I wrote this almost exactly one year before 9/11; before I had a blog.
At
six in the morning of December Seventh, Nineteen Forty One, Hawaii
Time, A Japanese Naval Task force of six aircraft carriers and their
support craft reached a point two hundred miles north of the Hawaiian
island of Oahu. As the first faint light of dawn gleamed in the
eastern sky, forty-three fighter planes took to the air. These were
followed by one hundred and forty bombers, many of them equipped with
a secret new torpedo that was capable of operating in shallow water.
Their target was the United States Pacific Fleet, which was at the
moment lying at anchor in Pearl Harbor. It was Sunday, and most of
the Fleet’s sailors were still asleep. It had been a busy week of
one battle-preparedness drill after another, for war with Japan was
considered to be just around the corner, and the fleet wanted to be
ready for war when it came. It would come much sooner than any of
them thought.
At six in the morning in
Hawaii, it was 11:30 in the American capital, and after months of
frenzied peace talks with the Japanese government, official
Washington was strangely silent. The Chief of Staff of the United
States Army had just returned from his usual Sunday morning horseback
ride. Waiting for him in his office was an intercepted Japanese
radio message instructing the Japanese diplomatic delegation that the
peace talks were to be permanently broken off as of one p.m.
Washington time. The message followed an earlier warning that had
come in the week before, warning the Japanese embassy to destroy
their code machines and stand by for a complete end to diplomatic
relations. When this message was relayed to the Present of the
United States on the evening of December Sixth, his response was to
say: “This means war.” It was time to alert the Armed Forces in
Hawaii and the Philippines to expect an imminent attack.
Back in Hawaii, as the
sun came up over the eastern islands, the destroyer Ward
detected an unidentified vessel in a secured area and implemented the
shoot-on-sight orders that had recently been handed down. The dull
thud of an underwater explosion lifted a tiny submarine to the
surface of the water. It was obviously not American, and it had been
right at the entrance of the Pearl Harbor Naval Base. Word reached
the Admiral in Command of the Pacific Fleet that someone was
attacking the base, and he hurried to get dressed. Forty-five
minutes earlier, back in Washington, the top Commander of the Naval
Forces had reached for the telephone to notify Hawaii that war would
probably break out within hours, but changed his mind and telephoned
the White House instead. At ten forty-five on a Sunday morning, the
President’s phone line was busy. The top Army commander and the
top Navy commander held a hasty conference, and rather that using
official channels, they decided to send a warning message to their
field commanders in Hawaii by Western Union Telegram. The telegram
made its way across the US to a station in San Francisco, where it
was relayed on through another telegraph company to their office in
Honolulu. It was handed to a motorcycle-riding delivery boy who set
off with the coded message just as a hundred and forty Japanese
planes began to fill the sky over Oahu. It was five minutes to eight
in Hawaii, and 1:25 in Washington. Two Japanese diplomats were on
their way to a 2 p.m. meeting with the American Secretary of State.
In their briefcases were copies of the message that had been
intercepted by American Military Intelligence a day and a half
earlier. Within hours the whole world would know what only a handful
could now predict with certainty: The Unites States was at war.
Who was to blame for the
two thousand and three sailors, two hundred and eighteen soldiers,
one hundred and nine Marines, and sixty-eight civilians killed that
fateful morning in Hawaii? Was it the Army and Navy commanders on
the ground, who were relieved of their posts and spent the rest of
the war fighting to clear their records of unspecified charges? Was
it their supervisors in Washington, who right up to the minute of the
attack refused to grant them access to the intercepted Japanese radio
messages that caused so much alarm in Washington? Was it the
president himself, who, while campaigning for an unprecedented third
term in office, had assured audiences all over America that he would
never, never, never, involve their sons in a foreign war? Who had,
since 1939, been carrying out secret negotiations with Winston
Churchill as to the conduct of a future war with Germany? Who, in the
months leading up to Pearl Harbor, ordered his forces to share all
intercepted intelligence information with the British--including
information that was denied to his own commanders in Hawaii? Who had
ordered, on July 26, that all Japanese assets in America be frozen,
an order that everyone involved agreed amounted to an act of war?
Who, as the Japanese attack force was secretly steaming east from its
base north of Japan, gave orders to the Census Bureau to hand over a
list of all the Japanese people in America?
The former commander of
the Pacific Fleet, whom the President had dismissed from command at
the beginning of 1941 for insisting that to base all of the Pacific
Fleet in Pearl Harbor was to invite a Japanese surprise attack, put
it this way to an investigator:
Assume
you were the leader of the greatest nation in the world, and assume
that you saw, in another hemisphere, the development of a power which
you regarded as a threat to Western civilization as you knew it.
Supposing, however, that for various reasons, your conception of the
danger was not shared by your own people. Assume you saw that the
only salvation of Western civilization was to repel this particular
power, but that would require you to enter a foreign war for which
your people were not psychologically or militarily prepared. Assume
that what was needed to galvanize your own people for a unified
approach towards this basic danger to civilization was an incident in
which your posture was clearly of passive non-aggression and apparent
unpreparedness; and the incident in question was a direct act of
aggression which had no excuse or justification. Assume that you saw
this potentiality developing on the horizon and it was the solution
to the dilemma, as you saw it, of saving civilization and galvanizing
your own people. It is conceivable, is it not, that you’d want to
be sure that whatever the incident, it happened under circumstances
where it was perfectly clear that you were not the aggressor, and the
resulting incident galvanized your own people to a realization of the
terrible threat which they faced from this totalitarian force.
What difference does
it make to us who was responsible for involving our country in a war
which we would have all repudiated? Who really cares, fifty-nine
years later, that our nation was deceived into entering a war, a war
that cost millions of human lives, by a coldhearted administration
that made a calculated choice to act dishonorably in what they
perceived to be the best interests of the nation and, ultimately, the
entire world?
Who really cares? I do--not because 10 years
ago I stood over the hulk of the USS Arizona where it still lies at
the bottom of Pearl Harbor and watched streaks of oil still bubbling
up from the watery tomb where half the victims of that attack still
lie buried. I care, not because I stood in the Arizona Memorial
Visitors Center and listened to a tour guide go through a carefully
prepared explanation of that attack, which had been modified to avoid
offending the Japanese tourists who stood next to me. I care, not
for reasons having anything to do with the fact that I was involved
against my will in a war that could have easily been avoided. I care. The war brought about by the attack on Pearl Harbor is
long since over; its survivors have by now mostly died; there are few
left who still carry in their memories the horrors of that Sunday
morning. Wars have come and gone since that time with enough horrors
of their own. The full details of all the events leading up to Pearl
Harbor will never be fully known. So what does it matter if someone
in high places deliberately provoked that attack, suppressing both
information that could have prevented it, and information about the
attempt to let it take place?
Truth matters.
The truth really does matter. What really happened
really did happen, and no amount of lies, half-truths,
deceptions, and cover-ups take away from that fact. I cannot stand
before you today and say that the attack on Pearl Harbor came as a
surprise to the highest officials in the US Government any more than
I can say that the crucifixion of Jesus Christ was a plot hatched by
his followers to gain public sympathy for his teachings. Regardless
of what people have been told, regardless of what facts have been
manipulated or suppressed, regardless of what the majority of the
people believe, the truth is still true. The truth will always stand
up to scrutiny. The truth will always bear up under investigation.
The truth will always come out, because the truth is what really
happened, and no one can ever change that, no matter how much they
might wish to. You don’t even have to believe the truth to make it
true--it just is.
