A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (121 page)

Western intelligence did know that Japanese troops and fleets were on the move somewhere. But where? Most trackers had them headed south, toward Singapore, which led to some complacency at Pearl Harbor, where Admiral Husband Kimmel and General Walter Short shared responsibilities for the defense of the Hawaiian Islands. The officers had never worked out an effective division of command authority and had failed to schedule appropriate air reconnaissance. Despite repeated war warnings, Kimmel and Short had never put the fleet or airfields on full alert. As a result, American ships were sitting ducks on December seventh.

Japan attacked methodically and with deadly efficiency. Bombers, torpedo planes, dive bombers—all covered by Mitsubishi Zero fighter planes—took out American air power, then hit the battleships on “battleship row,” sinking or severely damaging every one. The worst casualty, the USS
Arizona
, went down in ten minutes with a thousand sailors. Few ships of any sort escaped damage of some type. Even civilian quarters suffered collateral damage from the attack, including large numbers hit by American antiaircraft rounds that fell back to earth.
⁹

Despite the phenomenal success of the attack, Yamamoto did not achieve total victory because three key targets, the American aircraft carriers, had been out on maneuvers. Going in, Yamamoto had expected to lose 30 percent of his entire force—ships included—yet he lost nothing larger than a midget sub and only a handful of aircraft. In a critical error of judgment, Yamamoto took his winnings and left the table without the carriers. Although unforeseen at the time, all the battleships except the
Arizona
would be salvaged and returned to action during the war. More important, by leaving the oil storage facilities undamaged, Yamamoto allowed U.S. forces to continue to operate out of Hawaii and not San Diego or San Francisco. The attack at Pearl Harbor had indeed been a crushing defeat for the United States, but the price at which the Japanese acquired their victory could not be measured in ships or men. An outraged American public had been galvanized and united.

 

Did Roosevelt Have Advance Knowledge About the Pearl Harbor Attack?

 

Even as the last smoke billowed from the sinking or capsized ships in Hawaii, many people were asking how the United States could have been so unprepared. Historian Charles Tansill suggested that the debacle could only have occurred with Franklin Roosevelt’s foreknowledge. Clearly, if a president in possession of advance warning had allowed hundreds of sailors and soldiers to die in a surprise attack, it would have constituted high treason. Why would any chief executive permit such a strike?

In his famous book,
Back Door to War
(1952), Tansill accused Roosevelt of allowing a Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor to provide the United States with the motivation and justification to enter the war against Hitler in Europe. A number of historians and writers added to the Tansill thesis over the years, but little new evidence was produced until the 1980s, when John Toland published
Infamy
, wherein he claimed to have located a navy witness who, while on duty in San Francisco, received transmissions locating the Japanese carriers and forwarded the information to Washington.

Adding to Toland’s revelations, a “Notes and Documents” piece in the
American Historical Review
disclosed that the FBI had acquired information from an Axis double agent named Duskow Popov (“Tricycle”), who had information on a microdot about the attack.
¹⁰
Although Toland and others maintained that Popov’s documents included a detailed plan of the Japanese air attack, it did no such thing. Tricycle’s data dealt almost exclusively with buildings and installations, but had nothing on ships, aircraft, scouting patterns, or any of the rather important items that one would expect from a “detailed plan.”
¹¹

In 1981, Asian historian Gordon Prange published
At Dawn We Slept
; following his death, his students Donald Goldstein and Katherine Dillon completed his work with new Pearl Harbor claims in
Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History
. The authors found Toland’s mystery sailor, Robert Ogg, who emphatically rejected Toland’s assertion that he had said he had intercepted massive Japanese radio traffic. Meanwhile, documents acquired from Japanese archives raised a more serious problem for the conspiracy theorists because they proved the Japanese fleet had been under strict radio silence during the attack voyage to Pearl Harbor.

The controversy refused to go away. In 1999, Robert B. Stinnett’s
Day of Deceit
revived the argument that Roosevelt had prior knowledge of the attack with important new code-breaking information. But the crucial pieces of “evidence” that Stinnett employed often proved the opposite of what he claimed. He used precise intelligence terms—code breaking, interception, translation, analysis—interchangeably, which produced massive errors: an intercepted document is not necessarily broken, and if intercepted and broken, it may not be translated, and if intercepted, broken, and translated, it may not be analyzed for days, weeks, or even years. Some of the intercepts in November 1941 were indeed broken, but not translated or analyzed until…1945!

The entire argument of the revisionists hinges on the notion that FDR couldn’t get into the war with Germany without a pretext. But Roosevelt had already had ample cause, if he’d wanted it, to ask for a declaration of war against Germany. Nazi U-boats had sunk American ships, killed American sailors, and in all ways shown themselves hostile. Against a nation that had declared war on Mexico over a handful of cavalry troopers or that had declared war on Spain for the questionable destruction of a single ship, Germany had long since crossed the line needed for a declaration of war. Despite the isolationist elements in Congress, it is entirely possible that FDR could have asked for a declaration of war after the sinking of the
Reuben James
or other such attacks. Certainly the U-boats were not going to stop, and it was only a matter of time before more Americans died. Pearl Harbor was a tragedy, but not a conspiracy.

Sources:
Charles Beard,
President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War
(New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1948); Walter Millis,
This Is Pearl!
(New York: William Morrow, 1947); Charles C. Tansill,
Back Door to War
(Chicago: Regnery, 1952); Gordon W. Prange with Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon,
At Dawn We Slept
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981); John Toland,
Infamy
(New York: Doubleday, 1982); Dusko Popov,
Spy/Counterspy
(New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1974); Harry Elmer Barnes, “Pearl Harbor After a Quarter of a Century,”
Left and Right
, IV (1968); Roberta Wohlstetter,
Pearl Harbor
(Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1962); Robert B. Stinnett,
Day of Deceit
(New York: Free Press, 2000).

 

On December eighth, Roosevelt, appearing before the jointly assembled House and Senate, called December 7, 1941, a “date which will live in infamy” as he asked Congress for a declaration of war against Japan. Four days later Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. With a declaration of war only against Japan, it appeared to some isolationists that it still might be possible to avoid entering the war in Europe. Hitler refused to oblige them and rushed headlong at the United States and the USSR simultaneously.

Indeed, Hitler, at the recommendation of his foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, had no intention of allowing the United States to get its declaration of war in ahead of his own. “A great power does not allow itself to be declared war upon,” Ribbentrop purportedly said. “It declares war on others.”
¹²
War with Germany had been far closer than many isolationists imagined: in May 1941, the Nazis sank the freighter
Robin Moor
, prompting Roosevelt to extend American neutral waters to Iceland and allow American warships to escort U.S. merchantmen farther out to sea. A few months later, German vessels attacked the USS
Greer
; and in October 1941 they torpedoed the destroyer
Kearney
, which managed to make it back to port. The House of Representatives voted the next day to arm American merchant ships. Then, on Halloween, Germans sank the destroyer
Reuben James
, killing 115 Americans. At that point, the United States would have been fully justified by international law in declaring war on Germany and her allies, but Roosevelt was still unconvinced that the American public would support him. Yet even if Japan had not bombed Pearl Harbor, it is inconceivable that tensions with Nazi Germany would have subsided. Rather, more casualties and direct German attacks would have provoked the United States into declaring war on the Axis powers anyway.

Congress had consistently failed to appreciate the danger posed by both the Nazi regime and the perception of U.S. weakness propagated in the Japanese mind by Hitler’s repeated incursions. Americans came to war with Hitler reluctantly and only as a last resort. At no time prior to Pearl Harbor did anywhere close to a majority of citizens think the events in Europe sufficiently threatened U.S. national interests. Roosevelt, on the other hand, recognized both the moral evil of Hitler and the near-term threat to American security posed by Nazi Germany. However, he nevertheless refused to sacrifice his personal popularity to lead the United States into the war sooner, knowing full well it would come eventually—and at a higher cost.

Had the United States deliberately and forcefully entered the war in Europe earlier, on its own timetable, perhaps some of Hitler’s strategic victories (and, possibly, much of the Holocaust) might have been avoided. For example, American aircraft would have already been in England by 1940, meaning that the Battle of Britain would not have been close. Moreover, a European buildup almost certainly would have brought the Pacific military forces into a higher stage of alert. And, most important, an American presence well before 1942 might have been just enough to force Hitler into scrapping the German invasion of Russia.

Isolationist critics from the Right have argued that American entry in Europe was needless even after Pearl Harbor and that the Soviets had all but won the war by the time the United States got involved in any significant way.
¹³
This view not only distorts battlefield realities—the Eastern Front was not decided completely until after Kursk in 1943—but it also ignores the fact that American aid may have tipped the balance for the Soviets between 1942 and 1944. Moreover, it should be noted that Stalin offered to negotiate with Hitler in December 1942, a full year after Pearl Harbor, and again in the summer of 1943—hardly the act of a man confident of victory on the field. Stalin was as suspicious of Churchill and Roosevelt as he was of Hitler, and he feared that the Anglo-American powers would encourage a Nazi-Soviet war of exhaustion.
¹⁴
Certainly the Soviets wore out the
Wehrmacht
in the east, and they absorbed a disproportionate amount of Nazi resources in some areas, especially men and tanks. But those contributions have to be seen in the context of the entire conflict, and not just in the battles on the Eastern Front. When the bigger picture is revealed, it is clear the U.S. economy won the war.

Putting the Ax to the Axis

Unlike during the Vietnam conflict some thirty years later, in December 1941 the only Americans lying about their ages or searching for sympathetic doctors for notes were trying to fake their way
into
the armed forces. Men too old and boys too young to be eligible for service managed to slip past the recruitment authorities. It was easy to do with more than 16 million males enlisting or being drafted into the armed forces. Another 245,000 women in the Women’s Army Corps (WACS) and WAVES (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Services, which was the women’s naval auxiliary created largely through the efforts of Senator Margaret Chase Smith), supported the effort. Other women, such as actress Ida Lupino, joined the ambulance and nurse corps, and Julia Child, later to be a cooking guru, served with the Office of Strategic Services in Ceylon. Ethnic minorities like the Japanese and blacks, discriminated against at home, brushed off their mistreatment to enlist, winning battle honors. The Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team became the most decorated American division of the war, and included future U.S. Senator Daniel K. Inouye, who lost an arm in combat. The all-black 99th Fighter Squadron saw action in Italy.

Celebrities of the day did not hesitate to enter the armed forces. Even before Pearl Harbor, many well-known personalities had signed up for the reserves, including Major Cecil B. DeMille, Brigadier General Cornelius Vanderbilt III, and Colonel David Sarnoff. And once war broke out, rather than seeking safety behind the lines, a number of movie stars and sons of elite families gave up their prestige and the protections of wealth to actively pursue combat assignments. Theodore Roosevelt Jr. quit his job in 1941 to go on active duty as a colonel and later saw action on D-Day.
¹⁵
Academy Award winner Van Heflin joined the army as an artilleryman; television’s
Gunsmoke
hero, James Arness, was in the army and wounded at Anzio, earning a Bronze Star; Eddie Albert, wounded at Tarawa, also earned a Bronze Star rescuing wounded and stranded marines from the beach;
Get Smart
’s Don Adams, a marine, contracted malaria at Guadalcanal; Charleton Heston was a radio operator on B-25 bombers; Art Carney, sidekick of Jackie Gleason on
The Honeymooners
, suffered a shrapnel wound at Saint-Lô before he could fire a shot. Ernest Borgnine, who later would play fictional Lieutenant Commander McHale in
McHale’s Navy
, had already served in the navy for twelve years before World War II; Lucille Ball’s famous Cuban husband, Desi Arnaz, was offered a commission in the Cuban navy, where, as an officer, he would be relatively safe on patrol in the Caribbean. He refused, choosing instead to enlist in the U.S. Navy, where he was rejected on the grounds that he was a noncitizen. Nevertheless, he could be drafted—and was—and despite failing the physical, went into the infantry, where he injured his knees. He finished the war entertaining troops.