Why remember Pearl Harbour?

[Imran Khan]

VIEW: Why remember Pearl Harbour? —Eri Hotta
Diplomacy no longer works with terrorism, but it can help to prevent it by dealing carefully with potentially hostile states. With global expectations mounting for a fresh start in US foreign policy, it is vital not just to remember, but to understand the attack on Pearl Harbour

December 7 marks the 67th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. Over the years, “the day of infamy” has become a classic reference point for galvanising patriotic sentiment in America. In the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack, for example, analogies to Pearl Harbour were made frequently.

But despite its central place in America’s collective memory, Pearl Harbour remains little understood. Why did Japan initiate such a seemingly self-destructive war in the first place? Aside from lessons that Japan must learn from its momentous decision, is there something to be learned by the United States as well?

The decision to attack Pearl Harbour was reached after five months of deliberations that included numerous official conferences. It was a gradual process in which more sympathetic, albeit firm, US engagement might have helped sway Japan in a different direction. In fact, Japanese government opinion was so divided that it is surprising that it was able to unite in the end.

Many in the Japanese Army initially regarded the Soviet Union as the main threat facing the country. Others saw the US as the primary enemy. Some were concerned with more abstract, ideological enemies, such as Communism and “Americanism”, while there were also voices highlighting the menace of the “white race” (including Japan’s allies, Germany and Italy) against the “yellow race”.

Then there were those who preferred not to fight any enemy at all, particularly the US, whose long-term war-making power, the government knew, far surpassed Japan’s own. The tactical mastermind of the Pearl Harbour operation, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, was one of them.

Over the course of the summer of 1941, events slowly tilted Japan towards the possibility of war with the West. But Pearl Harbour was in no way inevitable. Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union compelled Japan in July 1941 to prepare a plan of attack. Although it made clear Japan’s desire to take advantage of the European conflict and gain a foothold in the European colonies in Southeast Asia, the plan was not clear about who constituted Japan’s true enemy.

Japan’s military thrust into Southeast Asia led President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration to impose sanctions. The US froze Japanese assets, an example followed by Britain and the Dutch East Indies. When Japan responded by taking over southern French Indochina, the US retaliated by imposing an embargo on oil exports to Japan. Rather than telling Japan that the US was determined to search for a diplomatic solution, America’s categorical reaction confirmed it to the Japanese as an arrogant and conceited enemy. Moreover, by transferring its Pacific Fleet from San Diego to Pearl Harbour, the US encouraged the Japanese understanding that the US fully anticipated war with Japan.

World War II in the Pacific finally came about for many different reasons. But it was, above all, the sense of encirclement and humiliation that united the deeply divided Japanese government. Feeling defeated by a series of failed approaches to the US, including an overture to hold direct talks with Roosevelt, Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe resigned on October 16, making hard-line Army Minister Hideki Tojo his successor.

The high-handed tone of the Hull Note of November 26, demanding Japan’s withdrawal of all its troops from China, was a final blow to the moderates in Japan’s government, who still hoped for diplomatic negotiations. By this time, many policymakers were convinced that the US was not ready to hear them out. It was ultimately in the name of saving Asia for all Asians from what was regarded as Western arrogance that the government united to wage war. On December 1, it was decided that the war would commence in six days.

There were legitimate historical reasons for Japan to feel humiliated on the eve of war. The gunboat diplomacy that resulted in the opening of Japan and unequal treaties in the mid-19th century was but a beginning. More immediately, the Great Depression and the subsequent compartmentalisation of the world into economic blocs also worked to the advantage of the already powerful. Coupled with the economic hardship of the interwar years were instances of racial prejudice in the US that aimed at preventing Japanese immigration. United by this long-simmering and humiliating sense of exclusion, Japanese policymakers, whatever their differences, stumbled toward the December 1 decision to go to war.

With almost 70 years of hindsight, Pearl Harbour should offer some lessons for US foreign policy today. Despite obvious differences between Pearl Harbour and recent Islamist terrorist tactics, they show the common desire of self-proclaimed Davids to topple their Goliaths in a clearly lop-sided battle. These Davids depend on Western technologies to overcome imbalances of power, and are driven by a sense of real or imagined humiliation.

But no matter how strong and historically justified such grievances may be those who resort to murderous tactics must be condemned. However, high-handedness and tough talk alone are an inadequate response, for this approach further humiliates those who already feel humiliated, and alienates those who might otherwise proffer a more moderate voice. Diplomacy no longer works with terrorism, but it can help to prevent it by dealing carefully with potentially hostile states. With global expectations mounting for a fresh start in US foreign policy, it is vital not just to remember, but to understand the attack on Pearl Harbour. —DTPS

Eri Hotta is author of Pan-Asianism and Japan’s War 1931-1945

 

[dr.umer]

Report Debunks Theory That the U.S. Heard a Coded Warning About Pearl Harbor ​

Newyork Times

December 6, 2008

It has remained one of World War II’s most enduring mysteries, one that resonated decades later after Sept. 11: Who in Washington knew what and when before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941?

Specifically, who heard or saw a transcript of a Tokyo shortwave radio news broadcast that was interrupted by a prearranged coded weather report? The weather bulletin signaled Japanese diplomats around the world to destroy confidential documents and codes because war with the United States, the Soviet Union or Britain was beginning.

In testimony for government inquiries, witnesses said that the “winds execute” message was intercepted as early as Dec. 4, three days before the attack.

But after analyzing American and foreign intelligence sources and decrypted cables, historians for the National Security Agency concluded in a documentary history released last week that whatever other warnings reached Washington about the attack, the “winds execute” message was not one of them.

A Japanese message intercepted and decoded on Nov. 19, 1941, at an American monitoring station on Bainbridge Island, in Washington State, appeared to lay out the “winds execute” situation. If diplomatic relations were “in danger” with one of three countries, a coded phrase would be repeated as a special weather bulletin twice in the middle and twice at the end of the daily Japanese-language news broadcast.

“East wind rain” would mean the United States; “north wind cloudy,” the Soviet Union; and “west wind clear,” Britain.

In the history, “West Wind Clear,” published by the agency’s Center for Cryptologic History, the authors, Robert J. Hanyok and the late David Mowry, attribute accounts of the message being broadcast to the flawed or fabricated memory of some witnesses, perhaps to deflect culpability from other officials for the United States’ insufficient readiness for war.

A Congressional committee grappled with competing accounts of the “winds execute” message in 1946, by which time the question of whether it had been broadcast had blown into a controversy. The New York Times described it as a “bitter microcosm” of the investigation into American preparedness.

“If there was such a message,” The Times wrote, “the Washington military establishment would have been gravely at fault in not having passed it along” to military commanders in Hawaii. If there was not, then the supporters of those commanders “would have lost an important prop to their case.”

In an interview, Mr. Hanyok said there were several lessons from the controversy that reverberate today. He said that some adherents of the theory that the message was sent and seen were motivated by an unshakable faith in the efficacy of radio intelligence, and that when a copy of the message could not be found they blamed a cover-up — a reminder that no intelligence-gathering is completely foolproof.

Washington also missed potential warning signs because intelligence resources had been diverted to the Atlantic theater, he said, and the Japanese deftly practiced deception to mislead Americans about the whereabouts of Tokyo’s naval strike force.

“The problem with the conspiracy theory,” Mr. Hanyok said, “is that it diverted attention from the real substantive problems, the major issue being the intelligence system was so bureaucratized.”

Beginning about Dec. 1, Washington became aware that the Japanese were ordering diplomats overseas to selectively destroy confidential documents. But, the N.S.A. study found, “because of the sometimes tardy exploitation of these messages, intelligence officers in the Army and Navy knew only parts of the complete program.”

“It is possible,” the study went on, “that they viewed the Japanese actions as ominous, but also contradictory and perhaps even confusing. More importantly, though, the binge of code destruction was occurring without the transmittal of the winds execute message.”

The authors concluded that the weight of the evidence “indicates that one coded phrase, ‘west wind clear,’ was broadcast according to previous instructions some six or seven hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor.”

“In the end, the winds code never was the intelligence indicator or warning that it first appeared to the Americans, as well as to the British and Dutch,” they wrote. “In the political realm, it added nothing to then current view in Washington (and London) that relations with Tokyo had deteriorated to a dangerous point. From a military standpoint, the winds coded message contained no actionable intelligence either about the Japanese operations in Southeast Asia and absolutely nothing about Pearl Harbor.

“In reality,” they concluded, “the Japanese broadcast the coded phrase(s) long after hostilities began — useless, in fact, to all who might have heard it.”

That war with Japan was anticipated is apparent from a separate memorandum to President Franklin D. Roosevelt dated Nov. 13, 1941, from William J. Donovan, director of the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. The memorandum was found in the National Archives last year by the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group.

Reporting on a conversation the week before between Hans Thoman, the German chargé d’affaires to the United States, and Malcolm R. Lovell, a Quaker leader, Mr. Donovan quoted Mr. Thoman as saying that Japan was trying to buy time.

“In the last analysis, Japan knows that unless the United States agrees to some reasonable terms in the Far East, Japan must face the threat of strangulation, now or later. Should Japan wait until later to prevent this strangulation by the United States, she will be less able to free herself than now, for Germany is now occupying the major attention of both the British empire and the United States.

“If Japan waits, it will be comparatively easy for the United States to strangle Japan,” Mr. Donovan’s memorandum quoting Mr. Thoman continued. “Japan is therefore forced to strike now, whether she wishes to or not.”

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U.S. Navy Translation of Message No. 2353 Published on Nov. 28, 1941, and Revision of Translation Issued on Sept. 26, 1944

Translation of Japanese Diplomatic Message No. 118, Tokyo to Honolulu, Nov. 28, 1941 (pdf)