FDR - Jean Edward Smith [317]
* A twelve-month extension would have passed with less difficulty, but Rayburn and McCormack chose to go for the full eighteen months Marshall and Stimson requested. The bill passed by the Senate differed slightly from the House version, and rather than go to conference and face another vote in the House, the Senate simply adopted the House version (37–19) on August 14, 1941 (50 Stat. 886).
* The Greer “incident” was ambiguous. While on a mail run to Iceland, Greer was notified by a British patrol plane of a U-boat in the area. Greer shadowed the submarine using sonar but did not fire. She reported the sub’s location to the British plane, which dropped four depth charges but missed. The German U-boat commander could easily have assumed it was the Greer that had fired. He might also have assumed from Greer’s profile that it was one of the destroyers transferred to the British Navy by the United States. In any event, the U-boat fired two torpedoes at the Greer, both of which missed. Greer returned fire and loosed nineteen depth charges, which also missed. There was “no positive evidence that submarine knew nationality of ship at which it was firing,” the Navy told FDR. Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945 287 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).
TWENTY-THREE
DAY OF INFAMY
Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.
—FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, DECEMBER 8, 1941
ROOSEVELT WAS CONSUMED by the war in Europe: his relations with Churchill, Lend-Lease, aid to Russia, and the struggle in the Atlantic. The military leadership—Stimson and Knox, Marshall and Stark—shared the president’s concern. As a consequence the deteriorating situation in the Pacific received less attention. Discussions with Japan were handled by the State Department, and subordinate commanders saw little sense of urgency. Vessels of the Pacific Fleet routinely put in at Pearl Harbor every Friday so officers could spend weekends with their families; the Army parked its airplanes wingtip to wingtip to minimize the number of sentries required; antiaircraft guns remained limbered so as not to alarm Hawaii’s tourists; and the island’s radar operated three hours a day. Military intelligence cracked the Japanese diplomatic code in August 1940 (MAGIC), but the Army and Navy initially assigned it such a low priority that it often required two weeks to translate the intercepts and occasionally as long as two months. “The island of Oahu, due to its fortification, its garrison, and its physical characteristics, is believed to be the strongest fortress in the world,” General Marshall assured Roosevelt in April 1941. “With the force available [to defend it], a major attack against Oahu is considered impractical.”1
American relations with Japan had been on a downward spiral ever since the Grant administration. President Grant had spent a month in the country during his world tour in 1879. “My visit to Japan has been the most pleasant of all my travels,” the former chief executive wrote from Tokyo. “The country is beautifully cultivated and the people, from the highest to the lowest, the most kindly and the most cleanly in the world.… The progress they have made in the last twelve years is incredible.… This is marvelous when the treatment of their people—and all eastern people—receive at the hands of the average foreigner is considered.”2 Grant was so captivated that one of the reasons he considered accepting a third term in 1880 was to improve American relations with China and Japan.3
Grant lost the Republican nomination to James A. Garfield,