December 1941 (25 page)

Right in the middle of the attack, a squadron of B-17s making a refueling stop on their way to the Philippines from San Francisco arrived as Japanese war planes buzzed around them. The squadron was commanded by Major Truman Landon, who remarked, “Hell of a way to fly into a war! Unarmed and out of fuel!”
⁸¹
Radio station KGU in Hawaii had kept broadcasting all night so the B-17s could use their radio locators.

The Japanese planes did likewise.

FDR and the War Department were hampered by misinformation coming out of the Pacific. Nearly all initial reports were sketchy, incomplete, and often woefully false. One news report said that the
Oklahoma
and the
West Virginia
battleships were engaged in sea action against the Japanese.
⁸²
Another said Japanese planes had glided in over Pearl Harbor so as to escape detection.
⁸³

Wild speculation was one thing; the lack of full information and detail was another. One of the first “Extra” editions out was the
Maryville Daily Forum
based in Missouri. Over the top one-third of the broadsheet read in huge, old Western-style wanted-poster type face, “Japs Attack Manila
⁸⁴
with the subheads “Reports Stagger London”
⁸⁵
and “Far East Crisis Explodes!”
⁸⁶
Another said, “Little information is immediately available regarding the strength of the Japanese air attacks.”
⁸⁷

An Associated Press wire story with the dateline of Honolulu carried the headline “Two Japanese Bombers Appear over Honolulu; Unverified Report Says a Foreign Warship Appears Off Pearl Harbor.” The excited reporter filed his story via the transpacific telephone cable as the battle was actually taking place. The story noted that no bombs had apparently been dropped on Honolulu and that civilians were being taken off the streets by military personnel. The initial report noted there were no casualties yet known.
⁸⁸

Within minutes, the AP story made its way around the world, with reactions from Berlin, New York, and Washington. America's great and loyal ally, Russia, was quiet on the attack. The Third Reich had no comment initially, and the story out of the nation's capital announced that President Roosevelt had called for an “extraordinary meeting of the cabinet for 8:30 p.m. tonight and to have congressional leaders of both parties join the conference at 9 p.m.”
⁸⁹

Another local report was filed, this one by Frank Tremaine via the United Press: “Flash—Pearl Harbor under aerial attack. Tremaine.” His initial dispatch was sent via cable to UP offices in San Francisco and Manila. Subsequently, he filed additional reports as his wife, Kay, sent them along.
⁹⁰

A newlywed couple, Wallace Holman and Rosalie Shimek, had been married the day before in Baltimore and spent their honeymoon in New York City at the Roosevelt Hotel where that evening they listened to Guy Lombardo perform at the hotel. The next day they were strolling along a street in New York, startled as furious shopkeepers began throwing out anything that bore the brand “Made in Japan.” No one knew where Pearl Harbor was, including the couple, and one merchant told them it was “off New Jersey.”
⁹¹
But all knew America had been attacked by Japan. A little boy, Gerald Eckert, in Rochester, New York, heard about an attack on Pearl, but wondered why the Japanese were attacking the old lady down the street whose name was Pearl.
⁹²

Rumors mixed easily with reports. One said the Japanese fleet, having blasted the navy out of the water at Pearl Harbor, was now steaming north to the Aleutian Islands to attack military outposts there. Yet another said that American ships were in hot pursuit of the Japanese fleet now heading for its home waters.

In Washington, the formerly sleepy town quickly began to take on a war atmosphere, as pedestrians huddled around cars to listen to the radio, citizens called newspaper offices, hungry for details, and others called to inquire about the location of air-raid shelters. “The shrill voices of newsboys calling war extras broke the ordinary Sabbath evening calm.”
⁹³
In bold type, the
Washington Post
's Extra edition boomed, “U.S. AT WAR! JAPAN BOMBS HAWAII, MANILA.”
⁹⁴

As soon as Roosevelt had been notified by Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, he summoned his press secretary, Stephen T. Early, who then called together the White House press corps to make an official announcement at 2:22 p.m., Eastern time.
⁹⁵
“The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor from the air and all naval and military activities on the Island of Oahu, principal American base in the Hawaiian Islands,” said Early, reading from a statement given to him by the president. Early responded to the first question, “So far as we know, they came without warning.”
⁹⁶

Some 150 tense reporters were in attendance then, and throughout the day. The White House became the country's hub for information on unfolding events. Roosevelt remained in his private library in the second-floor residence, taking reports and meeting with staff, including his “two secretaries, Marvin McIntyre and Maj. Gen. Edwin S. Watson.”
⁹⁷
The president “ordered war bulletins released at the White House as rapidly as they were received. A sentence or two was added to the story of the surprise attack every few minutes for several hours.”
⁹⁸

Early called press conferences all throughout the afternoon, and reporters ran back and forth from their cubbyholes to the press secretary's office, writing fresh copy or issuing radio broadcasts with each new announcement.
⁹⁹
As each new development was ready to be announced, a secret Service man would stroll across the hall and remark, ‘Press Conference!' setting off a stampede for Early's desk.”
¹⁰⁰
Telegraph boys rushed about.

At each press conference, Early would attempt to elaborate on the coordinated and unfolding attacks by the Japanese throughout the Pacific. In case no one missed the duplicity by the Japanese, he said,

So far as is known, the attacks on Hawaii and Manila were made wholly without warning when both nations were at peace, and were delivered within an hour or so of the time that the Japanese ambassador and the special envoy, Kurusu, had gone to the State Department and handed to the Secretary of State Japan's reply to the Secretary's memorandum of November 26. As soon as the information of the attacks . . . was received by the War and Navy Departments it was flashed immediately to the President at the White House. Thereupon and immediately the President directed the Army and Navy to execute all previously prepared orders looking to the defense of the United States. The President is now with the Secretary of War and the Secretary of the Navy. Steps are being taken to advise the congressional leaders.
¹⁰¹

At 3:18 p.m. Early's personal secretary told the reporters the attacks were apparently still under way. Halfway through the afternoon, Early appeared to retract the story that Manila had been bombed but later retracted the retraction.
¹⁰²

Unfortunately, there was no plan for the defense of the United States. The navy in the Pacific was either obliterated or scattered, and the Army Air Corps in Oahu had simply been annihilated. A second wave of 171 planes then hit Hawaii. And then another round of news came, this time confirming the worst fears: “Admiral C. Bloch, commandant in Hawaii had reported ‘heavy damage' to the islands, with ‘heavy loss of life.'”
¹⁰³

As the second wave continued the attack on Pearl Harbor, the governor of Hawaii John Poindexter, was on the phone with Roosevelt.
¹⁰⁴
A bomb went off in front of the governor's mansion at Washington Place, killing a man. Another detonated close to the offices of the
Honolulu Advertiser
. A woman was killed when the Waikiki section of Honolulu was bombed.
¹⁰⁵
Poindexter had been appointed territorial governor by FDR, but within a few months, he would be replaced by a military government in Hawaii.

Early or his secretary, Miss Ruthjane Rumelt, held press conferences at 2:22, 3:18, 3:22, 3:33, 3:57, 4:45, 6:00, 6:08, and 6:24. It was 3:33 when he announced that a Japanese sub seven hundred miles off of California had fired on a transport, crippling it. It was 3:57 when he announced the emergency meeting with the cabinet and congressional leaders. At 6:00 p.m., he announced that another over-flight of Japanese planes was preparing yet again to hit Pearl Harbor. He later had to retract it, saying that the White House and the War Department were attempting to separate fact from rumor, but because they had not been able to reach the commanders of the navy and army in Hawaii, “[t]he President is, therefore, disposed to believe, and is rather hopeful that the . . . report is erroneous.” At 6:08, he reported that unidentified planes had been spotted over Guam. At 6:24, he announced Guam had been attacked.
¹⁰⁶

While the news buzzed, other issues needed to be addressed. One of the first people FDR met with after his phone call from Knox was Charles Fahy, solicitor general of the United States. The two met “to discuss what steps were to be taken against Japanese aliens in the United States.”
¹⁰⁷
The same question was being considered and answered in other quarters as well. According to one story datelined Norfolk, Virginia, the director of public safety there, Col. Charles B. Borland, “immediately ordered the arrest of all Japanese nationals in this strategic naval center” as soon as he'd heard of the attack.
¹⁰⁸

On the streets of America, strangers were talking to strangers, and some compared the atmosphere of hotel and movie lobbies, restaurants and clubs to that of London during the German blitz two years earlier. “Something of the strange psychological phenomenon . . . Folks wanted to be together. A sense of comradeship . . . was apparent.”
¹⁰⁹
Americans across the country attending Sunday movie matinees were surprised to see the film stopped, the managers walk out on stage, and news reports read to them of the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Pedestrians lined Pennsylvania Avenue and the streets on both sides of the White House, including West Executive Avenue between the State Department and the Executive Mansion, but Secret Service agents and police officers later closed the perimeter around the area. As night fell, the crowd moved across the street to Lafayette Park. “Some stood on the running boards of the cars. Some climbed the stone abutments of the iron fences. Some stood in the middle of the thoroughfare. Some held their children on their shoulders. But all kept quiet and all looked at the lighted windows, with no eyes for anything else.” A visitor from Colorado, Dorothy Quine, was in the crowd. “I can't understand it when Kurusu is here talking about peace,” she said.
¹¹⁰

At the Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines Service Club in Washington, a sign was posted: “All Servicemen Are Due in Camp at Reveille Tomorrow. Signed, Secretary of War.” The servicemen, like everybody else, were stunned at the attacks and yet cocky too. “The men at the club last night were generally grim and confident of a quick American victory.”
¹¹¹

The military ordered all personnel into uniform, immediately. Many military men had been working in “civvies” instead of their uniforms at their defense jobs for years to avoid making the town look “militaristic.” That would all change.

Then an oddly worded paragraph appeared in an AP story: “There was a disposition in some quarters here to wonder whether the attacks had not been ordered by the Japanese military authorities because they feared the President's direct negotiations with the Emperor might lead to an about-face in Japanese policy and the consequent loss of face by the present ruling factions in Japan.”
¹¹²
The reporter and their source(s) seemed to be trying to pin the blame for the surprise attack on President Roosevelt because he reached out to Hirohito the night before.

Vice President Henry Wallace was in New York, but he caught the first available plane back to Washington and he arrived at 6:00 p.m. that evening. Wallace went directly to the White House where he and the cabinet met alone with FDR, beginning at 6:40 p.m. Wallace then attended the second meeting that included members of Congress. He still had time to make his near daily visit to the White House physician at 5:50 and was, according to records, there for over an hour.
¹¹³

Earlier, he'd met alone with the Solicitor General of the United States, Charley Fahey. Fahey
's
capacity was to act as the lead attorney for the country, and presumably FDR wanted to discuss the legalities of declaring war against another nation.
¹¹⁴

As members of Congress and the cabinet arrived that night at the White House, the crowds outside cheered. The first to arrive was a now former isolationist, Senator Hiram Johnson of California, smoking a cigar, saying nothing.
¹¹⁵
Longtime internationalists gloated, if under their breaths. “What a sight. The great isolationist . . . All the ghosts of isolationism stalk with him, all the beliefs that the United States could stay out of war if it made no attack,” penned Richard Strout, famed writer for the
Christian Science Monitor
.
¹¹⁶

Roosevelt had been in meetings off and on for a reported ten hours from the time the White House had first learned of the attack. It was in these meetings that he received a report from Gen. Douglas MacArthur that Japanese planes were also over Luzon and that they had bombed several American airfields in the Philippines.
¹¹⁷
“Upon being advised of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, Lieut. Gen. Douglas MacArthur . . . placed his entire command on the alert.”
¹¹⁸
But the planes at Clark Field remained parked wingtip to wingtip, and many were easily destroyed by the Japanese.