The Last Empire (58 page)

In retrospect, Acheson wrote, cheerfully, “If we did make our points clearer than truth, we did not differ from most other educators and could hardly do otherwise.” After all, as he noted, it was the State Department’s view that the average American spent no more than ten minutes a day brooding on foreign policy; he spends less now that television advertising can make anything clearer than truth.

Today, we are not so much at the brink as fallen over it. Happily, as of this election, we were not at our old stamping ground, Armageddon. Rather, we were simply fretting about fibs involving drunken driving and the true cost of that mother-in-law’s medicine as opposed to the pampered dog’s, when, had the candidate been true to his roots, he could have found, in a back alley of Carthage, Tennessee, two pinches of cheap sulphur that would have dewormed both mother-in-law and dog in a jiffy.
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The Times Literary Supplement

10 November 2000

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J
APANESE
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NTENTIONS IN THE
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ORLD
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Sir,—I am in Clive James’s debt for the succinct way that he has assembled what must be at least 90 percent of all the Received Opinion having to do with the start and finish of the American–Japanese war of 1941–45 (Letters, November 24). Were it not for occasional Jacobean resonances, one might suspect that Dr. Barry Humphries had been working overtime in his bat-hung lab, assembling yet another Australian monster: a retired Lt. Col. with a powerful worldview fueled by the tabloid press of Oz.

James begins briskly: Vidal has an “admonitory vision” to the effect that the “leadership class” of the American empire thinks “that Washington is the center of the world. Unfortunately, Vidal seems to think the same.”

Indeed they do. Indeed I do. Indeed, Washington has been the uncontested global center for most of the twentieth century, which I tend to deplore—Washington’s primacy, that is. In a recent book,
The Golden Age,
I concentrate on the decade 1940–50 when the New World gave birth to the global arrangement.

I start with the convergence on Washington of more than 3,000 British agents, propagandists, spies. Yes, I was there. At the heart of an isolationist family that “entertained,” as they used to say, everyone, I personally observed the brilliant John Foster in action. Foster was attached to Lord Lothian’s British Embassy. He enchanted the Washingtonians while secretly working with Ben Cohen, a White House lawyer, to draft the Lend-Lease agreement which proved to be the first blow that President Roosevelt was able to strike for England. Residents of that other center, Canberra, no doubt have a different tale to tell.

I make the hardly original case that Franklin Roosevelt provoked the Japanese into attacking us for reasons that I shall come to presently.

James, armed to the teeth with Received Opinion (henceforth RO), tells us that Japan was provoked into war by the Japanese Army, “which had been in a position to blackmail the Cabinet since 1922 and never ceased to do so until surrender in 1945,” brought on, as RO has it, by gallant Harry Truman’s decision to drop a pair of atomic bombs. None of this conforms to what we have known for some time about the internal workings of Japan’s intricate system of governance, not to mention our own. There was indeed a gung-ho Japanese military war party that was busy trying to conquer as much of China as possible en route to South-East Asia where the oil was. There was also a peace party, headed by Prince Konoye, who was eager, as of August 1941, to meet with FDR, who kept postponing a face-to-face discussion to sort out differences. Had FDR been interested in peace in the Pacific, he could have met with Konoye, much as he was secretly meeting with Churchill on a soon-to-be-related matter.

James correctly notes that we had broken Japan’s diplomatic code, Purple, but he seems unaware that, by early October 1940, we had also broken many of the Japanese military codes, specifically parts of the Kaigun Ango: the twenty-nine separate naval codes which gave us a good idea of what their fleet was up to during the entire year before Pearl Harbor. RO assures James that, if FDR wanted war, he would not have sent the Emperor, on December 6, a cable whose only message seemed to be a wistful hope that the Japanese would not try to replace the defeated French in Indo-China. James seems ignorant of the context of that message.

Here it is. On Saturday, November 15, 1941, General Marshall, the U.S. Army Chief of Staff, called in various Washington newspaper bureau chiefs. After swearing them to secrecy, he told them that we had broken Japan’s naval codes, and that war with Japan would start sometime during the first ten days of December. On November 26, Cordell Hull, FDR’s Secretary of State, presented Japan’s two special envoys to Washington with a ten-point proposal, intended, as Hull told Secretary of War Stimson, “to kick the whole thing over.” Of FDR’s ultimatum, Hull later remarked, “We [had] no serious thought Japan would accept. . . .” What was the proposal? Complete Japanese withdrawal from China and Indo-China, Japan to support China’s Nationalist Government and to abandon the tripartite agreement with the Axis. FDR had dropped a shoe. Now he waited for the Japanese to drop the other. They did. RO has it that we were taken by surprise. Certainly, FDR was not.
But apparently the unwarned military commanders at Pearl Harbor were, and 3,000 men were killed in a single strike.

RO always had a difficult time with motive. Since FDR could never, ever, have set us up, why would the Japanese want to attack a wealthy continental nation 4,000 miles away? Fortunately, RO can always fall back on the demonic view of history. As a race, the Japanese were prone to suicide. Hardly human, they were a bestial people whose eyes were so configured that they could never handle modern aircraft or bombsights. As a young soldier in the Pacific, I was, along with everyone else, marinated in this racist nonsense. But should this demonic reading of the Japanese character not be true, one must wonder why the Japanese military, with a difficult war of conquest in China that was using up their wealth and energy in every sense, would want to provoke a war with the United States so far away? RO has had sixty years to come up with an answer; and failed to do so.

Today, no one seriously contests that FDR wanted the U.S. in the war against Hitler. But 60 to 80 percent of the American people were solidly against any European war. In November 1940, FDR had been elected to a third term with the pledge that none of America’s sons would ever fight in a foreign war “unless attacked.” Privately, more than once, he had said to others that the Japs must strike the first blow or, as he put it to Admiral James O. Richardson (October 8, 1940), “as the war continued and the area of operations expanded, sooner or later they would make a mistake and we would enter the war”; hence, FDR’s series of provocations culminating not in a Japanese “mistake” but in the ultimatum of November 26 that left the Japanese with no alternative but war, preferably with a “sneak” knockout attack of the sort that had succeeded so well against Russia in 1904, at Port Arthur. Did FDR know that the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor, where much of our
Pacific fleet was at anchor? Or did he think they would strike at some lesser venue like Manila? This matter is, yet again, under scrutiny.

James’s RO is correct when he notes that the German-Italian-Japanese tripartite agreement was of a defensive nature. They were not obliged to join in each other’s offensive wars. Why Hitler declared war upon the U.S. is still a “puzzle,” according to no less a historian than Dr. Henry Kissinger, not a bad historian when not obliged to gaze into a mirror (cf. his
Diplomacy
).

At war at least in the Pacific, how could FDR be so sure that he would get his war in Europe? Well, FDR is easily the most intricate statesman of our time: as Nixon once said admiringly of Eisenhower, “He was a far more sly and devious man than most people suspected, and I mean those words in their very best sense.”

Once the U.S. was wholeheartedly at war on December 8, 1941, our artful dodger could, under wartime powers, aid Britain and the Soviets, as he was already doing with Lend-Lease and other virtuous if quasi-legal measures. Also, FDR’s problem with his election pledge ceased to exist when the Japanese responded so fiercely to his provocations and ultimatums. As usual, he got what he wanted.

Received Opinion: without Truman’s pair of atom bombs, the famous Japanese war party that had seized control of the government would have ordered a million Japanese to jump off cliffs onto the invading Americans had not the Emperor, distressed by the bombs, etc. . . . Let us turn from comfortable RO to Authority, to Ambassador Joseph C. Grew’s memoir,
Turbulent Era: A diplomatic record of forty years, 1904–1945
. As U.S. Ambassador to Japan, Grew was dedicated to bringing together FDR and Prince Konoye, little suspecting that, where Konoye was apparently sincere in wanting peace, FDR was not. By autumn 1941, Grew was exasperated by Washington’s unrelenting line that the Japanese government was completely dominated by the military war party:

We in Tokyo were closer to the scene than was the Administration in Washington and we believed, on the basis of the highest possible intelligence, and so reported, that the Japanese government at the time was in a position to control the armed forces of the country. We explained in several of our telegrams to our Government that Germany’s attack on Soviet Russia had given those elements in Japan which controlled national policies further and convincing evidence that confidence could not be placed in Germany’s promises. . . . No one, I think, would contest the view that the Japanese government was in a far better position to control its forces in the summer of 1941 than it was in December 1938. . . .

The problem with RO, even when served up by so sensitive a writer as Clive James, is that contrary evidence must not be admitted. RO still clings to the myth that Japan would have fought to the end if Truman had not dropped his A-bombs. But Japanese envoys had been making overtures for a year in, variously, Sweden, Switzerland, Portugal, the Vatican, etc. Message: the war is over if the Emperor is retained.

Finally, the most important Japanese player, as I noted in my piece (November 10), the Emperor himself, on July 18, 1945, wrote Truman a letter “looking for peace” (Truman’s words). On August 3, 1945, an official’s diary notes that Truman, Byrnes, and Leahy were discussing a telegram “from the Emperor asking for peace.” Truman, inspired, some believe, by Secretary of State Byrnes, wanted to intimidate the Soviets with our super-weapon. So he had his two big bangs, contrary to the advice of his chief military commanders. Here is Eisenhower: “I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to [Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson] my grave misgivings. . . . I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.”

FDR, like so many Americans of his generation, found irresistible the phrase “unconditional surrender”—General U. S. Grant’s adamantine message to the Confederacy. FDR applied it to the Axis powers. Truman inherited this policy. Then, once he had dropped his bombs, he promptly abandoned unconditional surrender and kept the Emperor. For Clive of Canberra, I recommend the latest, if not last, word on the subject,
The Decision To Use the Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth
by Gar Alperovitz. For the why and what of Pearl Harbor, there is now R. B. Stinnett’s
Day of Deceit
, soon to be a subject of strenous debate in another journal.

Again, how could FDR have known Hitler would declare war on us after Pearl Harbor? James’s RO provides him with no sensible motive. So he falls back on the demonic—“megalomania” which drove Hitler to ensure that he would be at war on every side. But this won’t do. Hitler was certainly subject to fits of inspiration, but he was usually very cautious in his dealings with the “mongrel” Americans. In his December 11 declaration of war to the Reichstag, he gave a seemingly rational if odd reason. On December 4, at the President’s request, General Marshall had presented FDR with a war plan in which he proposed that, as Hitler was the principal enemy of the U.S. and the world, the United States should raise an expeditionary force of 5 million men and send it to invade Germany by July 1, 1943. The plan—one hopes of no more than a contingency nature—was leaked onto the front page of the
Chicago Tribune
, the great trumpet of isolationism. The headline, “F.D.R.’S
WAR PLANS!” Three days later, Pearl Harbor erased the story, but Hitler had seen it and mentioned it as “proof” of FDR’s predatory designs on the Axis, noting (more in sorrow than in anger?), “Without any attempt at an official denial on the part of the American Government, President Roosevelt’s plan has been published under which Germany and Italy are to be attacked with military force in Europe by 1943 at the latest.” (This is from
A World to Gain
by Thomas Toughill, an intriguing amateur sleuth.)

Finally, for an analysis of the persisting myth about the dropping of the A-bombs, Mr. Alperovitz is hearteningly shrewd.

The Times Literary Supplement

1 December 2000

Sir,—When Kenneth Tynan came to New York to practice his trade as drama critic, he had only recently become a Marxist. Brecht had had something to do with it, and I think he may have read some of Marx. Certainly he often quoted him, usually at midpoint during one of our late evenings at the Mayfair workers’ canteen, Mirabelle. “Money should not breed money,” Ken would stammer. Upon arrival in New York, he began to evangelize. I watched him with an ancient
Partisan Review
editor, a former Stalinist, Trotskyite, Reichian. Fiercely, Ken told him what it was that money must never do. When Ken had run out of breath, the weary old class warrior said, “Mr. Tynan, your arguments are so old that I have forgotten all the answers to them.”

The estimable Clive James (Letters, December 8) is in a time warp similar to Ken’s. Thirty years of incremental information about the American-Japanese war have passed him by. He thinks “the real [Japanese] fleet sent no radio messages” en route to Pearl Harbor: that “was long ago invalidated.” No. What has been invalidated is the myth that the Japanese kept complete radio silence. In 1993 and 1995 (under the Freedom of Information Act), all sorts of transcripts came to light, as well as Communication Intelligence Summaries such as this one for December 6, 1941, where an American code-breaker reported: “The Commander in Chief Combined (Japanese) Fleet originated several messages to Carriers, Fourth Fleet and the Major Commanders.” Each headed towards Hawaii and interacting. Although there is some evidence that James has kept up with the latest Hirohito books (Chrysanthemum Porn, as we call it in the trade), he has no interest in political revelations. I do. But then I spent
five years researching
The Golden Age
, trying to figure out what actually happened at Pearl Harbor, and why the A-bombs were dropped
after
Japan was ready to surrender, and why . . . I shall not repeat myself, but I must note, in passing, the purity of a certain mid-twentieth-century journalistic style that continues to reverberate like the beat beat beat of the tom-tom in Clive of Canberra’s burnished prose. Ingredients? High Moral Indignation, no matter how hoked up, linked to
ad hominem
zingers from right field. I referred to the leader of the peace party at the Japanese court, Prince Konoye. I was interested in his proposals. Our period journalist is interested in Konoye as an anti-Semite who faked his own suicide note. Is it possible that I have misjudged Konoye’s dedication to peace? Was he also, like so many Japanese princes, an adulterer? If so, was that the reason FDR refused to meet him at Juneau, an Alaskan beauty spot that is, in summer, a breeding ground for the largest mosquitoes
in North America? FDR’s sense of fun seldom abandoned him. In any case, for whatever reason, after suggesting a comical venue, FDR backed down. Peace in the Pacific was not his dream.