Pearl Harbor
Revisited
December 7, 1999
World War
II is raging again, at least in the press. Pat Buchanan has been
called a Hitler-lover for suggesting the currently unthinkable: that entry
into the war may not have been in the best interests of Americans. And
Pope Pius XII is still being smeared for his “silence” about
Hitler during the war (though the greater mystery is his wartime silence
about Communism). Sometimes the rhetoric of these controversies gets so
heated that one wishes Hitler were still here to restore a little
perspective.
Now a new book argues that President
Franklin D. Roosevelt probably knew in advance that the Japanese were
about to attack Pearl Harbor. This “sneak attack” by those
“sneaky Japs,” as we used to call them, may have been
trumped by the sneakiness of our sneakiest president (current incumbent
included). Everyone knows that FDR wanted to get into the war and lied to
the American public in order to achieve this goal. But would he have gone
so far as to allow the preventable slaughter of thousands of American
soldiers and sailors?
In Day of Deceit (Free Press),
Robert B. Stinnett amasses circumstantial evidence that FDR knew what
was coming. He shows that U.S. intelligence had broken the Japanese
military code and that, contrary to official U.S. insistence, the Japanese
fleet bound for Pearl Harbor did not maintain radio silence.
Reviewing the book for the Wall
Street Journal, Bruce Bartlett cites an even more suggestive piece of
evidence: “a memo from Lieutenant Commander Arthur H. McCollum,
the top expert on Japan in naval intelligence before the war.”
“Dated October 7, 1940,”
writes Mr. Bartlett, “the memo outlines an eight-point plan to force
Japan to attack the U.S. Among the recommendations were the relocation
of the U.S. Pacific Fleet from San Diego to Hawaii and an embargo on all
trade with Japan. Mr. Stinnett correctly notes that every item on
McCollum’s list was acted upon — starting the day after
Roosevelt received the memo.”
![[Breaker
quote: What did FDR know, and when did he know it?]](breakers/991207.gif)
Mr. Stinnett himself, amazingly, defends
Roosevelt’s deliberate inaction: “Heinous as it seems to
families and veterans of World War II, of which the author is one, the
Pearl Harbor attack was, from the White House perspective, something
that had to be endured in order to stop a greater evil — the Nazi
invaders in Europe who had begun the Holocaust and were poised to invade
England.”
Here, sad to say, is an extension of the
standard defense of FDR: that he had no choice but to act cynically in order
to achieve his noble goals. Such is “the White House
perspective,” not to be confused with the perspective of American
boys and their anxious parents. To say that Pearl Harbor “had to be
endured” is to lose sight of who was doing the enduring. It
wasn’t FDR, who welcomed the opportunity Pearl Harbor gave him.
With boundless cynicism, Roosevelt proceeded to scapegoat the military
commanders of Pearl Harbor, stripping them of their rank for being
unprepared for the attack he had failed to forewarn them of!
The notion that Roosevelt was upset
because the Nazis had “begun the Holocaust” deserves a
particularly coarse horselaugh. FDR never mentioned the persecution of
Jews as a casus belli. As of December 7, 1941, all he knew was that the
Nazis had rounded up and incarcerated people of Jewish ancestry — a
practice he emulated by rounding up and incarcerating American citizens
of Japanese ancestry, a policy even FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, not
exactly renowned as a civil libertarian, protested as unconstitutional.
Roosevelt turned the U.S. Constitution
into a charred ember and helped the Soviet Union win World War II,
complete with the spoils of ten Christian countries which fell to the
tender mercies of “Uncle Joe” Stalin. After FDR’s
death, the United States, in partnership with Stalin, adopted Soviet
jurisprudence by conducting show trials of German officials at
Nuremberg.
Roosevelt also deserves full credit for
the terror bombing of German and Japanese cities and for launching the
development of nuclear weapons. Killing millions of civilians, mostly
women and children, may seem an odd way to oppose the Holocaust; but by
now we have all learned to internalize “the White House
perspective.”
Joseph Sobran
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