Ahmed Naguib Roushdy* re-examines the controversy that continues to surround the United States' entry into W WII On 7 December, every year since the end of World War II, over one and a half million Americans have visited the floating memorial stands on the US battleship Arizona, sunk on that day by the Japanese air force in a surprise attack against the US fleet anchored at Pearl Harbour, Hawaii. Many American and British historians have tackled the incident, either as a separate subject or within the context of writing about World War II, among them the late Gordon W Prange, who took 30 years to produce four immensely detailed volumes, At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor, first published in 1980. The subject is hard to grasp. What is true about Pearl Harbour is as true about any epoch of history, particularly during armed conflicts: it is extremely difficult to find satisfactory answers to crucial questions, or even to be certain about the facts. On 7 December 1941, 366 Japanese planes flew from Japanese air craft carriers 3,500 miles across the Pacific, attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbour, sinking the Arizona with 1,777 sailors on board and destroying 19 other battleships and warships as they lay at anchor, killing 1231 sailors, 68 civilians and injuring 710. The American airfields at Pearl Harbour were attacked simultaneously and 188 aircraft destroyed on the ground. The army lost 218 men and 364 were wounded. The Marines lost 109 with 69 wounded. The number of human casualties in the course of the sudden, unexpected attack may be less than those of 11 September 2001, but the financial and military loss at Pearl Harbour dwarfed that of the September incident. The moral damage was incalculable. President Franklin D Roosevelt was informed of the attack around 1:30pm on Sunday by Frank Knox, the secretary of the navy. Worried about the effect on the American people, he decided to withhold the news from US media. But next day the president became emotional when reporting the disaster to the US Congress: "Yesterday, December 7, 1941 -- a day which will live in infamy -- the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by the naval and air force of the Empire of Japan," he stated. The members of Congress were shocked and felt shame and humiliation. Senator Tom Connelly, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relation Committee shouted, "How did they surprise us while naked?" The incident had a great effect on Roosevelt, who cherished his service in the navy as assistant secretary. The effect on the American people was a mixture of surprise, fear, puzzlement, humiliation and loss of confidence in the government. The people were angry because the government failed to prepare the country against Japan, which attacked without a formal declaration of war and when negotiations between the US and Japan to solve their differences were ongoing. (The 1907 Hague Convention requires a formal declaration of war at least half an hour before any attack). The blitz occurred two years and three months after World War II began with the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939. The US remained neutral at the beginning of the war, retaining diplomatic relations with England, France, Germany, Italy and Japan, though its neutrality was, in effect, nominal. Roosevelt was struggling to pull the American economy out of a new recession after his economic plan "The New Deal", formulated in 1933, was able to save the country from the disastrous effects of the crash of 1929. He managed to reduce the number of unemployed inherited from president Hoover in March 1933 from 14 million in 1937 to five million. Yet by early 1939 unemployment was back on the rise, growing to 9,600,000. Production was falling as demand shrank. Roosevelt was baffled. Roosevelt and his New Deal advisers attracted the resentment of large US corporations who objected to his decisions to give labourers more benefits and the right to unionise, and the imposition of taxes on them to fund employees' retirement pensions. They refused to hire more workers or to increase production. Only when World War had started and Hitler had invaded Poland, France and the Netherlands and attacked England by air almost daily did the situation change. When World War II erupted the United States decided to remain neutral, retaining diplomatic relations with the Axis powers, though Britain had been its faithful ally in World War I against Germany. In reality Roosevelt believed the Fascist regimes of the Axis powers were endangering the security of Europe and Asia and threatening democracy in the world. He was determined to help England from falling as France had fallen but knew he could not sell the war to the American people, with their crushing memories of World War I and of the great economic depression of the 1930s. During his campaign for re-election he said he would not send Americans to fight in a foreign land, a promise he knew he could not keep. But he managed to persuade Congress to approve the Lend-Lease Agreement Act to aid England and Europe with food supplies and weapons and signed it on 11 March 1941, which helped energise the American economy, one reason why Roosevelt might have been keen to find a reason to become militarily involved in the war. Germany was furious and warned the United States that it had breached its neutrality. Its submarine fleet, the so called U-boats sank many US cargo ships as soon as they reached the Atlantic. In 1937 Japan attacked China and gained control of almost the entire coast, thus cutting off Chinese supply lines. Determined to consolidate its grasp on China and Southeast Asia, Japan signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy on 27 September 1940. A NATO like mutual defence treaty, the pact's partners agreed to help one another "with all political, economic and military means when one of the three Contracting Parties is attacked by a power at present not involved in the European War or in the Sino-Japanese conflict". Obviously these conditions qualified the neutral United States as a future enemy of the Axis powers. The pact encouraged Japan to occupy Vietnam, a French colony, and after the fall of France and the Netherlands to GermanyJapan, in its march to dominate Asia, stationed troops in northern Indochina and Indonesia and was considering attacking India. But who, in the end, was to blame for the Pearl Harbour disaster? Professor Prange, in his abovementioned study, and others, such as Thomas Fleming in The Dealers War -- F.D.R. and The War Within World War and Joseph Perisco in Roosevelt's Secret War, discuss this question. The Japanese had been planning the attack on Pearl Harbour for some time, the aim being to incapacitate the American fleet in the Pacific and prevent the US from damaging Japanese interests in Asia. They did not intend to engage the Americans in a wide scale war. Roosevelt, though, was seeking to involve the United States in the war, to help England and France and prevent further Japanese expansion in Asia. Roosevelt decided to wait until the Japanese attacked first. It seems that he had pre-knowledge of a forthcoming attack but was not sure of the target. Roosevelt did not tell Congress about the Japanese plans to persuade Congress to enter the war in order to help England from falling to Germany and to stop Japan from moving closer to its Pacific shores. Many writers have concluded that Roosevelt and his military and navy commanders, although they knew about Japan's plans to attack South East Asia -- the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand or Burma -- there was no clear evidence that Pearl Harbour was a target, especially given that the American base there was the strongest naval fort in the world. Neither did they assume the Japanese would attack by air. This was an example of appalling judgement, repeated by the Bush administration when Condoleezza Rice, the then National Security adviser, said in Congress after 11 September 2001 that there were smoking guns but the administration had not expected Al-Qaeda to attack a building by air. Some claim Winston Churchill knew of the Japanese plan to attack at Pearl Harbour but did not tell Roosevelt because he wanted the US to enter the war. Defenders of Churchill ask why he would want Japan to attack the US since he was desperate for the latter's help in fighting the Germans. Churchill, though, famously said he was ready to ally with the devil to win the war. Actually Germany declared war against the US after Pearl Harbour after the appearance of a document called The Rainbow Five, claimed by some to have been leaked under Roosevelt's orders, containing a secret plan to attack Germany. Following the death of Roosevelt before the end of the war US Congress formed a committee to investigate Pearl Harbour but it failed to reach any clear decision on Roosevelt's role. The committee blamed Japan for its unprompted attack without first declaring war. The committee also blamed the naval leadership in Hawaii for failing to discharge their duties in the light of warnings received from Washington that there were reports of an imminent attack by the Japanese, though it characterised their failings as errors of judgement rather than dereliction of duty. The real truth may never be known, buried with the two main actors, Roosevelt and Churchill. What is clear though is that people in every country remain vulnerable to the poor judgement and negligence of their leaders. * The writer is attorney-at-law, New York.
