Pearl Harbor Betrayed (19 page)

In the Pearl Harbor literature much has been made of the fact that Halsey announced to
Enterprise
's crew that they were operating under war conditions, that radio silence would be observed, that all torpedoes and bombs were to be armed, that any submarine sighted or detected was to be sunk, and that any aircraft not identified as American was to be shot down. His aggressive spirit and tactical preparedness have sometimes been interpreted to show that Kimmel, by contrast, lacked those qualities. Apart from the fact that it was Kimmel who authorized Halsey to go on a war footing, it was also Kimmel who, in direct violation of Stark's restraining order, went to war conditions himself on the same date, 28 November, when he ordered all sea and air forces to depth-charge any submerged submarine detected by sonar in the harbor approaches and in the fleet operating area. Neither Newton nor Brown was put on a war footing; nor, unlike Halsey, was either told of the 27 November war warning.

*   *   *

By 18 October the shakeups in the Japanese cabinet were complete. The militarists were in control. Tojo Hideki, now a full general, was prime minister. He also held the cabinet offices of war minister and home minister, the latter office in charge of national police. Admiral Toyoda Teijiro was replaced as foreign minister by Togo Shigenori, a senior diplomat and moderate, who hoped that war with the United States could be put off until that power's entry into the war against Germany, and who, under the Emperor's mantle, wrung from Tojo a reluctant pledge to make yet one more effort to secure an accommodation with Hull and Roosevelt. In that endeavor Togo could take no comfort from the desire of Ambassador Nomura to quit his post and return home. Arguing that those Americans who trusted him were “poor deluded souls” for thinking that he had any influence with the new military cabinet, Nomura wrote, on 23 October: “I don't want to be the bones of a dead horse. I don't want to continue this hypocritical existence, deceiving other people.… Please send me your permission to return to Japan.” To which Togo replied, under the same date: “I appreciate the efforts you are making.… We express our hope that you will see fit to sacrifice all of your own personal wishes, and remain at your post.”
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Meanwhile, in the Japanese Imperial General Headquarters at Tokyo, as well as in naval, air, and army bases both in the home islands and in occupied territories of China and Indo-China, preparations for war moved ahead at an anxious pace. Weather conditions dictated the schedule to be followed. The Southern Operation to make Japan self-sufficient in oil, rubber, tin, bauxite, and other raw materials through the capture of Malaya and the NEI had to be mounted no later than December, before the northeast monsoon roiled the South China Sea. Effective occupation of the British and Dutch possessions had to be completed during the Manchurian winter, when traditional enemy Russia would find it difficult, though not impossible, to menace Japan's exposed northern flank. And Yamamoto's transpacific raid on Pearl Harbor would have to be launched no later than December, before the onset of winter gales and worsened visibility in the northern route, or Vacant Sea, which was chosen in preference to the calmer southern or central routes because it was distant from normal shipping tracks. In Japanese home waters the carriers and other warships assigned to the Hawaiian operation diligently practiced refueling at sea, which was not as commonplace then as it would become later in the war, and in various home bays air crews rehearsed the complicated approach patterns that would have to be flown in the Oahu airspace. At the same time, aircraft flew bombing-run drills to prepare for strikes they would be ordered to make on the same 7 December (8 December in the Phillipines) against Clark Field on Luzon Island, where General MacArthur's air staff husbanded their growing fleet of B-17 Flying Fortresses.

The Japanese Army had not at first agreed with its Navy counterparts that the Philippines should be attacked at all. Its forces were not as strong as originally hoped: since, by mid-August Russia had not dispatched her Siberian troops to the German front, it appeared that only eleven out of Japan's fifty-one divisions and 700 out of 1,500 in-commission Army aircraft (remembering that much of Japan's manpower and equipment was tied up in the occupations of China and Indo-China) could be committed to the Southern Operation. But, the Navy argued successfully, Japan could not permit an unsinkable aircraft carrier, which was the Philippines, to stand, unmolested, astride her southward advance, trade routes, and communications. In mid-August Army strategists agreed with that imperative, and undertook the development of detailed operational plans based on the joint decision to attack and occupy the Philippines. Since an attack on the Philippines would bring the United States into the war anyway, Yamamoto's plan for a simultaneous carrier-borne attack to disable the American fleet at Pearl Harbor made all the more sense to the Army.

On 20 October the two services agreed on a final plan for making war at one and the same time against the British Commonwealth, the NEI, and the United States. Hostilities were to open with six different but nearly simultaneous operations. These were: (1) a surprise air attack on Pearl Harbor and Oahu airfields for the purpose of destroying or neutralizing the U.S. Pacific Fleet; (2) occupation of Siam with the object of obtaining a base for operations against Malaya; (3) landings in northern Malaya and on the Isthmus of Kra as first stages in the capture of Singapore; (4) bombing raids on the U.S. B-17 Flying Fortresses based at Clark Field on Luzon Island in the Philippines; (5) seizure of the U.S. Pacific islands of Guam and Wake in order to isolate the Philippines; and (6) invasion of the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong. The air attacks on Clark Field were to be followed by landings of ground forces on Luzon and Mindanao Islands; landings in northern Malaya were to be followed by landings in British Borneo; and capture of Jolo Island in the Sulu Sea would help make possible capture of the NEI. Second and third phases of the Southern Operation would establish a defensive cordon, or perimeter, that would run from the Kuriles through Wake Island, the Marshall and Gilbert Islands, the Bismarck Archipelago, New Guinea, Timor, Java, Sumatra, and Malaya to Burma, and west to India.
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On 5 November an Imperial conference placed its imprimatur on the general war plan. At the same time, its participants agreed to have Nomura make one last effort to secure an agreement with Washington. Two proposals in sequential order, lettered A and B, were to be placed before Hull and Roosevelt. Proposal A was a reformulation of previously stated Japanese positions, including Japan's right to maintain armed forces in northern China, Mongolia, and Hainan for “a necessary period” (which Nomura was to interpret as “about twenty-five years”). All other troops presently in China would be withdrawn when that country agreed to make peace with Japan. Similarly, upon the signing of such a treaty, Japan would withdraw her troops from Indo-China. The Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy would remain in force. Unwritten but understood in these terms was the requirement on Washington's part to force Chiang Kai-shek's government into a peace treaty under threat of denying it all further economic and military aid. Should Washington refuse to comply, Nomura was to produce Proposal B (largely the work of Foreign Minister Togo), which posited a modus vivendi—a temporary war-preventing truce—based on the following terms:

1. Both the Governments of Japan and the United States undertake not to make any armed advancement into any of the regions in Southeastern Asia and the Southern Pacific area excepting the part of French Indo-China where the Japanese troops are stationed at present.

2. The Japanese Government undertakes to withdraw its troops now stationed in French Indo-China upon either the restoration of peace between Japan and China or the establishment of an equitable peace in the Pacific area. In the meantime the Government of Japan declares that it is prepared to remove its troops now stationed in the southern part of French Indo-China to the northern part of the said territory upon the conclusion of the present arrangement which shall later be embodied in the final agreement.

3. The Governments of Japan and the United States shall cooperate with a view to securing the acquisition of those goods and commodities which the two countries need in Netherlands East Indies.

4. The Governments of Japan and the United States mutually undertake to restore their commercial relations to those prevailing prior to the freezing of the assets. The government of the United States shall supply Japan a required quantity of oil.

5. The Government of the United States undertakes to refrain from such measures and actions as will be prejudicial to the endeavors for the restoration of general peace between Japan and China.
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On 5 November Togo cabled Nomura that an agreement with Washington must be secured no later than the twenty-fifth of that month. Since Nomura was in the dark about war-making schedules that were driving events at home, he must have been alarmed by the imposition of a deadline, as he read Togo's grim message:

Because of various circumstances, it is absolutely necessary that all arrangements for the signing of this agreement be completed by the 25th of this month. I realize that this is a difficult order, but under the circumstances it is an unavoidable one. Please understand this thoroughly and tackle the problem of saving the Japanese-U.S. relations from falling into a chaotic condition. Do so with great determination and with unstinted effort, I beg of you.
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Neither Kimmel nor Short was advised of this deadline.

To brace up Nomura's drooping spine, and to assist him in arguing the reasonableness of Proposal A, Togo sent a second, seasoned, diplomat to Washington, Kurusu Saburo, who, as ambassador in Berlin, had been a signatory of the Tripartite Pact. When Togo transmitted the text of Proposal A to Nomura, he told the ambassador that he was to exert every effort to keep Hull's Four Principles off the table.

Coincidentaly, on that same 5 November, General Marshall and Admiral Stark met in Washington to make military recommendations to the President. On their table was a request from Chiang Kai-shek for U.S. military intervention should the Japanese attack Kunming and sever the Burma Road, over which U.S. and British Commonwealth aid reached the Nationalist government. In their estimate the service chiefs strongly advised against such intervention, even by airpower alone. Such action, they stated, would engage the United States in a Far Eastern war, when the ABC-1 agreement and Rainbow 5 plan clearly stipulated that “the primary objective” of U.S. policy was the defeat of Germany, which was considered “the most dangerous enemy.” From other sources it is known how impatient Stark was with the way in which the China incident kept pulling the United States into deeper and darker thickets, far distant from where he wanted the action to be. On 17 October he had written Kimmel:

The stumbling block of course, is the Chinese incident and personally without going in to all its ramifications and face-saving and Japanese army attitude, civil attitude and Navy attitude, I hardly see any way around it. I think we could settle with Nomura in five minutes but the Japanese Army is the stumbling block.
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The service chiefs' recommendations on 5 November were that material aid to China and the contributions of the American Volunteer Group (Flying Tigers) be accelerated, but “that no ultimatum be delivered to Japan.” Their estimate includes three other points that merit more than passing attention. The first is the clear recognition on Stark's part that Kimmel lacked the warships and auxiliaries to operate in the western Pacific, for which Stark states, he “would have to be strengthened by withdrawing practically all naval vessels from the Atlantic” and he “would require tremendous merchant tonnage.” The second point is a contribution from Marshall on the reinforcement of the Philippines, with special reference to the B-17 fleet and “the potency of this threat” in deterring Japanese operations south and west of the islands. “The present combined naval, air, and ground forces,” the Army chief said, “will make attack on the islands a hazardous undertaking.” But where the capability of the B-17 was concerned, War Department planners had made a gross miscalculation, as Marshall acknowledged after the war.
46
To have effective and credible deterrent power of the kind Marshall (and Stimson) envisioned, the Philippines needed
thousands
of the heavy bombers, not the two hundred scheduled to be on location by April 1942. (And, of course, one could not allow half of the existing force to be destroyed on the ground, as MacArthur would allow, with seven to ten hours' prior notice of what had happened at Pearl Harbor on 7 December.)

The third point is the statement, probably authored by both chiefs, that “the only current plans for war against Japan in the Far East are to conduct defensive war, in cooperation with the British and Dutch, for the defense of the Philippines
and the British and Dutch East Indies
[emphasis added]”; and the chiefs did recommend to the President that the United States go to war if Japan attacked British or Dutch territory or mandated territory.
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The question may be asked, Was the United States
committed
to go to war if Japan attacked only Malaya and/or the NEI but not the Philippines or any other U.S. territory?

The answers to that question are circumstantial, since no document from the President or from the departments of State, War, or Navy has surfaced to prove a formal commitment to that effect. The evidence that does exist is mostly of British origin. In his statement before the Joint Congressional Committee, Secretary Stimson, drawing on his diary, recalled the President's unminuted cabinet meeting of Friday, 7 November. The President opened with what he said was his first-ever general poll of the cabinet: