"
Interestingly enough, the American people narrowly missed having an opportunity to learn the essential truths about Pearl Harbor in a sensational and fully publicized manner less than three years after the event. As a result of research by his staff, and possibly some "leaks" from Intelligence officers of 1941, Thomas E. Dewey, the Republican candidate for the presidency, had learned during the campaign of 1944 that President Roosevelt had been reading the intercepted Japanese diplomatic messages in the Purple and other codes and was aware of the threat of a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor at any time after November 26, 1941, but had failed to warn the commanders there, General Walter C. Short and Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, in time to avert the attack or to meet it effectively. Dewey considered presenting these vital facts in a major campaign speech. Roosevelt learned of this through the Democratic grapevine planted at Republican headquarters and, in understandable alarm, pressured Mr. Dewey through General George C. Marshall to abandon his plan, on the ground that it would endanger the war effort by revealing that we had broken Japanese codes. Marshall twice sent Colonel Carter W. Clarke to urge Dewey not to refer to Pearl Harbor during the campaign. To cover up for Roosevelt, Marshall has contended that he operated on his own initiative in sending Clarke to importune Dewey. As Clarke knew by this time, the basis of his plea was spurious, namely, that such a speech by Dewey would first reveal to the Japanese that we had broken their Purple diplomatic code. Actually, the Japanese had learned of this from the Germans by the end of April, 1941, over three years before the 1944 campaign. Dewey did not know this at the time and, as a supposedly patriotic duty, he suppressed the speech and the publicity which might have won the election for him.5 In a column written for the King Features Syndicate and widely published on the eve of the 1964 election, the famed journalist, John Chamberlain, described Dewey's lugubrious retrospective observations on his deception by Roosevelt and Marshall in 1944:
Nixon's 1960 agony recalls that of Thomas Dewey in 1944, when the Republicans knew practically all the details about the surprise at Pearl Harbor yet were loath to put the issue into the campaign lest they reveal to the Japanese that the United States had broken a critical code.
This columnist vividly recalls riding in a car from Elmira to Geneva, New York, in August of 1945 with Dewey and listening to his rueful account of the decision to say nothing about Pearl Harbor. The worst of it, from Dewey's standpoint, is that he had a suspicion that the Japanese had changed their codes long before 1944, which would have made campaign revelations about Pearl Harbor harmless to the U. S. from a military standpoint.
When I talked to Tom Dewey in 1945, he thought he might have been cheated out of a winning issue in 1944.
Chamberlain made similar revelations in an article in Life while the Congressional Pearl Harbor investigation was still in progress, yet Mr. Dewey was never called to testify. John T. Flynn gave me much more detail about Pearl Harbor and the Dewey campaign by personal correspondence and conversation in the autumn and early winter of 1944. Flynn had been active at Republican headquarters during the campaign. My suggestion to Mr. Dewey in 1966 that he publicize the facts of the 1944 situation in connection with the twenty-fifth anniversary of Pearl Harbor proved fruitless. This is entirely understandable. In 1966, Mr. Dewey was not a candidate for the presidency. He was the responsible head of a great legal firm, and publicity so damaging to Roosevelt's public reputation might have alienated important clients not only among Democrats but also Republicans who were interventionist-minded relative to World War II. It might, however, also have done more to give the American public some idea of the realities of Pearl Harbor than the combined writings of revisionist historians in a whole generation since 1944."
Barnes
"
When war broke out in Europe in early September, 1939, this gave Roosevelt an ominous impulse and continuous inspiration. The war had hardly begun when, on September 11th, Roosevelt wrote Churchill, then only First Lord of the Admiralty, suggesting that they work together through a secret system of communication: "What I want you and the Prime Minister to know is that I shall at all times welcome it, if you will keep me in touch personally with anything you want me to know about. You can always send sealed letters through your pouch or my pouch." Churchill is said to have responded enthusiastically, including the statement: "I am half American and the natural person to work with you. It is evident that we see eye to eye. Were I to become Prime Minister of Britain we could control the world." A method of secret communication was agreed upon in which Roosevelt would sign himself "Potus" (President of the United States), and Churchill would sign as "Former Naval Person". About 2000 messages were exchanged in this way prior to Pearl Harbor, and Churchill is our authority for the statement that the really important negotiations and agreements between Britain and the United States from 1939 to Pearl Harbor were handled in this way, all quite unknown to the American public. It has since become obvious that while Roosevelt was assuring this country of his peaceful aims he was also actually doing all possible in cooperation with Churchill to get us into war as soon as practicable. In addition to other sources, I have this information personally from Tyler Kent, the code clerk in the American embassy in London, who read all of this material from September, 1939, to the time of his arrest in May, 1941. Two telegrams that have been recovered from this secret correspondence, indicate the tenor and objectives of their collaboration. Roosevelt told Churchill that the United States was firmly isolationist and could not be induced to enter the war in behalf of Poland. Churchill responded: "Every chain has its weakest spot and the weak link in the Axis chain is Japan. Goad Japan into attacking the U. S. and you will have the U. S. in the war." While this proved to be the strategy followed by Roosevelt, it is unlikely that the policy originated with Churchill."
Barnes
"Despite the strong American isolationist sentiment, Roosevelt never really gave up hope of getting the United States into the war after October, 1937, first and directly in Europe until at least the end of July, 1941. During the spring and summer of 1941 he did everything possible to provoke Germany and Italy to produce some "act of war" in Europe or on the Atlantic that he could use to get the United States into the European conflict, especially through our illegal convoying of munitions and supplies to Britain and Russia, but neither Germany nor Italy would rise to the bait. He had not, however, neglected the possibility of war with Japan. The extensive and quasi-secret increases in the American navy after 1933 obviously pointed the finger at Japan. As far back as the winter of 1937-1938 he had sent Captain Royal E. Ingersoll to Europe to discuss with the English the possibilities of collaboration in the event of war with Japan. In January, 1941, Roosevelt and Hull rejected the amazingly generous Japanese effort to settle Japanese-American relations by peaceful methods presented by a commission with full Japanese authorization. The rebuff of this really sensational overture from Japan seriously undermined the hope of the latter in arriving at a peaceful settlement with the United States, but the effort was continued for over ten months. Japan offered to retire from the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis in return for a guaranty of peace with the United States."
Barnes
"On August 9-12, 1941, Roosevelt met with Churchill at Argentia, off the coast of Newfoundland, and arranged the details of entering the second World War through the backdoor of a war with Japan. Churchill wished immediate war but Roosevelt insisted on having at least three months to "baby" the Japanese along so as to have more time to get ready for war, to allow Russia to take more heat off Britain, and to extend the possibility that Germany or Italy would still provide an act of war on the Atlantic, now that Russia was at war with Germany. These aggressive moves were disguised to the American public by issuing a high-sounding but morally deceptive Atlantic Charter, actually only a press release, the terms of which had been violated before the ink was dry on the document; indeed, by actions before the meeting at Argentia."
Barnes
"
For years before the attack on Pearl Harbor, naval maneuvers had been held off the island of Oahu in Hawaii to test the feasibility of a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The results were far from reassuring to the United States, and were equally a definite warning of the danger and practicability of a Japanese task force attack there. As early as 1932, Admiral Harry E. Yarnell, one of our earliest air-minded naval officers, made the first carrier-based task force test and he was able to execute a surprise attack when operating only sixty miles off Pearl Harbor. These maneuvers were continued, and in 1938 a successful air attack was launched from the carrier Saratoga one hundred miles off Pearl Harbor. The Japanese task force in December, 1941, operated from over 200 miles away. In April, 1941, General Frederick L. Martin and Admiral Patrick N. L. Bellinger, commanders of the Army and Navy air forces respectively at Pearl Harbor, described in detail the nature of a possible Japanese air attack on Pearl Harbor which was uncannily identical with Yamamoto's plan for the actual Japanese attack a few months later. This was forwarded to the Army and Navy headquarters in Washington but no positive response or protective operation took place.
Long before Admiral Kimmel assumed command at Pearl Harbor in January, 1941, it had become basic in Pacific naval strategy to accept the fact that if the Japanese ever started a war with the United States they would first strike our Pacific fleet, especially if based at Pearl Harbor, to protect their flank before they could safely move large naval forces south or north from Japan. This had been constantly emphasized to Washington from the time of the assertions of General Hugh Drum in 1935 and of General George V. Strong in 1940, to the observations in 1941 of Commander Arthur N. McCollum, head of the Far Eastern Section of Naval Intelligence, the man who had probably the best informed conceptions of the naval and diplomatic situation in the Far East, with the possible exception of Colonel Otis K. Sadtler of the Army Signal Corps and Colonel Rufus S. Bratton, Chief of the Far Eastern Section of Military Intelligence.
Viewed most generally, then, it had long been assumed that the Japanese would not go to war with the United States without first protecting their flank by trying to destroy the American Pacific fleet, wherever it was stationed. It was also clear that the American fleet would be both more inciting and more vulnerable to a Japanese attack if stationed at Pearl Harbor, as compared to its relative safety before the spring of 1940, when it had been based on the Pacific coast of the United States, mainly at San Diego. Admiral James O. Richardson, Kimmel's able predecessor as commander of the Pacific fleet, bitterly protested the fleet's permanent retention at Pearl Harbor, after maneuvers in the spring of 1940, and labelled Pearl Harbor "a damned mouse trap" for the American navy.Indeed, it is certain that Richardson's untimely removal as head of the fleet was brought
about by his determined resistance to what he considered the folly of keeping the fleet at Pearl Harbor. Admiral Frank E. Beatty, a well informed authority, has told me that it may also have been due in part to the animosity of Harry Hopkins, who sat in on Richardson's conferences with Roosevelt. Richardson was annoyed by Hopkins' interjection of his opinions into the debate and understandably commented unflatteringly on Hopkins' lack of qualifications as an authority on naval strategy."
Barnes
"Kimmel had never heard of the Purple machine or of our breaking the Japanese Purple code. Pearl Harbor had been denied a Purple machine in the summer of 1941, when the one which was originally designed to go to Pearl Harbor was sent as a "spare" to London, which already had two Purple machines.But Kimmel had been given clearly to understand that he would immediately obtain all information of any significance in safeguarding his operations at Pearl Harbor and believed he was getting it. Actually, Kimmel never received any of the intercepts from the diplomatic messages in the Purple code after the meeting of Roosevelt and Churchill at Argentia early in August, 1941, and no details about Japanese-American negotiations at any time."
Barnes
"Stark wrote Kimmel frequently and in a friendly manner but the main theme of his letters before September was that Germany was our main enemy, that Roosevelt wished to get into the war directly in Europe, and that the administration did not desire to be drawn into waging a two-front conflict by having a war with Japan on its hands. When Stark did begin later on to write Kimmel about a possible war with Japan, he stressed the fact that it would probably begin thousands of miles away in the Philippines, the southwest Pacific, or in the English possessions and the Dutch East Indies, and even here was as likely to be one of Japan against Britain and Holland as directly against the United States. Of course, Stark was fully aware that any Japanese attack on British or Dutch territory would immediately bring the United States into war against Japan, as arranged in ABCD and Rainbow 5. Never once did Stark hint of any early Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and it is very possible that he did not expect one until December 4th, when Roosevelt by his order to Marshall bottled up any Navy warnings to Pearl Harbor and Stark was so informed."
Barnes
(Japan was unable to just go to war against Britain an Holland because of ABCD etc) "It so happened that December 4th was the day on which the Chicago Tribune published the implications of Rainbow 5, which fully proved that Roosevelt had been planning war over many months, if necessary without any attack on American forces, while at the same time he was assuring the American people that all his actions were designed to keep the United States out of war. Naturally, this sensational exposure created great excitement in Washington, and Roosevelt ordered Marshall to try to locate the source of this embarrassing leak."
"Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, as one of the leading warmongers of the time, was eager to get us into any available war, although he preferred one with Germany, but he wished to have Hawaii well prepared for war and seems to have played no decisive role in precipitating war with Japan or blacking out Hawaii. By the latter part of November, when the Japanese began to send extensive forces southward and it seemed possible that the Japanese would make their first attack in the southwest Pacific, on the islands or mainland, Knox was especially vigorous in maintaining that the United States must stick by the arrangements in ABCD and Rainbow 5 and resist the Japanese by force even though there was no attack on American territory and forces."
Barnes
"But on the heels of his victory in the election of 1940, Roosevelt, as noted earlier, started military conferences with the British which, in April 1941, ended at Singapore with the ADB agreement, to include the Dutch. It was all implemented by ABCD and Rainbow 5, which specified that if the Japanese went beyond a certain arbitrary line in the Southwest Pacific-100'E and 10.N – and even threatened the British and Dutch possessions there, the United States would enter the war against Japan even if American territory, forces and flag were not attacked by the Japanese. Roosevelt actually desired, above all, to avoid having to enter the war in this manner. If this happened, he would have to reveal that he had deceived the American public in his campaign promises and would not have anything like a united country behind him."
Barnes
"Secretary Henry Morgenthau tells of a conversation with Roosevelt as late as the morning of December 3rd in which the latter seemed frustrated, despairing of any Japanese attack, and feared that he and Churchill might have to plan and strike the first blow, an emergency which Roosevelt desperately wished to avoid for political reasons, as Stimson has revealed in his Diary and was stipulated in the messages to Short on November 27th and to Kimmel on November 29th."
"There are three reputable reports from British intelligence in the Far East that, between November 30th and December 7th, London was informed that the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor on December 7th. If these reports, or any one of them, are accurate, then there is little doubt that Churchill would have passed the information on to Roosevelt. General Bonner Fellers, who was in Army Intelligence in the Near East and located at Cairo, has given me personally and by letter the following relevant information. Here, quoting from his letter of March 6th, 1967:
About 10:00 A. M., Saturday, December 6, 1941, I walked into the Royal Air Force Headquarters in Cairo. The Air Marshal who was then in command of the RAF Middle East sat at his desk. Immediately, he opened with: "Bonner, you will be at war within 24 hours." He continued: "We . . . have a secret signal Japan will strike the U. S. in 24 hours." . . . I had been in Egypt for about fifteen months. During that time no word whatsoever had been sent to me from G-2 in Washington that Japanese-American relations were strained."
Barnes
"Marshall had very special reasons for being subservient and trustworthy to Roosevelt. The latter, influenced by Mrs. Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins, had rescued Marshall from obscurity after his conspicuous failure in the armed command of the famous Eighth Regiment, and MacArthur had relegated him to the post of an instructor of the National Guard in Illinois. Roosevelt promoted Marshall to be full general over some thirty-four superior officers, and even made him Chief-of-Staff of the Army. There is no doubt that Marshall also greatly admired Roosevelt personally and, as the events of December 4-7 demonstrated, put his loyalty to the President above his loyalty to the military services and his country."
(Talk about inverts!)
"The main reason for deploring overemphasis on the failure to send last minute warnings is that this obscures and confuses the real nature and the extent of the guilt for failing to warn Hawaii in plenty of time.It is also futile and misleading to exaggerate the minor acts of incompetence or mis-judgment at Pearl Harbor between very early morning on the 7th and the attack at 7:50, so much stressed by Roberta Wohlstetter at the beginning of her book on Pearl Harbor. Such were the failure properly to interpret the discovery of a Japanese scouting submarine right off Pearl Harbor on the early morning of the 7th, the apparent indifference shown by Lieutenant Kermit Tyler of the Army Air Corps to the report from the Army radar station about some strange approaching planes, which might have been thought to be those of Admiral Halsey who was returning with his task force from Wake or the approaching B-17's, and the official closing down of this radar station at 7:00 on the morning of the 7th, as had been ordered, but was not actually closed. These have some curious interest as minor deficiencies and mistakes of judgment, greatly bolstered by the impact of hindsight, but they had little to do with the approach, diverting or repulse of the Japanese bombing planes, which were already well on their way from their carriers to attack Pearl Harbor.....Defenders of Roosevelt and Washington have sought to equate these trifling and exaggerated errors, due to surprise, confusion and haste at Pearl Harbor on the morning of the attack, with the failure of Washington to pass on the Bomb Plot messages to Short and Kimmel, the refusal to give them the Purple diplomatic messages, the denial of a Purple machine to Pearl Harbor, and the killing of the efforts of McCollum, Noyes, Sadtler, Bratton and others after November 26th to warn Short and Kimmel about the approaching danger of a Japanese attack. These were the main deliberate delinquencies of Washington which made possible the successful Japanese attack – to say nothing of the fact that most of the top Washington officialdom, civil and military, involved in such matters, appear to have permitted the movement of Japanese task forces down the southwest Pacific and the strategic assumptions of Rainbow 5 (WPL 46) to drive the whole traditional Pacific naval strategy relative to the threat to Pearl Harbor from their minds."(Methods used in the anti-revisionist propaganda film "Tora ,Tora,Tora")
"While the attack on Pearl Harbor may have saved Roosevelt's political record at home, from the point of view of Japanese military interests it would certainly have been far better for the Japanese to have refrained from attacking Pearl Harbor. They would have gained much more from Roosevelt's desperate embarrassment and formidable handicaps in being involved in a war that started in the distant East Indies without any attack on American forces or territory or Congressional sanction than they did by sinking the battleships at Pearl Harbor and uniting the country behind Roosevelt's war effort. War started under such circumstances as the invocation of Rainbow 5 (A2) in behalf of the Antipodes could have provided a Roman holiday for the anti-interventionist forces in the United States led by America First."
The missed opportunity
"
On the face of it, President Roosevelt's daring gamble in providing a Japanese surprise attack on an unwarned Pearl Harbor appeared at the time to be a glorious success. Considering the magnitude of the political stakes in the game he was playing, the loss of a few strategically antique dreadnaughts and the death of three thousand men were trivial, indeed. Roosevelt's operations had enabled him to bring the United States into the war with a country strongly united behind him. That it turned out in this manner was only because of several strokes of almost incredibly good luck which could hardly been expected and which he did not deserve. But for these the surprise attack might well have proved the major military disaster in the history of the United States. First of all, was the personality, policy and operations of Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, who commanded the Japanese task force that made the attack. He was a member of the Japanese moderate party which wished to keep peace with the United States. He was a personal friend of Saburo Kurusu who had been sent to Washington in the autumn of 1941 to aid Ambassador Nomura for this purpose, and he opposed precipitating war with the United States. Moreover, as a matter of naval strategy, Nagumo never approved of Admiral Yamamoto's bold plan to attack Pearl Harbor, believing it far too risky and likely to end in disaster. Nevertheless, due to the rigorous Japanese seniority rule, he had to be placed in command of the task force assigned to attack Pearl Harbor although his record as a naval officer was not distinguished.
Nagumo was nervous and worried during the trip from the Kurile Islands to Hawaii. As soon as the successful attacks of the Japanese planes on Pearl Harbor on the morning of the 7th was reported to him, Nagumo ordered the task force to head back toward Japan. If Commander Minoru Genda, who had handled the strategic planning and details of the surprise attack, or Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, who directed the actual attack on the 7th, had been in command of the task force and attacked Pearl Harbor again on December 8th, the Pacific War might have been turned in favor of Japan in the course of the next few days, or even few hours. As the most favorable outcome for the United States, victory could have been postponed for several years, at great additional expense and appalling losses of war vessels and manpower.
The machine shops and other mechanical equipment, the army and navy supplies, and the large store of oil at Pearl Harbor were highly vulnerable to bombing. The oil was still above ground. The planes that remained available at Pearl Harbor after the attack on the morning of the 7th could have put up no decisive resistance to Japanese fighter planes and bombers. The anti-aircraft batteries were not sufficient to repel another Japanese bombing attack, although they might have inflicted more damage than was the case on the morning of the 7th. With the machine shops, military equipment and oil supplies destroyed, the heavy cruisers and carriers that had been sent on to Wake, Midway and Johnston Islands might have been rendered helpless as soon as their oil supply ran out and been captured by the Japanese unless they had been scuttled by their own commanders. The damaged or sunk ships at Pearl Harbor could not have been reconditioned.
Admiral Yamaguchi, commander of the second Japanese carrier division, announced that he was ready to send out fresh planes for a third attack even on the afternoon of the 7th, and those which had been used on the morning of the 7th could have been made ready for a better planned attack on the morning of the 8th. Yamaguchi, Genda and Fuchida begged Nagumo to remain and continue the destruction at Pearl Harbor, but Nagumo refused, and Yamamoto declined to intervene and compel Nagumo to remain and press the attack, which would surely and inevitably have destroyed Pearl Harbor for a year or two, at least, as our great Pacific naval base in the mid-Pacific. To have recaptured Hawaii from the Japanese or defeated Japan from the Western coast of the United States would have been a colossal, prolonged and expensive undertaking and would have seriously reduced or slowed down our effectiveness on the European front.
It has been said that the Japanese could have landed and taken over the Hawaiian Islands immediately after attacks on the 7th and 8th. This is not likely because the task force did not have any landing craft for an extensive occupation. But with the American heavy cruisers and the carriers rendered useless after their oil and gasoline ran out, the Japanese could certainly have returned with all the landing craft and other equipment needed and very possibly taken over the Hawaiian Islands before the United States could have provided successful resistance. To be sure, General Short had an excellently trained army of over 30,000 troops in Hawaii, but with their facilities, equipment end armament devastated by Japanese attacks on the afternoon of the 7th and the morning of the 8th, their effectiveness would have been greatly impaired. All of these possibilities were clearly foreseen in a panicky message sent by the top Washington military brass to the Pearl Harbor command on the morning of December 9th which is described below. Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, who ultimately succeeded Admiral Kimmel and directed the naval warfare which delivered the decisive victories over the Japanese in the Pacific, agreed with Genda and Fuchida: "Future students of our naval war in the Pacific will inevitably conclude that the Japanese commander of the carrier task force missed a golden opportunity in restricting his attack on Pearl Harbor to one day's operations, and in the very limited choice of objectives." Hence, it is no exaggeration to maintain that it was Admiral Nagumo's timidity, hesitation and lack of strategic vision and courage which transformed Roosevelt's desperate gamble of goading the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor from a major national calamity into a great American strategic and political success for the moment."