and did he deliberately allow the attack that
took more than 2,000 American lives in order to draw America into the
most deadly, destructive war in history?
There are two basic camps regarding FDR and America's entry into
the war. The first holds that FDR was preoccupied with the war in
Europe and didn't want war with japan. American strategic thinking of
the time, perhaps reflecting Anglo-Saxon racism about Japanese abilities, dismissed the Japanese military threat. War with japan would sap
American resources that should be directed toward the defeat of Germany.Supporting this camp is the large body of evidence of the Arnerican diplomatic attempts to forestall war with Japan.
The other camp holds that FDR viewed Japan-allied to the German-Italian Axis-as his entrke into the European war. This stand
holds that FDR made a series of calculated provocations that pushed
Japan into war with America. The ultimate conclusion to this view is
that FDR knew of the imminent Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and
not only failed to prevent it, but welcomed it as the turning point that
would end isolati~nistobstruction of his war plans.
Neither view is seamless, and the reality may lie in some combination of the two, with such factors as human frailty, overconfidence on
both sides, and the tensions of a world already at war thrown in. You
might also cast a vote for historical inevitability. AQlash between Japan
and tlie United States and other Western nations over control of the
economy and resources of the Far East and pacific was bound to happen. A small island natiofi with limited resources but great ambitions,
Japan had to reach out to control its destiny. That put the highly rnilitarized and industrialized empire on a collision course with the Western nations that had established a colonial presence in the Pacific and
Asia, and had their own plans for exploiting that part of the world.
With that in mind, certain facts remain. Japanese-American relations were bad in the 1930s, and worseiled w h e n the Japanese sank an
American warship, the Panay, on the Yangtze River late in 1937, a
clear violation of all treaties and an outright act of war. But America
was not ready to go to war over a single ship. Attempting to influence
the outcome of China's struggle against japan, Roosevelt loaned money
to the Nationalists in China and began to ban exports to Japan of certain gods that eventually included gasoline, scrap iron, and oil.
to attack Pearl Harbor,
: hat
did:^^^ k
n about
~ a~ Japaneaa
i and.~djdheknow~
At j A.M., Hawaiian lime, on Sunday, December 7,
m
.
I
1
1941, hva U.S.
Army privates saw something unusual an their mobile radar screens.
More than 50 planes seemed to be appearing out of the northeast.
When they called in the information, they were told it was probably
just part of an expected delivery of new B-17scoming from the mainland United States. The men were told not to worry about it. What
they saw was actualw the first wave of 183 Japanese planes that had
arrived at Hawaii on Japanese carriers and struck the American naval
base with complete surprise.'
At 0758 the Pearl Harbor command radioed its first message to the
world. AIR RAID PEARL HARBOR. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. An
hour later, a second wave of 167 more Japanese aircraft arrived. The
two raids, whish had lasted only minutes, accounted for nineteen ships,
of them eight battleships sunk, capsized, or damaged, and 292 aircraft,
including 117 bombers, darnaged or wrecked. And 2,403 Americans,
militaly and civilian, had been killed, with another 1,178 wounded.
The following afternoon, President Roosevelt requested and won a declaration of war against Japan. With that done, Germany declared war
on America under its treaty terms with Japan. Soon America was at war
with Germany and Italy as well.
No question has tantalized historians of the wartime period more
than this one: Did President Roosevelt know the Japanese were going.
.
,
,
;,
,
:j
iL
T
I
1
Were these provocations to force japan into war, or sensible reactions
to Japanese aggression in China and elsewhere in Asia? The Japanese
were iritent on dominating the Asian world and proved thenlselves quite
r~itl~less
in achieving that goal. In Nanking, China, atrocities committed
against the Chinese rank with the worst of human behavior. The
of Korea still bear historic gn~dgesagainst the Japanese for the cruelty of
their wartime rule, such as forced labor and the forced prostitution of
thousands of Korean women as "comfort maidens" who were made to
work in brothels servicing Japanese solcliers.
His~oricalopinion divides on this point. It is clear that moderation
on either side might have prevailed. B u t in the United States, the secretary of state was demanding complete Japanese withdrawal,from their
territorialronquests. At the same time in japan, hawkish militants led
by General Hideki Tojo (1884-1948) had gained power. Moderation
was tossed aside, and the two speeding engines continued on a runaway
coIlision course.
By late in 1941, it was more than apparent that war was coming with
Japan. American and foreign diplomats in Japan dispatched frequent
warnings about the Japanese mood. Nearly a year before the Pead Harbor attack, Joseph Grew, t l ~ eU.S. ambassador in Tokyo, had wired 3 specific warning about rumors of an attack on Pearl Harbor. And more significantly, the Japanese diplomatic code had been broken by American
intelligence. Almost all messages between 'Tokyo and its embassy in
Washington were being intercepted and understood by W a s h i i ~ g t o ~ ~ .
There is no longer any doubt that some Arrlericans knew that "zero
hour," as the Japanese ambassador to Washington called the pianned
attack, was scheduled for Derelaber 7. They even knew i t would come
at Pearl Harbor. According to John Toland's a c c o ~ t i of
~ t Pearl Harbor,
Infamy, Americans had not o~llybroken the Japanese code, but the
Uutch had done so as well, and thrir warnirlgs had been passed on to
Washington. .4 British clodlle agent code-named Tricycle had also sent
explicit warnings to the United States.
Here is where human frailty and overconfidence, A I I ~even American racism, take over. Most American injlitary planners expected a
Japanese attack to come in the Philippines, America's major base in
the Pacific; the American naval FortiScations at Pearl Harbor were
believed to be too strong to attack, as well as too far away for the Japan-
ese. The commanders there were more prepared for an attack by sabotcnrs, which explains why the battleships were packed together in the
harbor, surrounded defensively by smaller vessels, and why planes were
parked in neat rows in the middle of the airstrip at Hickam Field, ready
to be blasted by Japanese bombing runs.
Many Americans, including Roosevelt, dismissed the Japanese as
combat pilob because they were all presumed to be "nearsighted." The
excellence of their eyes and flying abilities came as an expensive surprise to the American military. There was also a sense that any attack
on Pearl Harbor would be easily repulsed. Supremely overconfident,
the Navy commanders on Pearl Harbor had been warned about the
possibility of attack, but little was done to secure the island. The general impression, even back in Washington in h e Navy secretary's office,
was that the japanese would get a bad spanking, and America would
still get the war it wanted in Europe.
In his history of espionage and
behavior, For the President's Eyes Only, Christopher Andrew makes this case: "The 'complete
surprise' of both Roosevelt and Churchill reflected a failure of imagination as well as of intelligence. It did not occur to either the president
or the prime minister that the 'little yellow men,' as ChurctlilI sometimes spoke of them and Roosevelt thought of them, were capable of
such a feat of arrrls. When General Douglas MacArthur first heard the
news of the attack by carrier-borne aircraft on Pearl Harbor, he insisted
that the pilots must have been mercenaries."
Regardless of whether or not the attack was invited and why specific
warnings were ignored or disregarded, the complete devastation of the
American forces at Pearl Harbor was totally unexpected. Evea today,
the tally of that attack is astonishing. Eighteen ships were sunk or seriously datnaged, including eight battleships. Of these eight, six were
later salvaged. Nearly two hundred airplanes were destroyed un the
g o u n d , and 2,403 people died that morning, nearly half of them
aboard the battlesllip Arizona, which took a bomb down its smokestack
and went to the bottom in minutes.
A day after the attack, Roosevelt delivered his war message to Congress. The long-running battle between isolationists anrl interventionists was over.
While the revisionists and conspiracy tl~eoristspersist, a convir~cing
i
1
b
1
1
11
1
I
I
II
Roont to U11st to Big Boorn
case for Roosevelt trying to avoid war with Japan has hccn made by many
prominent historians. Among them are Joseph Persico. who wrotc:
The revisiotlist thr.ory requires a certain path of logic. First,
FUR had to know that Pearl Harbor was going to be bombed.
His secretaries of State, War and Navy either did not know or, if
they did, they all lied and conspired in the deaths of henty-four
hundred Americans and the near-fatal destruction of the Pacific
Fleet. . . . . For FDR to fail to alert the defenders of an attack
that he knew was coming, we must premisc that the president
had enlisted men of the stature of Stirnson, Hull, Knox and
Marshall in a treasonous coi~spiracy,or that he had a unique
source of information on Japanese fleet ~novcrnentsunknown to
anyone else in the governmcnt.
The eminent British military historian john Keegan is equally disn.
charges defy togic," Kccgan
missive of the conspiracy ~ ~ u t i o "These
wrote in The Secor~dWorld War. "Churchill certainly did not want war
against japan, which Britain was pitifully equipped to fight, but only
American assistance in the fight against Hitler. . . . Roosevelt's foreknowledge can be dernonstrattd to have been narrowly circumscribed.
Although the American cryptanalysts had broken bod] the Japanese
diploinatic cipher Purple and the naval ciphcr . . . such instructions did
not. include details of war plans."
There is another issue, as Americans haw learned since September
1 1, 200 1, a new generation's (lay of infamy. I-laving intelligence ar~d
using it well are two very different things. The Icft \hand does not always
know what the right is doing, as tlie FBI and CIA demonstrated in
revealing the pieces of tllc puzzle they had before the terrorist attacks
of September 11. Rut that does not suggest that il~cirfailure to see the
whole puzzle complete leads to a conspiracy theory in which America
wanted to create a war against Islar~~.
While understanding the past can
sometimes help ui~dcrstandthe present, this may be one case in which
knowing the present can help reconcile Lllc mysteries of the past,
Must Read: IBr an nvewicw of the pcriod leading up to Pearl
Iiarhor and an account of ihc days surrounding the attack, The