
Rising Sun,
p. 57.

33
. PHA, Pt. 16, pp. 2175–77.

34
. Winston S. Churchill,
The Second World War,
Vol. 3,
Their Finest Hour
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1949), p. 404.

35
. For a more detailed presentation of these Atlantic events, see Michael Gannon,
Operation Drumbeat: The Dramatic True Story of Germany's First U-Boat Attacks Along the American Coast in World War II
(New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1990), pp. 83–89.

36
. As examples of recent works that date the “shoot on sight” order to the post-
Greer
period one may list: Clay Blair,
Hitler's U-Boat War,
Vol. 1,
The Hunters, 1939–1942
(New York: Random House, 1996), p. 360; Peter Padfield,
War Beneath the Sea: Submarine Conflict, 1939–1945
(London: BCA, 1995), p. 164; O'Neill,
Democracy at War,
p. 31; William K. Klingaman,
1941: Our Lives in a World on Edge
(New York: Harper & Row, 1988), pp. 370–71; and Waldo Heinrich,
Threshold of War: Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Entry into World War II
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 167.

37
. Naval Historical Center Library, Rare Books, Operation Plans Nos. 4-41 and 5-41 (1 and 18 July 1941, respectively), in MS, dated 1946, CINCLANT, Administrative History No. 139, “Commander Task Force Twenty-Four,” pp. 61–62. Confirming copies of the same orders are found in Operational Archives [hereafter OA/NHC], Box CINCLANT (June–Sept. 1941), Operation Plan 5-41, Serial 00120, 15 July 1941; NARA, RG 80, Records of the CNO Headquarters COMINCH 1942, Box 11, cited in Task Force Fifteen, USS
Idaho
, Flagship, Secret Serial A4-3 (005), 29 August 1941; and Washington National Records Center, Suitland, Maryland, RG 313, Box 108, CINCLANT, cited in Task Force Three, USS
Memphis
, Flagship, n.d., but presumed July 1941. Operation Orders Nos. 6-41 and 7-41 were found in OA/NHC, Box “CINCLANT, Jun.–Sept. 1941.” All the above-cited archival collections, though not the NHC Library, have been moved to NARA, Archives II, Modern Military Branch, in College Park, MD.

38
. Ibid.

39
. Interview with Jürgen Rohwer, Stuttgart, Germany, 16 December 1986. Dr. Rohwer described the
Admiral Scheer
incident in his “Die USA und die Schlacht im Atlantik 1941,” Jürgen Rohwer and Eberhard Jäckel, eds.,
Kriegswende Dezember 1941
(Koblenz: Bernard & Graefe Verlag, 1984), pp. 81–103.

40
. The conversations and text of the agreement are given in PHA, Pt. 15, pp. 1485–1550. An ABC-22 staff agreement for joint United States-Canadian defense was incorporated into ABC-1.

41
. Rear Admiral Turner, who was one of two flag officers representing the Navy in the staff conversations, stated in 1944: “It would be a grave error for anyone to get the idea that the war in the Central Pacific was to be purely defensive. Far from it.” PHA, Pt. 26, p. 265.

42
. Morison,
Rising Sun,
pp. 53–54.

43
. WPPac-46, with four annexes, is given in PHA, Pt. 37, pp. 837–71.

44
. Here again the writer relies on Feis,
Road to Pearl Harbor
, pp. 150–59.

45
. Cordell Hull,
The Memoirs of Cordell Hull,
Vol. II, (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1948), p. 987.

46
. Ibid., p. 995.

47
. From postwar interrogation of Admiral Nagano Osami, chief of the Naval General Staff, cited in Feis,
Road to Pearl Harbor,
p. 217 and n. 20.

48
. PHA, Pt. 32, p. 560. On the same date that the President issued his freeze order he federalized the Philippine Army and appointed Douglas MacArthur its commanding general. By this same date the American Volunteer Group, composed of American pilots who called themselves the “Flying Tigers,” were flying Curtiss P-40B fighters in missions against the Japanese in China.

49
. NARA, RG 80, PHLO, Box 29, Stark to Cooke, 31 July 1941.

50
. Morison,
Rising Sun,
p. 63, n. 37. In placing controls on oil exports Roosevelt intended to permit low-grade gasoline for civilian and commercial purposes to continue flowing at 1936 levels, and so informed Ambassador Nomura. However, Secretary Ickes and Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson enveloped the flow in so much red tape that the embargo became total. See John Costello,
Days of Infamy: MacArthur, Roosevelt, Churchill—The Shocking Truth Revealed
(New York: Pocket Books, 1994), p. 57.

51
. As naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison assayed the moment: “The oil embargo and assets-freezing order of 26 July 1941 made war with Japan inevitable unless one of two things happened, and neither was humanly possible. The United States might reverse its foreign policy, restore trade relations and acquiesce in further Japanese conquests; or the Japanese government might persuade its army at least to prepare to evacuate China and renounce the southward advance [which would surely] have been disregarded by an Army which, as the facts show, would accept no compromise that did not place America in the ignominious role of collaborating with conquest.” Morison,
Rising Sun,
p. 63.

Chapter Five: An Air of Inevitability

1
. Morison,
Rising Sun,
p. 68.

2
. Hull wrote later: “We could not forget that Konoye had been Premier when Japan had invaded China in 1937; he had signed the Axis Alliance in 1940 and had concluded the treaty with the puppet government in Nanking designated to give Japan the mastery of China.” Hull,
Memoirs,
II, p. 1024.

3
. Ibid., pp. 1019–34; Feis,
Road to Pearl Harbor
, pp. 253–76; Morison,
Rising Sun,
pp. 68–70.

4
. PHA, Pt. 14, p. 1402, CNO to CINCPAC, CINCAF, CINCLANT, 16 October 1941.