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The Roosevelt Presidency The War Years Copyrighted Material December 7, 1941 Washington: 5 AM EST---- The fourteenth part of Togo's transmission is received by Station SAIL; it is decoded and translated by 7 AM: "Very Important. Will the Ambassador submit to the government of the United States (if possible the Secretary of State) our reply to the United States at 1 PM on the 7th your time." Kramer delivers this to the White House at 10 AM; McCollum delivers a copy to Admiral Stark. [Did
the identical set of Army intercepts reach General Marshall in a
timely fashion? All involved realized that 1 PM in Washington is 7:30 AM in Hawaii, yet Marshall did not reach a decision to notify the Pearl Harbor commanders until 11:45 AM. He sent the following to his four Army commands: "Japanese are presenting at 1 PM EST today what amounts to an ultimatum; also they are under orders to destroy their code machine immediately. Just what significance the hour may have we do not know but be on alert accordingly. Inform naval authorities of this communication." The radio signals failed to reach Honolulu, so the message to General Short was sent by Western Union to San Francisco, then RCA radio to Hawaii. The bombs were already falling as the messenger was bicycling to the army post carrying Marshall's alert. Stinnett, pp.231-235; Morgenstern, pp. 53-60.] December 7, 1941 Pearl Harbor: 3:42 AM---- An ensign on the minesweeper USS Condor spots the conning tower of a partially submerged submarine less than two miles from the entrance to the harbor. The destroyer USS Ward is alerted in plain language, according to orders issued by Admiral Kimmel a month earlier to provide all ships and command posts of submarine contacts. The sub is not located but later, when the anti-submarine net is lifted to permit the entrance of the barge Antares, two midget submarines slip through. One is sighted and destroyed at 6:45 AM, the first act of the war. Japan loses its first ship and its two crew members. [Five midget subs had piggy-backed their way across the Pacific on the top of mother submarines and were released ten miles outside the harbor entrance with the intent of damaging battleships and, hopefully, aircraft carriers after the aerial barrage had begun.] Pearl Harbor: 7:53 - 8:25 AM---- The first wave of bombers, torpedo planes and fighters hits Pearl Harbor. First the Army, Navy and Marine airfields are bombed and strafed where the planes, lined up nose-to-nose and wingtip-to wingtip, are sitting ducks. Then torpedo planes hit Battleship Row. [A clever invention— a wooden "float" added to the fin of the torped—- enabled the torpedo to right itself instead of crashing into the floor of the shallow harbor. Previously Pearl Harbor had been considered by the US Navy to be immune to torpedo attacks such as destroyed the Italian fleet at Taranto.] Pearl Harbor: 8:10 AM---- The forward powder magazine of the Arizona is hit and explodes; nearly 90% of her crew die. Pearl Harbor: 9 AM----
The second aerial wave begins. Rear Admiral Walter Anderson arrives
on Battleship Row from his Diamond Head home and takes charge of
rescue efforts and damage control. Pearl Harbor: 9:35 AM---- The aerial attack ends, and the planes start returning to their carriers which have moved to the Mendelssohn Seamount, 200 miles northwest of Kauai. Some American warplanes pursue them, there are some dogfights, and some Japanese planes go down. [They left behind 2273 Army and Navy dead and 1119 wounded. Sixteen of the 101 warships in the harbor suffered major damage— Utah, Arizona, Oklahoma, Cassin and Downes. 188 planes were lost. The Japanese lost only 29 planes and their five midget submarines. In what is popularly considered to be the worst disaster in American military history, some strategic errors were made by Japan and Admiral Yamamoto. They chose not to hit the massive stores of oil— some five million barrels— nor destroy the Navy's repair facilities, dry docks and machine shops nor disable Oahu's electrical supply grid. Instead they concentrated on overage battleships and managed to hit only 20% of the ships in the harbor. The two ships that were a complete loss were due to be declared overage the next year. Most of the other damaged ships were repaired within a few weeks and all of them at some point engaged in naval battles with the Japanese. The main part of the Pacific fleet, as we know, was at sea at the time of the Japanese attack. The neglected strategy would have forced the US fleet to retreat to the West Coast and given the Japanese more time for military operations before the US could regain the initiative. Stinnett, pp.239-252; C lausen, p. 9. The American military had supposedly not expected Hawaii to be attacked. Yet a final exam question at the Japanese Naval Academy for the last ten years had been: "How would you carry out a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor?" Howe, Ashes, p. 161. Rear Admiral Richard Turner would later testify that the possibility of a Japanese attack from the North Pacific had been discussed for at least 25 years. In 1938 Vice Admiral Ernest J. King had conducted an exercise of a simulated air raid from Prokofiev Seamount, differing from Admiral Kimmel's (and Nagano's) only that the attack was at midday instead of an hour after dawn. Stinnett, p. 147. And, as Harold Ickes noted in his diary a week later, the Russo-Japanese War had been started in 1903 by a sneak attack which demolished the Russian fleet at Port Arthur. Ickes, Secret Diary, III, p. 663. In August the FBI and Director Hoover had been warned by Dusan Popov, a double agent for the British and Germans, that the Japanese air force was preparing an aerial bombing of the fleet at Pearl Harbor, an attack modeled on the British bombing of the Italian naval base at Taranto the previous November— which had devastated the Italian navy and guaranteed naval control of the Mediterranean for the British. Hoover chose to ignore the warning and did not pass the information on to Military Intelligence (with whom he was having a feud over turf) or to FDR. There is some evidence that in February or March 1942 Hoover told a group of conservative friends at a private dinner at the Army-Navy Club that he had given FDR warnings of a Pearl Harbor attack and had been told by FDR to keep the information confidential. Summers, Official, pp. 122-129, 136-137.] December 7, 1941 War in the Pacific: In addition to the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese bombard Singapore and occupy Hanoi in northern Vietnam. December 8, 1941 FDR
asks Congress to declare war against Japan: "Yesterday, December
7, 1941, [The Los Angeles Times editorialized that California was "a zone of danger" and the public should be "alert" and "keen-eyed" for "spies, saboteurs and fifth-columnists: We have thousands of Japanese here . . . Some, perhaps many, are . . . good Americans. What the rest may be we do not know, nor can we take a chance in the light of yesterday's demonstration that treachery and double-dealing are major Japanese weapons." The
1940 census listed 126,947 Japanese living in the 48 states; more
than 60 percent had been born here and were American citizens. Nearly
three-quarters of the Japanese lived in California; most were involved
in agriculture and horticulture. Daniels, Decision
to Relocate, December 8, 1941 Holocaust: The Chelmno death camp (in the western part of Poland newly incorporated into Germany) opens for business. Jews are killed by carbon monoxide administered in mobile vans. Laqueur, Terrible Secret, p. 12. December 10, 1941 War in the Pacific: Japanese forces invade the Philippines. US Marines are forced to surrender Guam after a two-day siege. December 10, 1941 Pearl Harbor Intelligence Cover-Up Begins: Upon the return of the cruise ship Lurline to its San Francisco berth, it is boarded by Lieutenant Commander Preston Allen of Naval Intelligence who demands the ship's radio log. [The log has not been seen since. However, Leslie Grogan, the first assistant radio officer, partially reconstructed the log from memory. Evidently the North Pacific was bristling with radio messages from Japanese shore stations to ships northwest of the Lurline as it traveled from San Francisco to Hawaii, November 29-December 3. Grogan realized the significance of these unusual broadcasts from "JCS, Yokohama" and the repeat-backs from smaller ships. He gave a transcript of the broadcasts and the RDF findings to Naval Intelligence upon arrival in Honolulu. As he wrote in his journal, "If anyone should ask me, I would say it's the Jap's Mobilization Battle Order . . . it's safe to say something is going to happen, and mighty soon, but how soon?" Grogan's transcript also has disappeared. Stinnett, pp. 193-198; Toland, Infamy, pp. 278-280.] December 11, 1941 Hitler declares war on the United States in a speech to the Reichstag. He cites the plan published in American newspapers "to attack Germany in 1943 with all the resources of the United States. Thus our patience has come to a breaking point." Congress responds with a declaration of war on Germany and Italy. [Earlier that year Hitler had pledged to support Japan in any future war with the United States, with the expectation that Japan would attack the Russians in the East and thus take the pressure off his armies in the West. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor took him completely by surprise. It is ironic that Hitler, after working so hard to keep America out of the war, should make good this promise to a deceitful ally. It was a foolish act; there was so much American anger at the Japanese over Pearl Harbor that public opinion would not have permitted a declaration of war against Germany and especially not the concentration of war effort in Europe rather than in Asia. Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop urged Hitler to let the Japanese and Americans knock each other out while Germany concentrated on the Russians and the British. However, Hitler, always the final arbiter in foreign policy and military strategy, heeded the advice of Admiral Raeder who referred to the Rainbow Five declaration and counseled all-out submarine warfare against this undeclared enemy. Fleming, New Dealers' War, pp. 30-36; Duffy, Hitler, p. 105.] December 11, 1941 Pearl Harbor Cover-Up: Director Communications Rear Admiral Leigh Noyes orders his subordinates: "Destroy all notes or anything in writing." All pre-Pearl Harbor Japanese military and diplomatic intercepts are consigned to Navy vaults.
[Two weeks after the Japanese surrender in August, 1945 all intercepts
were classified December 12, 1941 Involuntary Servitude and Slavery: At FDR's behest Attorney General Francis Biddle issues Circular No. 3591 to all federal prosecutors. This overturns the unwritten law that the federal Department of Justice will ignore most possible cases of involuntary servitude, leaving such prosecutions to the states. From now on alleged peonage complaints will be investigated and successfully prosecuted on the grounds of involuntary servitude and slavery. Biddle cites numerous laws already on the books that may be used. "In the United States one cannot sell himself as a peon or slave— the law is fixed and established to protect the weak-minded, the poor, the miserable. Men will sometimes sell themselves for a meal of victuals or contract with another who acts on surety on his bond to work out the amount of the bond upon his release from jail. Any such sale or contract is positively null and void and the procuring and causing of such contract to be made violates" the law. [FDR
was well aware of the quasi-slavery of African-Americans in the
Black Belt of the Deep South [See entry for June
4, 1903] and also certain of the propaganda usage that could
be made of this condition by Japan and Germany. Despite some initial
foot-dragging by Technological advances for the farmer— tractors, chemicals, cotton-picking machines and other harvesters— reduced the need for manual labor in agriculture. Many black laborers moved to the north for work in war factories; returning black veterans often chose to live outside the Deep South. The turpentine farms and sawmills of Georgia and the Florida Panhandle were the last to abandon the use of slave labor. By the 1950s there was still a trickle of complaints coming in to federal authorities. By the beginning of the 21st century the occasional case was apt to be that of exploited immigrants or foreigners smuggled into the country for slave labor in industries such as the textile industry and most definitely not limited to the South. Blackmon, pp. 377-381.]
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