Pearl Harbor Betrayed (42 page)

drawn by Robert M. Berish for
The Rising Sun in the Pacific,
courtesy National Historical Center

Within ten minutes Kimmel was in his corner office on the second deck of the submarine base, absorbing information and issuing messages and orders, including these:

At 0816:

FROM THE COMMANDER IN CHIEF TO ALL SHIPS AND STATIONS X HOSTILITIES WITH JAPAN COMMENCED WITH AIR RAID ON PEARL X

 

At 0817:

FROM CINC TO COMPATWING-2 X LOCATE ENEMY FORCE

 

At 0832:

FROM CINC TO ALL SHIPS PRESENT PEARL X JAPANESE SUBMARINE IN HARBOR

 

At 0902:

FROM CINC TO COMTASKFORCE 38 AND 12 AND ALL SHIPS PACIFIC FLT X EXECUTE WPL46 AGAINST JAPAN
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*   *   *

At Washington, Admiral Stark was talking with Navy Secretary Knox in the latter's office when a dispatch arrived from Pearl Harbor. It was Lt. Comdr. Ramsey's terse composition: “Air Raid Pearl Harbor: This Is No Drill.” Knox was disbelieving. “My God!” he barked. “This can't be true, this must mean the Philippines.” But Stark checked the point of origin on the signal, and said, “No, sir, this is Pearl.”
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Knox then called the President, who was with Harry Hopkins. As Hopkins wrote later that day,

I lunched with the President today at his desk in the Oval Room. We were talking about things far removed from war when at about 1:40 Secretary Knox called and said that they had picked up a radio from Honolulu from the Commander-in-Chief of our forces there advising all our stations that an air raid attack was on and that it was “no drill.”
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For twenty minutes, while awaiting confirmation of the message and additional details, Roosevelt discussed the likelihood of the report being true, as against Hopkins's belief that “there must be some mistake and that surely Japan would not attack in Honolulu.”
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*   *   *

Army Secretary Stimson, after an hour and a half meeting with Secretaries Hull and Knox in the secretary of State's office that broke up at noon, returned home for lunch. His diary entry for that Sunday records:

And just about 2:00 o'clock, while I was sitting at lunch, the President called me up on the telephone and in a rather excited voice asked me, “Have you heard the news?” I said, “Well, I have heard the telegrams which have been coming in about the Japanese advances in the Gulf of Siam.” He said, “Oh, no. I don't mean that. They have attacked Hawaii. They are now bombing Hawaii.” Well, that was an excitement indeed.
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General Marshall left the office of the Chief of Staff at noon, directly after filing an alert to General Short (copy to Admiral Kimmel), and had his driver take him to his quarters at Fort Myer for lunch. Before leaving, he had asked Col. John R. Deane, secretary of the general staff, to keep the office open and to have some of the commissioned and civilian personnel report for duty. As Deane remembered events six months later:

At about 1:30
P.M
. an enlisted man from the Navy rushed into my office out of breath with a pencil note, which was supposed to have been a message from the Navy radio operator at Honolulu and which said, as I recall: “Pearl Harbor attacked. This is no drill.” I immediately telephoned General Marshall at his quarters at Fort Myer.… He directed me to contact Hawaii if possible and verify the message. Before I could do this another and more official message came, indicating the correctness of the first message that had been received. General Marshall was in his office within ten minutes.
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*   *   *

This Sunday as on every Sunday since he first entered the State Department in 1933, Cordell Hull was in his office: first, as planned, to meet with Knox and Stimson; second, as expected since about ten o'clock when he was handed the “one o'clock” Magic decrypt, to receive the Japanese emissaries Nomura and Kurusu. The formal request made by them to have that audience at 1:00
P.M
. came by telephone shortly before noon. Hull agreed to remain in his office for that purpose. But shortly after the agreed-upon hour, Nomura called to ask for a postponement until 1:45. The two men entered State's diplomatic waiting room, in fact, at 2:05, the exact time when Hull received a call from Roosevelt advising him in a “steady but clipped” tone that “there's a report that the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor.” Hull asked if the report had been confirmed, and the President answered that it had not. (Stark would telephone in the confirmation to Roosevelt at 2:28, adding that there was damage to the fleet and loss of life.) Hull told Roosevelt that Nomura and Kurusu were waiting outside his office. The President advised him to go ahead and receive them, not to mention that he possessed news about an attack, but to receive their fourteen-part message “formally and coolly and bow them out.”
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Part of the mythology of Pearl Harbor is the explanation commonly given for Nomura's and Kurusu's failure to make the deadline imposed on them by Tokyo. The assumption of many is that Japan intended to break off negotiations with the United States as a substitute for a formal declaration of war, and to do so a half hour prior to the opening of hostilities. Article I of the Second Hague Peace Convention (1907), which Japan had signed, required that hostilities undertaken by one nation against another should not commence “without an explicit warning, in the form of either a reasoned declaration of war or of an ultimatum with conditional declaration of war.”
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Apparently, Japanese Foreign Minister Togo interpreted the fourteen-part response to Hull's Ten-Point note as meeting the stipulations of the last phrase cited. Roosevelt, too, after reading the first thirteen parts, said, “This means war”; as described above. Thus, according to a widely held belief, Japan's surprise attack would be considered in that country at least to be “honorable.” The delay in meeting that “half-hour prior” deadline has traditionally been attributed to the tardiness of the Japanese embassy in preparing the fourteen-part message for presentation. Ordered by a dispatch that had followed the pilot message that they “be absolutely sure not to use a typist,” Nomura and Kurusu relied upon an embassy official named Okumura Katsuzo, whose typing skills were at best “hunt and peck.” His slowness at the typewriter, so the story goes, forced the postponement of the presentation until after the attack.

Conservative historians in Japan have promoted this account to support their views, first, that the United States forced their country into war, and, second, that the only factor preventing the onset of hostilities from being entirely honorable was a bumbling embassy staff in Washington. In 1999 those views were challenged by Professor Takeo Iguchi, of the faculty of law and international relations at the International Christian University in Tokyo. Iguchi has turned up papers in the Foreign Ministry archives, as well as the war diary of the Imperial General Staff, which suggest that Japan's diplomatic and military leaders deliberately retarded the delivery of the fourteen-part message as a means of assuring the success of a surprise attack. A 7 December entry in the war diary notes with satisfaction that “our deceptive diplomacy is steadily proceeding toward success.” The diplomatic documents include an earlier draft of the fourteen-part message, dated 3 December, that more closely tracked the Hague requirement of a warning, in that it stated that Washington “would be held responsible for any and all the consequences that may arise in the future.” But the war diary shows that the Army and Navy staffs objected to that warning and forced the adoption of the weaker, non-threatening language contained in the final message. Professor Iguchi maintains that the delay in presenting the message was also deliberately planned by the military with the cooperation of a pliant Minister Togo. His evidence is the unusual number of “garbles” in the original enciphered text—significantly more than one finds in other diplomatic traffic. (These garbles, it may be noted, seem not to have slowed down the U.S. Navy cryptographers.) Iguchi observed that many leading historians in his country have described the embassy's fumbling performance as an “ugly blemish” on Japan's modern history. “But,” in his own view, “the blemish belongs to those who engaged in deliberate deception, or who have failed to ever go into the documentary evidence.”
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*   *   *

At 2:20 Secretary Hull directed that Nomura and Kurusu be brought into his office. He stood to meet them with one of his aides, Joseph W. Ballantine, alongside. Believing that there was but “one chance out of a hundred that [the Pearl Harbor attack] was not true,” he received the two Japanese with a stern face, and did not invite them to be seated. Nomura said that he had been instructed by his Foreign Ministry to deliver a message to the secretary at one o'clock, but had been delayed in putting it into proper form. Hull took the document and asked what the significance of one o'clock was. Nomura said he did not know. Hull skimmed through the fourteen parts—he had read them before—and then fixed a cold eye on Nomura:

I must say that in all my conversations with you during the last nine months I have never uttered one word of untruth. This is borne out absolutely by the record. In all my fifty years of public service I have never seen a document that was more crowded with infamous falsehoods and distortions—infamous falsehoods and distortions on a scale so huge that I never imagined until today that any Government on this planet was capable of uttering them.
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With that, he nodded toward the door. The two emissaries silently withdrew, their heads bowed. They would learn about the attack when they reached the embassy.

*   *   *

At 3:00
P.M
. President Roosevelt met with Hull, Stimson, Knox, Marshall, Stark, and Hopkins. We are indebted to Hopkins for a short contemporaneous account of the discussion: “The conference met in not too tense an atmosphere because I think that all of us believed that in the last analysis the enemy was Hitler and that he could never be defeated without force of arms; that sooner or later we were bound to be in the war and that Japan had given us an opportunity. Everybody, however, agreed on the seriousness of the war and that it would be a long, hard struggle. During the conference the news kept coming in indicating more and more damage to the fleet.”
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No doubt Stark was one of those present who was eager to duke it out with Hitler. But war with Japan by no means meant that Germany would necessarily declare war against the United States as a consequence of the Japanese attack. There was no known pact requiring it. Nor was it certain that the Congress would vote for a U.S. declaration against Germany, absent a German attack or declaration. (Four days later, in one of history's more baffling decisions—improvised and unnecessary, it doomed his war—Hitler declared war on the United States. On the same day, the U.S. Congress reciprocated.)

At 4:00 that afternoon, Washington time, Japanese Imperial Headquarters formally declared that a state of war existed between that country and both the United States and Great Britain. Prime Minister Churchill called the White House from England. He had heard the news. He would learn later that Singapore had been attacked, and that landings had been made at Khota Baru in Malaya. Roosevelt told him, “We are all in the same boat now.”
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In the evening, beginning at 8:30, Roosevelt met with his entire cabinet in the Oval Room. “The President nodded as we came in,” wrote Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, “but there was none of the usual cordial, personal greeting. This was one of the few occasions he couldn't muster a smile.” She mentioned “the terrible shock of Pearl Harbor, the destruction of his precious ships.…”
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The President sat at his desk with the cabinet in a semicircle in front of him. “He opened by telling us that this was the most serious meeting of the Cabinet that had taken place since 1861,” Stimson recorded in his diary, “and then he proceeded to enumerate the blows which had fallen upon us in Hawaii.”
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After which, he read slowly from the very brief draft statement that he intended to present to Congress the next day. Most of the members supported Hull's suggestion that the President deliver a more lengthy address covering the entire range of Japan's lawless conduct. But Roosevelt demurred; he thought a short statement centered on the attack at Hawaii would be both more widely read and more effective. Forgoing the proffered help of Hull and his staffers, he would write the finished statement himself. No one present supported Stimson's advocacy of a request to Congress that war also be declared against Germany. At about 9:30
P.M
., as FDR's aides had arranged, the cabinet meeting was enlarged to include Vice President Henry Wallace and ten leading senators and representatives of both the Democratic and Republican parties. “The President began by a very frank story of what had happened, including our losses,” Stimson recorded. “The effect on the Congressmen was tremendous. They sat in dead silence and even after the recital was over they had very few words.”
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Among those few words, we learn from another source, were these from Senator Thomas T. “Tom” Connally (D. Tex.), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee: “Well, they were supposed to be on alert.… I am amazed at the attack by Japan, but I am still more astounded at what happened to our Navy. They were all asleep. Where were our patrols? They knew these negotiations were going on.”
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