This will be my most controversial post—perhaps my only controversial post. [1] December 7 has come and gone again, and there was little discussion of the details surrounding Pearl Harbor, except for appropriate remembrances of those who died.
A decade ago I began to research the history of the Pearl Harbor attack. I had happened upon the book Infamy by a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, John Toland, which raised disturbing questions about foreknowledge of the attack. [2] This was Toland’s third book about World War II. His prize-winning Rising Sun had treated the attack as a dastardly Japanese act; the second revealed poor communication between Washington, D.C., and Hawaii; and Infamy blamed the U.S. president and his high-level advisors for allowing the attack to go forward.
In Liberty magazine in 2010 (you can read the article on p. 39 of the October issue in Liberty Unbound ) I reviewed The Pearl Harbor Myth: Rethinking the Unthinkable, a 2007 book by George Victor. [3] And I took the opportunity to discuss the long-standing controversy over the question, Did President Roosevelt and/or his advisors know about the potential attack and could they have taken action to prevent it?
My conclusion was, and remains, that FDR knew the Japanese were about to attack, as did his chief of staff, George Marshall, and they almost certainly knew the target would be Pearl Harbor. This is heresy to most people. In 2001, Robert Bartley, the esteemed editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal, called the possibility that the president would conceal such information “wildly implausible; what commander would sacrifice most of a fleet to open a two-front war?” [4]
But it’s not all that implausible. George Victor, the author who provides persuasive evidence of high-level knowledge, is sympathetic to FDR. He supports the president’s decision to avert his eyes to what was coming. World War II was a necessary war against Germany, Victor believes, and one of FDR’s few options was to turn around American opinion by allowing a surprise attack to proceed. Victor also observes that the large number of deaths (2400) would not have been expected. The battleship “Arizona” exploded because a bomb reached its magazine, and the “Oklahoma” capsized. Those two unlikely events killed 1600 people.
To some, Victor’s claims are beyond the pale. However, in 2010 a 937-page book appeared, written by Percy Greaves. [5] In 1945, Greaves had been an advisor to the Republicans on the congressional committee that conducted a massive investigation into Pearl Harbor (with 39 volumes of testimony). The majority report put most of the blame on the two Hawaiian commanders, Walter Short and Husband Kimmel, and mildly criticized War Department and Navy officials. The minority report included in its blame the president and his top staff, including Marshall. Greaves’ book went even farther, saying that “ultimate responsibility . . . must rest on the shoulders of President Roosevelt.”[6]
A few facts among many: FDR’s chief of staff, the famed George Marshall, testified before the congressional committee, but he was vague about where he had been on Saturday night, December 6, and Sunday morning, December 7, before the attack occurred. A war hero by the time of his testimony, he was not pressed. Harold Stark, Chief of Naval Operations, also testified that he couldn’t remember where he was on Saturday night. But then a friend who had gone with him to the National Theater that night jogged his memory, and he was forced to admit that he had received a call from the White House after he returned. Quite likely, the call was to bring him to a late-night meeting.
If you are the least bit intrigued by what I have said here, or by the Liberty article, you will want to read pages 601-603 of Winston Churchill’s The Grand Alliance, one of his six volumes on the Second World War. [7]
[1] The title refers to a quote from William Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Barack Obama paraphrased it in a speech in 2008.
[2] John Toland, Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath (New York: Doubleday, 1983).
[3] George Victor, The Pearl Harbor Myth: Rethinking the Unthinkable (Dulles VA: Potomac Books, 2007).
[4] Wall Street Journal, Dec. 3, 2001.
[5] Percy L. Greaves Jr., Pearl Harbor: The Seeds and Fruits of Infamy (Auburn AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2010).
[6] Greaves, 865.
[7] Winston S. Churchill, The Grand Alliance (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1950), 602-603.
My father, a WW II-era Navy guy, would have agreed with Jane’s theory. There just seemed to be too many coincidences lined up in a tidy row for him to buy whatever the FDR regime was selling.
Vic Brown (see comment below) touches on a growing trend: an increasing number of people are no longer believing the official story on almost anything. It predates the Trump era (which Vic says was the tipping point for him); it has been obvious that our government, media, and academic institutions are lying–even if only by omission–on so many levels. Michael Anton wrote in the Claremont Review about an increasingly popular alt-right website that seems incoherent except for one dictum: “question everything.” And that seems to be the motto for an increasing segment of the non-academic thinking population: everything is up for discussion, from the “flat earth” model to government “false flag” operations. Clearly not all–or even a majority– of such theories are true, but it is just as clear that the official story frequently doesn’t cut the muster. We seem to be approaching an intellectual “Second Coming” (Yeats), when “the center does not hold.”
Huhhh? What? Roosevelt n Company knew about Pearl Harbor attack – really? Jane that’s just silly.
75 years later and there is no proof of conspiracy.
Was there incompetence – yes.
Was there a coverup and scapegoating to protect the administration – sure.
The big question is
Did the US Government and Military know the Japanese
-were going to combine their Carriers into a Massive strike force
-make an Eight thousand mile round trip voyage while avoiding detection
-launch a surprise Air attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th?
AND
Knowing about the Japanese plans did the US Government and Military collude to keep it a secret?
Cmon.
Farren Joy: I understand your skepticism. I think you will be less skeptical if you read the article I wrote in Liberty magazine. You can see it on p. 39 of the October 2010 issue at http://www.libertyunbound.com/node/275. Believe me, I don’t make these claims lightly.
In response to a question, here is a bit more information about Churchill’s memoir, mentioned at the end of the post. The most relevant passage begins: “I do not intend in these pages to attempt to pronounce judgment upon this tremendous episode in American history. We know that all the great Americans round the President and in his confidence felt, as acutely as I did, the awful danger that Japan would attack British or Dutch possessions in the Far East, and would carefully avoid the United States, and that in consequence Congress would not sanction an American declaration of war. “
This is fascinating and I believe that Roosevelt would have run this risk to move the US away from isolationism because he knew what letting Great Britain and France fall to the Germans would mean for our country inevitably.
Jane, this is very interesting. I have to say that I have developed, since November 2016, a deep distrust of government, based on the information that I have been able to piece together. .
Your blog suggests to me that mistrust in government may be a valid position to have at all times, since government secrecy and duplicity may be something that is in its very nature.
Based on the infamous Kavanaugh hearings, it is clear to me that power and control are clearly the highest priorities. Whoever stands in the way will simply be destroyed.
The Liberty article is a summary tour de force. As I was reading in my usual very slow pace, I was thinking about how hindsight makes connecting the dots far easier than before-the-fact picking them out of a great buzzing swarm of facts and would-be facts. As your summary progresses, however, a few key facts very close to the grand dot–the attack–combine with Rooseveltian character to weigh the evidence very much toward the conclusion that Roosevelt made a grand gamble and horrible mistake–the gamble that the attack would cause minimal damage to the fleet and maximum damage to isolationist sentiment. The first part was a disaster, the second part produced his desired results.
Nice job.