When Hull called at 9 p.m., he told Roosevelt that he had just finished reading an explosive speech which Premier Tojo was scheduled to deliver the following day. The speech called on Japan, “for the honor and pride of mankind,” to take immediate steps to wipe out U.S. and British “exploitation” in the Far East. Hull was convinced that a Japanese attack was imminent; he advised Roosevelt to return to Washington as soon as possible. The president agreed to leave the following day.
On Sunday morning, Grace Tully accompanied the president as he paid a short farewell call on Missy. She was “nearly in tears at losing us so soon,” Grace recalled. Accustomed for decades to being at the center of the whirling action, she could only sit back and watch as the presidential party pulled away, leaving her alone in a small cottage in a tiny community in the middle of Georgia.
• • •
Eleanor was in the midst of a press conference on Monday morning, December 1, when the presidential party returned. She had just announced some appointments to the OCD when Franklin’s dog, Fala, came running into the room. “That means the President is here,” she told reporters, a smile on her face as she leaned down to pat Fala’s head.
Tensions with Japan continued to escalate through the first week of December, as the United States awaited Japan’s reply to Secretary Hull’s note. By Friday’s Cabinet meeting, on December 5, Secretary Knox was so agitated, Frances Perkins recalled, that you could see “the blood rush up to his neck and face.” Still, the president insisted that the United States keep the option of peace alive. “We must strain every nerve to satisfy and keep on good relations with this group of Japanese negotiators,” he told Hull. “Don’t let it deteriorate and break up if you can possibly help it.”
Toward the end of the meeting, the discussion turned to the whereabouts of the Japanese fleet. “We’ve got our sources of communication in pretty good shape,” Knox assured the president, “and we expect within the next week to get some indication of where they are going.”
On Saturday afternoon, December 6, intelligence experts at the War and Navy departments, who had broken the secret Japanese code in July, intercepted a message from Tokyo informing the Japanese ambassador that a fourteen-part response to Hull’s ten-point document was on its way. By early evening, the first thirteen parts had been transmitted; the fourteenth part, Tokyo said, would be sent the following morning. When the first thirteen parts were deciphered, a feeling of dread filled the air. It was obvious from the point-by-point rejection of each and every one of Hull’s proposals that Japan was refusing all reconciliation; only one glimmer of hope remained—nowhere in the thirteen points had Japan formally broken off negotiations.
The improbable hope of Saturday night was crushed on Sunday morning, December 7, when the fourteenth part of the Japanese message, terminating diplomatic negotiations, arrived. Within minutes, a second message came through, instructing Ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura to deliver the entire fourteen-part reply to Secretary Hull at precisely one o’clock. To Colonel Rufus Bratton, chief of the Far Eastern Section of the War Department, the timing of the 1 p.m. deadline seemed significant. With a sinking heart, he told General Marshall that he feared it might coincide with an early-morning attack somewhere in the Pacific. Marshall acted swiftly, writing a priority dispatch to the various American commanders in the Pacific. “The Japanese are presenting at 1 p.m. EST today what amounts to an ultimatum. Just what significance the hour set may have we do not know, but be on the alert.” Uncertain of the security of the scrambler phone, Marshall opted to send his warning by the slower method of commercial telegraph. In order of priority, the warning was to go first to Manila, then to Panama, and finally to Hawaii. By the time the message reached the telegraph station in Honolulu, the attack on Pearl Harbor had already begun.
• • •
Shortly after 7:30 a.m., local time, while sailors were sleeping, eating breakfast, and reading the Sunday papers, the first wave of 189 Japanese planes descended upon Pearl Harbor, dropping clusters of torpedo bombs on the unsuspecting fleet. Half the fleet, by fortunate coincidence, was elsewhere, including all three aircraft carriers, but the ships that remained were tied up to the docks so “snugly side by side,” Harold lckes later observed, “that they presented a target that none could miss. A bomber could be pretty sure that he would hit a ship even if not the one he aimed at.” Within minutes—before any anti-aircraft fire could be activated, and before a single fighter plane could get up into the air—all eight of the American battleships in Pearl Harbor, including the West Virginia, the Arizona, and the California, had been hit, along with three destroyers and three light cruisers.
Bodies were everywhere—trapped in the holds of sinking ships, strewn in the burning waters, scattered on the smoke-covered ground. Before the third wave of Japanese planes completed its final run, thirty-five hundred sailors, soldiers, and civilians had lost their lives. It was the worst naval disaster in American history.
Knox relayed the horrifying news to the president shortly after 1:30 p.m. Roosevelt was sitting in his study with Harry Hopkins when the call came. “Mr. President,” Knox said, “it looks like the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor.” Hopkins said there must be some mistake; the Japanese would never attack Pearl Harbor. But the president reckoned it was probably true—it was just the kind of thing the Japanese would do at the very moment they were discussing peace in the Pacific. All doubt was settled a few minutes later, when Admiral Stark called to confirm the attack. With bloody certainty, the United States had finally discovered the whereabouts of the Japanese fleet.
While the president was on the phone with Stark, Eleanor was bidding luncheon guests goodbye. Heading back toward her sitting room on the second floor, she knew by one glance in her husband’s study that something had happened. “All the secretaries were there, two telephones were in use, the senior military aides were on their way with messages. I said nothing because the words I heard over the telephone were quite sufficient to tell me that finally the blow had fallen and we had been attacked.” Realizing at once that this was no time to disturb her husband with questions, Eleanor returned to work in her room. Earlier that morning, she had begun a chatty letter to Anna which spoke of her plans to come to California for a visit in early January. When she resumed writing after lunch, she told Anna, “the news of the war has just come and I’ve put in a call for you and Johnny as you may want to send the children East.” In the confusion of the first news of Pearl Harbor, it was thought that Japan might attack the West Coast as well. Finally, she drew the letter to a close. “I must go dear and talk to Father.”
The first thing Eleanor noticed when she went into her husband’s study was his “deadly calm” composure. While his aides and Cabinet members were running in and out in a state of excitement, panic, and irritation, he was sitting quietly at his desk, absorbing the news from Hawaii as it continued to flow in—“each report more terrible than the last.” Though he looked strained and tired, Eleanor observed, “he was completely calm. His reaction to any event was always to be calm. If it was something that was bad, he just became almost like an iceberg, and there was never the slightest emotion that was allowed to show.” Sumner Welles agreed with Eleanor’s assessment. In all the situations over the years in which he had seen the president, he “had never had such reason to admire him.”
Beneath the president’s imperturbable demeanor, however, Eleanor detected great bitterness and anger toward Japan for the treachery involved in carrying out the surprise attack while the envoys of the two countries were still talking. “I never wanted to have to fight this war on two fronts,” Franklin told Eleanor. “We haven’t got the Navy to fight in both the Atlantic and the Pacific . . . so we will have to build up the Navy and the Air Force and that will mean that we will have to take a good many defeats before we can have a victory.”
At Jimmy Roosevelt’s home in Washington, the phone rang. The White House operator was on the line telling him his father wanted to talk
with him. Jimmy had not yet heard the news of Pearl Harbor. “Hi, Old Man, what can I do for you?” Jimmy asked. “I don’t have time to talk right now but could you come right away?” “Pa, it’s Sunday afternoon,” Jimmy said, laughing, but then, sensing there was something wrong from the tone of his father’s voice, he agreed to come at once. “He was sitting at his desk,” Jimmy recalled. “He didn’t even look up. I knew right away we were in deep trouble. Then he told me. He showed no signs of excitement, he simply and calmly discussed who had to be notified and what the media campaign should be for the next forty-eight hours.”
“Within the first hour,” Grace Tully recalled, “it was evident that the Navy was dangerously crippled.” And there was no way of knowing where the Japanese would stop. The president’s butler Alonzo Fields recalls overhearing snatches of a remarkable conversation between Harry Hopkins and the president that afternoon in which they imagined the possibility of the invading Japanese armies’ driving inland from the West Coast as far as Chicago. At that point, the president figured, since the United States was a country much like Russia in the vastness of its terrain, we could make the Japanese overextend their communication and supply lines and begin to force them back.
Meanwhile, a little bit at a time, the public at large was learning the news. “No American who lived through that Sunday will ever forget it,” reporter Marquis Childs later wrote. “It seared deeply into the national consciousness,” creating in all a permanent memory of where they were when they first heard the news.
• • •
Churchill was sitting at Chequers with envoy Averell Harriman and Ambassador John Winant when news of the Japanese attack came over the wireless. Unable to contain his excitement, he bounded to his feet and placed a call to the White House. “Mr. President, what’s this about Japan?” “It’s quite true,” Roosevelt replied. “They have attacked us at Pearl Harbour. We are all in the same boat now.”
“To have the United States at our side,” Churchill later wrote, “was to me the greatest joy.” After seventeen months of lonely fighting, he now believed the war would be won. “England would live; Britain would live; the Commonwealth of Nations and the Empire would live.” The history of England would not come to an end. “Silly people—and there were many . . . ,” Churchill mused, “—might discount the force of the United States,” believing the Americans were soft, divided, paralyzed, averse to bloodshed. He knew better; he had studied the Civil War, the bloodiest war in history, fought to the last inch. Saturated with emotion, Churchill thought of a remark British politician Sir Edward Grey had made to him more than 30 years before. The U.S. was like “a gigantic boiler. Once the fire is lighted under it there is no limit to the power it can generate.”
Shortly before 5 p.m., the president called Grace Tully to his study. “He was alone,” Tully recalled, with two or three neat piles of notes stacked on his desk containing all the information he had been receiving during the afternoon. “Sit down, Grace. I’m going before Congress tomorrow. I’d like to dictate my message. It will be short.”
He began to speak in the same steady tone in which he dictated his mail, but the pace was slower than usual as he spoke each word incisively, specifying every punctuation mark. “Yesterday comma December 7th comma 1941 dash a day which will live in world history . . .”
While the president worked on his speech, Eleanor was across the hall, rewriting the script for her weekly radio broadcast. When she reached the NBC studios at 6:30 p.m., she was joined by a young corporal, Jimmy Cannon, who was scheduled to follow her with a report on morale in the army. Astonished to be in the presence of the first lady, the young soldier fumbled with the clasp on his script. “She leaned over,” he later wrote, “gently took it from me and broke the clasp.”
“For months now,” Eleanor began, “the knowledge that something of this kind might happen has been hanging over our heads . . . . That is all over now and there is no more uncertainty. We know what we have to face and we know we are ready to face it . . . . Whatever is asked of us, I am sure we can accomplish it; we are the free and unconquerable people of the U.S.A.”
Corporal Cannon listened to the first lady’s cultured voice and then delivered his own message. As she arose to go, he later told a PM reporter, she turned to him and said suddenly, as though it had been on her mind all the time she had been there, “The Japanese Ambassador was with my husband today. That little man was so polite to me. I had to get something. That little man arose when I entered the room.” Apparently, Eleanor could not get out of her mind the fact the Japanese ambassador was talking to her husband at the very moment when Japan’s airplanes were bombing Pearl Harbor.
It is a curious story, for there is no evidence that the Japanese ambassador was at the White House that Sunday. The only explanation is that Eleanor mistook the Chinese ambassador, who had stopped by to see the president shortly after noon, for the Japanese ambassador. Indeed, in the weeks to follow, the inability to tell a Chinese from a Japanese proved so widespread that Chinese consulates took steps to tag their nationals with signs and buttons: “Chinese, not Japanese, please.” As angry citizens mistakenly victimized their Chinese allies, Life magazine marched into the fray with a rule-of-thumb guide to distinguish “friendly Chinese from enemy alien Japs.” The typical Chinese, Life argued, “is relatively tall and slenderly built. His complexion is parchment yellow, his face long and delicately boned, his nose more finely bridged.” In contrast, the typical Japanese “betrays aboriginal antecedents in a squat, long-torsoed build, a broader, more massively boned head and face, flat, often pug nose, yellow-ocher skin and heavier beard.”
At eight-thirty on Sunday night, the Cabinet began to gather in the president’s study. A ring of extra chairs had been brought in to accommodate the overflow. The president, Perkins noted later, was sitting silently at his desk; he was preoccupied, seemed not to be seeing or hearing what was going on around him. “It was very interesting,” Perkins observed, “because he was always a very friendly and outgoing man on the personal side. He never overlooked people . . . . But I don’t think he spoke to anyone who came in that night. He was living off in another area. He wasn’t noticing what went on on the other side of the desk. He was very serious. His face and lips were pulled down, looking quite gray. His complexion didn’t have that pink and white look that it had when he was himself. It had a queer gray, drawn look.”
Finally, he turned around and said, “I’m thankful you all got here.” He went on to say this was probably the most serious crisis any Cabinet had confronted since the outbreak of the Civil War. Then he told them what he knew. “I remember,” Perkins later said, “the President could hardly bring himself” to describe the devastation. “His pride in the Navy was so terrific that he was having actual physical difficulty in getting out the words that put him on record as knowing that the Navy was caught unawares . . . . I remember that he said twice to Knox, ‘Find out, for God’s sake, why the ships were tied up in rows.’ Knox said, ‘That’s the way they berth them!’ It was obvious to me that Roosevelt was having a dreadful time just accepting the idea that the Navy could be caught off guard.”
By 10 p.m., congressional leaders had joined the Cabinet in the over-crowded study. The president told the gathering that he had prepared a short message to be presented at a joint session of Congress the following day. The message called for a declaration by Congress that a state of war had existed between Japan and the United States from the moment of the attack Sunday morning. He then went on to describe the attack itself, repeating much of what he had told his Cabinet, including new information that Japanese bombs had also hit American airfields in Hawaii, destroying more than half the planes in the Pacific fleet. Apparently, the planes had been an easy mark, since they were grouped together on the ground, wing tip to wing tip, to guard against subversive action by Japanese agents. “On the ground, by God, on the ground,” Roosevelt groaned.
“The effect on the Congressmen was tremendous,”
Stimson recorded. “They sat in dead silence and even after the recital was over they had very few words.” Finally, Senator Tom Connally of Texas spoke up, voicing the question that was on everyone’s mind. “How did it happen that our warships were caught like tame ducks in Pearl Harbor?” he shouted, banging the desk with his fist, his face purple. “How did they catch us with our pants down? Where were our patrols? They knew these negotiations were going on. They were all asleep.”
“I don’t know, Tom,” the president muttered, his head bowed, “I just don’t know.”
Historians have focused substantial time and attention trying to determine who knew what and when before the 7th of December—on the theory that Roosevelt was aware of the Japanese plans to attack Pearl Harbor but deliberately concealed his knowledge from the commanders in Hawaii in order to bring the United States into hostilities through the back door. Unable to swing Congress and the public toward a declaration of war against Germany, critics contend, the president provoked Japan into firing the first shot and then watched with delight as the attack created a united America.
To be sure, Roosevelt was concerned that, if war came, the Japanese should be the ones to initiate hostilities. Stimson records a conversation on November 25 in which the president raised the possibility that Japan might attack without warning. The question Roosevelt asked “was how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.” But in the discussion, as in all others preceding Pearl Harbor, the reigning assumption was that Japan would attack from the south. Though Pearl Harbor was mentioned once, the previous January, in a report from the U.S. ambassador to Japan, Joseph Grew, to the State Department, it was assumed, again and again, right up to December 7, that the Philippines was the most likely target for Japanese aggression.