FDR Knew Pearl Harbor Was Coming

Pearl Harbor the movie offers fresh opportunity for those who correctly believe that Roosevelt knew of an impending attack by the Japanese and welcomed it as a way of snookering the isolationists and getting America into the war. The Naval Institute's website is featuring a detailed article by Daryl Borgquist to the effect that high Red Cross officials with close contacts to Roosevelt quietly ordered large quantities of medical supplies and experienced medical personnel shipped to Hawaii well before Dec. 7, 1941. In 1995, Helen Hamman, the daughter of one of these officials, wrote to Bill Clinton a letter disclosing that her father had told her in the 1970s that shortly before the Pearl Harbor attack Roosevelt had told her father of the impending raid and told him to send Red Cross workers and supplies to the West Coast to be deployed in Hawaii. Roosevelt, Ms. Hamman wrote, told her father "the American people would never agree to enter the war in Europe unless they were attack [sic] within their own borders."Borgquist's research, now published in the Proceedings of the Naval Institute, shows that the Red Cross was indeed staffed up and on a war footing in Hawaii by November 1941.

Foreknowledge by FDR of the "surprise attack" on Pearl Harbor has been demonstrated about every five years, ever since the Republicans made a huge issue of it after World War II. Each time there's a brief furor, and then we slide back into vaguer language about "unproven assertions" and "rumors." It's one of the unsayables of 20th-century history, as Charles Beard discovered in 1948 when he published his great book President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War 1941, subtitled "A Study in Appearances and Realities." Beard effectively disposed of the "surprise attack" proposition after researching official government documents and public hearings. For example, the State Dept.'s own record showed that FDR's Secretary of State Cordell Hull conferred with the British ambassador on Nov. 29, 1941, and imparted the news that "the diplomatic part of our relations with Japan was virtually over and the matter will now go to the officials of the Army and Navy." As Beard and others pointed out, the U.S. had already not only undertaken the blockade and embargoes that forced Japan into the war, but also knew that Japan was about to attack and waited for it to do so, so the isolationists could be outmaneuvered and the U.S. could enter the war on a tide of popular feeling. At dawn on Dec. 7, 1941, the first wave of Japanese planes flew in from the east over the Waianae Mountains, leaving about 4000 American casualties with 2400 dead. Beard's scholarly but passionate investigation into secret presidential diplomacy incurred venomous abuse, as did his judgment that the ends (getting the U.S. into the war) did not justify the deceptive means.

Back in the early 1980s John Toland published his excellent book Infamy, which mustered all the evidence extant at that time about U.S. foreknowledge. He advanced the thesis that though FDR and his closest associates, including Gen. Marshall, knew the Japanese naval force was deployed with carriers in the North Pacific, they were so convinced of the impregnability of the base that they didn't believe the attack would have much serious effect. They thought a surprise Japanese raid would do little damage, leave a few casualties but supply the essential trigger for entering the war. Toland quoted from Labor Secretary Frances Perkins' diary an eerie description of Roosevelt's ravaged appearance at a White House meeting the night of Dec. 7. He looked, Perkins wrote with extraordinary perception, "not only as though a tragedy had occurred but as though he felt some more intimate, secret sense of responsibility."

The U.S. military commanders on Honolulu, Husband Kimmel and Walter Short, were pilloried, destroyed, set up to bear the major responsibility. For many years they fought to vindicate themselves, only to face hidden or destroyed evidence and outright perjury from their superiors.

In May of 1983 an officer from the Naval Security Group interviewed one of Toland's sources who had previously insisted on remaining anonymous. The person in question was Robert Ogg, who had been an enlisted man in naval Intelligence during the war, and was one of those who detected the presence, through radio intercepts, of a Japanese task force working its way toward Pearl Harbor in the first week of December 1941. This force had been under radio silence, but the "silence" had been broken on a number of occasions.

Both Ogg and his immediate superior, Lt. Hosner, reported their intercepts and conclusion to the chief of intelligence of the 12th Naval District in San Francisco, Capt. Richard T. McCullough. McCullough was not only a personal friend of Roosevelt's but enjoyed assured access to him through Harry Hopkins' phone at the White House. Ogg confirmed in 1983 that McCullough had said at the time that the information about the Japanese task force had been passed to the White House. British code-breakers at Bletchley had also passed the news to Winston Churchill that Pearl Harbor was to be attacked.

The lesson here is that there is no construction too "bad" or too "outrageous" but that it cannot be placed upon the actions of powers great or small, though usually great. When Toland's book was published there were many who scoffed at the "inherently implausible argument," the "fine-spun conspiracy theory." Gazing up the newly emerging national security state and the dawn of the Cold War, Beard argued that the ends did not justify the means, and concluded thus: "In short, with the Government of the United States committed under a so-called bipartisan foreign policy to supporting by money and other forms of power for an indefinite time an indefinite number of other governments around the globe, the domestic affairs of the American people became appendages to an aleatory expedition in the management of the world... At this point in its history the American Republic has arrived under the theory that the President of the United States possesses limitless authority publicly to misrepresent and secretly to control foreign policy, foreign affairs and the war power." Truer words were never written.

The "Good War"

Just as FDR's foreknowledge of the attack is rediscovered every few years, so, too, is the fact that the Pacific war was a very nasty affair. Last Sunday the British Observer reported on a tv series to be broadcast on Britain's Channel 4 this month, "containing disturbing and previously unseen footage from the Second World War that had languished forgotten in archives for 57 years. The images are so horrific senior television executives had to be consulted before they were considered fit for broadcast."

There's combat film of American soldiers shooting wounded Japanese and using bayonets to hack at Japanese corpses while looting them. "Former servicemen interviewed by researchers spoke of the widespread practice of looting gold teeth from the dead?and sometimes from the living." The archival film is fresh evidence of the atrocities, but the atrocities themselves are an old story, best told by John Dower in his 1986 book War Without Mercy. Back in the February 1946 issue of The Atlantic the war correspondent Edgar L. Jones wrote, "We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying in a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled the flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter openers."

By the spring of 1945 the Japanese military had been demolished. The disparities in the casualty figures between the Japanese and the Americans are striking. From 1937 to 1945, the Japanese Imperial Army and Navy suffered 1,740,955 military deaths in combat. Dower estimates that another 300,000 died from disease and starvation. In addition, another 395,000 Japanese civilians died as a result of Allied saturation bombing that began in March 1945. The total dead: more than 2.7 million. In contrast, American military deaths totaled 100,997. Even though Japan had announced on Aug. 10 its intentions to surrender, this didn't deter the bloodthirsty Gen. "Hap" Arnold. On Aug. 14, Arnold directed a 1014-plane air raid on Tokyo, blasting the city to ruins and killing thousands. Not one American plane was lost and the unconditional surrender was signed before the planes had returned to their bases.

This raid, like the dropping of the A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was aimed at Moscow as much as Japan, designed to impress Stalin with the implacable might of the United States. The Cold War was under way, and as Beard prophesied in 1948, democracy wilted amid the procedures of the national security state, whose secretive malpractices are still being exhumed. A particularly macabre example was reported in the same edition of The Observer, relating the new footage of atrocities in the Pacific War.

Papers released by the American Dept. of Energy showed that scientists from the UK Atomic Energy Authority removed children's bones and bodies to ship to the United States for classified nuclear experiments. Among documents obtained by The Observer is the transcript of a secret meeting in Washington of "Project Sunshine," where Willard Libby, a scientist who later won the Nobel Prize for his research into carbon dating techniques, told colleagues, "Human samples are of prime importance, and if anybody knows how to do a good job of body-snatching, they will really be serving their country."

British scientists from Harwell and the Medical Research Council supplied not only American researchers but their own labs with body parts, collecting about 6000 corpses between 1955 and 1970. As The Observer reported, Jean Prichard, whose baby died in 1957, said her child's legs were removed by hospital doctors and taken to Harwell without permission. To prevent her from finding out what had happened, she says she was forbidden to dress her daughter for her funeral. "I asked if I could put her christening robe on her, but I wasn't allowed to, and that upset me terribly because she wasn't christened. No one asked me about doing things like that, taking bits and pieces from her."

Footnote: Since Al Gore is letting it be known he is limbering up to reenter the political arena, I should remind you that he helped cover up radiation experiments on little children taking place in Oak Ridge, TN. It's all laid out in an excellent little book about Gore by Jeffrey St. Clair and me, of which several thousand copies now lie gathering dust, pending Gore's return, at which point I will once again be laying them out on the sidewalk for purchase on favorable terms.