War and Myth VI

To most Americans on Sunday afternoon, December 7, 1941, the attack on Pearl Harbor came totally out of the blue. We were suddenly, unexpectedly—and for no good reason—assaulted by an enemy that sank our Pacific Fleet.
(No one stopped to ask WHY the Pacific Fleet was anchored permanently in Hawaii rather than at its home base in California. When FDR went on the air over the PA system in Grand Central Station and they played the “Star Spangled Banner”, all the outraged commuters stood at attention as their trains rushed out of the station empty. [It is now illegal to play the National Anthem in that venue.]) No one asked, “How/why did this happen?”)
American Ambassador to Tokyo, Joseph Grew wasn’t shocked. He came home for a visit two years before and was horrified at American ignorance of what was going on in the Pacific—and the uninformed hostility of Americans toward Japan.
American officials in Washington weren’t shocked either. SURPRISED, yes. We never imagined a bunch of little yellow people would dare to strike at our majestic fleet—or that they had the capacity to build carriers that could sail that far.
Two weeks before the attack, American Secretary of State Cordell Hull was asked by another cabinet member how the negotiations with Japan were going. It’s no longer my job, he replied—it’s now in the hands of the Secretaries of War and Navy.
Tokyo had, by their lights, done its best to avoid war. America, the pro-de Gaulle French Empire, the Dutch government in exile (which controlled the oil in Indonesia), the entire British Empire and American controlled Latin America had all agreed to sell Japan NO raw materials. That was, effectively, the entire commodity producing planet—except for China.
New York had frozen Japan’s financial assets in American banks. The only materiel Japan could lay its hands on were domestically raised rice, wood, fish, water and rock. You can’t run a society much advanced beyond the Stone Age with those materials.
Japan had pleaded with us. The “god-emperor” had made the unprecedented offer to travel to America to negotiate a lifting of the embargo. We said NO. Not unless Japan pulled completely out of China—the last source of raw materials available to them anywhere on earth.
We had built our whole foreign policy—since the landing at Jamestown—on someday owning and controlling China ourselves. Now that Britain, France, Germany and Russia were no longer in the picture, we were outraged that the Japanese threatened to thwart us.
It was a good old fashioned imperialist struggle—the Empire of Japan vs the American Empire. The Japanese were well aware that we were building a huge new fleet to destroy them. They knew of our ambitions toward China. They also knew they had another year, year-and-half, to settle affairs with America before Japan ran out of fuel and our fleet was too big to hope to defeat.
They sent the Nomura delegation to Washington to negotiate a resolution BEFORE the end of 1941 (and the beginning of Typhoon season in the Pacific) or “things are going to happen automatically. We knew this. We knew that the Japanese fleet was at sea. We thought they’d go directly for Indonesian oil—and our fleet had been moved out to Pearl Harbor to strike them from behind.
We never imagined they’d be smart enough to hit us first and then move on to the oil. Roosevelt may have felt a good bit of a fool as, voice shaking, he began, “Yesterday, a Day that will live in Infamy … .”
And so the myth of America’s total innocence was created. Next time let’s look at the myths that grew out of the German War.