Joseph E. Persico (22 page)

Through Magic decrypts, FDR knew of the Japanese frustration. One broken cable dated November 4, 1941, and marked “urgent” from Tokyo's foreign minister, Matsuoka, to the ambassador in Washington, Nomura, warned: “Conditions both within and without our Empire are so tense that no longer is procrastination possible, yet, in our sincerity to maintain pacific relationships between the Empire of Japan and the United States of America, we have decided, as a result of these deliberations, to gamble once more on the continuance of the parleys, but this is our last effort. . . . We gambled the fate of our land on the throw of this die.”

In the face of intensifying mutual mistrust, the President sought to strengthen security at home by dealing with his customary bugaboo, fifth column infiltration, particularly by Japanese living on the West Coast, whether American citizens or aliens. Carter employed in his ring a Chicago businessman, Curtis B. Munson, a levelheaded operator not easily stampeded into herd judgments. With FDR's blessing, Carter had sent Munson to the West Coast to gauge the loyalty of Japanese residents. Munson reported, “There are still Japanese in the United States who will tie dynamite around their waist and make a human bomb of themselves.” But American-born Japanese were “universally estimated from 90 to 98 percent loyal to the United States. . . . They are very American and are of a proud, self-respecting race suffering from a little inferiority complex and a lack of contact with the white boys they went to school with. There is no Japanese ‘problem' on the coast, there will be no armed uprising of Japanese.” FDR glanced at these findings and quickly dismissed them as “nothing much new.” What caught his eye, however, was a later Munson paragraph: “Your reporter . . . is horrified to note that dams, bridges, harbors, power stations etc. are wholly unguarded everywhere. The harbor of San Pedro could be razed by fire completely by four men with hand grenades. . . . Dams could be blown and half of lower California might actually die of thirst. . . .” An alarmed FDR moved quickly. Memories of smoldering Black Tom munitions storehouses in 1916 were still alive in his mind. On November 11 the President directed Carter, Donovan, the FBI, and the Army to protect these sites. In Roosevelt's shotgun style of delegation, the four parties could sort out their respective roles themselves. He further told Carter, “[I]mmediate arrests may be required.”

Was the United States facing an attack, overt or covert by Japan? In mid-November, Britain's Joint Intelligence Committee issued its assessment. Yes, Japan and the United States were approaching a crisis. But above all, the British analysts concluded, the Japanese would never risk war with the United States. If negotiations between America and Japan broke down, the Japanese might well attack, but in Southeast Asia, and their first target would likely be Thailand.

*

That fall, the President received a document of such sensitivity that its exposure could provoke an international crisis. Its thudding title, “Army and Navy Estimate of United States Over-All Production Requirements,” masked its significance. Within the War Department, the plan had been shorthanded to “Rainbow Five.” The previous July, the President had asked General Marshall to prepare an estimate of what it would take, should America enter the war, to defeat Germany. By September 25, the top-secret seventeen-page Rainbow Five report, was on the President's desk. The plan projected the full productive capacity of a great industrial nation—its manpower, machinery, and matériel—to achieve the objective. Rainbow Five predicted the need for 216 infantry divisions, 51 motorized divisions, and a vastly expanded Navy, all at a projected cost of $150 billion. Given the secrecy of the document, only thirty-five copies were made.

However aggressive the President himself felt, the debate between interventionists and isolationists went on and extended into the War Department. Though involved in devising a contingency plan for war with Germany, some members of Marshall's staff were unhappy at considering the Third Reich even as a theoretical enemy. Officers who thought, with the President, that the United States could wage a successful war against Germany, or that it should do so, were put down by their isolationist colleagues as “soreheads.”

On the evening of December 3, Senator Burton K. Wheeler received a surprise visit from an unidentified officer in the Army's War Plans Division. The officer had with him a copy of the Rainbow Five plan. “Aren't you afraid of delivering the most secret document in America to a senator?” Wheeler is supposed to have asked. His visitor was unfazed, replying that Congress had “a right to know what's really going on in the executive branch when it concerns human lives.” The next day, Wheeler leaked the Rainbow Five plan to Chesley Manly, the Washington correspondent of FDR's fiercest journalistic critic, the
Chicago Tribune.

J. Edgar Hoover was tasked to investigate the leak. Suspicion fell instantly on an officer in the War Plans Division, Colonel Albert C. Wedemeyer, a soldier of partly German extraction and a warm friend of General Ludwig Beck, chief of the German General Staff. Hoover's report to the attorney general, marked “strictly personal and confidential,” was emphatic but circumstantial. “Wedemeyer spent two years in Germany attending the German War College,” the FBI chief noted. “He is reported to be most pro-German in his feelings, his utterances and his sympathies. He personally travelled through Germany with Colonel Lindbergh. . . .” On September 21, “Wedemeyer took four days' leave for the purpose of going to New York to attend a banquet or dinner with Colonel Lindbergh. . . . Colonel Wedemeyer engaged in rather heated discussions with fellow officers at the War Department concerning his lack of sympathy with the Administration's international program. . . . He advocates a ‘hands off' policy toward Japan. . . . He is otherwise very isolationist in his statements and sympathies.” However, neither the FBI nor the Army was able to connect Wedemeyer directly to the leak.

Rainbow Five was a major military secret, and its disclosure likely violated the Espionage Act of 1917. The attorney general, Francis Biddle, thought that the
Chicago Tribune
's publisher, Colonel Robert McCormick, could be prosecuted under the act. Printing the story had, in fact, troubled the
Tribune
's managing editor, J. Loy Maloney, who bucked the decision up to McCormick. If FDR had a premier hater, it was the tall, stern, sixty-one-year-old conservative publisher of the
Tribune.
Given his rigid tory views, one wit called McCormick “the greatest mind of the fourteenth century.” McCormick told Maloney that he wanted the story to run, and on page one. It appeared on December 4 under a headline that shouted,
FDR'S WAR PLANS! GOAL IS TEN MILLION ARMED MEN, PROPOSED LAND DRIVE BY JULY,
1943. The body of the story read: “. . . President Roosevelt calls for American Expeditionary Forces aggregating five million men for a final land offensive against Germany and her satellites. . . . Germany and her European satellites cannot be defeated by the European powers now fighting against her. . . . If our European enemies are to be defeated, it will be necessary for the United States to enter the war. . . .” July 1, 1943, was the date set for America's presumed entry.

No matter that Secretary Stimson pointed out to the press that Rainbow Five was a
contingency
plan, not what the United States would do, but what the country might have to do. “What would you think of a general staff,” he lectured the reporters, “which did not investigate every conceivable type of emergency which might confront it?”

Though a contingent plan, Rainbow Five was the most provocative jab yet at Hitler. It dealt not only with estimates of guns, ships, and men that the United States might raise, but its dense appendices contained maps of Germany, potential targets, and made estimates of the strength of the prospective enemy. The explicitness of the plan would inevitably affect Hitler's strategic thinking, and it had to alarm Americans who wanted to keep the United States out of war. Rainbow Five, blown in a major American newspaper and its Washington affiliate, the
Times-Herald,
might have been a bombshell of international magnitude if its occurrence was not so totally obliterated by what was to happen in America on a peaceful Sunday afternoon just three days later.

Chapter X

Catastrophe or Conspiracy

IT WAS just past 1:30
P.M.
when FDR heard Frank Knox's voice over the phone telling him, “Mr. President, it looks as if the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor.” Soon a Signal Corps enlisted man was patching a line into the President's phone to take a call from Governor Joseph Poindexter in Honolulu. Listening hard through the static, the President exclaimed, “My God, there's another wave of Japanese over Hawaii right this minute!” A Secret Service man on duty remembered, “His chin stuck out about two feet in front of his knees, and he was the maddest Dutchman anybody ever saw.”

A stream of generals, admirals, and aides filed in and out of the office throughout the afternoon. At 8:30
P.M.,
members of the cabinet, summoned by the President, began arriving as stewards lugged in extra chairs, forming them into a horseshoe around the President's desk. At 9
P.M.,
FDR met with the leaders of Congress. Through the window facing south over the Ellipse the moon could be glimpsed riding in a haze over a capital that had started the day at peace. In front of the White House, a crowd milled about, the stunned, the curious, and the angry. A stenographer took notes as FDR began addressing the arc of grave faces. At the root of the Japanese attack, the President said, he detected machinations of the Axis partnership: “. . . [W]e received indications from various sources—Europe and Asia—that the German government was pressing Japan for action under the Tripartite Pact. In other words, an effort to divert the American mind, and the British mind from the European field, and divert American supplies from the European theater to the defense of the East Asia Theater.” FDR told his listeners, who leaned forward to catch his somber delivery, that his administration had reluctantly reached the conclusion that the ongoing negotiations with Japan were a sham, particularly the sticking point concerning the U.S. demand for Japan's withdrawal from China. “. . . [T]hey were to agree to cease their acts of aggressions, and that they would try to bring the China war to a close,” he said. He returned to the theme of Axis conniving: “And so the thing went along until we believed that under the pressure from Berlin the Japanese were about to do something. . . .” The sneak attack had a historical parallel in the Russo-Japanese war, FDR noted. Pearl Harbor was “equalled only by the Japanese episode of 1904, when two squadrons, cruisers . . . without any warning—I think on a Sunday morning, by the way—Japanese cruisers sank all of them. . . .”

As the President spoke, military aides continued to set fresh bulletins before him. He looked up from one to announce, “It looks as if out of eight battleships, three have been sunk, and possibly a fourth. Two destroyers were blown up while they were in dry-dock. Two of the battleships are badly damaged. Several other smaller vessels have been sunk or destroyed. . . . I have no word on the Navy casualties, which will undoubtedly be very heavy, and the best information is that there have been more than one hundred Army casualties and three hundred men killed and injured.” His labor secretary, Frances Perkins, the only woman in the cabinet, recalled, “The President could hardly bring himself” to describe the slaughter and had physical difficulty in getting the words out. Another eyewitness, however, Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, observed how FDR “demonstrated that ultimate capacity to dominate and control a supreme emergency which is perhaps the rarest and most valuable characteristic of any statesman.”

Senator Tom Connally of Texas, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, sat close to the President, his face red with rage as he bellowed, “How did it happen that our warships were caught like lame ducks at Pearl Harbor?” Connally slammed his fist down hard on the President's desk. “How did they catch us with our pants down?” “I don't know, Tom,” FDR answered. “I just don't know.” After the cabinet and congressional leaders left, Treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau returned to his office and told his staff gathered there, “They will never be able to explain it.” Adolf Berle wrote in his diary: “. . . If there is anyone I would not like to be it is the Chief of Naval Intelligence.”

Aides, couriers, and secretaries continued to enter the President's study all evening. At twenty-five minutes past midnight FDR received his last visitors. He had summoned the COI chief, Bill Donovan, and the CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow, recently back from covering the war from London, who had been invited for Sunday supper. Earlier that day, Donovan had been at a football game at the Polo Grounds, watching the Brooklyn Dodgers pummel the New York Giants 21 to 7, when a voice announced over a loudspeaker, “Colonel William Donovan, come to the box office at once. There is an important phone message.” The message was from the President's son Captain Jimmy Roosevelt, telling Wild Bill that the President needed him in Washington at once.

Now, some eleven hours later, the parade of officials finally ended, Donovan and Murrow found FDR alone sitting in semi-darkness, his face illuminated by a pool of light from a desk lamp. The room was still cluttered with the extra chairs. Stacks of books, piles of yellowed papers tied with string rested alongside the bookcases, and FDR's ship models cast their shadows against the walls. Gathering dust in one corner stood an incongruous pipe organ. Removed from the President's desk were the stamp album, magnifying glass, scissors, and stickers he had been working on when Knox's call turned his world upside down. The reporter in Murrow noted that the President was now wearing a shapeless gray “sack jacket” and munching a sandwich washed down with a beer. FDR's ashen pallor matched the jacket, and he appeared drained of energy. Still, Murrow remembered, “Never have I seen one so calm and so steady.” The President asked Murrow about morale in bomb-blasted London. Murrow's response that Britain would hold out clearly pleased FDR. He had received a call earlier from Churchill and told the PM, “We're all in the same boat now.”

FDR had before him the latest damage assessments from Pearl Harbor delivered by Admiral Stark. Over 350 Japanese torpedo and dive bombers had struck in three waves. Casualties were heavy and would ultimately total 2,403 Americans dead and 1,178 wounded. Much of the Pacific Fleet lay at the bottom of Pearl Harbor or in disemboweled ruin, the decks running red and strewn with bodies. The Navy's losses totaled eighteen vessels, including the battleships
Arizona, West Virginia,
and
California
sunk, the
Oklahoma
capsized, and the
Nevada
run aground. The President turned to Donovan, speaking in cold rage, “They caught our ships like lame ducks! Lame ducks, Bill! . . . We told them at Pearl Harbor, and everywhere else, to have the lookouts manned. But they still took us by surprise.” The ship losses seemed particularly personal to him. He still liked to refer to his years as assistant secretary as, “When I was in the Navy.” The losses suffered by the Air Corps were almost as staggering as the fleet's. Nearly 350 planes had been destroyed or damaged. FDR pounded his fist on the desk. “They caught our planes on the ground, by God, on the ground!”

Pearl Harbor was an intelligence failure of stunning magnitude. Not only naval intelligence but all military intelligence had failed abysmally. The FBI failed. The fledgling Donovan organization failed, though on that night FDR never criticized Donovan's performance. Rather, he told Donovan, “It's a good thing that you got me started on this [intelligence business]. . . .” When, through Magic, the President, the secretaries of war and state, and the service chiefs were able to read what the Japanese ambassador and foreign minister were saying up to the moment the first torpedo struck the first American warship, with broken codes revealing that the Japanese had spies reporting on the fleet's deployment at Pearl Harbor, how could the imminence of the attack have been missed? Why had both signal and human intelligence failed so totally?

The answer can be found only by examining how the intelligence available to the President was used, misused, or unused. In hindsight, a fairly straight line can be traced from clue to clue to an inevitable attack. If one seeks perhaps the earliest warning it was the message Ambassador Joseph Grew transmitted from Tokyo to Secretary Hull on January 27, 1941, over eleven months before the attack. “A member of my Embassy,” Grew cabled, “was told by my . . . colleague that from many quarters, including a Japanese one, he heard that a surprise mass attack on Pearl Harbor was planned by the Japanese military forces, in case of ‘trouble' between Japan and the United States. . . . My colleague said that he was prompted to pass this on because it had come to him from many sources, although the plan seemed fantastic.” On the other hand, a Magic intercept of a Japanese transmission from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo dated February 15, just nineteen days after Grew's message, predicted an American, not a Japanese threat: “Indications seem to be that the U.S. has decided to declare war on Japan within the next three weeks.”

China had continued to remain the sore point between the United States and Japan. The Japanese, as late as September 1941, continued to demand first, that the United States and Britain not increase their military position in the Far East; second, that the United States lift its embargo on oil; and third, that America stop aiding Chiang Kai-shek. The State Department had advised the administration “that adoption and application of a policy of imposing embargoes upon strategic exports to Japan would be . . . likely to lead to this country's becoming involved in war.” War could likely have been averted since the United States could have lifted the oil embargo at no cost to itself. But FDR had stuck to the position that Japan must leave China; and this demand the Japanese could not abide. Thus, something of a diplomatic Kabuki dance leading inexorably toward war had followed.

By November, Japan had two key emissaries in Washington, the regular ambassador, Kichisaburo Nomura, and a special envoy, Saburo Kurusu. Kurusu had earlier served in the Japanese consulate in Chicago, where he married an American, Alice Little. At a press conference on his most recent return to the United States, Kurusu had sought to ingratiate himself with an American audience by saying, “I fully realize the difficulty of my task, making a tight scrum, I wish I could break through the line and make a touchdown.” Kurusu's aide had to explain to baffled American reporters that “scrum” was a rugby term, and that the envoy had meant to say “huddle.”

Every communication, however secret, between the two diplomats and Tokyo during the buildup to Pearl Harbor was available to the President. A November 5 message classified “of utmost secrecy,” from the foreign office to the Washington embassy carried instructions in the event that a long-shot pending accord between Japan and the United States could be approved. This message, broken and translated the same day, set a suspiciously rigid deadline. “It is absolutely necessary that all arrangements for the signing of this agreement be completed by the 25th of this month,” the dispatch read. Behind this message, and unknown even to Nomura and Kurusu, was a decision reached by the Japanese cabinet, headed now by the tough new premier, General Hideki Tojo, to go to war if the Americans failed to meet the deadline.

FDR might have been warned of what was coming if one of his chief intelligence sources had possessed more imagination. During the late summer of 1941, the FBI chief in New York, Percy E. “Sam” Foxworth, arranged a meeting between his boss, J. Edgar Hoover, and a Yugoslav named Dusko Popov, recently arrived in the United States. Popov came from a wealthy family with far-flung business connections, which allowed him to pursue his burning passion, café society high life. In 1939, Johann Jebsen, with whom Popov had attended school in Germany and who now worked for the Abwehr, recruited the Yugoslav playboy as an agent. Popov was sent to spy in England, where he promptly revealed his Abwehr role to MI6. The British happily recruited him as a double agent. Abwehr officials were so pleased with the intelligence Popov fed them, fabricated by MI6, that they decided to send him to America to establish a spy network.

Popov arrived in the United States via neutral Portugal aboard a flying boat in August 1941. In order to carry out his double agent role without being arrested as an actual German spy, Popov would have to get Hoover's approval to operate a bogus espionage ring. It was then that Sam Foxworth arranged for Hoover to meet Popov. What Popov had already revealed to Foxworth was extraordinary. He told him that his friend Jebsen and Baron Gronau, the German air attaché in Japan, had escorted Japanese naval officials to Taranto, Italy, to study one of the war's most effective air raids. The Japanese wanted to learn how the British, in November 1940, had practically destroyed the Italian fleet in Taranto harbor by using torpedo planes launched from the aircraft carrier
Illustrious.
If that intelligence did not suggest Japanese interest in Pearl Harbor, Popov had stronger evidence. Before leaving Lisbon, the Abwehr gave him a lengthy list of questions to pursue while he was in America. Much of the questionnaire was general and predictable: He was to report on American troop movements, war production, shipping activity, and military base locations. But his most specific instructions, covering a third of the questionnaire and given “the highest priority,” dealt with Pearl Harbor. Popov was to travel to Hawaii to answer these queries: “Details about naval ammunition and mine depot on Isle of Kushua [Pearl Harbor]. . . . Is the Crater Punch Bowl [Honolulu] being used as an ammunition dump? . . . How far has the dredger work progressed at the entrance and in the east and southeast lock? Depth of water? . . . The pier installations, workshops, petrol installations, situation of dry dock No. 1 and of the new dry dock which is being built. . . . Reports about torpedo protection nets newly introduced in the British and USA Navy.” The Abwehr also wanted, clearly at the behest of the Japanese, sketches and the exact location of “Wickham” (Hickam), Wheeler, Luke, and “Kaneche” (Kaneohe) airfields.