Winds of War (132 page)

As a German staff officer, I look upon Pearl Harbor as an abstract battle problem like Salamis or Trafalgar. Yamamoto’s operation surprised the Americans precisely because it was such a foolish thing to do, such an outrageous gamble, such bad strategy, such muddled politics, and such unsound psychology. Even if it succeeded, it was just about the worst move the Japanese could try. Therefore the Americans made the mistake of shutting it from their minds. The Japanese irrationally went ahead and did it, and it happened to work.

A little-noted passage in the hearings, from the interrogation of the cashiered Admiral Kimmel, may provide a key to the mystery. Aerial torpedoes in those days needed to be dropped in deep water in order to straighten out and make their run. The minimum depth, according to American technical opinion, was about seventy-five feet. Pearl Harbor is thirty feet deep. The danger of a torpedo plane attack on the battle fleet was therefore called “negligible,” and no torpedo nets were rigged. On December 7, aerial torpedoes hit seven battleships and wreaked vast havoc in Pearl Harbor. For the Japanese had devised a torpedo that could be launched in less than thirty feet, and their pilots had practiced shallow launchings from May to December! This sums up the mental difference in 1941 between the two nations.

Did Roosevelt Plan It?

The historical suspicion arose, and still lingers, that Roosevelt and his top aides conspired to cause the Pearl Harbor defeat. On this theory, they concealed from the Hawaiian command their certain knowledge that Japan was about to strike, obtained from decoded diplomatic telegrams, so as to keep the armed forces there unprepared for the blow. Roosevelt, on this view, decided that getting America solidly into the war was more important militarily than the loss of his battleships. This conjecture originated with the military leaders who were caught napping. They and their supporters maintain it to this day.

Roosevelt was, of course, capable of this dastardly action. He was capable of anything. But the record shows that the Pearl Harbor command, and all the United States forces in the Pacific, certainly knew that war was imminent. Indeed, all they had to do was read the newspapers. In any case, there is no acceptable excuse for professional military leaders ever to be surprised, even under the most lulling and peaceful of circumstances. It happens, but it is not excusable.

No evidence has turned up, in exhaustive investigations, that Roosevelt knew where the blow would fall. The Japanese kept the secret of the intended target perfectly. Their own top diplomats did not know it. Our Supreme Headquarters did not know it. It was never entrusted to a coded cable.

The American military men were surprised because, like the Red Army in June, they were psychologically unprepared for war. On the eve of the attack, the officers at Pearl Harbor no doubt observed the sacred American Saturday night ritual of getting stinking drunk, as did most of their men, and so when the first bombs fell, they were incapable of manning their numerous planes and A.A. guns to defend themselves. Here the rule “
Know the enemy
” definitely helped the Japanese. If American forces, wherever stationed, are ever attacked again, the proper time will always be Sunday morning. National character changes very slowly.

Roosevelt would have been far better served by a victory at Pearl Harbor than by a disaster. Success in repelling the blow would have raised the martial spirit higher. The Americans were a long time recovering mentally from the Pearl Harbor defeat. Roosevelt was not an imbecile, and only an imbecile would have forgone a chance to countersurprise the oncoming exposed Japanese fleet and sink it. Roosevelt did not warn the Pearl Harbor command of an imminent air strike because he, like everybody else, did not know and could not guess that the Japanese would act as grotesquely as they did. The conspiracy theory of Pearl Harbor is a trivial excuse for professional failure.

It is of course absolutely the case that by cutting of Japan’s oil supply and then brusquely demanding, as the price of restoring it, that the Japanese make peace in China and stay out of East Asia, Franklin Roosevelt forced Japan to attack. There was no other honorable escape for this proud warlike nation from the corner into which he squeezed them. But these global political maneuvers, at which he was a grand master, he performed openly. The newspapers were full of the diplomatic exchanges, so talk of conspiracy is silly. Roosevelt probably hoped to the last that he could bully and bluff this smaller, weaker nation into obeying him without war. Hitler would have played that situation exactly the same way. However, there was this difference: the German armed forces would not have let him down by being surprised, as Roosevelt’s did. We were soldiers.

____________

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: Roon’s professional acumen is most striking when German conduct is not in the picture. With his appraisal of the Pearl Harbor surprise, I unhappily concur. He neglects the real bungling and stupidity that went on in Washington during those days, as well as in Hawaii; but his conclusion must be accepted that there is never an excuse for commanders in the field to be surprised. A similar failure by our armed services in the nuclear age will spell the end of American history. There will be no margin for recovery next time. – V.H.

* * *

Chapter 58

A sense of lost time haunted Victor Henry as he sat on the back lawn of the Army and Navy Club in Manila at three o’clock in the morning, listening to a broadcast of a football game going on eleven thousand miles away. Overhead, as always on Army-Navy game night, Orion sprawled brilliantly across half the heavens. On the roads outside Moscow the constellation had blazed brightly, too, but far down toward the southern horizon.

Pug sat on the grass amid a crowd of officers from both services, and a sprinkling of their Filipino girlfriends. Wives had long since been sent home. The old smells of Army-Navy night - fresh-cut lawn grass, frangipani, rum, women’s perfume, and the rank smell of harbor water – the paper lanterns, too, the heat, the sweaty feeling even in a cotton shirt and slacks, the old inter-service jokes and insults, - all pulled him back in spirit a dozen years. Life in Manila was amazingly unchanged. The jumpy overwrought embassy people in Tokyo had been speculating that there might be no Army-Navy game, that either the Japanese would go to war by Thanksgiving, or at least the American armed forces would be on full alert. Yet there stood the same old display board, with the flat white football that would slide back and forth on a string across the painted gridiron. There were the mascot animals - Army mule in a brown blanket, Navy goat in a blue one - tethered and waiting for the comic moments. It might just as well be sleepy 1928, Pug thought. Only the floodlights blazing across the bay at the Cavite Navy Yard for all-night repair work suggested that it was November 1941, and that the Navy was slightly bestirring itself for an emergency.

The loudspeakers bellowed above the chatter on the lawn, and the radio reception tonight was better than in some years. This game still had its old ritual fascination for Pug; he was following it tensely, smoking a cigar. Once his nostalgia had been keen for the tough youthful combat on the grass, the slamming of bodies, the tricky drilled plays, above all for the rare moments of breaking free and sprinting down the field, dodging one man and another with the stands around him a roaring sea of voices. Nothing in his life had since been quite like it. But long ago that nostalgia had departed; those grooves of memory had worn out. To think that lads much younger than his own two sons were out on that chilly field in Philadelphia now, made Victor Henry feel that he had led a very long, multilayered, existence, and was now almost a living mummy.

“Pug! I heard you were here.” A hand lightly touched his shoulder. His classmate Walter Tully, bald as an egg and deeply tanned, smiled down at him; Tully had left the submarine school to take command of the undersea squadron at Manila. He gestured at a crowded table near the display board. “Come and sit with us.”

“Maybe at the half, Red.” It was decidedly an anachronism, but everybody still used the nickname. “It’s more like the old days, sitting on the grass.”

“You’re dead right. Well, I’ll join you.”

“Now you’re talking. Sit you down.”

Tully had played Academy football too, and he listened to the broadcast as intently as Pug. After a while the white football slid all the way for an Army run to a touchdown. Amid yells, cheers, and groans, a young lieutenant unloosed the mule, jumped on its back, and galloped around the lawn.

“Oh, hell,” Pug exclaimed.

Tully shook his head. “We’re going to lose this one, old buddy. They’ve got a fine backfield. We could use Pug Henry in there.”

“Ha! Fifteen-yard penalty for illegal use of wheelchairs. Say, ed, you’re the original Simon Legree, aren’t you?”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean sending the
Devilfish
out on exercises the night of the Army-Navy game. What’s the matter, you think there’s a war threatening or something?”

Tully grinned at the heavily ironic tone. “It was Branch Hoban’s idea. They’re going alongside for two weeks starting today - they’re due in at noon - and he wanted to get in some drills. You’ll see plenty of Byron.”

“I’ll only be here till the Clipper leaves.”

“Yes, I hear tell you’ve got the
California
. That’s just great, Pug.”

The game resumed. After some dull skirmishing the white ball-shape shot far across the board; Navy had intercepted a pass and run it deep into Army territory. Pug and Tully got to their feet and joined in the Navy yells of “Beat Army! Goal! Goal!” while an ensign happily paraded the goat around. The half ended right after the touchdown. Cheerily Red Tully ordered drinks from a passing steward. “Let’s stay here on the grass, Pug. Tell me about Rooshia.”

His happy grin changed to a tough sober look as Victor Henry described the tank battle he had observed and the October 16 panic in Moscow. “Jesus, you’ve really been in there! I envy you. And here we sit, fat, dumb, and happy. They told me you flew here via Tokyo.”

“That’s right.”

“What’s the straight dope, Pug? Are those bastards really going to fight? We’re getting some scary alerts here, but at this point we’re kind of numb.”

“Well, our people there are worried. The ambassador talked to me at length about Japanese psychology. They’re a very strange nation, he said, and hara-kiri is a way of life to them. The odds don’t matter much. They’re capable of executing a suicidal plan suddenly, and he fears they will.”

Tully glanced around at the nearby couples on the grass or on folding chairs, and dropped his voice. “That checks out. Admiral Hart received a straight war warning today, Pug. But we’ve been hearing nervous chatter from Washington, on and off, all summer and fall. In July when they landed in Indo-China and Roosevelt shut off their oil, we all thought,
here goes!
The squadron ran dawn and dusk GQ’s for a week, till it got kind of silly. Should I start that up again?”

Pug gestured his puzzlement with turned-up palms. “Look, I talked to some businessmen one night at a dinner party in the embassy, Americans, British, and one Jap, a big-time shipbuilder. The Jap said the straight word, right from the Imperial Court, is that war with the USA is unthinkable. Everybody there agreed. So – you pays your money and you takes your choice.”

“Well, all I know is, if they do go, we’re in big trouble. The state of readiness in the Philippines is appalling. The people themselves don’t want to fight the Japs. That’s
my
opinion. The submarine force is so short of everything – torpedoes, spare parts, watch officers, what have you – that it’s simply pitiful. Speaking of which, when did you see Byron last?”

“I guess about six months ago. Why?”

“Well, he has more damn brass! He walked into my office the other day and asked for a transfer to the Atlantic command. His own skipper had turned him down and Byron was trying to go over his head. I sure ate him out about that. I told him, Pug – I said this, word for word – that if he weren’t your son I’d have kicked his ass out of my office.”

Victor Henry said with forced calm, “His wife and baby are in Italy. He’s worried about them.”

“We’re all separated from our kinfolk, Pug. It just isn’t in the cards to transfer him. I’m trying to comb submarine officers out of tenders and destroyers. I’d do anything within reason for a son of yours, but –”

“Don’t put it that way. Byron’s just another officer. If you can’t do it, you can’t.”

“Okay. I’m glad you said that.”

“Still, his family problem is serious. If it’s possible, transfer him.”

“There’s this little problem of the Japs, too.”

“No argument.” Victor Henry was taking some pains to keep his tone light and friendly. A crowd roar poured from the loud speakers, and he said with relief, “Okay! Second half.”

When the game ended, many people were stretched out asleep on the grass, under a paling sky streaked with red. White-coated boys were still passing drinks and huddled Navy officers were bawling “Anchors Aweigh,” for their team had won. Pug declined Captain Tully’s invitation to breakfast and went up to his room for a nap.

He had stayed in a room like it – perhaps in this very one – on first reporting to Manila, before Rhoda had arrived with the children to set up housekeeping. High-ceilinged, dingy, dusty, with featureless old club furniture and a big perpetually turning and droning fan, the room hit Pug again with a strong sense of lost time and vanished days. He turned the fan up high, stripped to undershorts, opened the french windows looking out over the bay, and sat smoking cigarette after cigarette, watching the day brighten over the broad blue harbor and the busy traffic of ships. He was not sleepy. He sat so for more than an hour, scarcely moving, while gathering sweat trickled down his naked skin.