Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor. Robert B. Stinnett. The Free Press/Simon and Schuster. 386 pages; appendices; notes; index; $26.
By Maj. Gen. Edward B. Atkeson
U.S. Army retired
In retrospect, Pearl Harbor was not just the opening gun for the United States¹ entry into World War II. It was to the American people what the Great Flood was to Noah and to the three principal monotheistic religions. Philosophers have ventured that if every man, woman and child in the world over the age of 4 were to be wiped from the face of the earth, the next generation would grow up remembering the flood. And so it is with Americans and Pearl Harbor. The Kennedy assassination, Watergate and presidential misbehavior may have consumed more column inches of newsprint in recent years, but in the longer term, no controversy seems to stir the American soul as does the cataclysm of Pearl Harbor -- still without satisfaction. Writers like Robert B. Stinnett would have us launch yet one more investigation, this time with all cards on the table.
Stinnett points out that none of the investigations thus far has called for testimony from the working-level officers and enlisted personnel who actually made the key radio intercepts, translated the messages or plotted the traces of Japanese maritime traffic across the Pacific. He attempts to correct this through extensive interviews. Also, employing barrage assaults on the official National Archives with Freedom of Information Act requests, he has pulled together substantially more of the warp and woof of the mystery surrounding questions of ³who knew what, and when did he know it?² Stinnett believes that he has pinned the ³who² down to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, famous for his exclamation, upon receiving notification that the Japanese planned to break off diplomatic negotiations, ³This means war!²
The chiefs of Army and Navy intelligence were apparently informed sometime between 10 p.m. and 1 a.m., Washington time, the night before the attack, but for some reason it would be late the next morning before the word got to Army Chief of Staff Gen. George C. Marshall.
Stinnett accuses Marshall of dallying, even after he had the information, and then technical problems and casual office procedures intervened to delay the arrival of the warning in Hawaii until enemy aircraft were approaching their targets.
Both Marshall and Adm. Harold R. Stark, chief of naval operations, whom Roosevelt declined to call out of an evening theater performance because he did not want to cause a stir, appear as sort of unindicted co-conspirators in the ³deceit.² But Stinnett is generous in his blame. Even poor Adm. Walter S. Anderson, commander of battleships, Pacific fleet, takes it on the chin because he chose to spend the weekend at his residence ashore, rather than in his bunk afloat in the harbor along with his doomed command. Stinnett¹s research is impressive. He devotes 66 pages to notes in tiny print, some of them running to almost a page each. His thoroughness in combing through the tangle of messages he managed to get released reminds one of a 16th-century Michelangelo working on the Sistine Chapel. By no means has he uncovered all of the evidence. (The National Security Agency still holds tantalizing details under lock and key.) Nonetheless, he has made a significant contribution.
Where Stinnett goes astray -- and stray he does -- is in reaching down into the naval staff files to grasp a confidential memorandum of an obscure lieutenant commander attempting to portray a likely future based upon what was known in 1940, the year before America entered the war. To the surprise of no one who might have been reading the newspapers at the time, Lt. Cdr. Arthur H. McCollum wrote that the ³chances [were] rapidly increasing that the United States [would] become a full-fledged ally of the British Empire in the very near future.² Almost as an afterthought, he added, ³If by these means Japan could be led to commit an overt act of war, so much the better.² It would be unfair to assume that this was the comment of an officer having any greater malevolence in mind than the words disclose. Yet Stinnett sees more.
With virtually no evidence that the McCollum memorandum ever saw the light of day outside the Office of Naval Intelligence, Stinnett supposes that it went straight to the White House and became the blueprint for FDR¹s ³deceit² of the country. One wonders what McCollum would think about the supposition if he were alive today. But the McCollum memorandum is the fulcrum of the argument: no master plan, no ³deceit.²
The book is a masterpiece of research, albeit with a number of the most important exhibits extracted from earlier U.S. government publications, based upon Japanese files seized after the war, not from radio intercepts acquired before or during the conflict. While the book asserts that U.S. radio intercept stations were reading both Japanese diplomatic and military traffic and detected the movement of the attack fleet across the North Pacific, the case is not that clear. For all the authenticity furnished by interviews, too many details have been forgotten, and a number of witnesses contradict one another. The new evidence is inconclusive.
The work is a creditable effort, but it suffers from the rather stretched accusation of deceit. It is admirable for its technical depth, but the accusations of wrongdoing in high places -- true or not -- overload the credits. The likelihood of simple human failing on a mass scale, such as when the air defense duty officer on Hawaii told his radar operator not to worry about target blips coming in from the north, is overwhelming. One can only imagine that Stinnett feared that his excellent work would hang unsold if it did not have a splashy title. The publication of his work in the present form simply adds one more tragedy to the story of Pearl Harbor and another book to the conspiracy shelf.
MAJ. GEN. EDWARD B. ATKESON, Ph.D., USA Ret., is a senior fellow at AUSA¹s Institute of Land Warfare. He has written four books and more than 100 articles on military affairs. |
