Pearl Harbor after a Quarter of a Century
Harry Elmer Barnes
IX:
Roosevelt Luck!
“. . . Roosevelt’s gamble might have been temporarily
frustrated if he had not had aid from across the Atlantic and from, of
all persons, Adolf Hitler, through the latter’s idiotically precipitate
declaration of war on the
United
States . . . . If he had been adroit and realistic . . . Hitler would
have sent the American people a strong note of condolence over our
losses as a result of the ‘treacherous Japanese surprise attack,’ and
declared his firm neutrality in the forthcoming war between Japan and
the United States. This would have seriously upset Roosevelt’s
intrigues with Churchill and their joint arrangements with Russia, as
well as gravely hampering and delaying the prosecution of the war in
both Europe and the Pacific.”
—Harry Elmer Barnes
On
the face of it, President Roosevelt’s daring gamble in providing a
Japanese surprise attack on an unwarned
Pearl Harbor
appeared at the time to be a glorious success. Considering the
magnitude of the political stakes in the game he was playing, the loss
of a few strategically antique dreadnaughts and the death of three
thousand men were trivial, indeed. Roosevelt’s operations had enabled
him to bring the United States into the war with a country strongly
united behind him. That it turned out in this manner was only because
of several strokes of almost incredibly good luck which could hardly
been expected and which he did not deserve. But for these the surprise
attack might well have proved the major military disaster in the history
of the
United States.
First
of all, was the personality, policy and operations of Admiral Chuichi
Nagumo, who commanded the Japanese task force that made the attack. He
was a member of the Japanese moderate party which wished to keep peace
with the
United States. He was a personal friend of Saburo Kurusu who had been
sent to
Washington
in the autumn of 1941 to aid Ambassador Nomura for this purpose, and he
opposed precipitating war with the
United States. Moreover, as a matter of naval strategy, Nagumo never
approved of Admiral Yamamoto’s bold plan to attack
Pearl
Harbor, believing it far too risky and likely to end in disaster.
Nevertheless, due to the rigorous Japanese seniority rule, he had to be
placed in command of the task force assigned to attack
Pearl
Harbor although his record as a naval officer was not distinguished.
Nagumo
was nervous and worried during the trip from the Kurile Islands to
Hawaii. As soon as the successful attacks of the Japanese planes
on Pearl Harbor on the morning of the 7th was reported to him, Nagumo
ordered the task force to head back toward
Japan. If Commander Minoru Genda, who had handled the strategic
planning and details of the surprise attack, or Commander Mitsuo Fuchida,
who directed the actual attack on the 7th, had been in command of the
task force and attacked Pearl Harbor again on December 8th, the Pacific
War might have been turned in favor of Japan in the course of the next
few days, or even few hours. As the most favorable outcome for the
United States, victory could have been postponed for several years, at
great additional expense and appalling losses of war vessels and
manpower.
The
machine shops and other mechanical equipment, the army and navy
supplies, and the large store of oil at Pearl Harbor were highly vulnerable to bombing. The oil was still
above ground. The planes that remained available at
Pearl Harbor
after the attack on the morning of the 7th could have put up no decisive
resistance to Japanese fighter planes and bombers. The anti-aircraft
batteries were not sufficient to repel another Japanese bombing attack,
although they might have inflicted more damage than was the case on the
morning of the 7th. With the machine shops, military equipment and oil
supplies destroyed, the heavy cruisers and carriers that had been sent
on to Wake, Midway and Johnston Islands might have been rendered
helpless as soon as their oil supply ran out and been captured by the
Japanese unless they had been scuttled by their own commanders. The
damaged or sunk ships at
Pearl Harbor
could not have been reconditioned.
Admiral
Yamaguchi, commander of the second Japanese carrier division, announced
that he was ready to send out fresh planes for a third attack even on
the afternoon of the 7th, and those which had been used on the morning
of the 7th could have been made ready for a better planned attack on the
morning of the 8th. Yamaguchi, Genda and Fuchida begged Nagumo to
remain and continue the destruction at Pearl Harbor, but Nagumo refused,
and Yamamoto declined to intervene and compel Nagumo to remain and press
the attack, which would surely and inevitably have destroyed Pearl
Harbor for a year or two, at least, as our great Pacific naval base in
the mid-Pacific. To have recaptured Hawaii from the Japanese or
defeated Japan from the Western coast of the United States would have
been a colossal, prolonged and expensive undertaking and would have
seriously reduced or slowed down our effectiveness on the European
front.
It
has been said that the Japanese could have landed and taken over the
Hawaiian Islands immediately after attacks on the 7th and 8th. This is
not likely because the task force did not have any landing craft for an
extensive occupation. But with the American heavy cruisers and the
carriers rendered useless after their oil and gasoline ran out, the
Japanese could certainly have returned with all the landing craft and
other equipment needed and very possibly taken over the Hawaiian Islands
before the United States could have provided successful resistance. To
be sure, General Short had an excellently trained army of over 30,000
troops in
Hawaii, but with their facilities, equipment end armament
devastated by Japanese attacks on the afternoon of the 7th and the
morning of the 8th, their effectiveness would have been greatly
impaired. All of these possibilities were clearly foreseen in a panicky
message sent by the top
Washington
military brass to the Pearl Harbor command on the morning of December
9th which is described below.
Admiral
Chester W. Nimitz, who ultimately succeeded Admiral Kimmel and directed
the naval warfare which delivered the decisive victories over the
Japanese in the Pacific, agreed with Genda and Fuchida: “Future students
of our naval war in the Pacific will inevitably conclude that the
Japanese commander of the carrier task force missed a golden opportunity
in restricting his attack on Pearl Harbor to one day’s operations, and
in the very limited choice of objectives.” Hence, it is no exaggeration
to maintain that it was Admiral Nagumo’s timidity, hesitation and lack
of strategic vision and courage which transformed Roosevelt’s desperate
gamble of goading the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor from a major
national calamity into a great American strategic and political success
for the moment.
Nagumo
did have some relatively minor considerations to support his hesitation
about remaining to renew the attack on the 7th and 8th. He knew that
the carriers
Enterprise and
Lexington were somewhere between Wake and Pearl Harbor with their
escorts of heavy cruisers, and he did not know when the carrier
Saratoga might be returning from the West Coast. He feared they
might all converge on his task force if he lingered to devastate
Pearl
Harbor and the Army installations. He needed more fuel to indulge in
any prolonged further action. His worries were actually unjustified,
for Kimmel, right after the attack, had ordered Halsey and Newton to
take their station with the two carriers southeast of Wake to await
Nagumo’s return and launch an attack on all or a part of his task force,
and the Saratoga was only just leaving the West Coast. Nagumo
would have been safe in remaining until he destroyed the installations
and equipment at Pearl Harbor on the 8th.
Even
with the benefit of Nagumo’s stubborn timidity, the naval war with Japan
might not have turned out to be a string of naval victories if our naval
cryptanalysts had not been able to break the Japanese Naval Code JN-25
for the late summer of 1940 [this date should read 1942—ed.]. Through
Commander Rochefort and others it was then possible to supply Nimitz and
other naval commanders with the Japanese naval battle plans before the
major conflicts. This breaking of JN-25 and earlier Japanese naval
codes was a long and slow process, the result of good organization and
teamwork rather than the feat of any one genius in cryptanalysts. The
work was started by Commanders Safford and Rochefort in 1923-1927 and
not completed until late summer in 1940 [again, this date should read
1942—ed]. Further checking was, of course, constantly required to deal
with minor changes in the code, new ciphers and the like.
This
assertion of the indispensable services of Rochefort and his associates
is well confirmed by our defeat at Savo in August, 1942, when our naval
forces were commanded by Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner and met heavy
losses, only escaping virtual annihilation because the Japanese
commander did not recognize the seriousness of the losses he had
inflicted. As a leading naval expert on the Pacific War, and himself a
crucially important participant, wrote me: Savo was a more disgraceful
defeat than Pearl Harbor, but whereas Kimmel, who was surprised in the
bargain was dismissed in disgrace, Turner came through his disgraceful
performance at Savo in a blaze of glory and was allowed to continue as
head of amphibious operations.” My informant did not add that Turner
was saved from possible further disgrace later on mainly by the genius
of Admiral Raymond A. Scruance our real expert in directing amphibious
warfare.
Even
with the aid of Nagumo, Nimitz, Safford, Rochefort, and Spruance,
Roosevelt’s gamble might have been temporarily frustrated if he had not
had aid from across the Atlantic and from, of all persons, Adolf Hitler,
through the latter’s idiotically precipitate declaration of war on the
United States on the Thursday after Pearl Harbor. Japan had failed to support Hitler in 1939, and especially in
the summer and autumn of 1941. Hence, he did not have the slightest
moral reason for honoring his formal commitments to
Japan in the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis, but had every political and
military reason for ignoring them. If he had been adroit and realistic,
after the fashion of Churchill and Roosevelt, Hitler would have sent the
American people a strong note of condolence over our losses as a result
of the “treacherous Japanese surprise attack,” and declared his firm
neutrality in the forthcoming war between
Japan
and the United States. This would have seriously upset Roosevelt’s intrigues
with Churchill and their joint arrangements with
Russia, as well as gravely hampering and delaying the prosecution
of the war in both
Europe and the Pacific.
Instead,
in one of the most rash, ill-considered and fateful acts of his whole
career, Hitler did not wait long enough even to discover the reactions
of the American people to the Pearl Harbor attack, once the initial
shock of our losses had worn off. He declared war on the Thursday after
the Japanese attack on Sunday. This virtually destroyed the possibility
of American anti-interventionists being able soon to demonstrate that
the attack was due to Roosevelt’s withholding warning information from
Pearl Harbor. Of this the Intelligence and Communications operating
groups in Washington were well aware at the time and might have leaked the
information as a result of their indignation. Somebody, apparently, did
leak this information to Dewey’s headquarters in the autumn of 1944.
The
directors of
America First were actually debating about continuing operations
when a rumor of Hitler’s imminent decision on war arrived and frustrated
this possible decision. Confirmation of this is contained in a letter
written to me by the distinguished American industrialist and railroad
magnate, Robert R. Young, on June 2, 1953. Young wished
America First to continue even after Hitler’s declaration of war:
I
happened to be one of the three dissenting voices when the Directors of
the
America First Committee voted to disband on the Wednesday after
Pearl Harbor.
I felt then and still feel that if the Committee could only have been
kept going some of these people who will become national heroes could
have been made to pay for their sins by their liberty or even by their
lives. If the Republicans had not been equally corrupted they could
have had the whole damned crowd in jail.
At
any rate,
Roosevelt’s
gamble paid off handsomely for the moment, within the pattern of his
bellicose program. Whether it paid off in the long run for the benefit
of the United States, the Far East, or the world, can best be left to
those who are now assessing our domestic and political crises, the
current political and military conditions in the Far East, our military
budget, and the battle mortality of men and planes in Vietnam. The
Korean War, the wars in the Middle East, the Vietnam War, and the bloody
conflicts and confusion in Africa, as well as the communization of
Eastern Europe and China and its threat to the Far East, all grew
directly our of the second World War and, to a large extent, out of
American participation in it.
It
might be well to observe in conclusion that Admiral Nagumo may have had
his share of good luck as a result of panic and misjudgment at
Washington during the days immediately after Pearl Harbor, in which
Roosevelt does not seem to have been involved, although Stimson,
Marshall, Stark and Turner were.
Immediately
after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Kimmel ordered all the craft that
could still move at Pearl Harbor to leave at once and join the heavy
cruisers, destroyers and carriers that had previously been sent out to
Wake and Midway under Halsey and
Newton. Rochefort had informed Kimmel that Nagumo would probably
deploy some of his task force to attack Wake on his return, and Kimmel
ordered Halsey to take his station with the combined forces of the two
carriers and heavy cruisers southeast of Wake and await the arrival of
any of Nagumo’s task force diverted to Wake.
There
was a real possibility of surprising a considerable part of the Japanese
task force on its way back to
Japan and inflicting serious damage upon it. The total Japanese
task force, of course, outnumbered anything the United States could
muster at Wake at the time, except in the matter of heavy cruisers, in
which we were much superior, but the element of complete surprise might
have outweighed this disparity in armament in favor of the United
States. Both 126 carriers, the
Enterprise and the
Lexington, had a complement of planes and plenty of fuel. Since it
was unlikely that more than a portion of Nagumo’s task force would be
sent to Wake on the return trip, the American force gathered there might
have equalled or surpassed the Japanese. It is doubtful if the American
forces could have run down Nagumo’s whole task force on the return trip
for the latter would have had a considerable head start and had proved
to be a fast-moving group of ships.
Admiral
Nagumo did not have the slightest precise knowledge as to the actual
location of any of the American warships except for those at Pearl
Harbor at the time of the attack. But Commander Rochefort, who was in
charge of the direction-finding and ship-location operations at
Pearl Harbor,
knew the location of the returning Japanese task force. He has assured
me repeatedly, and no other authority dead or alive could be better
informed on the matter, that he believes that the rallied and
concentrated American naval force could have inflicted very serious
injury on the returning Japanese task force if a substantial portion of
it had been diverted to Wake. It might even have accomplished almost as
much as was achieved at Midway in June, 1942, thus markedly shortening
the time required to defeat
Japan. We should recall that the most decisive damage done to
the Japanese fleet, especially to their carriers, at the Battle of
Midway was accomplished mainly by the planes from the carrier
Enterprise, and the Japanese fleet moving on Midway in June, 1942,
was vastly larger than Nagumo’s task force that attacked Pearl Harbor.
And it was the same Admiral Nagumo who was to lose the battle at Midway
by his hesitation and lack of strategic genius, even when he was not
surprised. It is likely that he would have proved even more incompetent
if he had been surprised and attacked by the American forces in early
December, 1941.
All
this was nullified by a panicky message sent out of Washington with top
priority on the morning of the 9th by Stark and Turner, with the
approval of Stimson and Marshall, indicating their belief that there was
grave danger that the Hawaiian Islands could not be defended
successfully against further expected Japanese raids, ordering that
aggressive naval operations around Wake and Midway should be abandoned,
and directing that all naval resources controlled by the Pearl Harbor
command should be devoted to the defense of the Pearl Harbor area,
pending the possible retirement of American forces to the Pacific coast.
Washington authorities have sought to defend the panicky message 127 of
the 9th by alleging that the Navy could not afford serious damage to or
the loss of our two carriers, that the latter had never delivered a
successful naval attack, and that the leadership for a carrier operation
in war was as yet untested.
The
receipt of this message on the 9th led Admiral W. S. Pye, who had
replaced Kimmel, to call off the plan that Kimmel had ordered, thus
possibly saving Nagumo from undetermined losses, which might have been
decisive, and if so preventing the United States from having an early
and glorious naval victory that would have more than offset the
humiliation and naval losses in the Pearl Harbor attack and notably
shortened the war in the Pacific.
This
Washington panic relative to the Pearl Harbor situation, until it was
evident that the Japanese task force was on its way home and there was
no probability of any further immediate Japanese attacks on Pearl
Harbor, was momentarily so extreme that even some persons of high rank
in Washington envisaged an actual Japanese occupation of the west coast
of the United States. The United States would then trade space for time and meet the advancing
Japanese forces at the crest of the Rocky Mountains, with a final
rampart around
Denver. Stimson was one of those who were much alarmed and this
may have suggested to him the cruel and precipitate action in moving the
Japanese off the Pacific coast for which he was mainly responsible.
That
Roosevelt was not involved in sending this panicky message of the 9th
seems to be proved by the fact that both Secretary Knox and Admiral
Beatty, who was Knox’s aide and accompanied Knox on his trip to Pearl
Harbor right after the attack, assert that Roosevelt was more
disappointed by the cancelling of Kimmel’s plan for operations against
Nagumo than he was by the losses at Pearl Harbor. This, of course,
raises the question of why
Roosevelt
did not countermand Pye’s order.
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