Pearl Harbor Betrayed (20 page)

As to whether it was thought the American people would back us up if it became necessary to strike at Japan, in case she should attack England in Malaya or the Dutch in the East Indies. The Cabinet was unanimous in the feeling that the country would support such a move. The Cabinet voted this way even though only Mr. Hull and the President [beside himself and Knox] knew of the efforts which we had been making to reinforce the Philippines with the big bombers and which we in the Army felt could be effective support in case any attack should be made on the British or Dutch in southeastern Asia.
48

It has long been suggested that a secret oral commitment to give armed support to Britain was made by Roosevelt to Churchill during their Atlantic Conference at Argentia, Newfoundland, on 9–13 August 1941, though Churchill had to be aware that the U.S. Constitution required public congressional approval of such action, and minutes of their meeting of 11 August kept by Sumner Welles state that “… the President had desired to make it clear that no future commitments had been entered into,” except as authorized under the terms of the Lend-Lease Act.
49
In his famous two-hour Vote of Confidence address to the House of Commons on 27 January 1942 Churchill revealed that at the Atlantic Conference the “probability” was established “that the United States, even if not herself attacked, would come into a war in the Far East. As time went on one had greater assurance that if Japan ran amok in the Pacific, we should not fight alone.”
50
Recently, British historian John Costello compiled War Cabinet minutes and Foreign Office messages from December 1941, archived at the Public Record Office in Kew, that tend to confirm such a commitment on Roosevelt's part, made not to Churchill but to Britain's ambassador in Washington, Lord Halifax, on 4 and 7 (London time) December. On the latter date, Churchill cabled Halifax: “From your recent telegrams we understand we can rely on armed support of the United States if we become involved in hostilities with Japan.”
51
Admiral Kimmel was not informed of this “commitment,” nor, more remarkably, was Admiral Hart, whose Asiatic Fleet was most proximate to the scene of a Japanese-British clash. But Hart learned of it from the U.S. naval attaché in Singapore, who cabled him at 1526 on 6 December (Singapore time):

[British Commander in Chief, Far East, Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert]
BROOKE POPHAM RECEIVED SATURDAY FROM WAR DEPT LONDON QUOTE WE HAVE NOW RECEIVED ASSURRANCE
[
sic
]
OF AMERICAN ARMED SUPPORT IN CASES AS FOLLOWS: AFIRM
[
sic
]
[A] WE ARE OBLIGED EXECUTE OUR PLANS TO FORESTALL JAPS LANDING ISTHMUS OF KRA OR TAKE ACTION IN REPLY TO NIPS INVASION ANY OTHER PART OF SIAM XX BAKER
[
B
]
IF DUTCH INDIES ARE ATTACHED
[
sic
]
AND WE GO TO THEIR DEFENSE XX CAST [C] IF JAPS ATTACK US THE BRITISH XX
52

A startled Hart radioed Stark: “Learn from Singapore we have assured Britain of armed support under three or four eventualities. Have received no corresponding instructions from you.”
53
In 1944 Stark testified that he had no knowledge in December 1941 of such assurances.
54
Hart also sent the information to Kimmel, but it arrived after the attack on Pearl.
55
With our only witnesses to that agreement Churchill, Halifax, and Brooke-Popham, the reader may wonder, Did Roosevelt in fact make the commitment described, or did the British ambassador hear only the words he decided to hear and none others? In other words, was the wish father to the “commitment”? We shall perhaps never know. If, in fact, Roosevelt
did
make such a commitment, was there any chance that he could get consent to it through the Congress? Of that, it is certain we shall never know.

*   *   *

On 7 November Ambassador Nomura presented Proposal A to Secretary Hull, who feigned close attention to its terms, since he had already read it through the lens of Magic. Though Nomura asked for a quick reply, Hull knew, again through Magic, that a fallback Proposal B was in the offing. While Nomura was nervously working against a 25 November deadline (as Hull also knew), it suited the State Department to play for time, mindful of the Stark-Marshall memorandum of two days before. Proposal A neither contained anything fundamentally new nor offered any real recessions from previously stated Japanese positions, and Hull said as much to Nomura on 15 November, when, finally, he formally made reply. He particularly pointed out that the proposal did not include withdrawal of troops from China and rejection of the Tripartite Pact. On that same date, special legate Kurusu reached Washington; two days later, accompanied by the ambassador, he called on both the secretary and the President. Hull found him a disagreeable sort: “Kurusu seemed to me the antithesis of Nomura. Neither his appearance nor his attitude commanded confidence or respect. I felt from the start that he was deceitful.”
56

Then, on the eighteenth, there occurred a remarkable mutation in the Japanese position. Kurusu, for all his off-putting first impression, showed himself capable of accommodation. With no instructions from or the pre-knowledge of Tokyo, he suggested to Hull that instead of each government rigidly continuing to pursue earlier argued positions, which were found to be so much at odds, they might want to strike out on an entirely fresh and different course, deciding, for example, to restore temporarily the status quo ante of early July—prior to the Japanese occupation of southern Indo-China and the U.S. imposition of the freeze order. (That this initiative ran counter to the Japanese military timetables would indicate that Kurusu arrived unaware of his nation's plans for Pearl Harbor.) Hull immediately resonated to the creative impulse of this move. Knowing from Magic that a Proposal B setting forth a modus vivendi was about to be presented, Hull saw in this moment an opportunity for the U.S. government to produce a conciliatory document of its own. Just the day before, the hardlining Treasury Secretary Morgenthau had suggested the carrot of gradually restoring oil supplies to Japan if that nation phased out her occupation of Indo-China. And Roosevelt himself, just before or after his first meeting with Kurusu on the seventeenth, suggested in a memorandum to Hull that for a six-month duration the two powers agree:

1. U.S. to resume economic relations—some oil and rice now—more later.

2. Japan to send no more troops to Indo-China or Manchurian border or any place South (Dutch, Brit. or Siam).

3. Japan to agree not to invoke the Tri-partite pact even if U.S. gets into European war.

4. U.S. to introduce Japs to Chinese to talk things over but U.S. to take no part in their conversations.

Later on Pacific agreements.
57

What Hull had in mind was a
three
-month truce that would give time for Stark and Marshall to prepare their forces. In his conception, during that period Japan would evacuate southern Indo-China and limit her force in northern Indo-China to 25,000 in exchange for a recision of the freeze order of 26 July. He placed responsibility for drafting the American modus vivendi document in the hands of State's Far Eastern Division, which also had in hand suggested hard-nosed terms for a temporary settlement in a memorandum drafted by Harry Dexter White, an assistant secretary of the Treasury, and transmitted to State by Morgenthau.
58
Before the American document took final form, however, Hull had to deal with the Japanese Proposal B, which Nomura and Kurusu formally presented him on 20 November.

By that date the two Japanese negotiators were in a bind. The day before, Kurusu had been sharply rebuked by Togo for proposing his own temporary limited arrangement, and both emissaries were admonished that there would be no withdrawal from southern Indo-China “merely on assurances that conditions prior to this freezing act will be restored.”
59
Thus, the one bargaining chip the emissaries held was taken from them. They were stuck with Proposal B, which they were instructed to present forthwith. When they did so, Hull, who had already read the Magic copy, had to restrain his outrage, as he wrote in his
Memoirs,
lest he give the Japanese “any pretext to walk out of the conversations.” He found the proposal “preposterous” and called it in his testimony before the JCC and in his
Memoirs
an “ultimatum.”
60
Certain nonpartisan historians since have characterized Hull's reaction as somewhat overdrawn.
61
The Japanese document was not intended to represent a final settlement. It was a stopgap arrangement on the basis of which further negotiations might proceed toward a comprehensive understanding. As such it was little different in nature from the modus vivendi document that Hull's own people were preparing.

One factor that drove Hull's intemperate reaction was a Magic decryption of 20 November from Togo to his emissaries instructing them to interpret Article I of Proposal B as requiring the suspension of all U.S. aid to Chiang Kai-shek.
62
China remained the sticking point, and Hull maintained that that particular condition was “unacceptable.” He had no difficulty in persuading Roosevelt to the same view. Historian Roberta Wohlstetter has commented, pointedly, that “from the extremity of his [Hull's] denunciation of Plan B, one would never have guessed that such a proposal [suspending aid to China] was currently being debated in his own Department.”
63

With Japan's Proposal B dead on delivery, all that remained as a possible bridge over troubled waters was State's own modus vivendi, which was passing through three successive drafts. As well as helping to inspire those drafts, the White-Morgenthau memorandum also became the basis of a so-called Ten-Point Program outlining U.S. terms for a future, final, and general settlement of disputed issues. Hull regarded the Ten Points as essentially a restatement of principles that long guided U.S. foreign policy. But points three and four required the Japanese to get out of China and Indo-China and to stop subverting the Chiang Kai-shek regime. In its bare-knuckle form, the Ten-Point document would not normally be the paper that a seasoned diplomat would want to put in front of potential enemies in the barometric chamber of endgame negotiations—unless one wanted war. Other, less intransigent options would be exhausted first. But Hull, as we shall see, would follow his own drummer. Nomura and Kurusu could not follow theirs, as Togo, in Tokyo, prescribed the beat for them. There were “reasons beyond your ability to guess why we wanted to settle Japanese-American relations by the 25th,” Togo cabled them on the twenty-second, but “if the signing can be completed by the 29th” and “if everything can be finished” by that date, “we have decided to wait until that date. This time we mean it, that the deadline absolutely cannot be changed. After that, things are automatically going to happen.”
64

Neither Kimmel nor Short was advised of this extended deadline.

In the days 21–26 November Hull submitted copies of the penultimate drafts of State's modus vivendi proposal and Ten-Point Program to service chiefs, and to the emissaries of Great Britain, Australia, the Netherlands, and China. Admiral Stark and Acting Assistant Chief of Staff Major General Leonard T. Gerow, acting for Marshall, approved of the modus vivendi, Gerow noting, “The adoption of its provisions would attain one of our present major objectives—the avoidance of war with Japan.”
65
The reactions that came in from the embassies and their home governments were mixed. The Dutch were generally in support of the truce document, though they worried about the amount of oil they would have to deliver. Australia came on board, somewhat reluctantly. Churchill, answering for the British, was tepid: “What about Chiang Kai Shek? Is he not having a very thin diet? Our anxiety is about China.”
66
And the Chinese were plainly livid: Chinese Ambassador Hu Shih and Chiang's brother-in-law T. V. Soong made anxious complaints to Roosevelt, Hull, Stimson, and Knox that not only China's military morale but her very survival was in danger of being sacrificed by this act of “appeasement.”
67

In the midst of Hull's consultations, Stimson had, on the twenty-fifth, what he called in his diary a “very full day indeed.” At 9:30
A.M
. he and Knox met in Hull's office to discuss the three months' truce that Hull planned to lay before the Japanese that day or the next. He joined Hull in thinking that there was not much chance of the Japanese accepting it. At noon he met for an hour and a half at the White House with Roosevelt, Hull, Knox, Marshall, and Stark. The President opened the meeting by stating that “we were likely to be attacked perhaps as soon as next Monday [1 December], for the Japanese are notorious for making an attack without warning, and the question was what we should do. The question was how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves. It was a difficult proposition.”
68
Much has been made of this Roosevelt statement by some revisionist historians, who see in it evidence that the President was deliberately provoking Japan into war. This theory is hard to reconcile, however, with the fact that all the principals at the meeting had earlier agreed that Hull should make one more effort to delay or avert war by presenting the Japanese emissaries with State's modus vivendi document. Stark and Marshall had the greatest stake in that agreement and wanted no war with Japan
at all
. More likely, Roosevelt was simply venting his doubt that the Togo government would accept the document—and what then? He would not be an aggressor himself.

The “difficult proposition,” of course, placed at a distinct military disadvantage the commanders in Hawaii and the Philippines who now would be expected to absorb the first blows—perhaps disabling blows—without, under this policy, being given the chance to make preemptive, protective strikes of their own. It is not thought (by this writer) that the President had Hawaii in mind when he made his statement, since those islands were so distant from the longitudes where Japanese actions were expected. Roosevelt, obviously, was looking for political cover with Congress and the public. Let the enemy fire the first shot; let an outraged citizenry shoot back. He did not reckon, however, with Admiral Kimmel's war plan WPPac-46, which stipulated that the Pacific Fleet would shoot and ask questions later if the Japanese so much as stuck their noses into the Hawaiian tent, say, within five hundred nautical miles out. And, as events unfolded, it was Kimmel who
did
fire the first shot in the Pacific war, Roosevelt's policy notwithstanding.