Alarm spread through the Philippines and a state of emergency was declared. MacArthur insisted to Washington that he had an army of 125,000 men ready to fight, but he needed weapons—guns, tanks, planes, and supplies. But from the War Department there was silence, so MacArthur played his last card: he telegraphed George Marshall that he was resigning and moving with his family to Texas! That produced immediate results. On a Sunday morning in July, MacArthur learned through the newspapers that, by order of the president, he had been placed in command of all U.S. armies in the Far East. Not only was MacArthur to be restored to four-star rank, Roosevelt announced he was freezing all Japanese assets in the United States and cutting off any further American shipments of oil, iron, or rubber to Japan.
The Japanese reacted by calling a million reservists into the army and issuing a statement saying that Roosevelt’s actions made U.S. relations “so horribly strained that we can not endure them much longer.” At last, MacArthur was going to get what he’d been screaming for all those years—men, munitions, planes. Through all of his military career, Douglas MacArthur had preached that “the history of war can be summed up in two words: ‘Too Late.’ Too late in comprehending the purpose of the enemy, too late in preparedness, too late uniting forces, too late standing with one’s friends.”
IN THE AUTUMN OF 1941, a high drama began to unfold between Washington and its far-flung outposts in the Pacific. American intelligence had penetrated the Japanese diplomatic code. Beginning in late November of 1941 tensions between Japan and the United States had risen to such heights that U.S. Army Chief of Staff George Marshall was convinced war could break out with terrible suddenness. He put the commanders in Hawaii, the Philippines, Wake, Guam, and Midway islands, and other remote stations and garrisons on what was called a “war warning”—an alert that hostilities could begin at any time.
Earlier that month MAGIC—the code breaker’s name for the top-secret project of intercepting Japanese messages—had intercepted a message from Tokyo to a secret agent in Hawaii telling him to send the precise locations of each American warship in Pearl Harbor. This caused the U.S. chief of naval operations, Admiral Harold “Betty” Stark, to reiterate to his commanders in Hawaii the necessity of sharp vigilance. Even as he did this, the Japanese aircraft carriers were already skulking their way toward the Hawaiian Islands.
Then, on the evening of December 6, the first thirteen parts of a fourteen-part message from Tokyo arrived at the Japanese embassy in Washington, D.C., with the final part to come the next day, December 7. Most of the thirteen parts of the message merely ticked off everything the Japanese didn’t like about the United States, including its continued presence in the Far East and the recent decision by the Roosevelt administration to discontinue selling oil, rubber, metal, and other needed material to Japan. It further stated, ominously, that when the fourteenth part of the message had been received the ambassador was to see to it that all major code machines and codebooks at the embassy were destroyed.
When Colonel Rufus Bratton of army intelligence, who was on duty that night, read the message he became alarmed and asked his boss for permission to wake up the chief of staff. But Bratton was told there was “little military significance” in the message and not to disturb General Marshall. When the message reached the White House, President Roosevelt was talking with his aide Harry Hopkins. Roosevelt read the thing and handed it to Hopkins, and when Hopkins finished reading it the president remarked, “This means war.”1
Hopkins suggested that the United States might want to attack the Japanese first. “No we can’t do that,” Roosevelt replied. “We are a democracy and a peaceful people.” Nor did the president initiate a call to General Marshall or Admiral Stark, possibly assuming that they had already been alerted.
The next morning, December 7, Marshall went out for his regular long Sunday morning horseback ride at Fort Myer, still unaware of the message. An aide finally found him around 11:30 a.m., and by the time the chief of staff got to his office and read the message it was around noon. Colonel Bratton was standing before him, fidgeting, holding the vital fourteenth part of the message, which had come in the early morning hours. At last, Marshall read it: the Japanese were breaking off negotiations, which was not exactly a declaration of war in itself, but the part about burning encoding machines and codebooks certainly sounded like war. The Japanese ambassador was instructed to read the message to the U.S. secretary of war Henry Stimson at exactly 1 p.m.
Bratton deduced that something was going to happen in the Pacific at that time, but he didn’t know where or what. It would be dark in the Philippines, he knew, and about daybreak at Pearl Harbor, but he never thought the Japanese would attack there. After the original “war warning,” Bratton would later explain, “everybody in Washington thought the fleet would be at sea.” It occurred to no one, apparently, to check.
When the chief of staff had read the entire message he conferred with Admiral Stark, then scribbled out a communication to all military commanders in the Pacific including Panama and Alaska:
Japanese are presenting at 1 p.m. eastern standard time today what amounts to an ultimatum, also they are under orders to destroy their code machine immediately. Just what significance the hour set may have we do not know, but be on the alert accordingly. Inform naval authorities of this communication—Marshall
In Washington, people were returning home from church or going out for Sunday dinner. Fans were filling up Griffith Stadium (the D.C. football stadium, now demolished) for the Redskins–Philadelphia Eagles game. As the rest of America went about daily life, Colonel Bratton was designated to get the new war warning to Pacific commanders by the highest possible priority. It would prove a daunting task.
He rushed the message to the army communications center where it would have to be typed out, encoded, sent, and delivered. By then, there was still nearly an hour left to alert the Pacific to the coming danger, but fate intervened. A giant solar storm had brewed up overnight and the army’s radio communications with Honolulu were interrupted. No one seriously thought about using the telephone, as historian Gordon Prang has pointed out. Even with a scrambler it was considered insecure, and anyone listening to Marshall’s message would have been able to figure out that the United States was reading Japan’s secret diplomatic messages.
The communications officer on duty told Bratton that the next best way to get the warning out would be through civilian services. So he had it encoded and sent by Western Union from Washington to San Francisco, where it would be cabled by RCA to Honolulu, and then delivered to the message center at Pearl Harbor. From there, it would be given to the army commanding general, who would then pass it to the navy admiral commanding the base. By the time it arrived neither officer would have need of a warning.
The Japanese fury first burst in the skies above the Hawaiian island of Oahu. Carrier-based planes from the Imperial Fleet wrecked the U.S. Pacific Fleet and surrounding air bases. December 7, 1941, was a day, Franklin Roosevelt famously said, “that would live in infamy.”
A FEW MONTHS PRIOR, George Marshall had planned to check himself into a hospital in Hot Springs, Arkansas. He was physically and mentally exhausted and felt he needed time off to recuperate. Since taking over as chief of staff in 1939, he had driven himself almost to the brink in organizing the U.S. Army for war, preaching preparedness at every turn. And, at every turn, congressional isolationists opposed him, accusing him of association with the Roosevelt regime through their newspapers. The war changed all of that; the isolationists either changed their minds or went underground, and whatever Marshall wanted was now only a matter of possibility—no mean task in itself.
The nature of the war had already changed dramatically before the Pearl Harbor attack. In June 1941, the Germans—instead of invading England as had been expected since the fall of France—suddenly turned on their erstwhile ally Russia. They launched a four-million-man attack along an 1,800-mile front in an attempt to surprise and subdue her old enem
y. This provided a measure of relief to the United States, because if Britain had fallen the Atlantic would have become impossibly dangerous and there would be no staging ground for American and British armies to attack the Germans in France.
And as for the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, although it decimated the American fleet of battleships, it failed to accomplish two highly important tasks that would vastly improve America’s fortunes in the months to come—it did not wreck the naval stores and shops that were vitally important to maintaining the fleet, and it did not sink the navy’s only two aircraft carriers then in the Pacific—Enterprise and Hornet—which were at sea when the attack occurred. Nevertheless, the American people were roused to a fury probably never known before or since.
Then a relatively small event in the developing scheme of things occurred the week after Pearl Harbor in the far-off waters of Malaya. There, Japanese bombers and torpedo planes sank two British battle cruisers, HMS Repulse and the Prince of Wales, forever changing the way navies would view their primary fighting strategy. Two incredibly expensive capital ships, free to maneuver in the open ocean, had been sunk by a handful of cheap airplanes. Even the Japanese senior naval officers in Tokyo found it difficult to believe. Overnight came the painful revelation that if battleships were to play any role in the war, they would require massive protection from carrier-based fighters, and that the carrier itself had now become the principal instrument of sea war. Winston Churchill “writhed and twisted in my bed as the full horror of the news sank in. In all the war I never received such a direct shock.”2
THE PHILIPPINES FOLLOWED PEARL HARBOR. A little past 3 a.m. on December 8 (December 7 in Hawaii) a frantic message flashed out from naval headquarters: “Enemy Air Raid Pearl Harbor. This Is Not A Drill.” It was received not by General Douglas MacArthur but by Admiral Thomas Hart, commander of the small U.S. Asiatic Fleet based at Manila, who did not inform the commanding general on the assumption that the army had its own means of finding out.
It did. An alert army radioman with a shortwave tuner had been listening to music on a San Francisco commercial station when the announcer broke in with a wire service bulletin. He went screaming into the night with the news.
When it eventually got to MacArthur, he dressed and asked his wife to bring him the Bible, which he read for an hour before going to headquarters. Admiral Hart was there and after a conference he received MacArthur’s blessing to steam his fleet south toward Australia to escape the fate of the ships at Pearl. While that conversation was in progress, Lieutenant General Lewis Brereton, commander of the Far East Air Force, rushed in to see MacArthur, wanting to send thirty-five B-17 heavy bombers to attack Japanese airfields on Formosa (now Taiwan) five hundred miles to the north. MacArthur refused on grounds that Roosevelt had sent a telegram insisting that the Japanese “strike the first blow”—a decision that has stirred controversy from that day until this one.
After arguing unsuccessfully that the Japanese had already done so at Pearl Harbor, Brereton ordered his bombers to take to the air and scout for an enemy invasion force—and of course to avoid being caught on the ground by a surprise attack. Again he asked MacArthur if he could attack Formosa; again he was denied, but instead was told to go there and take pictures of enemy airfields. After another hour, word came that MacArthur had authorized the attack on Formosa. Brereton ordered his planes to land at Clark Field, north of Manila, refuel, and load up with bombs.
These behemoths had barely touched down when the Japanese arrived overhead in force. Worse, the modern American P-40 fighters that had been scouting all morning for enemy planes had been ordered to land at Clark and refuel, and thus were sitting ducks on the runway when the bombs began to fall.† The pilots, who had been having lunch in the mess hall, rushed outside to see hundreds of Japanese bombers, “glistening in the sunlight,” hurtling toward them. The men immediately scattered to the four winds.
In a maddening stroke of bad luck, fog had also delayed the Japanese planes on Formosa—otherwise they would have arrived right when the P-40s would have been there to greet them, and the B-17s could have flown to safety.
No less than three warnings of approaching Japanese planes had been sent and all failed to get through. In one case, the Teletype operator, like the pilots, was eating his lunch when word came; in another, an unnamed lieutenant promised to sound the alert but never did. Most of the U.S. antiaircraft ammunition was ten years old and failed to explode, or it exploded thousands of feet below the Japanese planes. For the Americans, it was a debacle. When it was over an hour later, most of the Far East Air Force was a shambles—not only the planes but the hangars and stores had also been wrecked and the aviation fuel exploded. Brereton called it “one of the blackest days in U.S. military history.”3
The smoke had barely cleared when Brereton’s phone rang. It was Hap Arnold in Washington, chief of the U.S. Army Air Corps. He was furious.
“How in hell could an experienced airman like you get caught with his planes on the ground?” he demanded. “That’s what we sent you there for, to avoid just what happened!”
Brereton was trying to explain the situation when yet another flight of Japanese fighters appeared and began strafing his headquarters.
“What in hell is going on there!” Arnold shouted.
“We are having visitors,” Brereton replied sourly.4
For the next two weeks the Japanese continued to bombard and strafe airfields all over Luzon and the other islands, leaving the inhabitants only to wonder when the invasion would begin. They wrecked the great U.S. naval base at Cavite, and even though most of Admiral Hart’s larger ships were gone there were submarines, seaplanes, tenders, barges, oilers, tugs, and other useful craft either sent to the bottom or badly damaged. Thus MacArthur was left with no navy and no air force to contend with the rapacious Japanese, which was all the more galling because of his genuine love for the Philippines and the Philippine people, as well as his promises.
His biographer Manchester suggests that MacArthur—during this period after the initial air attacks—seemed to be in some kind of “daze” similar to that which afflicted Napoleon, George Washington, and even Stonewall Jackson at critical moments in their military careers. Perhaps that was so; MacArthur was then sixty-one years old, an age when most people are looking forward to retirement, when suddenly upon his shoulders was thrust tremendous responsibility.5
ON DECEMBER 11, 1941, Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy foolishly declared war on the United States, even though the Tripartite Pact did not require it. (It called for an Axis nation to declare war only in the event it was attacked by another power.) Thus the United States went from being a peaceful nation trying its best to stay that way to a belligerent at war with three powerful enemies who had been preparing for the occasion for nearly a decade.
It wasn’t as though America was totally surprised by her sudden entry into the war; five months before Pearl Harbor at a secret meeting aboard the heavy cruiser USS Augusta, Roosevelt and Churchill—with Marshall present—made the first grand strategic decision of the war, namely that Germany was the most dangerous enemy and must be defeated first. The American army Marshall oversaw was more than three times larger than the one before he became chief of staff. It had an authorized strength of 375,000 men, plus half a million National Guardsmen who could be activated if necessary.
But it was still woefully inferior to its enemies. Over the next year it would expand to an army of millions, all of whom—civilians, as in World War I—would have to be trained and provided for.
The magnitude of the task was simply overwhelming. The Germans and Italians had overrun Europe and North Africa—only tiny England hung on by a thread—and the Japanese were busy conquering Asia and the Pacific. The Imperial Navy subdued the U.S. possessions Guam and Wake, their garrisons made prisoners in ghastly POW camps. And of course the Philippines were under heavy attack. There were fears on the West Coast that the Japanese might invade California or the Paci
fic Northwest, and one large Japanese submarine did in fact surface off the coast near Santa Barbara. For about twenty minutes, it began bombarding an oil field and refinery there, killing a number of cows.
The secret agreement between Roosevelt and Churchill notwithstanding, the president wanted an immediate retaliation on Japan and was astonished when Marshall and other chiefs told him that none was possible at the moment—the United States simply did not have the strength. They might get a few submarines close enough to Tokyo or other cities, Roosevelt was told, but the fire from the subs’ lone three-inch (76mm) deck guns would produce slight damage, and the subs would probably be lost. A carrier attack seemed the only feasible scheme, but carrier planes didn’t have the range to penetrate Japan’s defensive perimeter of picket boats four hundred miles offshore, strike Japan, and return to their carriers. Even if they did, the size of their bombs was so small that, like the deck guns on the subs, they would likely only invite derision from the haughty Japanese. But Roosevelt was adamant that something be done—“the people demand it.” Marshall delegated the task to his air chief Hap Arnold.
In July 1940, Henry Stimson had again become secretary of war, and he procured a number of high-ranking civilians from the private sector—such as General Motors president William S. Knudsen—to oversee the vast production increases in tanks, artillery, planes, munitions, and the thousand and one other items necessary for an army to have a fighting chance. In retrospect, this was a brilliant move, because these powerful capitalists were unfettered by a lifetime in the military bureaucracy where justifications, reports, and other inflexible rules and regulations often made it difficult to quickly accomplish complex and expensive tasks. Automotive manufacturers ceased making cars and began turning out tanks, jeeps, and army trucks. Appliance manufacturers stopped making refrigerators, fans, and stoves and started making parts for military use. The great American arms industry retooled for military weapons.