Did FDR Provoke Pearl Harbor?<\/p>\n
Posted By Patrick J. Buchanan On December 5, 2011 @ 7:43 pm In
\nOn Dec. 8, 1941, Franklin Roosevelt took the rostrum before a joint session of Congress to ask for a declaration of war on Japan.<\/p>\n
A day earlier, at dawn, carrier-based Japanese aircraft had launched a sneak attack devastating the U.S. battle fleet at Pearl Harbor.<\/p>\n
Said ex-President Herbert Hoover, Republican statesman of the day, \u201cWe have only one job to do now, and that is to defeat Japan.\u201d<\/p>\n
But to friends, \u201cthe Chief\u201d sent another message: \u201cYou and I know that this continuous putting pins in rattlesnakes finally got this country bit.\u201d<\/p>\n
Today, 70 years after Pearl Harbor, a remarkable secret history, written from 1943 to 1963, has come to light. It is Hoover\u2019s explanation of what happened before, during and after the world war that may prove yet the death knell of the West.<\/p>\n
Edited by historian George Nash, Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover\u2019s History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath [1], is a searing indictment of FDR and the men around him as politicians who lied prodigiously about their desire to keep America out of war, even as they took one deliberate step after another to take us into war.<\/p>\n
Yet the book is no polemic. The 50-page run-up to the war in the Pacific uses memoirs and documents from all sides to prove Hoover\u2019s indictment. And perhaps the best way to show the power of this book is the way Hoover does it \u2014 chronologically, painstakingly, week by week.<\/p>\n
Consider Japan\u2019s situation in the summer of 1941. Bogged down in a four year war in China she could neither win nor end, having moved into French Indochina, Japan saw herself as near the end of her tether.<\/p>\n
Inside the government was a powerful faction led by Prime Minister Prince Fumimaro Konoye that desperately did not want a war with the United States.
\nThe \u201cpro-Anglo-Saxon\u201d camp included the navy, whose officers had fought alongside the U.S. and Royal navies in World War I, while the war party was centered on the army, Gen. Hideki Tojo and Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka, a bitter anti-American.<\/p>\n
On July 18, 1941, Konoye ousted Matsuoka, replacing him with the \u201cpro-Anglo-Saxon\u201d Adm. Teijiro Toyoda.<\/p>\n
The U.S. response: On July 25, we froze all Japanese assets in the United States, ending all exports and imports, and denying Japan the oil upon which the nation and empire depended.<\/p>\n
Stunned, Konoye still pursued his peace policy by winning secret support from the navy and army to meet FDR on the U.S. side of the Pacific to hear and respond to U.S. demands.<\/p>\n
U.S. Ambassador Joseph Grew implored Washington not to ignore Konoye\u2019s offer, that the prince had convinced him an agreement could be reached on Japanese withdrawal from Indochina and South and Central China. Out of fear of Mao\u2019s armies and Stalin\u2019s Russia, Tokyo wanted to hold a buffer in North China.<\/p>\n
On Aug. 28, Japan\u2019s ambassador in Washington presented FDR a personal letter from Konoye imploring him to meet.<\/p>\n
Tokyo begged us to keep Konoye\u2019s offer secret, as the revelation of a Japanese prime minister\u2019s offering to cross the Pacific to talk to an American president could imperil his government.<\/p>\n
On Sept. 3, the Konoye letter was leaked to the Herald-Tribune.<\/p>\n
On Sept. 6, Konoye met again at a three-hour dinner with Grew to tell him Japan now agreed with the four principles the Americans were demanding as the basis for peace. No response.<\/p>\n
On Sept. 29, Grew sent what Hoover describes as a \u201cprayer\u201d to the president not to let this chance for peace pass by.<\/p>\n
On Sept. 30, Grew wrote Washington, \u201cKonoye\u2019s warship is ready waiting to take him to Honolulu, Alaska or anyplace designated by the president.\u201d<\/p>\n
No response. On Oct. 16, Konoye\u2019s cabinet fell.<\/p>\n
In November, the U.S. intercepted two new offers from Tokyo: a Plan A for an end to the China war and occupation of Indochina and, if that were rejected, a Plan B, a modus vivendi where neither side would make any new move. When presented, these, too, were rejected out of hand.<\/p>\n
At a Nov. 25 meeting of FDR\u2019s war council, Secretary of War Henry Stimson\u2019s notes speak of the prevailing consensus: \u201cThe question was how we should maneuver them (the Japanese) into \u2026 firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can wipe the Japanese off the map in three months,\u201d wrote Navy Secretary Frank Knox.<\/p>\n
As Grew had predicted, Japan, a \u201chara-kiri nation,\u201d proved more likely to fling herself into national suicide for honor than to allow herself to be humiliated<\/p>\n
Out of the war that arose from the refusal to meet Prince Konoye came scores of thousands of U.S. dead, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the fall of China to Mao Zedong, U.S. wars in Korea and Vietnam, and the rise of a new arrogant China that shows little respect for the great superpower of yesterday.<\/p>\n
If you would know the history that made our world, spend a week with Mr. Hoover\u2019s book.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
******<\/p>\n
James Bovard<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. 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