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By Root 1640 0

void between the Army and the Navy. The Army assumed that the Navy was conducting distant reconnaissance off the islands, as provided for in joint defense plans; the Navy, for its part, believed the Army was continuously manning Oahu’s early-warning radar, which was also provided for. Neither proved to be the case. And neither the Army nor the Navy placed their forces on alert.114 Perhaps it was overconfidence, perhaps sloth—peacetime laziness amid the comforts of Honolulu, perhaps simply a refusal to take Washington’s war warning seriously. “I never thought those little yellow sons-of-bitches could pull off such an attack, so far from Japan,” Kimmel confessed years later.115

General Marshall put the attack into perspective. Pearl Harbor, he said,

was the only installation we had anywhere that was reasonably well equipped. Therefore we were not worried about it. In our opinion the commanders had been alerted. In our opinion there was nothing more we could give them.… In our opinion it was the one place that had enough within itself to put up a reasonable defense. The only place we had any assurance about was Hawaii.116*

The Japanese attack lasted little more than two hours. When the last plane winged away at 10 A.M., eighteen U.S. vessels, including eight battleships, had been sunk or heavily damaged. More than 175 military aircraft were destroyed on the ground and another 159 crippled. In all, 2,403 servicemen were dead, 1,103 of them entombed on the battleship Arizona, which sank almost instantly when a bomb exploded in its forward magazine. Another 1,200 men were wounded. Japan lost twenty-nine planes, mostly dive-bombers, in the second attack wave. “If I am told to fight regardless of the circumstances,” Yamamoto had told Konoye the year before, “I shall run wild for the first six months or a year, but I have utterly no confidence for the second or third years.”117

Roosevelt learned of the attack at 1:40 P.M. Washington time, roughly forty-five minutes after the first wave of Zeros began their strafing run. He was having a late lunch with Harry Hopkins at his desk in the upstairs study when Knox called from the Navy Department. “Mr. President, it looks like the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor.”118 A flurry of phone calls followed. At 2:30 Stark called the president with confirmation. “I could hear the shocked unbelief in Admiral Stark’s voice,” said Grace Tully as she put him through to FDR.119 Stark said that it was a very severe attack, the fleet had been heavily damaged, and there was considerable loss of life. Roosevelt told Stark to execute the standing orders that were to go into effect in case of war in the Pacific.120 Official Washington was not surprised by the Japanese attack, but it was stunned that it had come at Pearl Harbor and appalled by the damage.

At three o’clock Roosevelt met his war council. Reports continued to come in, each more terrible than the last. The president handled the telephone personally. He ordered Hull to inform the Latin American governments and secure their cooperation; Knox and Stimson were instructed to draft the necessary orders to put the nation on a war footing. Roosevelt discussed troop deployments at length with General Marshall and ordered military protection for the Japanese Embassy and all Japanese consulates in the United States. His mood was businesslike with no sign of panic. As Sumner Welles reported, FDR was at the center of the action and completely in charge. Eleanor, who went briefly into the study, noted her husband’s steadiness.121

Churchill called from Chequers, his weekend estate. “Mr. President, what’s this about Japan?”

“It’s quite true,” Roosevelt replied. “They have attacked us at Pearl Harbor. We are all in the same boat now.”

“That certainly simplifies things,” said Churchill. “God be with you.”122 Later Churchill wrote, “To have the United States on our side was to me the greatest joy. I thought of a remark [Sir] Edward Grey [the British foreign secretary] had made to me more than thirty years before—that the United States was like ‘a gigantic