Pearl Harbor Betrayed (51 page)

62
. PHA, Pt. 12, pp. 156–57.

63
. Wohlstetter,
Pearl Harbor,
p. 234. It may be added here that the centrality of the China issue was recognized by both sides when Nomura and Kurusu met with Hull on 1 December. According to Nomura's account, “We then said that behind the problems at hand, there has always been the China problem.… It is of the utmost importance for us to avoid standing by and watching our own respective countries die just because of the China problem. Hull indicates his agreement with this.” NARA, RG 80, PHLO, Statement of Evidence, p. 571.

64
. NA, RG 80, PHLO, Box 5, Statement of Evidence, Japanese Diplomatic Dispatches, pp. 337–38. This message was not sent to Kimmel or Short.

65
. PHA, Pt. 14, pp. 1103–07.

66
. Ibid., p. 1300. This message did not arrive at the White House until 12:55
A.M
. on the twenty-sixth.

67
. Ibid., Pt. 4, p. 1167 ff; Pt. 2, p. 774.

68
. PHA, Pt. 11, p. 5433, Stimson diary entry, 25 November 1941.

69
. Ibid., pp. 5433–34, diary entries 25, 26 November 1941.

70
. Hull's memorandum is reproduced in the Exhibits of the JCC, Pt. 14, pp. 1176–77. In his
Days of Infamy,
pp. 126–31, 384 n. 79, 386 n. 30, John Costello has used second- and thirdhand evidence to support his contention that “it was the president who took the decision to abandon the modus vivendi that Wednesday morning, over the secretary of state's strongly voiced objections.” In the first instance, he cites a letter from Max Bishop, a career State Department official who “kept the files of all American-Japanese conversations during the summer and fall of 1941.” In a letter to former ambassador to Japan Joseph C. Grew, dated 14 October 1955, Bishop related what he had been told by another State official, Landreth Harrison, who had been in Hull's office “just a day or so before November 26.” As Bishop related Harrison's experience: “Hull was summoned by private telephone to the White House. He asked Mr. Harrison to wait in the office for he, Secretary Hull, expected to return immediately. The Secretary was gone only 15 minutes or so and came back in a very agitated frame of mind. He said something like this: ‘Those madmen over there [White House—he may have used the term “madmen” but Harrison doesn't want to go that far] do not believe me when I tell them the Japanese will attack us. You cannot give an ultimatum to a powerful and proud people and not expect them to react violently.'”

In the second instance, Costello cites the same letter from Bishop as his source for a supposed exchange of letters between Hull and Hornbeck on 27 November. Bishop prefaced his relation of the text with the story that, sometime after 7 December, Hornbeck asked Bishop for the return of all his “personal memoranda.” Bishop complied, but not without first arranging to have them copied “because of their historical significance.” According to Bishop, the 27 November exchange went as follows: “In days to come,” Hornbeck is supposed to have written to Hull, “you will look upon the decision which was made and the action you took yesterday [holding back the modus vivendi] with great satisfaction.” He went on to reassure Hull that the modus vivendi note had little chance of success, since the Japanese would have viewed it as a “not … completely honest document” expressly crafted “to give us more time to prepare our weapons of defense.” Hull, according to the account, was angered by this oleaginous compliment and wrote back at once to say, “We differ so entirely … that I must in writing offer my dissent.” “It is no answer to the question of whether this proposal is sound and desirable at this most critical period,” he told Hornbeck, “to say that it probably would not have been accepted by Japan in any event. If that sort of demagoguery stuff would be rung into this sort of understanding, then there could never be any settlement between countries except at the point of a sword.” This sounds like a Hull proud of what he had attempted to produce as a truce or compromise.

The Harrison recollection is secondhand hearsay. Where the Hornbeck-Hull exchange is concerned, one must say that in history nothing substitutes for examination of the original documents. And here the original (alleged) Hornbeck-Hull correspondence of 27 November is missing. In the matter of Pearl Harbor much mischief has been created through appeal to secondary “sources” that, time and again, have proved to be worthless or wrong. The dialogue and correspondence reproduced in the Bishop letter may have in fact occurred in that or similar fashion (and “similar” means that the hearer or the reader might well have skewed what he heard or read). But in the effort of establishing that Roosevelt abandoned the modus vivendi over Hull's passionate objections, as Costello contends, the Bishop letter, one must conclude, has questionable probative value.

71
. PHA, Pt. 14, p. 1083. The memorandum was signed on the twenty-sixth and delivered on the twenty-seventh. Rear Admiral Turner is said to have fashioned the first draft. It should be remarked here that neither the modus vivendi note nor the Ten-Point note was sent to Kimmel and Short in Hawaii.

72
. NARA, RG 80, PHLO, Box 14, Hornbeck to Hull, 31 October 1941. On 3 November Hornbeck read a Statement to the Joint Board Meeting (Stimson, Knox, Marshall, Stark, and their respective War Plans staffs), in which he said of a U.S.-Japan war: “With Japan as comparatively weak as she is … we need not fear unduly the military outcome—or even the immediate consequence—of such a conflict”; NARA, RG 80, PHLO, Box 14, p. 2. Later in the meeting, Rear Admiral Royal E. Ingersoll, Stark's assistant CNO, objected to such brashness and declared that he for one did not accept State's view “that Japan could be defeated in military action in a few weeks”; PHA, Pt. 14, p. 1064. For a short profile of Hornbeck, see Thompson, “Department of State,” in Borg and Okamoto, eds.,
Pearl Harbor as History,
pp. 81–106,
passim
.

73
. Ibid., Pt. 5, p. 2089.

74
. See, e.g., the diary of Adolf A. Berle, Jr., Assistant Secretary of State, entry of 1 December 1941. Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, NY., microfilm of typescript in the University of Florida Libraries.

75
. Ibid.

76
. Julius W. Pratt,
Cordell Hull, 1933–44
(New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1964), vol. II, p. 515.

77
. Robert Dallek,
Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 308 and n. 48; cf. Wohlstetter,
Pearl Harbor
, p. 244; Feis,
Road to Pearl Harbor
, p. 320. For Roosevelt's and the American public's absorption with Europe and the Atlantic see Wohlstetter,
Pearl Harbor
, p. 230: “President Roosevelt was so deeply interested in the European situation that he left Far Eastern matters almost entirely to Secretary Hull.”

78
. See Appendix B. Hull recalled, in May 1946, that after the emissaries read the document, “Mr. Kurusu said that he felt that our response to their proposal [B] could be interpreted as tantamount to meaning the end”; PHA, Pt. 11, p. 5369.

79
. Reproduced in Feis,
Road to Pearl Harbor
, p. 321, n. 4. Stimson took a different view of the Ten Points document in his testimony before the JCC in March 1946: “The statement contained a reaffirmation of our constant and regular position without the suggestion of a threat of any kind. I personally was relieved that we had not backed down on any of the fundamental principles on which we had stood for so long and which I felt we could not give up without the sacrifice of our national honor and prestige in the world. I submit, however, that no impartial reading of this document can characterize it as being couched in the terms of an ultimatum, although the Japanese were of course only too quick to seize upon it and give it that designation for their own purposes.” Stimson, Statement before the JCC, PHA, Pt. 11, p. 5423. Among the diplomatic historians, Herbert Feis disputes the characterization of the Ten-Point program as an “ultimatum,”
Road to Pearl Harbor,
p. 321. According to Stimson, Roosevelt called it a “magnificent statement”; ibid., p. 5435. On 27 October 1945, anxious to exculpate Hull from a charge made by the Army Pearl Harbor Board in 1944 that Hull's Ten-Point program was “the document that touched the button that started the war,” Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal announced that Japanese documents taken from the heavy cruiser
Nachi
, sunk in Manila Bay, disclosed that the order implementing the Pearl Harbor attack (Combined Fleet Top Secret Operation Order No. 2) was dated 7 November, twenty days before Hull delivered the Ten-Point document. NARA, RG 80, PHLO, Box 23, Speech by Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal at the Navy League Dinner, Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York City, 27 October 1945. A similar exculpation, based on the same evidence, was issued to the press on 31 October 1945 by Secretary of State James F. Byrnes;
New York Times,
sec. 1, p. 2, 1 November 1945. The Army Board's charge originated from a misinterpretation of testimony given before it by former Ambassador Grew; PHA, Pt. 29, pp. 2148, 2151–53; Pt. 3, p. 137.

80
. Ibid., Pt. 11, p. 5422, Stimson diary entry, 27 November 1941. Asked to explain this statement during the JCC investigation, Hull answered: “From November 22 on it was my individual view that Japan was through with any serious conversations looking to a peaceful settlement. From that day I and my associates had reached a stage of clutching at straws in our effort to save the situation.” PHA, Pt. 2, pp. 404, 554. In his
Memoirs,
published in 1948, Hull denied making the Pilate-like “washed my hands” statement: “I did not make, and could not have made in the light of what occurred, the statement later attributed to me that I had ‘washed my hands' of the matter. As long as there was the most microscopic possibility of peace, I intended to continue working toward that end as the record shows” (II, p. 1080).

Chapter Six: War Warnings

1
. PHA, Pt. 11, p. 5435.

2
. Ibid., pp. 5423, 5425.

3
. Ibid., p. 5424.

4
. PHA, Pt. 11, p. 5424.

5
. Ibid., Pt. 14, p. 1330. The dates and times given are from KC, Roll 2, “Summary of Evidence Concerning Time of 27 and 28 Nov 41 War Department Warning Messages to Hawaii and Replies Thereto,” pp. 1–2.

6
. NARA, RG 80, PHLO, Box 5, Messages from the War and Navy Departments, 1941, p. 10; also PHA, Pt. 7, p. 2935.

7
. Ibid. Pt. 14, p. 1330.

8
. Ibid.

9
. Short replied on 29 November and 4 December, respectively, to the warnings from Adams and Arnold; ibid., pp. 1331, 1333.

10
. The Army levels of alert and what each required are given in Standing Operating Procedure, Hawaiian Department [5 November 1941] in Pt. 15, pp. 1440–44.

11
. Ibid. Wohlstetter explains how Short arrived at his three levels of alert in
Pearl Harbor
, Appendix, pp. 403–04; see also her p. 47.

12
. PHA, Pt. 10, p. 4860.

13
. For Short see ibid., Pt. 7, p. 2984. For Kimmel see KC, Roll 20, “My Knowledge of Condition of Army Alert November 27 to December 7, 1941.” Kimmel's chief of staff, Captain “Poco” Smith, told him that the Army had gone on all-out alert, and Bloch did not know the alert was for sabotage only until Short told him after the attack; see Prange,
At Dawn We Slept,
p. 730.

14
. PHA., Pt. 35, pp. 217–18.

15
. Ibid., Pt. 23, p. 1106.

16
. Ibid., Pt. 7, p. 3016. As shown in the present text, directly below Short's quotation, Short did institute radar reconnaissance, and in so doing accurately reflected Stimson's thinking. In his Statement before the JCC, Stimson praised “what I regarded as a most effective means of reconnaissance against air attack and one to which I had personally devoted a great deal of attention during the preceding months. I refer to the radar equipment with which the Hawaiian Department was then provided. This equipment permitted approaching planes to be seen at distances of approximately 100 miles; and to do so in darkness and storm as well as in clear daylight.” Ibid., Pt. 11, p. 5425.

17
. Ibid., p. 2930.

18
. Ibid. Marshall gave his reasons for declaring the alert in a letter addressed to Herron on 26 June, but never sent; ibid., Pt. 15, p. 1597.

19
. Ibid., p. 1594.

20
. Ibid., p. 1600.

21
. Ibid., Pt. 7, p. 2930.

22
. Ibid.

23
. Ibid., p. 2935.

24
. Ibid., p. 2941.

25
. Ibid., p. 2985.

26
. Ibid., p. 2942.

27
. Ibid., pp. 2942–43.

28
. Ibid., p. 2936.

29
. Ibid., p. 2922. In a “Memorandum for the Record,” dated 31 January 1942, Brigadier General Sherman Miles, who was stepping down as assistant chief of staff, Military Intelligence Division (G-2), wanted the world to know that, while he considered Short's acknowledgment message No. 959 “wholly inadequate,” he regarded his 29 November detailed report of what he was doing under Alert No. 1 “a satisfactory answer.” Neither message was approved or corrected. NARA, RG 80, PHLO, Box 26. Short's 29 November report was received in the War Department code room at 12:57
A.M
., 30 November, Washington time.

30
. PHA, Pt. 7, p. 2948.

31
. Ibid., p. 2949.

32
. Ibid., p. 2948.

33
. Ibid.

34
. Pogue,
Marshall: Ordeal and Hope,
p. 212.

35
. The history of the routing of Short's No. 959 through the Munitions Building was developed by Lt. Comdr. John Ford Baecher, USNR, one of two Navy liaison officers assigned to supply evidence to the JCC. He was a graduate of Harvard Law School with three years naval service. His four-page routing document was entitled “Memorandum for Mr. Hidalgo,” and was dated 14 March 1946. It is found in NARA, RG 80, PHLO, Box 26.