Monthly Archives: December 2015

Pearl Harbor.

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In the mid-19th Century, Japan responded to Western pressure by adopting some Western methods in order to preserve the rest of its society. China responded to Western pressure by going into a defensive crouch. Japan grew strong, while China grew weak. Eventually, Japan began to aspire to push out the “Gaijin” from Asia and to dominate China. The United States (and the other Western countries—Britain, France, Holland) did not want to be pushed out. So, that was a problem. In 1937 Japan invaded China. In 1939 the Second World War broke out in Europe (Germany and Italy versus France and Britain). Germany conquered Poland, France, Belgium, and Holland. Britain was left alone fighting Germany and Italy. Seeing Britain as vulnerable, Japan began to press on the British, French, and Dutch in the Far East. Fearing that a German defeat of Britain would put America next on Hitler’s To-Do list, the Americans aided Britain in both Europe and in the Far East. Economic sanctions were clamped on Japan. The American Pacific Fleet moved to its forward base in Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. American troops and planes were rushed to the Philippines, then an American possession. Then, on 21 June 1941, Germany attacked the Soviet Union. Everyone assumed that the Russians would soon be defeated. Britain would surrender. The war would end. The Japanese decided that they had to attack NOW if they weren’t to be left out of the winners. On 7 December 1941 Japan attacked the Americans in Pearl Harbor and the Philippines and the British in Malaya.

Why were the Americans surprised at Pearl Harbor?

Was war with Japan likely? American-Japanese relations had been deteriorating since 1937 as the US supported China, and then Britain and Holland against Japan. In December 1937 Japanese planes had bombed a US gunboat on a Chinese river. In late 1940 the US had halted export of aircraft parts to Japan. In July 1941 the US halted exports of oil to Japan. In August 1941 the US warned Japan that it would “take steps” if Japan attacked a neighboring territory. In November 1941 a poll showed that 52 percent of Americans expected war with Japan soon.

If war came, how would it begin? In 1904 Japan began its war with Russia by a surprise naval attack on the Russian Far East fleet in its harbor. In 1940 British torpedo bombers flying from an air-craft carrier had launched a surprise attack on the Italian fleet in its harbor at Taranto.

If war came, where would it begin? The Americans believed that Japan lacked the resources to attack to two widely separated areas at the same time. They believed that the build-up of American forces in the Philippines posed an immediate danger to a Japanese attack on Malaya and Indonesia. Therefore, the Americans expected any attack to hit the Philippines.

In Spring 1941 the Japanese Navy began preparing a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. This mean planning, but it also meant training. In November 1941 all six aircraft carriers of the Japanese fleet left their ports in the Home Islands and moved north to the remote Kurile Islands.

It was very difficult for an American to spy in Japan. Japan was at war with China, so security was tight. The physical differences between the Japanese and Gaijin made it impossible to just blend in with any crowd. Not many Japanese were willing to betray their country by spying for a foreign country. Unless American diplomats went and looked at Japanese naval bases, they wouldn’t see that the air craft carriers were missing. Even if they did, then they couldn’t know where they had gone. North, South, East, West?

The Japanese attack force sailed on 26 November 1941. Most of their course ran through the North Pacific above the normal most-direct-route shipping lanes between the West Coast of America and the Far East.

Radar has just been invented. Only one set operated in Hawaii and then for only part of the day. When an operator reported planes approaching from the north, it was assumed that these were American planes due to arrive from the US en route to the Philippines at that time.

The attack began at 7:00 AM on Sunday, 7 December 1941. Many officers and sailors had been ashore drinking the night before.

Fifth Column.

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War is a nasty business, based on what I’ve read over a lifetime. Civil war is worse still. It can pit parent against child, sibling against sibling.[1] It fuels suspicion of one’s fellow-citizens. In Summer 1936, civil war broke out in Spain. Although often seen as a prologue to the Second World, the Spanish Civil War was a primitive affair. Not a lot of tanks, or aircraft, or trucks. Marching up toward Madrid, the Nationalist (rebel) commander Emilio Mola divided his troops into four columns to better live off the barren land. He told the foreign correspondents accompanying his army that he had a “fifth column” of sympathizers inside the city which would support his troops. The phrase “fifth column” quickly passed into the common lingo of the era.[2]

In 1938, Austrian Nazis supported the German take-over of Austria. Sudeten Germans around the frontiers of Czechoslovakia agitated for a German taker-over, obviously at the behest of Berlin. Poles-of-German-ancestry demanded free dome from alleged “persecution.”

In Spring 1940, the Nazis unleashed their “Blitzkrieg” on Western Europe. Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, and—astonishingly—France collapsed. The idea that a powerful state like France could be beaten in weeks boggled the mind. “Collaborationist” regimes, or at least individual “collaborators,” sprang up in many places. The reactionary French Vichy government and the puppet-state in Norway headed by Vidkun Quisling offered prime examples. It soon became an article of faith in Britain and the United States that pro-Nazi “fifth columnists” had undermined their own society in the conquered countries.

Both in Britain and in the United States a hunt for “fifth columnists” soon began. In Britain, the new prime minister quickly put a stop to the left’s demands for prosecution of “the Guilty Men” who had supported appeasement.[3] Only a handful of obvious candidates were detained (Oswald Mosely, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, for example).

It proved to be very different in the United States. There an increasingly bitter debate began over American policy toward involvement in the global conflict. Lynne Olson has argued that the Roosevelt Administration engaged in a campaign of vilification against the leading exponents of “isolationism.”[4] The most notable target was Charles Lindbergh. The “Lone Eagle,” once America’s most admired person, suffered repeated, vitriolic attacks in the press and by FDR’s surrogates. (Interior Secretary Harold Ickes looks worse than he once did.)

Subsequently, after Pearl Harbor, the federal government criminalized Japanese ancestry on the grounds that such people were inherently disloyal.[5] Shrugging off that incident, Americans then launched themselves on an anti-Communist witch-hunt in the later Forties and in the Fifties. As Arthur Schlesinger the Lesser wrote in 1949: “the special Soviet advantage—the warhead—lies in the fifth column; and the fifth column is based on the local Communist parties.” The down-side of this appeared in “black-listing” (See: “Trumbo”) and “McCarthyism.” Much ignored is the reality of Soviet penetration of the US government.

So, the fear of disloyal Americans is nothing new. Most often, it’s been misplaced. That will not stop the idiots and hysterics.

[1] See how political correctness has watered down my prose?

[2] Ernest Hemingway wrote a play called “The Fifth Column.” On Mola, who knew something about civil war, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emilio_Mola

[3] It was hard to argue with a guy who had vocally opposed appeasement when he draws a veil over the past.

[4] Lynne Olsen, Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941 (New York, Random House, 2013).

[5] EffaBeeEye Director J. Edgar Hoover, seems to have thought the charges a crock. He headed American counter-intelligence. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_Americans