Pearl Harbor Betrayed (15 page)

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The Roosevelt administration's identification with Britain's war against Germany was further tightened during 1941 through the adoption of two formal war plans. The first, called the ABC-1 [American–British Commonwealth] Staff Agreement, represented the fundamental strategy that would be followed by the two powers in the Atlantic-European and Pacific theaters. It resulted from Anglo-American military staff conversations begun at London in September 1940 and concluded at Washington in January– March 1941. A key passage read:

Since Germany is the predominant member of the Axis Powers, the Atlantic and European area is considered to be the decisive theatre. The principal United States military effort will be exerted in that theatre, and operations of United States forces in other theatres will be conducted in such a manner as to facilitate that effort.…

Even if Japan were not initially to enter the war on the side of the Axis Powers, it would still be necessary for the Associated Powers [the United States and the British Commonwealth] to deploy their forces in a manner to guard against Japanese intervention. If Japan does enter the war, the military strategy in the Far East will be defensive. The United States does not intend to add to its present military strength in the Far East but will employ the United States Pacific Fleet offensively in the manner best calculated to weaken Japanese economic power, and to support the defense of the Malay barrier by diverting Japanese strength away from Malaysia.
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First proposed in U.S. military circles in a famous “Plan Dog” memorandum authored by Admiral Stark in November 1940, the “Germany first” strategy would be followed even if (as would happen) Japan attacked the United States before the Germans made an attack or declaration of war. The strategy rested on the assumption that the defeat of Germany ensured the defeat of Japan, but not the obverse. Meanwhile, as plainly stated here, the operations of the Pacific Fleet would be
offensive
as well as defensive. It would not be correct to assert, as some have during the years since, that the Pacific strategy was to be a “holding operation.”
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Only one serious disagreement divided the U.S. and British delegations. The British thought that their base at Singapore was essential for the defense of the Malay Barrier, and they urged that a detachment of the U.S. Pacific Fleet be sent to defend that base. The American naval delegation, arguing that Singapore could not be held, even with the detachment, if Japan seized airfields in southern Indo-China, from which she could bomb Singapore at will, insisted that the Pacific Fleet not be divided. The stalemate was acknowledged in the ABC-1 Staff Agreement. Though an effort was made to devise an ABCD (American–British Commonwealth–Dutch) Agreement similar to ABC, the effort failed after one week of discussion. One of the rocks on which it foundered was the uncertainty on all three sides on where Japan might strike next and on what self-interested measures would then be taken by such disparate partners as the distant United States, the British in Malaysia, the orphaned Dutch East Indies, and the locally concerned Australia and New Zealand. President Roosevelt, for his part, was puzzled about what course he could take, given Congress's reluctance to consider a declaration of war against anybody; though he personally believed that the United States should oppose with force a Japanese entry into Malaysia, because it would give Japan a near monopoly on rubber and tin.
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In the footsteps of ABC-1 came a comprehensive war plan produced in May by the Joint Board, soon to be renamed the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Called the United States Joint Army and Navy Basic War Plan, or, more commonly, Rainbow 5, the plan incorporated leading features of ABC-1. From it was derived the basic Navy plan WPL-46, and from it again Admiral Kimmel developed the operating plan that governed specifically the Pacific Fleet, WPPac-46, which was promulgated by him on 21 July. The first offensive action of the Pacific Fleet was to “make reconnaissance and raid in force on the Marshall Islands.”
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WPPac-46 was approved by Stark on 9 September. But with war plans at the tactical level there was no certainty that what read well on paper would play out the same in execution. In the oft-cited expression of Count Helmuth von Moltke (1800–1891), “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” In this instance, the events of 7 December would put the offensive features of WPPac-46 on temporary hold.

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At Tokyo the Konoye cabinet was reeling from new restrictions imposed in February by Secretary Hull, after consultation with the President, on the export to Japan of copper, brass and bronze, zinc, nickel, and potash. And during the weeks and months of 1941 that followed, one after another of materials and products that could serve the Japanese war effort were placed under control, e.g., lead, jute, burlap, borax, phosphate, carbon black, cork, and animal and vegetable fats.
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Exports of crude oil and regular gasoline were still off the table, but Hull found indirect means in that field, too, for punishing the Japanese warlords for what they
had
done in China and for what they
might
do next: in February and March he directed U.S. flag tankers to avoid Japanese ports, and he closed off further exports of oil drilling and refining machinery, storage tanks, containers, and even drums. Faced with these shortages in the energy field, the Japanese cabinet, with Foreign Minister Matsuoka in the lead, applied stiff pressure on the Netherlands East Indies (NEI) to provide unhindered access to her oil fields, technology, and equipment, as well as to her other raw materials. What Japan was demanding amounted to colonial domination of the NEI replacing that previously exercised by the defeated Dutch government in Europe. Because they feared that a U.S. cutoff of all oil exports would precipitate an armed takeover of the colony, NEI government officials sought a delicate balance, giving Japan just so much petroleum and raw materials as would keep her industries and military forces pacified, and, on the other hand, asking the United States to keep her own oil flowing westward lest there be unfortunate consequences for the NEI, including armed invasion. Hull and Hornbeck agreed to observe this policy, for the time being.

In February, the Konoye cabinet dispatched a new ambassador to the United States in an announced effort to improve political and economic relations. He was Admiral Nomura Kichisaburo, a former foreign minister, known for his dignity, character, and friendly inclinations toward the United States and Britain. Premier Konoye viewed the appointment of a moderate legate as a means both of buying time and of securing, if possible, reversal of export controls. Nomura himself seems not to have been optimistic of selling the New Order of Greater East Asia, given the anger in America over Japanese aggression in China, but, encouraged by former naval colleagues who wanted to avoid war, he agreed to try. At the date of his confirmation by the Emperor, he may not have been aware, given the bifurcation of Japanese officialdom, that his nation's independently operating warlords were then engaged in an intensive program of constructing airfields, seaplane bases, and fortifications throughout the mandated Marshall and Caroline Islands west-southwest of Hawaii. When on 14 February he presented his papers to Roosevelt, whom he had met before, he exhibited, as expected, a respectful, affable, and accommodating demeanor, to which Roosevelt responded in kind. To the President Nomura made clear that he was on a mission of peace. And in his discussions he never wavered from that course.

Altogether, from February through 7 December, the stately antifascist would meet with Roosevelt eight times, with Hull forty-five times, and with Welles six times. Interspersed were meetings with old naval acquaintances Stark and Turner. Hull said of him, “He spoke a certain—sometimes an uncertain—amount of English. His outstanding characteristic was solemnity, but he was much given to a mirthless chuckle and to bowing. I credit Nomura with having been honestly sincere in trying to avoid war between his country and mine.”
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Hull's conversations with the emissary were conducted after work in the secretary's private apartment at the Wardman Park Hotel. A small group of State Department staffers attended and recorded the discussions. Hornbeck, who dismissed the proceedings as a sham and abhorred the thought of compromise where China was concerned, was the least frequent in his attendance. It was Hull who had the hardest task in maintaining a diplomat's poker face and a semblance of interest in what Nomura had to say, because he knew every day beforehand what words the emissary would speak.

In August 1940 War Department cryptanalysts had created an electromechanical decryption device that penetrated the high-grade Japanese diplomatic cipher code-named “Purple.” With this equipment the Army and Navy alternated daily in “breaking” intercepted Japanese diplomatic (DIP) radio traffic. Thus Hull, who was one of the few Washington officials to see the machine's product, called “Magic,” was privy to all of Nomura's instructions from Tokyo, as well as to his reports home.

On 16 April Hull nudged the discussions along a more “get to the point” track by presenting four principles on paper that concisely represented the American position. In offering them to Nomura he invited the Japanese government's comment on them. They read:

1. Respect for the territorial integrity and the sovereignty of each and all nations.

2. Noninterference in the internal affairs of other countries.

3. National equality, including equality of commercial opportunity.

4. Maintenance of the status quo in the Pacific except where it might be altered by peaceful means.
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Tokyo would not comment on the principles until 11 May, possibly because it was hard-pressed to think of a reasonable reply that was not a capitulation, or, because the Konoye cabinet was preoccupied with another diplomatic development: on 13 April Foreign Minister Matsuoka concluded with Soviet Foreign Minister V. M. Molotov a Russo-Japanese Neutrality Pact. By its terms Russia and Japan would maintain peaceful relations with each other, and should either power be attacked by one or several third powers, the other would remain neutral throughout the duration of the conflict. The pact had advantages for each of the signers, if two duplicitous nations could trust each other's signatures. For Russia it meant that if she were invaded by Germany (as she would be, on 22 June) she need not worry about being stabbed in the back by a Japanese assault on her maritime provinces. For Japan it meant that she need not keep forces on the Manchurian border that abutted her traditional enemy, and could now execute her long-planned
hokushu nanshin
strategy: “Hold north, go south.”

When the Japanese reply to Hull's four principles came on 11 May, it took the rhetorical form of
ignoratio elenchi,
i.e., it totally ignored Hull's principles and instead made demands of its own, namely, that the United States should ask Chiang Kai-shek to negotiate peace with Japan, and, if he refused, should halt all further assistance to his government; that the United States should restore normal trade relations with Japan; that the United States should help Japan access natural resources, such as oil, rubber, tin, and nickel, in the southwest Pacific; and that the United States should recognize the Tripartite Pact as a purely defensive instrument. Since no regard whatever was paid in this reply to such benchmark international concepts as sovereignty, noninterference, equality, and peaceful means, it was clear to Hull and his associates that there existed little basis for meaningful negotiation. Still, after an interval, he gamely carried on his diplomatic discussion, hoping against hope that the principled Nomura might be able to convert his handlers. That there was little chance of that happening was confirmed at an Imperial conference on 2 July when the Japanese government declared its firm intention to advance the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere to the south irrespective of events elsewhere, and took the first public steps, including the mobilization of over a million conscripts, recall of Japanese merchant ships in the Atlantic, and censorship of mail, to place the nation on a war footing. Secretly, it authorized the Navy's carrier aircraft to begin practice bombing and torpedo attacks at Kagoshima Bay, where the surrounding hills and shallow water resembled the topography of Pearl Harbor.
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Then, on 12 July, U.S. Army and Navy cryptographers, who alternated in the decryption of Japanese diplomatic traffic, received a communication from Tokyo to the Vichy government in France announcing that if Vichy did not give Japan permission to occupy the southern half of French Indo-China by the twentieth of that month, Japan would forcibly do so unilaterally. On the basis of this Magic intelligence, Washington and London conferred on how best to impose appropriate economic penalties. When Vichy succumbed, granting Japan a joint protectorate of Indo-China, Japanese transports started carrying troops south toward the harbor of Camranh Bay and the airport at Saigon, the occupation of which would complete a virtual encirclement of the American Philippines. In response, on 26 July, after consulting by telephone with Hull, President Roosevelt issued an executive order freezing Japanese assets in the United States and choking off most of what remained of Japanese-American trade, which meant that now virtually
all
oil exports were embargoed. This drastic step was taken with the full realization by Roosevelt and Hull, who was recuperating from an illness in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, that it could lead to war with Japan, but with the conviction that anything less would be tantamount to countenancing and encouraging the Japanese conquests. Roosevelt's belief at the time (shared by Churchill) was that Japan would not engage the United States in hostilities unless and until Great Britain was defeated by Germany.

Secretaries Hull, Stimson, and Knox approved of the President's action. General Marshall was nervous about the military's state of unpreparedness, and hoped for a delay in the outbreak of hostilities.
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Admiral Stark forthrightly opposed the freeze order because war with Japan was not yet the war he wanted. Duking it out with Germany was the course to follow, the bellicose CNO wrote privately to “Savvy” Cooke (and Kimmel) on 31 July: “Protecting the Western Atlantic on a large scale … would almost certainly involve us in the war and [I told the President] that I considered every day of delay in our getting into the war as dangerous, and that much more delay might be fatal to Britain's survival. I reminded him that I had been asking this for months in the State Department and elsewhere, etc. etc. etc.”
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