Pearl Harbor forces a temporary diversion in the overall drive to assist
the Soviet Union
But for a few days at least all political matters relating to Communism
at home and abroad were dissolved in the national bellow of indignation
over the Pearl Harbor affair, and a brigade of the choicest partisans of
the Roosevelt regime began a two-fifths of a century offensive aimed at
distracting national attention completely away from any suspicions of possible
administration pre-knowledge of the coming attack, and fastening the blame
for it all upon the military and naval commanders at Honolulu. This infamous
enfilade blackened the character of these men but did not succeed in heading
off a formidable amount of investigation and literature which did anything
but entrench the desired result of this Roosevelt establishment.
Pearl Harbor made the fatalist argument come true. The varied forces ranging
from pro-Communists of the 1934-1939 "popular front" to the fervid
Anglophiles of 1939-1941 who had tirelessly argued that the entry of the
U.S. into war with either Germany or Japan or both was "inevitable"
were finally "vindicated," in their own mind, but in a way very
much different from that expected. Their own propagandistic efforts to bring
about this result as a matter of "conviction" and voluntary choice
were a total failure. It was not "isolationism" which got America
into the war. It was the inch-by-inch creeping intrusionism and "aid
short of war" which created all the policy imperatives that slowly
moved the country to a point where their threat to an adversary and the
sus- tained pressure on that adversary finally produced the attack so dearly
desired and needed by the administration's political warriors. A good case
can be made for the view that war with Japan was not entirely unwelcome
in the U.S.A. at any time. Decades of political and propaganda.hostility
toward Japan on many levels in the U.S.A. preceded Pearl Harbor. Even men
antagonistic to involvement in the European war after it broke out in 1939
did not feel the same way about mixing it up in the Pacific. Even the usually
anti-war Senator George Curtis (R.-Neb.) was quoted by Newsweek as late
as the end of October 1941 as saying "I'm not so sure that war with
Japan would be a bad thing.... I believe we could lick them.... Our bombers
could set the whole island (sic) ablaze in one night...."(172)
And contrary to the mountain of mendacious special pleading that flowed
across the land afterward alleging unbelievable unpreparedness, the general
belief prior to Pearl Harbor was that the country's defenses, and offensive
strength, too, for that matter, were at a high pitch of development, ready
for anything, even the obliteration of Japan itself, as Senator Norris believed.
The public had been encouraged to feel that immense armaments and the best
of war materiel were at hand, easily put to use in the destruction of any
enemy. The fairy tale of innocent, unready America on the eve of the attack
is not substantiated by what many millions of Americans read in nationally
circulated periodicals for weeks prior to December 7, 1941.
Time had primed its millions of readers (readership surveys in the 1940s
indicated that a publication's total reading audience might exceed its actual
paid circulation by from 5 to 15 times that number) with repeated accounts
of the bristling armor and fire power prevailing here. On November 10, 1941,
it had referred ad- miringly to Roosevelt as the man who "was waging
the first great undeclared war in U.S. history,''(173) and later
in the month, on the occasion of his press conference following the sinking
of the U.S. destroyer Reuben James by a German submarine while on convoy
duty for the British in the North Atlantic, the editors concluded from the
substance of FDR's talk that "the U.S. was far into the unknown waters
of war."
In its issue of December 8, unfortunately on the stands after the attack
had taken place, Time's editors confidently assured Americans, expecting
war any minute, that "Everything was ready from Rangoon to Honolulu,
every man was at battle stations."(174) They went on in a gloating
mood, describing the vast American and British war machine which was ready
to spring on the Japanese should they snap under Roosevelt's "war of
nerves" and "undeclared war" and react militarily. Nothing
was more opposite to the whine and snivel of innocence and outrage which
promptly rose to the heavens from these same war anticipators a few days
later.
A respectable compendium of such material could have been collected, including
accounts which actually picked out Pearl Harbor as the site of the coming
attack weeks before it happened. Hallett Abend, a widely read newspaper
reporter on matters Japanese in the pre-war decade, in his November 18 article
in Look, "How the U.S. Navy Will Fight Japan," which was exposed
to a possible reading audience of about 12 million, launched even more inspiring
misconceptions than did Time. Abend, who shared with Hugh Byas of the New
York Times a record for being consistently wrong about Japan and filing
repeatedly misleading material about affairs there, was ludicrously off
the mark in this confident puff as well, seeding his piece with the promise
of a Stalinist attack on Japan from Siberia as soon as the shooting began.
The meat of his vaticination concerning the coming Pacific war was wrapped
up in the following:
When the clash comes, the Japanese fleet will have to stay in home waters,
to guard the islands of the Empire against naval raids. Our own fleet will
cruise somewhere west of Hawaii, with scout planes far over the seas day
and night to prevent surprise raids on the Pearl Harbor naval base or on
our own West Coast cities.(175)
This is the kind of gargantuan misinformation to which Americans were exposed
as late as three weeks before the attack. But it indicates that at least
on the popular level Pearl Harbor was openly expected to be the point at
which the war might or would begin. The fundamental line of the Roosevelt
defense corps in the next quarter of a century was that the Washington establishment
was totally unaware of such a possibility, and vaguely imagined the Japanese
strike would be at Borneo or similarly irrelevant distant locations.
The ear-splitting barks of hostility toward the Japanese which rang out
from all corners of American opinion, and especially from the long-believed
contingent of radio and newspaper "old Japan hands," were remarkable
in their barren thinness. Their desperate suggestions produced no Japanese
casualties (the first in the U.S.A. were the cherry trees lining the tidal
basin of Washington, D.C., cut down by pseudo-patriotic vandals), but their
call for an obliterating victory never contemplated the consequences of
the accompanying triumph of Asian Communism, an almost sure guarantee. Most
of these "advisors" looked forward to nothing in Japan but an
abyss of smoking ruins and corpses, and few of these seers were able to
discern that a major revolution was under way in Asia, regardless of who
won the war, which would stand any American or "Allied" victory
in the area on its head in an extremely short time.(176) But the
beams from a dimmer search- light were never played on American public opinion
than those emanating from these cloudy beacons.
Previous Section | Table of Contents | Next Section
✳ ✳ ✳