Eighty two years ago today—on what President Franklin Roosevelt termed a “date which will live in infamy”—Japanese forces attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor off the coast of Hawaii, triggering U.S. intervention in World War II.
Historian Samuel Elliot Morrison wrote that one could “search military history in vain for an operation more fatal to the aggressor.” 2,403 Americans were killed and 1,143 were wounded. Eighteen ships were sunk or run aground, including five battleships.
In his address to the nation following the attacks, President Roosevelt stated that “the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by the empire of Japan.”
This statement was a lie: The Roosevelt administration had provoked Japan by engaging in a naval buildup in the South Pacific and by enacting an oil embargo, which crippled Japan’s economy and threatened its access to vital raw materials in Manchuria. Historian William Neumann concluded in a 1945 pamphlet “that this economic war could result in anything but a military conflict was extremely doubtful.”
Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson wrote in his diary of a White House meeting on November 25, 1941, in which he explicitly raised the question of “how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot.”
Hatton W. Sumners (D-TX), the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, stated in April 1942 that “this blaming [of] the Pearl Harbor tragedy on the treachery of the Japs is like the fellow who had been tickling the hind leg of a mule trying to explain his bunged-up condition by blaming the mule for having violated his confidence.”
President Roosevelt found himself in the position of tickling the hind leg of the Japanese mule because he knew that the American public would never support intervention in another world war unless the United States was attacked. A poll conducted by the American Institute of Public Opinion in 1936 had found that 95% of Americans would “today regard as imbecile anyone who might suggest that in the event of another European War, the United States should again participate in it.”
In the months before the Pearl Harbor attack, military cryptanalysts had cracked the Japanese diplomatic and military code. They were hence privy to cables specifying that Japan had broken diplomatic relations, which was crucial because in all of Japan’s previous wars—including the war with China in 1895, with Russia in 1904, and with Germany launched at Tsingtao in 1914—the severing of diplomatic relations was followed by a sneak attack on the enemy. The location of this attack was telegraphed also in other cables.
British historian Captain Russell Grenfell wrote in 1952 that “no reasonably informed person can now believe that Japan made a villainous, unexpected attack on the United States. An attack was not only fully expected but was actually desired. It is beyond doubt that President Roosevelt wanted to get his country into the war, but for political reasons was most anxious to ensure that the first act of hostility came from the other side, to a point that no self-respecting nation could endure without resort to arms. Mr. Oliver Lyttleton, then British minister of production, said in 1944: ‘Japan was provoked into attacking America at Pearl Harbor. It is a travesty of history to say that America was forced into the war.’”
Lost Chance for Peace
In the months leading up to Pearl Harbor, there was ample opportunity for FDR to have upheld his 1940 campaign pledge that American boys would not be sent into any foreign wars.
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As late as October 1941, at the urging of China hands in the State Department, FDR rebuffed a peace overture by Prime Minister Prince Fumimaro Konoye, a moderate who was subsequently pushed out in favor of hardliner Hideki Tojo.
The FDR administration did not want to be seen as condoning Japan’s conquests, though Konoye expressed willingness to withdraw Japanese troops from China and nullify participation in the Axis Pact with Germany and Italy.
British diplomat Sir Robert Craigie felt that, as late as December 1941, the United States could have reached a compromise with Japan involving the withdrawal of Japanese troops from Indochina in exchange for the resumption of U.S. oil shipments to Japan, which had been cut off by embargo. Craigie noted that, by this time, the prospects of a German victory had begun to look doubtful, which made U.S. and British intervention in a Far East campaign less of a necessity.
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“But they knew, they knew, they knew”
Right after Pearl Harbor, William Friedman, chief crypto-analyst of the Army Signal Corps whose team had solved Japan’s Purple code, paced back and forth in his home, his wife recalled, and muttered to himself repeatedly: “But they knew, they knew, they knew.”
Robert Stinnett, a naval photographer during the Pacific War and author of Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor, notes that two intercepted radio dispatches sent by Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto to the Japanese First Air Fleet on November 25th pointed to the anchoring of 31 Japanese warships at Hitokappu Bay in the Kurile Islands, which were awaiting instructions to sail to Hawaii.
A subsequent decoded dispatch had Yamamoto directing the Japanese air fleet to depart Hitokappu on November 26th and advance into Hawaiian waters through the North Pacific before attacking the U.S. fleet in Hawaii. Yamamoto even provided the latitude and longitude for portions of the route, while calling for the dealing of the U.S. fleet in Hawaii a “mortal blow.”
In January 1941, Joseph Grew had cabled Roosevelt to tell him that the Peruvian ambassador to Japan, Dr. Ricardo Schreiber, had told a member of his staff that he had heard from a Japanese source that the Japanese military forces planned, in the event of trouble with the United States, to attempt a surprise mass attack on Pearl Harbor using all their military facilities.
Nine months later, in October, Roosevelt received another warning of impending attack at Pearl Harbor from the Kremlin, which had obtained the information through its spy Dr. Richard Sorge. The information had been passed along in return for U.S. warnings of an impending attack by Germany on Russia.
Joe Lieb, a newspaper reporter who had served in the Roosevelt administration, claimed that his friend Cordell Hull confided to him on November 29, 1941, that President Roosevelt knew that the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor within a few days, and that the President was going to let this happen as a way to get the country into war.
Hull was strongly against this scheme and turned over a document to Lieb, which allegedly concerned the Pearl Harbor plan and urged him to take it to the press without revealing who had leaked it. Only one newspaper took the story, however, The Honolulu Tribune Herald, which created a front-page banner headline in its Sunday, November 30, issue: “Japanese May Strike Over Weekend.”
East Wind Rain
On November 19, 1941, the Japanese government had come to a secret decision that, if the country was to go to war with the United States, its diplomatic corps would be notified by insertion of a false weather report “east wind rain” in the middle of the daily language short-wave news broadcast.
When 52 suppressed pages of the Army Pearl Harbor Board report were finally made public on December 11, 1945, they disclosed that the Board had concluded that the “winds message” had indeed been inserted into the Japanese news and weather broadcast.
It was in turn picked up by a U.S. Navy monitoring station, translated on December 3, 1941, and its contents distributed to the White House, Army and Navy high commands—though not to Admiral Husband Kimmel and Lieutenant General Walter Short, the top military commanders in Hawaii (the two inexplicably were never provided with a decoding machine, and were refused clearance for viewing decrypted cables).
Cryptographer Laurance Safford stated that his superiors ordered him to destroy the notes he had made concerning the “East Wind Rain” message.
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Briggs said in this interview that he was the one who had intercepted this crucial message while on duty as a chief watch supervisor at the Naval communication station at Cheltenham, Maryland. Briggs further stated that he was ordered by his superior officer in 1946 not to testify about the matter to a Joint Congressional Committee and to cease any contact with Captain Safford.
A few weeks after the attack, FDR had set up an investigating commission under Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts, a friend and supporter of the president, which released a 13,000-page report in January 1942 exonerating Executive Branch authorities of any wrongdoing and blamed Kimmel and Short for the disaster.
Foreshadowing the Warren report following the JFK assassination, the Roberts Commission was an obvious whitewash. It did not interrogate senior FDR administration officials or inquire into Japanese intercepts and their distribution and evaluation in Washington or allow for Admiral Kimmel and General Short to defend themselves or for their attorneys to ask questions and cross-examine witnesses.
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Afterwards, Rear Admiral Leigh Noyes, the Navy’s Director of Communications, instituted a 54-year censorship policy that consigned the pre-Pearl Harbor Japanese military and diplomatic intercepts and the relevant directives to Navy vaults, while illegally ordering subordinates to “destroy all notes or anything in writing.” Fleet Admiral Ernest King threatened a loss of pension for any naval officer who disclosed the successful code breaking.
Within the State Department—as Frank Schuler, Jr., reported in an unpublished memoir uncovered by researchers at the Roosevelt Library—Stanley K. Hornbeck, Alger Hiss, and other top officials also falsified or removed key documents that painted the Roosevelt administration in a negative light, and demoted staffers like Schuler who threatened to expose this cover-up.
Percy L. Greaves, Jr., who headed the congressional investigation into Pearl Harbor, pointed out that those who maintained secrecy, failed to remember, or testified on behalf of the administration in the Pearl Harbor investigations rose very quickly to high places.
These people include Gen. George Marshall, who was made a permanent five-star general and the Secretary of State, Col. Walter Bedell Smith, who became a three-star general and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)’s second director.
On the other hand, virtually no one who testified in the various hearings as to the facts that were damaging to the Roosevelt administration and their superiors was ever promoted or rewarded.
The Truth Emerges
A week after V-J Day, President Harry S. Truman made public the lengthy findings of 1943 and 1944 Army and Navy Boards appointed to assess responsibility for Pearl Harbor. The Army Board, headed by Lieutenant General George Grunert, reversed the verdict of the Roberts Commission and concluded that “responsible authorities all expected an air attack before Pearl Harbor.”
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