Pearl Harbor after a Quarter of a Century
Harry Elmer Barnes
VII: The Overall Responsibility of
Roosevelt
for the Surprise Attack
“
[General
George C.]
Marshall’s directed behavior from December 4 to 7, 1941 . . . was one of
the most masterly products of Roosevelt’s genius for deception but was
directly opposed to Marshall’s personal views about starting war at this
time. Indeed, it is certainly high time that revisionist scholars
should cease placing the main blame for compelling [General] Short and
[Admiral] Kimmel to remain unwarned on foreign collaborators or on
Roosevelt’s American agents or stooges, like Hull, Marshall, Stark and
Turner, and put it squarely where it belongs, on the source of their
directions and operations: Roosevelt himself.
—Harry Elmer Barnes
The
essential facts and details explaining why and how Pearl Harbor was
surprised on Sunday, December 7, 1941, have now been presented. There
remains the question of the responsibility for the overall trends and
developments which led to the attack itself. Here, I believe that
fundamental responsibility can also be overwhelmingly—almost
solely—attributed to Roosevelt and his policies, in which there was far
more deliberation than inadvertence.
Our
entering the second World War was mainly the product of a political
program:
Roosevelt’s
turning to armament and war to bail himself out of the difficulties
created by the failure of his domestic program. The surprise attack was
a political rather than a military scandal. It may, of course, be open
to argument as to whether Roosevelt’s New Deal was not ideologically and
morally superior to the program and methods of his conservative
political opponents at home and that the latter must share the
responsibility for his shift to armament and war because of their stupid
hostility and often malicious resistance to domestic reforms.
Secretary
of State Hull has been vigorously criticized for his arrogant and
pharisaical diplomacy, based on unrealistic platitudes, beatitudes, and
banalities, and designed to make it impossible to arrive at a fair and
decent understanding with
Japan over Far Eastern problems. But for all this
Roosevelt
was primarily responsible. He had no hesitation whatever in being his
own Secretary of State when Hull’s policies did not coincide with his
own, even to the extent of insulting Hull by relying heavily on Raymond
Moley, Stimson and Henry Morgenthau in such matters. Roosevelt
permitted Hull to carry on diplomatic relations with Japan in the manner
which he did because Hull’s policies, strongly influenced by his
principal advisor on Far Eastern matters, the Japanophobe scholar,
Stanley K. Hornbeck, agreed perfectly with
Roosevelt’s
program. There has rarely been a greater meeting of minds between a
president and his secretary of state than in the accord between
Roosevelt and Hull over our negotiations with
Japan in 1941. If Hull had entertained contrary views Roosevelt
would no more have hesitated to push Hull aside over Japan than he did
in the case of the Morgenthau Plan dealt with at the Quebec Conference
in September, 1944.
So
far as the economic background of Pearl Harbor is concerned, the
responsibility was almost solely that of Roosevelt, whether we consider
the effort to save and prolong his political career by creating a
military economy to replace the New Deal or his use of economic and
financial methods to produce the economic strangulation of Japan and
force her into war. In the latter, he was vigorously opposed, at least
when instituted, by the top army and navy officials. Even Admiral
Turner strongly criticized this move.
Roosevelt’s
militant program was thoroughly in accord with his personal attitudes
and aims. His hostility to Japan went back to a deep-seated boyhood
affection for China and antipathy to Japan that were closely related to
his China-oriented family financial history, and to the alleged bad
impression of the traits, behavior and political ambitions of the
Japanese people made on him by a “Japanese schoolboy,” who was a fellow
student with Roosevelt at Harvard. Months before he was inaugurated, he
had a long conference on January 9, 1933, with Stimson, the most eminent
and passionate Japanophobe among the prominent American statesmen of the
present century. They were brought together by Roosevelt’s close adviser, Felix Frankfurter, who had been a
subordinate of Stimson in Frankfurter’s early legal career. Stimson’s
hatred of
Japan
and his erratic ideas about “aggressor nations” appealed to Roosevelt,
and these became the basis of the latter’s Japanese policy from January
9, 1933, when he met Stimson, to the attack on Pearl Harbor. When
Raymond Moley and Rexford G. Tugwell vigorously urged Roosevelt not to
accept Stimson’s bellicose attitude toward
Japan,
he answered that he could not very well help doing so in the light of
very satisfactory personal and financial relations that his maternal
grandfather had enjoyed with China.
Roosevelt’s
first striking gesture in revealing his aggressive foreign policy, the
Quarantine formula enunciated in the Chicago
Bridge speech of October 5, 1937, was straight Stimson political
and diplomatic ideology, and Stimson almost immediately released an
approving statement. It would be unfair, however, to attribute to
Stimson full responsibility for Roosevelt’s hostile behavior toward
Japan. He did not have to accept Stimson’s position, and he did
so only because it was in full agreement with his own personal attitude
and public policy. Late in 1937, as noted earlier, Roosevelt sent the
very able American naval officer, Captain Royal E. Ingersoll, to London,
and in January, 1938, Ingersoll discussed the possible relations and
operations of the United States and Great Britain in case they “were
involved in a war with Japan in the Pacific which would include the
Dutch, the Chinese, and possibly, the Russians.” From this time onward
Ingersoll had no doubt that Roosevelt had war with
Japan in the back of his mind and made no bones of this fact in
his confidential discussions with his professional associates.
In
the summer of 1941, when Roosevelt felt ready really to put the screws
on
Japan,
he logically summoned Stimson, already made Secretary of War, to come
forth and actively implement the Stimson doctrine, while
Hull proceeded with his evasive and procrastinating diplomatic
homilies. When Roosevelt allowed or directed
Hull to kick over the modus vivendi on November 26th, he
did this in direct opposition to the policy of Marshall and Stark, who
wished more time to get ready for war with
Japan.
Roosevelt
has been criticized by some on the ground that he got entangled with
Churchill, and that the latter dragged him into war. There is no doubt
of the powerful but unneeded efforts of Churchill in pressing Roosevelt
towards military action, but Roosevelt opened the door for British
importuning when he sent Ingersoll to Europe in the winter of 1937-38,
asked for an opportunity to collaborate in September, 1939, and later
agreed with and cooperated in the Anglo-American joint effort against
Germany. The over two years of voluminous secret communications between
Roosevelt and Churchill, which determined the course of relations
between the United States and Britain, completely hidden from the
American public, were instituted at Roosevelt’s request.
Marshall’s
directed behavior from December 4 to 7, 1941, which so cleverly and
successfully helped us into war by assuring the launching of a
successful Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, was one of the most
masterly products of Roosevelt’s genius for deception but was directly
opposed to
Marshall’s personal views about starting war at this time. Indeed,
it is certainly high time that revisionist scholars should cease placing
the main blame for compelling Short and Kimmel to remain unwarned on
foreign collaborators or on Roosevelt’s American agents or stooges, like
Hull, Marshall, Stark and Turner, and put it squarely where it belongs,
on the source of their directions and operations: Roosevelt himself.
Anti-revisionist
partisans of
Roosevelt
will pounce upon the above conclusions as a striking example of the
“devil theory of history.” Even if it were, which I do not concede, it
is fully as valid as their own “saint theory of history”: the portrayal
of Roosevelt as “Saint Franklin”! They utilize the latter
unhesitatingly and almost invariably in defending Roosevelt against all
charges of duplicity and responsibility in producing war with
Japan
and in bringing about the surprise attack on
Pearl Harbor.
They proclaim him a superb statesman and a major benefactor of all
mankind through his encouraging the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939
and bringing the United States into the war as soon as he was able to do
so in the face of the strongly anti-interventionist public opinion in
the United States right down to Pearl Harbor. This “saint theory” in
regard to Roosevelt has been valiantly, even aggressively in some cases,
upheld by writers like Admiral Samuel E. Morison, Arthur Schlesinger,
Jr., Thomas A. Bailey, Herbert Feis, Samuel Flagg Bemis, Roberta
Wohlstetter and T. R. Fehrenbach; indeed, by virtually every opponent of
the revisionist approach to 1939 and 1941. Revisionist historians can
logically insist that, if the anti-revisionist writers wish to attack
the “devil theory” mote in the eyes of revisionist scholars, the “saint
theory” devotees must remove this saintly beam from their own eyes.
More
important, however, is the fact that the indictment of Roosevelt as
overwhelmingly responsible for war with Japan and the surprise at
Pearl Harbor
is in no sense any literal application of the devil theory of history.
We are here concerned only with the rejection of peaceful overtures
from Japan long preceding Pearl Harbor and American responsibility for a
successful surprise attack there on December 7, 1941. For these deeds
and actions
Roosevelt
was primarily and personally responsible. There is no pretense here of
dealing thoroughly with the causes of wars in general, the
responsibility for the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939, the reasons
why Roosevelt turned from peace to armament and war after the campaign
of 1936, the basis of Roosevelt’s desire for the glamour of being a war
president, the wisdom of his domestic opponents in opposing the New Deal
system, and the like.
Even
less is there any attempt here to present and analyze the basic
geographical, biological, economic, sociological and psychological
causes of wars in general, which account for the genesis of all modern
wars including the second World War. Neither the devil nor the saint
theory is any explanation of such fundamental considerations. Nobody
under-stands this fact better than I do. Whatever defects my writings on
Revisionism and diplomatic history may have, it is beyond reasonable
dispute that I have given more attention to the fundamental causes of
wars in my writings than any professional diplomatic historian who has
ever dealt with the subject. Not even the case of Franklin D. Roosevelt
and the second World War can induce me to abandon this basic approach to
wars.
Forward to Chapter VIII
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