FDR - Jean Edward Smith [332]
The Army’s warning to commanders in the Pacific was less strongly worded but made the same point:
Negotiations with Japan appear to be terminated to all practical purposes, with only the barest possibilities that the Japanese Government might come back and offer to continue. Japanese future action unpredictable but hostile action possible at any moment. If hostilities cannot, repeat cannot, be avoided the United States desires that Japan commit the first overt act. This policy should not be construed as restricting you to a course of action that might jeopardize your defense.98
To this day there is no satisfactory explanation of why Hull jettisoned the quest for a cooling-off period with Japan or why FDR supported him. Roosevelt had too much on his plate. There is no doubt he was under great pressure. He had just ordered the Navy to shoot enemy vessels on sight in the Atlantic; he had just finished a bruising battle with Congress over repeal of the Neutrality Act;* and the German Army was thirty miles from Moscow. To press his proposal for a modus vivendi may have been more than Roosevelt wanted to take on. Like the wrongheaded oil embargo in July, events got ahead of him. As for Hull, his official biographer, Julius Pratt, confesses to being baffled: “The President had given Hull a very free reign in dealing with Japan.… [I]t seems that his decision to ‘kick the whole thing over’ (as Stimson records him saying) was a petulant one by a tired and angry man.”99 Whatever the reason, the plan for a temporary truce was discarded, and, as Stanford historian David Kennedy recently observed, “the last flimsy hope of avoiding, or even delaying, war with Japan thus evaporated.”100
Nomura and Kurusu were dumbfounded at the severity of Hull’s ten-point memorandum. Tokyo’s reaction was similar. “We felt that clearly the United States had no hope or intention of reaching an agreement for a peaceful settlement,” said Foreign Minister Togo, one of the most moderate members of the government.101 On December 1, at a meeting of the privy council attended by the Emperor, the Japanese government opted for war. “It is now clear that Japan’s claims cannot be attained through diplomatic means,” said Prime Minister Tojo. The Emperor asked each member of the council for his opinion. The decision was unanimous. Hirohito nodded acceptance. “At this moment,” concluded Tojo, “our Empire stands on the threshold of glory or oblivion.”102
On the morning of December 2 the chiefs of staff of the army and navy went to the Imperial Palace to formally request the Emperor’s approval for a war order issued in his name setting the date for attack as December 8 (December 7 in Hawaii and Washington), 1941. That afternoon, following the Imperial assent, powerful radio transmitters in Tokyo flashed the message to the Japanese armed forces:
NIITAKAYAMA NOBORE 1208.
(CLIMB MOUNT NIITAKA ON DECEMBER 8.)103†
As was the case with all great powers at the time, the filing cabinets of the Japanese military bulged with war plans to fit any contingency. A drive to the south had been war-gamed repeatedly, and the consistent finding was that an attack on the Dutch East Indies, Singapore, or Malaya would be at risk so long as the U.S. Asiatic Fleet was intact in the Philippines and the Pacific Fleet in Hawaii. The problem fell squarely into the lap of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander in chief of the Japanese Combined Fleet since 1939.
Yamamoto was at the summit of his distinguished naval career. Four years younger than MacArthur, Marshall, and Stark (all of whom were born in 1880), he had lost the fore and middle fingers on his left hand as a junior officer