Did FDR Provoke Pearl Harbor?
On Dec. 8, 1941, Franklin Roosevelt took the rostrum before a joint session of Congress to ask for a declaration of war on Japan.
A day earlier, at dawn, carrier-based Japanese aircraft had launched a sneak attack devastating the U.S. battle fleet at Pearl Harbor.
Said ex-President Herbert Hoover, Republican statesman of the day, “We have only one job to do now, and that is to defeat Japan.”
But to friends, “the Chief” sent another message: “You and I know that this continuous putting pins in rattlesnakes finally got this country bit.”
Today, 70 years after Pearl Harbor, a remarkable secret history, written from 1943 to 1963, has come to light. It is Hoover’s explanation of what happened before, during and after the world war that may prove yet the death knell of the West.
Edited by historian George Nash, Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath is a searing indictment of FDR and the men around him as politicians who lied prodigiously about their desire to keep America out of war, even as they took one deliberate step after another to take us into war.
Yet the book is no polemic. The 50-page run-up to the war in the Pacific uses memoirs and documents from all sides to prove Hoover’s indictment. And perhaps the best way to show the power of this book is the way Hoover does it—chronologically, painstakingly, week by week.
Consider Japan’s situation in the summer of 1941. Bogged down in a four year war in China she could neither win nor end, having moved into French Indochina, Japan saw herself as near the end of her tether.
Inside the government was a powerful faction led by Prime Minister Prince Fumimaro Konoye that desperately did not want a war with the United States.
The “pro-Anglo-Saxon” camp included the navy, whose officers had fought alongside the U.S. and Royal navies in World War I, while the war party was centered on the army, Gen. Hideki Tojo and Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka, a bitter anti-American.
On July 18, 1941, Konoye ousted Matsuoka, replacing him with the “pro-Anglo-Saxon” Adm. Teijiro Toyoda.
The U.S. response: On July 25, we froze all Japanese assets in the United States, ending all exports and imports, and denying Japan the oil upon which the nation and empire depended.
Stunned, Konoye still pursued his peace policy by winning secret support from the navy and army to meet FDR on the U.S. side of the Pacific to hear and respond to U.S. demands.
U.S. Ambassador Joseph Grew implored Washington not to ignore Konoye’s offer, that the prince had convinced him an agreement could be reached on Japanese withdrawal from Indochina and South and Central China. Out of fear of Mao’s armies and Stalin’s Russia, Tokyo wanted to hold a buffer in North China.
On Aug. 28, Japan’s ambassador in Washington presented FDR a personal letter from Konoye imploring him to meet.
Tokyo begged us to keep Konoye’s offer secret, as the revelation of a Japanese prime minister’s offering to cross the Pacific to talk to an American president could imperil his government.
On Sept. 3, the Konoye letter was leaked to the Herald-Tribune.
On Sept. 6, Konoye met again at a three-hour dinner with Grew to tell him Japan now agreed with the four principles the Americans were demanding as the basis for peace. No response.
On Sept. 29, Grew sent what Hoover describes as a “prayer” to the president not to let this chance for peace pass by.
On Sept. 30, Grew wrote Washington, “Konoye’s warship is ready waiting to take him to Honolulu, Alaska or anyplace designated by the president.”
No response. On Oct. 16, Konoye’s cabinet fell.
In November, the U.S. intercepted two new offers from Tokyo: a Plan A for an end to the China war and occupation of Indochina and, if that were rejected, a Plan B, a modus vivendi where neither side would make any new move. When presented, these, too, were rejected out of hand.
At a Nov. 25 meeting of FDR’s war council, Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s notes speak of the prevailing consensus: “The question was how we should maneuver them (the Japanese) into ... firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.”
“We can wipe the Japanese off the map in three months,” wrote Navy Secretary Frank Knox.
As Grew had predicted, Japan, a “hara-kiri nation,” proved more likely to fling herself into national suicide for honor than to allow herself to be humiliated
Out of the war that arose from the refusal to meet Prince Konoye came scores of thousands of U.S. dead, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the fall of China to Mao Zedong, U.S. wars in Korea and Vietnam, and the rise of a new arrogant China that shows little respect for the great superpower of yesterday.
If you would know the history that made our world, spend a week with Mr. Hoover’s book.
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"Did FDR Provoke Pearl Harbor?"
Yes.
My late Uncle Anthony McCarty was a Navy Seaman working in the engine room of a destroyer (U.S.S Chew?) and was there on December 7th seventy years ago. I was enrolled in a university oral history course back in '85 and chose to conduct a taped interview with him for my main project. Along with his memories of the war in the Pacific, in particular Pearl Harbor, he made the statement that he firmly believed President Roosevelt (along with Cordell Hull, I think) knew of the impending attack.
At the time I found this shocking, but now I can't help believing that the country was indeed betrayed, making FDR that much more execrable.
My father who served in the European theater in WWII never trusted Roosevelt and always felt, although he had no direct evidence, that Roosevelt had engineered our entry into the war. I remember that he became very angry when, years after the war, information was declassified and released that some within the German command had offered a surrender and a potential overthrow of Hitler, but that Roosevelt had pushed for unconditional surrender. My father's position was that the thousands of men were killed and maimed at D-Day and thereafter could have gone home or gone home whole. He did not, I think, contemplate the big picture, namely that Eastern Europe might have been spared its post-war nightmare, had Roosevelt not demanded unconditional surrender. My father's anger was kindled by his loyalty to the comrades who perished in Roosevelt's war.
My father had a cousin who is still under the coral off the shore of a Pacific Island. The lander his tank was in just happened to land in front of a hole hidden in the reef, and when the tank rolled off, that was it. I think it was Saipan.
Considering how many lives were lost, and despite the post-war baby boom, how many children were never born because of the casualties of that needless war?
That's a lot to answer for, aside from everything else.
It's all too obvious Roosevelt wanted war and went to great lengths to get what he wanted.
The war, like so many other events in our history that we thought we knew so well - what boy born in '49 didn't know the dates and names of the battles, the commanders, ships and planes - is now looming up, like the terrain of some strange planet in the porthole of an explorer's approaching rocket ship, full of unexpected craters, ravines, and shadowy forms; a vastly more detailed and complicated phenomenon than the uniform grey lump, the simple beginning, middle and end story we once saw it as.
The younger brother of one of my father's closest friends, 20-year old Hugo, was killed the moment he stepped of the landing craft at Guadalcanal; my dear dad, who was turned down for service in WW1 for being too young, was denied permission to go overseas in WW2 for being too old, serving 2 years in the Army stateside. What dismay he would feel if he were around to learn these new facts about his beloved adopted country.
When I was a Marine, I remember singing songs during the long humps :
It was good for Chesty Puller, It was good for Smedley Butler;
It was good for old James Baker, and its good enough for me! "
Smedley Butler was one of the few Marines to have won two Medals of Honor for two seperate actions. I wish he were still alive today explain the why of Iraq and the meaning of the Arab Spring. But I imagine the old conservative would be quickly mistaken for Noam Chomsky today, although they were very different types of men.
Smedley Butler on Interventionism
-- Excerpt from a speech delivered in 1933, by Major General Smedley Butler, USMC.
War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.
I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.
I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.
There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its "finger men" to point out enemies, its "muscle men" to destroy enemies, its "brain men" to plan war preparations, and a "Big Boss" Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism.
It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.
I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.
I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.
During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.
From Joseph de Maistre's Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg:
"The Angel of Death turns about this terrible world as does the sun, and will only grant relief to one nation in order to strike another...
"This unending carnage is foreseen and ordained in the grand design of the universe. It is through war that the [divine] DECREE is fulfilled. Have you not heard the Earth crying out for BLOOD? Thus is consummated the great law of destruction of living beings, from the cheese mite to man."
If war is a punishment for sin, why was it the young men from the large, pious families of Western France who served as the cannon fodder for the Third Republic from 1914 to 1918? We can only suppose that, had they lived, they would have abandoned the Faith or produced many children who would abandon it, and we have it from on high that to never have been born is a lighter fate than the punishment for sin.
Idem for the dead American soldiers of the Second World War.
Indeed, what a miserable valé of tears is this world...
As a 70s-era almost-career army officer, I can attest that it is typical for the troops—including volunteers—to eventually grasp the reality that they have been had.
As a directly relevant testament, one of my wife's in-laws was wounded in the Battle of the Bulge and, having almost lost a leg, found himself in a convalescent hospital in the environs of Washington, D.C. Lying among men having lost not just limbs but eyes, faces, and genitals, he recalled for us (around 1996) that a doctor walked into their ward to solemnly announce—in April 1945, presumably—"Men, I am sorry to tell you that today President Roosevelt has died."
Well, to the doctor's embarrassment, cheers and hoots erupted until the poor fellow was forced to retreat. Our relative's most memorable sentiment from that place was, "I hope that bastard burns in Hell!"
I think it a travesty that the Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. armed forces is not required to lead the charge.
"As a 70s-era almost-career army officer, I can attest that it is typical for the troops—including volunteers—to eventually grasp the reality that they have been had."
As an almost-career Army officer myself, I can at least attest to the truth of this for myself, Mr. Welling. In spite of the economic and job security many of us saw when we began, there truly was a sense that we were helping to defend something noble, our homes and families. You've got to make a living, so isn't this a noble way of accomplishing that mission?
As I believe I've written here before, I've endured an awakening to the reality of what has been happening in this current war and many of those in the past. Our native patriotism has been used against us; we've got to wake up and see what's really happening. The "conservatism" that got us here is not the conservatism of our forefathers.
I think John Keegan wrote a book several years ago about the different Faces of Command. I read it years ago as a young officer in the Marines and I remember he studied and contrasted the leadership qualities of Alexander The Great, Wellington, Grant and perhaps Hitler or Patton, to illustrate the modern model of unheroic leadership began with Grant and has developed into the managerial model that is used today.
One of the principles of modernism is to always substitute relevance for truth. In the case of Grant for instance, the relevant thing about battle was to mass troops with superior weaponry and kill as many as possible by utilizing technological superiority. He also had lieutenants such as Sherman who embraced the relevant technology of the day (telegraphs,railroads, superior artillery, and more available troops for cannon fodder) at the expense of truth --- (killing horses, cows, chickens, women, children etc.and burning independence, based on small property, to the ground, so that starvation and desperation would weaken their will to live and eventually to surrender) This has preety much been the model up until the present day. Leadership from the front is not only something considered out of date and ancient, but undesirable and irrelevant to today's mission. Afterall, for most modern commanders with battle experience, one war per lifetime is God's plenty. The relevant thing today in current politics is to find and elect new managers who don't know much and then dress them up as leaders of the people using the old rhetoric from old leaders.
Thank you, Mr. Welling, for filling me in on some of the attitudes that were filtered out in the official story. A few of the WWll movies (titles thankfully forgotten) hinted at the bitterness of troops, but even they pulled up short of your relative's report.
Reading between the lines of some of the stories based on defence department news releases concerning hospitalized troops, I gather that nowadays they have minders who accompany visitors, to ensure that such outbursts of truth don't occur.
Pat's point here is well taken, but I'm afraid he has given a very distorted view of what George Nash's marvelous editing of Hoover's Magnum Opus is all about. In fact only 12 pages out of over 900 are devoted to Pearl Harbor, and there is nothing new in those twelve pages that contributes to our understanding of its "infamy." Rather, the volume, including Nash's deep and rich nearly 100 page introduction, sums up the disastrous effects of what we later came to know as liberal internationalism, applied to the period 1933-roughly 1955. The story of Hoover's 2nd and 3rd and fiftieth thoughts about what to include is almost as interesting as the foreign policy story itself. There are no great revelations here, and no smoking guns. But as the working out of a President's brilliant mind in relation to the great foreign policy disasters of the 20th century this is a book every serious American should read.
By the way, this is John Willson writing--as is normal with me and techno-devices, I got signed in under a pseudonym, which I never use.
for the history buffs: December 3, 1941 diary entry by Galeazzo Ciano (after Japanese ambassador seeks meeting with Duce):
"What does this new event mean? Now that Roosevelt has succeeded in his maneuver, not being able to enter the war directly, he has succeeded by an indirect route -- forcing the Japanese to attack him. Now that every possibility of peace is receding farther and farther into the distance, to speak of a long war is an easy, very easy prophecy to make. Who will have the longest wind? this is the way the question should be put."
When it comes to Pearl Harbor, the homeless modern liberal has no idea what he’s supposed to think. On the one hand, the cowardly Japanese attack of December 7, 1941 has been decidedly condemned by one of the icons of liberaldom, Mr. New Deal himself. On the other hand, what’s not to like about a day on which hordes of lovable Asians transgressed all codes of honor by slaughtering thousands of unsuspecting Whites? And so the denizens of journalism do not know which of their idols to appease: should they kowtow to ethnic feelings by screening the public from the facts about the Pearl Harbor atrocity? Or should they exploit December Seventh as an opportunity to lionize Roosevelt, and through him their god Obama? The resulting silence is deafening, and highly amusing in its illumination of the convulsions of liberal logic.
http://edwardwaverley.blogspot.com/2011/12/courage-of-charles-lindbergh.html