Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor (5 page)

“That’s the way they berth them,” the Navy secretary replied.

Roosevelt informed the cabinet that he planned to go before a joint session of Congress at noon the next day to deliver a speech and request a declaration of war. The president then read his remarks aloud. Afterward Hull interjected that the brief message was inadequate and again urged Roosevelt to deliver a more in-depth report. “The President disagreed,” Wickard recorded in his diary, “but Hull said he thought the most important war in 500 years deserved more than a short statement.”

Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn of Texas accompanied by four congressmen and five senators joined the meeting at 9:45 p.m. Roosevelt again reviewed the latest damage reports. “The effect on the Congressmen was tremendous,” Stimson wrote in his diary. “They sat in dead silence and even after the recital was over they had very few words.” When the shock of the news faded, the search for blame began. While a few red-faced congressmen muttered profanities, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Tom Connally of Texas exploded. “How did it happen that our warships were caught like tame ducks in Pearl Harbor?” Connally demanded, his face turning purple as he banged his fist on the desk. “I am amazed at the attack by Japan, but I am still more astounded at what happened to our Navy. They were all asleep.”

“I don’t know, Tom,” the president answered, his head bowed. “I just don’t know.”

CHAPTER 2

To the enemy we answer—you have unsheathed the sword, and by it you shall die.

—SENATOR ARTHUR VANDENBERG, DECEMBER 8, 1941

PRESIDENT
ROOSEVELT
GATHERED
IN
the oval study with his advisers on the frigid afternoon of December 21, 1941, two weeks to the day after the Japanese pounded Pearl Harbor. The president had addressed Congress at 12:30 p.m. the day after the attack. Sixty-two million listeners—almost one out of every two Americans—tuned in to hear his 518-word speech, the largest daytime audience ever for a radio broadcast. Roosevelt followed those remarks a day later with a fireside chat designed to prepare the public for life at war, from the need for troops to fight on foreign shores to the material shortages, increased taxes, and long hours Americans would battle on the home front. “We are now in this war. We are all in it—all the way,” Roosevelt warned in the twenty-six-minute speech. “Every single man, woman, and child is a partner in the most tremendous undertaking of our American history. We must share together the bad news and the good news, the defeats and the victories—the changing fortunes of war.”

Only days earlier Navy Secretary Frank Knox, who had flown to Pearl Harbor to survey the damage sustained in the 110-minute assault,
submitted his nineteen-page report to the president. Of the eight battleships at Pearl Harbor that Sunday morning, the
Maryland
,
Pennsylvania
, and
Tennessee
had escaped serious damage. Knox estimated that the
Nevada
and the
California
—hit by a combined three torpedoes and six bombs—could both be refloated in a few months. The
West Virginia
in contrast had taken a much bigger beating, pounded by as many as nine torpedoes that ripped open the entire port side. Knox reported that the ship could be raised but would require two years to overhaul. The capsized
Oklahoma
likewise could be righted, but the Navy secretary questioned whether the aged battleship even warranted salvage. The worst damage centered on the
Arizona
, hit by aerial bombs that blew out the sides. Some eleven hundred sailors remained entombed inside. “The
Arizona
,” Knox reported, “is a total wreck.”

The surprise attack had outraged the American public, a reaction reflected in newspaper editorials nationwide. “The battle is on,” declared the
New York Herald Tribune
, while the
Los Angeles Times
denounced the raid as the “act of a mad dog.” “Japan has asked for it,” the paper wrote. “Now she is going to get it.” “Do the war-mad officials of the Japanese Government honestly believe they can get away with a crime like this,” asked the
Philadelphia Inquirer
. “Or are they intent upon committing national hara-kiri?” Beneath the bluster and bravado many papers underlined the importance of national unity. “If we have not forgotten our differences before, we will forget them now,” observed the
Palm Beach Post
, while the
Chicago Sun
wrote that “the nation is one or it is nothing.” “‘Politics is adjourned,’ whether between parties, factions, or economics,” argued the
San Francisco Chronicle
. “From now on America is an army with every man, woman, and child a solider in it, all joined to the one end of victory.”

The president didn’t need the papers to read the nation’s mood. Thousands of telegrams and letters arrived daily at the White House, including messages of support from nearly three dozen of the nation’s forty-eight governors, many echoing New Mexico’s governor, John Miles. “This is the home of the Rough Riders,” Miles wrote. “You can depend on us.” Even Roosevelt’s former foe in the 1936 election, Governor Alf Landon of Kansas, vowed his support: “Please command me in any way I can be of service.” Dozens of mayors likewise wrote in support,
from large cities such San Francisco, Atlanta, and New Orleans to small towns like Minnesota’s Anoka, home to just seven thousand residents. Diverse groups, from the Crow Indians of Montana to African Americans and even the Ku Klux Klan, cabled support. Many more letters and telegrams arrived from regular citizens, including a taxicab driver in Washington who had just paid off his car and offered to chauffeur government officials for free. Others offered up their children and husbands. Even four-year-old Ivor Ollivier of California vowed to fight: “I would like to kick every Jap into the middle of the Pacific and watch them sink.”

Roosevelt knew he needed all the support he could muster as the news worsened. The Japanese had not stopped at Pearl Harbor, but targeted American forces across the Pacific. Guam fell soon after the raid on Hawaii, and forces on Wake stood just hours before surrender. The enemy likewise had wiped out much of America’s airpower in the Philippines and would soon seize the capital of Manila. The British had suffered similar defeats. Hirohito’s forces sank the battleship
Prince of Wales
and the battle cruiser
Repulse
—important symbols of British naval power in the Pacific—and would soon capture Malaya. The Japanese onslaught appeared unstoppable. “I never wanted to have to fight this war on two fronts. We haven’t got the Navy to fight in both the Atlantic and the Pacific,” the president had confessed to his wife, Eleanor, soon after Pearl Harbor. “We will have to build up the Navy and the Air Force, and that will mean that we will have to take a good many defeats before we can have a victory.”

The president understood that continued defeats would only demoralize the American public, already anxious now that sandbags crowded West Coast windows and blackout curtains dangled in the White House. Polls showed that one out of every two Americans now feared the enemy would bomb American cities. Those worries had even infected some of the president’s top advisers. “You are not only the most important man to the United States today, but to the world,” chief of naval operations Admiral Harold Stark warned in a letter five days after the attack. “If anything should happen to you, it would be a catastrophe.” The Secret Service aimed to prevent such a crisis, converting a vault under the Treasury Department into a bomb shelter. The president had bristled at the increased security, but consented to at least strap a gas mask to his wheelchair. “Henry,” he
told Treasury Secretary Morgenthau, “I will not go down into the shelter unless you allow me to play poker with all the gold in your vaults.”

Victory on the battlefield and at sea was the only way to allay the nation’s fears and nurture the vital patriotism that had arisen from the ashes of Pearl Harbor. Once that unity faded, the blame would begin. Already those resentments festered beneath the surface, as evidenced by a White House report days after the attack that had analyzed editorial opinions. “The shock and awareness of loss occasioned by the attack gave rise to the expression of certain resentments in the press,” warned the December 15 memo. “There was guarded criticism of the military and naval command in the Pacific.” Many Americans no doubt shared the private outrage Roosevelt’s close friend Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long captured in his diary the day after the attack. “Sick at heart,” Long wrote. “I am so damned mad at the Navy for being asleep at the switch at Honolulu. It is the worst day in American history. They spent their lives in preparation for a supreme moment—and then were asleep when it came.”

These challenges confronted Roosevelt as he welcomed his military advisers into his cluttered study at 2:55 p.m. Despite the troubles in the Pacific, he had enjoyed a quiet Sunday. Eleanor had hopped the train to New York for the weekend, where she had seen the Cole Porter play
Let’s Face It!
on Broadway before traveling up to the family’s home in Hyde Park. Snow flurries fell and the pond showed signs of freezing as she marveled at the foothills of the Catskills, a welcome reprieve from the war that now dominated her husband’s life. “I wish I could tell you how clear and beautiful the stars were that twinkled through the windows of my porch Saturday night. I almost felt I could touch them,” she wrote. “They made the world of war and sorrow seem so very far away and unreal.” The president had eaten lunch with Harry Hopkins before meeting for twenty-five minutes with Ambassador Lord Halifax of Britain. Roosevelt had seen the diplomat out the door as he ushered in his war council.

Around the study sat Hopkins, War Secretary Stimson, Knox, Admiral Stark, newly appointed U.S. Fleet commander Admiral Ernest King, Army chief of staff General Marshall, and Lieutenant General Henry “Hap” Arnold, chief of the U.S. Army Air Forces. Roosevelt opened with news that Prime Minister Churchill and his team of more
than eighty advisers would arrive the next day in Washington. Marshall gave the president an estimate of the situation, before Roosevelt zeroed in on the Far East, demanding America build up forces in Australia, the East Indies, and the Philippines. The president, like most Americans, felt anxious to fight. He planned to press Churchill about sending American troops into battle in the Atlantic theater, a move he felt would not only deliver a blow to German morale but buoy domestic spirits. Roo-sevelt wanted to achieve the same goal in the Pacific, where a White House analysis of editorial opinion revealed “almost unanimous endorsement of forceful action against Japan.”

The challenge Roosevelt faced was that America was in no position to go on the offensive. The president’s long struggle against isolationist lawmakers had handicapped America’s war preparation at the same time Japan had stockpiled raw materials and hammered out thousands of new tanks, planes, and warships. Roosevelt had witnessed firsthand the struggle of the Army when he inspected maneuvers in August 1940 in upstate New York, only to discover soldiers drilling with drainpipes in place of mortars and broomsticks for machine guns. Some had never even fired a rifle. The Air Forces suffered similar shortages. Of America’s three thousand combat planes, only about one-third were ready for war. So desperate was the Navy to recruit new sailors that it slashed standards for eyesight, height, and teeth; applicants needed as few as eighteen teeth, including just two molars. Even the president’s war council appeared to suffer from such disorganization—no one bothered to take formal meeting minutes—that it would only infuriate British military leaders scheduled to arrive within hours. “The whole organization,” one later griped, “belongs to the days of George Washington.”

Roosevelt looked past these challenges and pressed his advisers: When could America operate from airfields in China? China appeared America’s only real option to take the fight to Japan. The fall of Guam coupled with the siege of Wake and the attack on the Philippines had robbed America of strategic air and naval bases in the region. The Russian port city of Vladivostok would have been preferable—it was only 675 miles from Tokyo—but the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact of April 1941 meant Premier Joseph Stalin would likely refuse such a request. Allowing American bombers to operate from Russia would only risk Japanese retaliation, a threat the beleaguered Soviets could not afford,
given the war in the west against Germany. Marshall briefed Roosevelt on militarizing ex-Army officers who had volunteered to fly missions in China under Colonel Claire Chennault, a former fighter instructor who had passed on a quiet Louisiana retirement to advise the Chinese. The morning papers reported that Chennault’s fliers had shot down four Japanese planes only the day before.

Though pleased with the news, the president wanted more. It was not enough to pick off a handful of enemy planes over the distant skies of China. Such a scuffle would hardly dent Japan’s powerful war machine, much less spark fear among the empire’s military leaders or civilian population. Likewise, such a small victory set against the continued defeats would have no real effect on the shell-shocked American public, particularly when compared with the spectacular raid on Pearl Harbor that had killed and injured thousands and crippled an entire fleet. The Japanese needed to experience the same shock, humiliation, and destruction that America had suffered. Roosevelt understood there was only one way to accomplish that lofty goal, a demand he would repeatedly press upon his advisers in the days and weeks to come. “The president was insistent,” Arnold recalled, “that we find ways and means of carrying home to Japan proper, in the form of a bombing raid, the real meaning of war.”