ANOTHER
DAY OF INFAMY
Congress is trying to legislate the history of what happened
on the eve of Pearl Harbor.
What
is history? Is it something we decide on the best available evidence,
weighing and culling the many varied accounts of the past? Or
is it, instead, something to be decreed and imposed on us, decided
by what some politicians say or maybe a judge somewhere? These
questions may seem banal or obvious, but they have become very
real-ever since—the U.S. Congress recently decided to write
the main tenet of a conspiracy theory into an official bill.
The
amendment in question was tacked onto a defense bill and passed
by both houses of Congress last October. It calls on the President
to restore Rear Adm. Husband E. Kimmel and Maj. Gen. Walter C.
Short posthumously to the highest ranks they held at the onset
of World War II.
Kimmel
and Short were, respectively, the Navy and Army commanders at
Pearl Harbor at the time of the Japanese sneak attack there; they
were demoted upon their subsequent forced retirements. Asking
to restore their ranks is the most, legally, that our national
legislature can do. The final decision will rest with the President.
Congress would like him to exculpate both men, because they "were
not provided necessary and critical intelligence . . . that would
have alerted them to prepare for the attack."
This
last line is the rub. It passes the buck for the fiasco at Pearl
Harbor to the high command in Washington at the time, most prominently
President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Army Chief of Staff Gen. George
C. Marshall. In so doing, it gives credence to the very ur-conspiracy
theory of American history, the notion that Roosevelt or Marshall
or both knew the Japanese attack was coming but deliberately kept
the Pearl Harbor garrison in the dark, in order to maneuver America
into World War II.
The
backers of the bill have insisted that they are not passing on
blame to any particular person or persons. Former Delaware senator
William V. Roth, Jr., the amendment's main sponsor, claims that
what happened at Pearl Harbor "was a systemic failure in which
the gravest mistakes were made by the Washington authorities."
But this is disingenuous, at best-a clever political maneuver
that makes for bad history. If "critical intelligence" was indeed
withheld in Washington, intentionally or not, wasn't someone to
blame for the loss of 2,403 American lives on December 7, 1941,
the "date that will live in infamy"?
A
series of military and congressional investigations in the 1940s
sought to answer this very question. Their general conclusions
were the same as those of a 1995 Pentagon review, which determined
that responsibility for the defense of Pearl Harbor that terrible
day "should be broadly shared" but that "the intelligence available
to Adm. Kimmel and Gen. Short was sufficient to justify a higher
level of vigilance than they chose to maintain."
The
vast majority of historians concur, and they are supported by
the facts. There was plenty of infamy to go around for Pearl Harbor.
The high command in Washington did blunder in not sharing every
last scrap of information it had with Kimmel and Short. For that
matter, even a garrison that knew the very moment of the Japanese
attack would have had trouble resisting it, what with our unforgivable
lack of preparedness more than two years after the rest of the
world had marched off to war.
Yet
Washington did pass on ample warnings that war might be imminent.
On October 16, 1941, the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations
(OPNAV) sent a message to Kimmel advising him that a new cabinet
in Japan was likely to be "strongly nationalistic and anti-American."
It advised that "hostilities between Japan and Russia are a strong
possibility" and went on to warn, "Since the US and Britain are
held responsible by Japan for her present desperate situation
there is also a possibility that Japan may attack these two powers.
In view of these possibilities you will take due precautions.
. . ."
A
further Navy Department message, received by Kimmel on November
27, was even more explicit, beginning: "This dispatch is to be
considered a war warning. Negotiations with Japan looking toward
stabilization of conditions in the Pacific have ceased and an
aggressive move by Japan is expected within the next few days."
This message stated that the most likely target of a Japanese
attack would be "either the Philippines Thai or Kra Peninsula
or possibly Borneo" but ordered Kimmel to "execute an appropriate
defensive deployment preparatory to carrying out the tasks assigned
in WPL [War Plan] 46. Inform district and army authorities. A
similar warning is being sent by War Department. . . ."
Finally,
on December 3, 1941, the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations
warned Kimmel that Japanese diplomats in London, Hong Kong, Singapore,
Manila, and Washington had been instructed to destroy their top
code machines "and all secret documents." Remarkably, Kimmel would
later testify that he did not consider the destruction of the
code machines to be "of any vital importance." Indeed, no warnings
of any sort, from either Washington or their own intelligence
officers, moved Short and Kimmel to take any special precautions.
On
December 6, the very eve of the Japanese attack, General Short
was informed that the Japanese consulate in Honolulu was burning
its papers, something his chief intelligence officer regarded
as "very significant." Short later recalled receiving the information
but "did not consider it a matter of importance."
On
the morning of December 7, about an hour before the Japanese planes
struck, Kimmel was informed that his ships had sunk a Japanese
minisub trying to enter Pearl Harbor.
One
is tempted to be flippant and ask, "Just what part of 'This dispatch
is to be considered a war warning' didn't you understand?," but
that would be unfair. Few people can even begin to comprehend
what it must be like to command a large base in time of war. The
constant barrage of information received in such circumstances,
most of it scurrilous or irrelevant, can obscure what seems, with
the advantage of hindsight, to be the most direct of warnings.
What these messages do make clear, however, is the weakness of
the conspiracy theories surrounding Pearl Harbor. If Franklin
Roosevelt or anyone else in Washington had wanted Pearl Harbor
caught by surprise, why pass on such direct advisories to the
base there? Why, for that matter, would any Commander in Chief
want his forces caught napping in the first place? All Washington
had to do was to give Pearl Harbor an explicit last-minute warning
and Japan's fleet would have been caught flatfooted, thousands
of miles from its home waters and close to nothing but American
possessions. A sneak attack in which Americans ably defended themselves
and beat back the attackers would have looked far better for the
President-and still got us into war.
Yet
any objective look at the historical record shows that far from
trying to provoke a war in the Pacific, the Roosevelt administration
was doing its best to forestall one. FDR and his closest advisers
had always viewed Hitler and Nazi Germany as the leading threat
to the United States, and they feared that the country would be
distracted from this menace by a war with Japan.
True,
Germany was supposed to come to Japan's aid under the terms of
the Axis pact, but then, Hitler was hardly known for honoring
his treaties. Roosevelt actually pursued what amounted to a stalling
strategy in Asia for months, alternating economic embargoes with
conciliatory negotiations. Obviously, the policy was a failure,
but it was nevertheless one that FDR pursued right up to the end,
sending a direct last-ditch appeal for peace to Emperor Hirohito
on December 6.
Indeed,
Roosevelt's "date that will live in infamy" speech to Congress
asks for a declaration of war only against Japan. Even with that
there might have been some difficulty in getting us into the war
in Europe had Hitler not been arrogant enough to beat us to the
punch, declaring war on the United States on December 11.
It
is, in the end, disturbing that one even has to debunk this sort
of libel against men like Franklin Roosevelt and George Marshall.
Certainly, history is an ongoing process of revision and debate,
and mistrust of any received wisdom can be a good thing. Yet most
of the promulgators of conspiracy theories are not engaging in
anything like a serious historical debate. Rather they are using
a whole series of other forums-shoddy television shows, sensational
movies such as Oliver Stone's ongoing chronicles of American paranoia,
and now legal and political actions-to push their propaganda across
without serious scrutiny.
In
November and December 1999, to take another example, the family
of the late Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., used a wrongful-death
suit to press their belief that Dr. King was assassinated not
by James Earl Ray but by a much wider government conspiracy, one
possibly orchestrated by President Lyndon Johnson. The Kings'
lawyer, a longtime conspiracy theorist, exploited the opportunity
to fill an official court record with all sorts of innuendo and
speculation about the civil rights leader's death. He thereby
pre-empted a thorough new Justice Department investigation, begun
in 1998 and concluded last June, that found no evidence of a government
conspiracy.
"These
are historical judgments rendered without evidence or meaning,"
was how Ambassador William vanden Heuvel, chairman of the Franklin
and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, characterized both the King "trial"
and the congressional resolution for Kimmel and Short. Which also
brings us back to our original question: What is history? It is
all that we are now, and all that we believe ourselves to be.
If we are to start now tearing ourselves down, knocking apart
everything we know to be the truth, not on the basis of any new
evidence or research but simply to serve some narrow purpose or
ancient grudge, what will be left of us? Wouldn't that reduce
us to a nation of seething suspicion, bereft of a common reality?
If the U.S. Congress were to pass a resolution claiming that Husband
Kimmel and Walter Short were dedicated, patriotic men who served
their country to their best of their ability and should not be
singled out for censure-if it were to declare that they did no
worse than, say, even such a commander as Douglas MacArthur, who
was caught with his planes on the ground in the Philippines the
day after Pearl Harbor—then I, for one, would have nothing
against restoring them to their full ranks, and I suspect that
nearly all Americans would feel the same way.
Or,
if the Congress really does believe that "critical intelligence"
was withheld from the garrison at Pearl Harbor, it ought to hold
fair and balanced hearings on the matter and lay out all its findings
to the public. To conduct its business as it has is to sneak a
conspiracy theory through the back door of the people's house.
It sets a sorry precedent.
©
2000 Copyright Forbes Inc.
