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.
Billy Mitchell predicted Japan would attack back the 20s
As usual, PB expresses some truths mixed with incomprehensible morality.
The US pursued a policy of non-conciliation with the Empire of Japan. In my opinion, this policy was moral and correct.
There is a legitimate argument that it was not wise, at least in the short run. There is no question that a more conciliatory policy could have prevented war, but it also would have been arguably immoral.
gee I thought it was in response to japans aggression and ethnic cleansing in china that caused us to slap japan with a boycott that led to pearl harbor
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.
Some genius (and I say genius since these things usually happen with just a single planner) realized that he had to use the existing resources to acquire oil in just about 30 days, so some things were possible and others weren't.
There was little margin for error so the planner simply chopped off all the "nice to have" stuff ~ leaving himself with an air attack on Pearl Harbor, main battle groups to Singapore, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and as soon as that was clear the tankers were sent to the oil fields ~
Later on, in the exuberance of victory somebody else sent units to the Aleutians, Sakhalin and beyond, and to screw around in the South Pacific.
They ended up with a great deal of their ground combat units bogged down on islands we never attacked nor needed to attack. The Japanese were forced to supply those troops on those islands with ships that were probably needed to support activity in China. The Chinese venture continued, and then got worse when the US used safe areas in China as landing pads for bombings of the Japanese Home islands.
One thing led to the next and the US ended up with the whole enchilada!
If the Japanese could have counted on a 6 month supply of oil back in 1941, they'd spent more time planning the attack because that was going to happen anyway whether we cut off their oil or kept sending.
All the theories that place the blame on FDR necessarily assume the Japanese didn't know how to plan major war movements ~ and that's just crazy talk!
Ah, good old Charles Beard, whose book An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (New York; Macmillan, 1913) portrayed the Constitution as the product of a rich men's plot. Robert E. Brown demolished this view in his book Charles Beard and the Constitutuin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton, 1956).
Beard's pupil William Appleman Williams, who also taught at Wisconsin, blamed the Cold War on the US in his book The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: Marzani & Munsell, 1959), which inspired a generation of "revisionist" historians who blamed the US for all of the world's problems.
All they needed to do was make it expensive for the US to move into or return to the Western Pacific basin and we were out of the war permanently (their thinking, not mine).
The issue for the US was control of the Philippines and Hawaii (and at the time the Japanese owned outright hundreds of Pacific islands. They'd been collecting them for centuries. We had to be vigilant lest they decided they needed more Pacific islands).
Only to a liberal does not giving into a tyrant (a liberal) constitute provocation. Typical liberal tactics.
Exactly so —the Pacific War was very much about oil.
In fact as a Navy guy very much aware that oil was the lifeblood of a modern Navy, Yamamoto had done a big paper at Harvard regarding the US oil industry —he even had a convertible and spent a good deal of time driving around the USA checking out refineries and so on.
And that is why he paid a maximum of attention to speedily gaining control and re-establishing productive oil-rich places like the Dutch East Indies, etc.
Oil, oil, oil, oil, oil —the economy and Navy need it.
And...I don’t have a problem with it —in fact I think very little has changed.
As we will soon see in the Spraties, etc.
Your #46. Dead on.
I’ve been reading Homer’s threads for eons, and just recently checked the FR homepage.....”Homer” is a HEN, not a HE! Heh....
One must consider just how totally commited FDR was to saving the the Soviet Union and the british empire and just how equally opposed Americans were to be f#@k%d by the russians and brits again after just twenty years.
Spraties = Spratly Islands, South China Sea, etc.
Basically now we’re 1938, or so, all over again, but this time Japan is China, Japan is (sort of) China, and we are somewhat poorer.
No, I think it was the Gordon Lightfoot, that was rammed by the Cat Stevens.
??
really?
hhmmm
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