Posted on 12/06/2011 3:32:36 PM PST by Kaslin
On Dec. 8, 1941, Franklin Roosevelt took the rostrum before a joint session of Congress to ask for a declaration of war on Japan.
A day earlier, at dawn, carrier-based Japanese aircraft had launched a sneak attack devastating the U.S. battle fleet at Pearl Harbor.
Said ex-President Herbert Hoover, Republican statesman of the day, “We have only one job to do now, and that is to defeat Japan.”
But to friends, “the Chief” sent another message: “You and I know that this continuous putting pins in rattlesnakes finally got this country bit.”
Today, 70 years after Pearl Harbor, a remarkable secret history, written from 1943 to 1963, has come to light. It is Hoover’s explanation of what happened before, during and after the world war that may prove yet the death knell of the West.
Edited by historian George Nash, “Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath” is a searing indictment of FDR and the men around him as politicians who lied prodigiously about their desire to keep America out of war, even as they took one deliberate step after another to take us into war.
Yet the book is no polemic. The 50-page run-up to the war in the Pacific uses memoirs and documents from all sides to prove Hoover’s indictment. And perhaps the best way to show the power of this book is the way Hoover does it -- chronologically, painstakingly, week by week.
Consider Japan’s situation in the summer of 1941. Bogged down in a four year war in China she could neither win nor end, having moved into French Indochina, Japan saw herself as near the end of her tether.
Inside the government was a powerful faction led by Prime Minister Prince Fumimaro Konoye that desperately did not want a war with the United States.
The “pro-Anglo-Saxon” camp included the navy, whose officers had fought alongside the U.S. and Royal navies in World War I, while the war party was centered on the army, Gen. Hideki Tojo and Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka, a bitter anti-American.
On July 18, 1941, Konoye ousted Matsuoka, replacing him with the “pro-Anglo-Saxon” Adm. Teijiro Toyoda.
The U.S. response: On July 25, we froze all Japanese assets in the United States, ending all exports and imports, and denying Japan the oil upon which the nation and empire depended.
Stunned, Konoye still pursued his peace policy by winning secret support from the navy and army to meet FDR on the U.S. side of the Pacific to hear and respond to U.S. demands.
U.S. Ambassador Joseph Grew implored Washington not to ignore Konoye’s offer, that the prince had convinced him an agreement could be reached on Japanese withdrawal from Indochina and South and Central China. Out of fear of Mao’s armies and Stalin’s Russia, Tokyo wanted to hold a buffer in North China.
On Aug. 28, Japan’s ambassador in Washington presented FDR a personal letter from Konoye imploring him to meet.
Tokyo begged us to keep Konoye’s offer secret, as the revelation of a Japanese prime minister’s offering to cross the Pacific to talk to an American president could imperil his government.
On Sept. 3, the Konoye letter was leaked to the Herald-Tribune.
On Sept. 6, Konoye met again at a three-hour dinner with Grew to tell him Japan now agreed with the four principles the Americans were demanding as the basis for peace. No response.
On Sept. 29, Grew sent what Hoover describes as a “prayer” to the president not to let this chance for peace pass by.
On Sept. 30, Grew wrote Washington, “Konoye’s warship is ready waiting to take him to Honolulu, Alaska or anyplace designated by the president.”
No response. On Oct. 16, Konoye’s cabinet fell.
In November, the U.S. intercepted two new offers from Tokyo: a Plan A for an end to the China war and occupation of Indochina and, if that were rejected, a Plan B, a modus vivendi where neither side would make any new move. When presented, these, too, were rejected out of hand.
At a Nov. 25 meeting of FDR’s war council, Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s notes speak of the prevailing consensus: “The question was how we should maneuver them (the Japanese) into ... firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.”
“We can wipe the Japanese off the map in three months,” wrote Navy Secretary Frank Knox.
As Grew had predicted, Japan, a “hara-kiri nation,” proved more likely to fling herself into national suicide for honor than to allow herself to be humiliated.
Out of the war that arose from the refusal to meet Prince Konoye came scores of thousands of U.S. dead, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the fall of China to Mao Zedong, U.S. wars in Korea and Vietnam, and the rise of a new arrogant China that shows little respect for the great superpower of yesterday.
If you would know the history that made our world, spend a week with Mr. Hoover’s book.
I can easily believe that he may have considered war an antidote to this problem.
“Did FDR Provoke Pearl Harbor?”
The cruise of the Great White Fleet under Theodore Roosevelt’s administration was partially a message to check Japanese expansionism. The Japanese were determined to dominate Asia- they proved that by thrashing China in 1895, and then Russia in 1905, their seizure of Germany’s Asian possessions in WWI, and then their expansion into China after 1931. Opposition to this expansion- and that was the general thrust of US policy beginning with T.R.- pretty much set Japan against the US, regardless of what FDR thought or did.
Thank you for that. I get so sick of this garbage. I despise FDR, but I think he was in the minority to see the extreme dangers posed by Germany and Japan. The "FDR-Knew-In-Advance" is one of of the lies in my book "48 Liberal Lies About American History" and, yes, it was started by a liberal (a Marxist, actually) Charles Beard.
Had we not faced the Japanese after 12/7/1941 we would have faced them later when they were stronger. FDR was right.
You, and other FReepers who want to make up your own minds would do well to follow Homer_J_Simpson's daily retrospective on the NY Times from 70 years ago. Don't just start tomorrow with the news of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Go back two months and read, and see what you think.
ML/NJ
I think you’re thinking of the RMS Titanic which was rammed by a Russian sub in the Bering Sea in 1952.
The third strike would be to take out the oil storage facilities at Pearl which speculation says would have extended the war by 2 years.
lol. The Japanese had been planning and practicing the attack on Pearl Harbor for a decade. They trained naval pilots with a mock-up of Pearl Harbor.
The Japanese were going to attack sooner or later whether the US did anything or not. The Japanese were planning to conquer the entire Pacific. Or did Borneo, Philippines, Singapore and all those other places also “maneuver” the Japanese into attacking them?
Attack on PH *caused* the Vietnam War.
Umm.....ok. Yeah, right.
Yes, it has been very enlightening. He has been doing this for over a year... maybe two.
I do think that Japans’ invasion and rape of China helped topple the nationalists and bring about Red China. Maybe we should make Japan fix that?
One thinks that they could have done a better job. I wonder what the “Cheney is Evil Agent of Halliburton” crowd thinks about this question. After all, “truth is the first casualty in war”, you know.
The Japanese considered TR to be an honest broker as a result of his efforts to end to Russo-Japanese war. TR was the only statesman with good relations with all the leaders of the WWI beligerents at the beginning of the war. Too bad he wasn’t elected in ‘12, if there was anyone who could’ve brought all sides together and averted the tragedy of WWI, it was TR.
I have often wondered what would have happened if the Japanese had invaded only the Dutch East Indies--the source of the oil they wanted--and maybe Thailand, proclaiming the move a "peacekeeping operation," and not attacked the US or crossed into British territory. Would we have done anything? Or how about if they had invaded the Society Islands, which include Tahiti, New Caledonia, the Marquesas Islands and other French possessions? The French most likely would have surrendered without firing a shot, but would we have done anythng?
Similarly, what would have happened if Japan had attacked only the US and that the air, ground and naval forces used to attack British and Dutch possessions had been used to attack Hawaii, the western Aleutians or other US targets. Could they have knocked us out?
We didn’t start the war —I’m happy we won.
But did FDR *want* to war on Japan with no moral responsibility for STARTING it? Why, yes —that’s absolutely true.
And Churchill very badly wanted FDR in the war, and the two had been working for quite some time on how to manage it, when presto, finally the Japanese threw the solution right into their laps.
Did Japan deserve to get whipped? Oh sure..!
They didn’t attack just the USA —they attacked Hong Kong, Singapore, Malasia, Vietnam, Australia, the British, and others, and ALL AT ONCE.
In fact, in Singapore when they took over the hospitals, they went from bed to bed, simply bayonetting doctors and patients. They even shot nurses and doctors performing surgery.
It also turned out that the IJA had made absolutely NO PLANS AT ALL for provisioning for POWs and conquered peoples —nothing at all.
China invaded by Japan in '37.
Germany invaded Poland in '39.
Lend-lease started in '41.
No doubt somebody at the War Department was taking notice.
but I think he was in the minority to see the extreme dangers posed by Germany and Japan.
Below are two paragraphs taken from, Daniel Yergin’s “The Prize”.
All that day, the reports flowed into Washington from Pearl Harbor disjointed, fragmentary, and finally, dismal. “The news coming from Haawaii is very bad.” Stimson noted in his diary at the end of that long Sunday. “It has been staggering to see our people there, who have been warned long ago and were standing at alert, should have been so caught by surprise.” How could such a disaster have occurred.
Senior American officials had fully expected a Japanese attack, and imminently. But they expected it to be in Southeast Asia. Virtually no one, whether in Washington or Hawaii, seriously considered, or even comprehended, that Japan could - or would- launch a surprise assault against the American fleet in its home base. They believed, as General Marshall had told President Roosevelt in May of 1941, that the island of Oahu, where Pearl Harbor was located, was “the strongest fortress in the world.” Most of the American officials seemed to have forgotten-or never knew-that Japan’s great victory in the Russo-Japanese War have begun with a surprise attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur.
I second the recommendation. Very interesting stuff.
Pearl Harbor was intended to keep the US from doing anything about it.
Boy did they screw up.
Now, let's say that didn't happen and we kept feeding them oil. They had an atom bomb program under way ~ not many results at the time but they understood the concepts behind several different possible atom bombs.
It was just a matter of time and it could have been the Japanese making sure we did not achieve hegemony over the Pacific ocean through adroit threats to use atom bombs on us.
Should I say it ~ naw, wouldn't be fair, naw, go ahead, say it anyway ~ the East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere would have included China, Siberia, Yakutia, Manchuria, SE Asia and probably everything East of the Ganges.
You'd seen Harry Truman signing a START treaty with Japan that would make the US a Nuclear Free Zone.
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