Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor
Robert B. Stinnett
The Free Press, 2000
xiv + 386 pages
Ask the common man about Pearl Harbor, and one will perhaps hear words like “sneak attack” or “unprovoked.” A university student might get lucky with a good professor and learn that the Americans had been putting the economic screws to the Japanese for years before that infamous day. The Japanese, needing raw materials, attacked Pearl Harbor as part of a larger campaign to create their “Co-Prosperity Sphere.” I learned this during my undergraduate days. Robert B. Stinnett has taken the history much further in his necessarily technical work, Day of Deceit.
The argument is simple: Franklin Delano Roosevelt followed eight, pre-arranged, steps to provoke an attack from the Japanese. He did so because the American public was overwhelmingly against entering the Second World War. Indeed, FDR had promised not to drag the country into the conflict during the 1940 presidential election campaign. America needed to be attacked and Roosevelt manipulated the Japanese into attacking. But there is more: because of American code breaking and radio monitoring, the American president and some of his inner circle knew Pearl Harbor was going to be attacked nearly down to the very day but let it happen anyways. Finally, the military commanders in Hawaii, Admiral Husband Kimmel and General Walter Short, were purposely denied vital intelligence before 7 December. Both were relieved from their posts, in disgrace, after the attack.
I said that this is a technical work which some readers will certainly find a little dry at times. Stinnett’s approach is necessary, however, because he needs to explain, and the reader needs to understand, the myriad ways the US military had cracked virtually all the Japanese codes before 7 December 1941. The reader also needs to know that the US Navy could also track the movements of the Japanese when they used their radios. Once the reader gets used to the technical jargon of the US military, Day of Deceit becomes a gripping read.
How did Stinnett marshal the evidence to prove his case? Through tremendously hard work: interviews, digging through various archives and personal records and making many Freedom of Information Act requests (FOIA). The author, in fact, dedicated his book to the late Congressman John Moss who authored that law. Take for instance the steps that Roosevelt took to provoke the Japanese into attacking. These were the brainchild of Lieutenant Commander Arthur H. McCollum. He was the man responsible for “the routing of communications intelligence to FDR from early 1940 to December 7, 1941, and provided the President with intelligence reports on Japanese military and diplomatic strategy.” (p. 7) The author spends most of Chapter 2 proving that Roosevelt read McCollum’s five page “eight-action memo.” The president certainly followed McCollum’s eight steps to the letter. Nevertheless, how did Stinnett get hold of the eight-action memo (the entirety of which is reprinted in Appendix A)? He was able to find it in “the personal classified file of Arthur McCollum” (p. 256) in the US National Archives. This was a lucky break because the US Navy had started destroying records almost immediately:
The key evidence of what really happened began to be concealed as early as December 11, 1941, only four days after the attack. The first step in the clean-up came from Rear Admiral Leigh Noyes, the Navy’s Director of Communications. He instituted a fifty-four year censorship policy that consigned the pre-Pearl Harbor Japanese military and diplomatic intercepts and the relevant directives to Navy vaults. “Destroy all notes or anything in writing,” Noyes told a group of his subordinates on December 11. (p. 256)
Not only was this illegal, only the American Congress has the authority to destroy such documents, but Noyes later denied issuing the destructive order only to admit to giving the order at a later date.
Although he proves his main thesis, Stinnett’s work also demonstrates there was a cover up after the attack. In two investigations after the war, Congress was told the Japanese adhered to strict radio silence for several days in the lead up to the attack. Yet, the author found the navy intercept records that conclusively prove the Japanese did not maintain radio silence and therefore the United States Navy tracked the Japanese fleet movements. (p. 47) This has become a myth that most historians have echoed ever since. In a later chapter, Stinnett proves that government officials lied about having Japanese spy Tadashi Morimura under surveillance in the months before the attack and that the government had intercepted and decoded sixty-nine spy messages sent from Honolulu to Tokyo in 1941. (p.111).
In a final example, there are several more, the author explains how the liner SS Lurline, on her way to Hawaii from San Francisco, picked up radio communications of the Japanese fleet over a week before the attack. The ship’s reconstructed log states that the Lurline got “good radio finder bearings, mostly coming from a Northwesterly [sic] direction.” (p. 196) This was, of course, the direction from which the Japanese attacked. One of the radio operators from the Lurline had to reconstruct the log from memory after the US Navy confiscated the original on 10 December. Stinnett in researching his book tried to find the original log, but it had been removed illegally from the Federal Records Centre sometime after another historian had made a FOIA request to see the log in the late 1970s. According to the archivist working at the centre, “It had to be someone from the Navy” who removed the original log.
In the end, Roosevelt and many likeminded officials got their way. The Japanese attacked, and the American people rallied to the battle flag. Stinnett ends his study not by criticising the president’s actions but lamenting the distortion of the past, “The real shame is on the stewards of government who have kept the truth under lock for fifty years. Had the facts uncovered in this book been known immediately after the war ended…how different American history might be viewed today.” (p. 259)
