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When informed that the Japanese were Stacking Pearl Harbor, Navy Secretary Frank Knox blurted out, “My God, this can’t be true. This must mean the Philippines.” Knox was among U. S. military and civilian planners who were so preoccupied with deterring a Japanese attack on the Philippines that an attack on Pearl Harbor was unthinkable to them.
American strategists had no easy task in 1940 and 1941. Isolationist sentiment in Congress and the voting public thwarted a national sense of urgency. The increased government spending that eventually alleviated the economic problems of the Depression had only Just begun. Large segments of the public looked askance at military budgets. A cohesive Republican minority in the Senate and House and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Post-1938 loss of authority among Democratic legislators limited executive initiatives. On the international scene, uncertainty reigned. This uncertainty provided fertile ground for miscalculations especially when a new weapon system seemed to offer a counter to the threat that growing •Japanese power presented for the Philippines and Southeast Asia.
In general, strategic planners agreed on the probability °f America’s eventual involvement in the war. They clashed over how best to prepare for it, given the national mood and the available military resources. During these Worrisome months, the major agencies responsible for formulating foreign and strategic policy followed two parallel and competing lines of thought directed at the same goal—forestalling defeat of Great Britain without controversial exposure of U. S. forces.
As early as July 1940, planners in the State Department argued that the United States must move to support Britain while at the same time deterring Japanese advances in the Pacific. Stanley K. Hombeck, the political advisor at the State Department, advocated a policy of embargo coupled with forward military deployment in the Pacific to paralyze Japan and to keep it in a condition of “negative equilibrium.”1 Ambassador Joseph Grew in Japan agreed but Warned of the possibility of a bold response by the Japanese military.2 The State Department’s argument had convinced President Roosevelt, who ordered the Pacific Fleet, after its summer maneuvers of 1940, to remain in its forward base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, instead of returning to home port in California. Roosevelt wanted to ease the fhreat to Singapore and the East Indies. He accepted the State Department’s position that the fleet’s forward deployment provided a presence to make Japan’s military Ihink twice about moving into the resource-rich areas of Southeast Asia.3
By the summer of 1941, the administration’s proponents of deterrence expanded and developed their arguments. Japan, they argued, was unsure of itself. A halfhearted member of the Axis and caught off-guard by the
German invasion of the Soviet Union, Japan now had an unanticipated enemy at its back. Overcommitted and “half whipped” in China, it could not risk a U. S. military response to an attack on the Malay barrier.4 The United States, by helping the Chinese increase the tempo of their operations against Japanese forces, by placing obstacles in front of its possible southward advance, and by waiting for a favorable turn in the battle of the Atlantic, could buy time and wait for Japan’s “internal constituencies” to force the country out of the Axis.5
Following this logic, the State Department wanted, in addition to the Pacific Fleet’s continued deployment at Pearl Harbor, further naval units such as cruiser task forces to patrol deep into the Western Pacific. The department’s official position about using the Navy to deter Japan came up repeatedly in conferences at the White House. Secretary of State Cordell Hull continually pushed for cruises to Australia, cruises to the Philippines, and reinforcement of the Asiatic Fleet, then based in Manila. Influenced by these recommendations, Roosevelt told Admiral Harold R. Stark, Chief of Naval Operations, that he wanted naval task forces “popping up” at various places throughout the Western Pacific to keep the Japanese guessing.6
Stark argued vigorously against these proposed diversions of naval units. He and fellow admirals believed this represented a dangerous splitting of forces and invited the needless loss of ships in case of war. Using every ploy, he managed to convince Roosevelt not to order major naval demonstrations in the Southwest Pacific.7 The debate continued to 7 December 1941, with Hornbeck eventually accusing the military of not understanding the problem.8 They understood well enough, however they rejected the reasoning of Hornbeck and his colleagues.
Late in 1940, Admiral J. O. Richardson, Commander of the Pacific Fleet, had come to Washington to debate with Stark and the President about the advisability of leaving his fleet at Pearl Harbor. The base, he contended, could not support proper training, resupply, and refitting. San Pedro, its home port, could. The greater readiness his command could sustain while based on the West Coast would impress Japan’s leaders far more than its present forward location. Richardson lost his reclama and after the 1940 election, his job, for he had pushed too hard and in the process had said things Roosevelt could not forgive. But the logic of his brief and the intensity of his appeal led Stark to review the strategic plans for the Pacific.9
Convinced of the need for a new approach, Stark went back to basics. The Navy did not possess the combat power at the outset of hostilities to fight both an Atlantic and Pacific offensive.10 The Army, drawing on its World War I experience and its subsequent thinking of the Depression years, had pressed for acceptance of the idea that the war would have to be won by the invasion of the enemy homelands by ground forces. The Army also advocated considering the Pacific a secondary theater.11 These concerns, plus anxiety over Britain and the fate of Europe, led Stark to recommend that, in case of a two-ocean war, the United States direct its efforts toward Germany first;
this plan subsequently became known as “Plan Dog.” It provided the basis for the U. S. position advanced later in secret discussions with the British in Washington from 29 January to 29 March 1941.
Called the ABC-1 Conversations, these negotiations between representatives of the senior military planning staffs of both countries produced a combined plan to be followed if the United States entered the war. The ABC-1 Agreement specified that the threat posed by Germany demanded a major effort in the Atlantic theater, the defenses of British positions in the Mediterranean, and a U. S. defensive-offensive strategy in the Far East.
During the talks, the U. S. planners turned a deaf ear to the British arguments that U. S. power should guarantee their imperiled bastion at Singapore for “political, economic and sentimental considerations.”12 The U. S. military wanted no unnecessary distractions from the main effort. As the text of the agreement explained: “Since Germany is the predominant member of the Axis Powers, the Atlantic and European area is considered to be the decisive theater. The principal United States military effort will be exerted in that theatre, and operations of United States forces in other theatres will be conducted in such a manner as to facilitate that effort .... The United States does not intend to add to its present military strength in the Far East. . . ,”13 In short, there would be no diversion of forces to Singapore. That fortress would receive only indirect aid through whatever U. S. naval action occurred in the Central Pacific. The meeting produced several other important directives. The ABC-2 Agreement committed the United States, at the expense of its own air forces, to supply great numbers of aircraft of all types to Great Britain. The joint U. S. plan, Rainbow 5, then translated the ABC-1 strategy into operational instructions for U. S. forces.14
General George C. Marshall, Army Chief of Staff, had throughout these turbulent months held views similar to Stark’s. He had contributed to ABC-1 and ABC-2 and had supported the Navy on Plan Dog. Like Stark, who had worked hard to protect the units of the fleet from the far- flung deployments advocated by the State Department, and to prepare them for the trans-Pacific offensive in case of war, Marshall had struggled to protect the Army’s mobilization base. To a President anxious to send equipment— especially aircraft—to aid Britain or to help China, he had repeatedly warned that extra allocations to Lend-lease cut into the “seed com” of a future Army.15 Marshall, along with his Navy counterpart, sought to husband material for the training base and to prepare his divisions and air wings for war. The idea of defense in the Pacific theater using the strategic triangle (Hawaii, the Aleutians, and Panama) as a foundation, while concentrating the main effort against Germany, fell in line with several decades of Army planning.16
Thus, by mid-1941, all parties to the strategic debate agreed that a German victory over Britain posed the greatest threat. The State Department’s planners pushed for forward deployment of forces throughout the Pacific to deter Japan from moving south by threatening the flanks of its advance. This, they argued, along with aid to China, offered the greatest relief to Britain and the best chance o preempting further Japanese aggression.
Marshall and Stark, who were supported by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, had doggedly and successfully countered the State Department’s proposals. ABC-L which had tacit presidential approval, underwrote their views. The United States would aid Britain directly, through Lend-lease, without diversions from U. S. forces in training to protect Britain’s imperial outposts. If war came, the United States would direct its major effort at Germany and hold the line in the Pacific. The State Department had advocated a concept of deterrence to forestall hostilities; the military had successfully demanded a single-minded preparation for defense once war came-
Two other factors further confused the strategic situation: concern for the fate of the Philippines, and Roosevelt’s way of dealing with his subordinates. In spite of the fact that in the first stages of a two-ocean war, temporary concession of the Philippines in the face of superior Jap3' nese combat power seemed logical to many policymakers, abandoning a loyal ally in the face of the Japanese jugge^' naut stuck in their throats. Many of the defense offiei3 s had served in the Far East and were in one way or another old Philippine hands. They included Marshall, Stimson. Stark, Major General Edwin Watson, Roosevelt’s military assistant, and others. Francis B. Sayre, then-High Commissioner in Manila and an old political associate of the President’s, had ensured that he reported directly to R°0' sevelt, not through the Department of Interior. He pushe for a Philippine defense.17 Any plausible proposal to d° something to help the Philippines, at a time when policy makers felt they could do nothing in other areas, found 3 most receptive audience. In spite of their position on str3' tegic diversions made at the ABC-1 Conference, the Phj' ippines had to the Americans, like Singapore to the British, sentimental and political ties.
Sympathy for an old hero also made an impact. In Mar' shall’s words after the war, “ . . . we turned and tried to do something for General Mac Arthur . . . .”18 Leaving one of the Army’s elder statesmen and his command to certain defeat was distasteful. MacArthur seemed equal to the task of making a manageable situation out of the de fense of the islands. Soon, his ebullient and overly op11' mistic reports began to arrive in Washington. Marshall an Stimson were both impressed with the progress he re ported. The old “grognard,” newly recalled to active duty, seemed to be the man of the hour.19
In spite of Roosevelt’s sympathy for the plight of the Philippines, his desire to keep the Japanese away from tne back door to the British Empire, and his desire to help Britain in the Atlantic, he failed in the last months bef°r^ Pearl Harbor to give firm direction to the development 0 strategic policy. He did not provide for his senior mil>taDj and civilian strategists coherent guidance on priorities an principles. As one scholar of the New Deal has argued- “His keenness in judging and directing new subordinate8 was totally absent when it came to a judgment between abstract concepts.”20 This became a crucial problem-
Roosevelt loved to josh the experts and to dismiss then" concerns lightly without examining the dilemmas the)
Presented for resolution.21 When confronted with a diffiCult question, he would often smile and say, “Please don t ask me that.” Stark particularly complained of not being able to get decisions. “Policy seems to be something never fixed,” he wrote, “always fluid and changing. There’s no use kicking on what you can't get, definite answers.” Stimson wrote in his diary that while Roosevelt bad “flashes of genius,” he could not concentrate on solving hard problems. Dealing with him was like “chasmg a vagrant beam of sunshine around a vacant room.”"
This problem seriously affected Stark, who had been elected Chief of Naval Operations over the heads of several more senior admirals. His official correspondence "nth them was deprecatory and laced with comments that show his insecurity.23 He disliked his job and the problems he encountered in dealing with Roosevelt. Stimson called him a “trimmer,” the “weakest” of Roosevelt s advisors.24 Stark, for a variety of reasons, was not only ‘fiade uncomfortable by his admirals, but, like the rest of b>s Washington colleagues, he suffered the limitations imposed by a most difficult Commander in Chief.
Although the Army was not, like the Navy, a subject of intense presidential interest, its leaders shared similar Problems. Marshall did not have a direct working relationship with the President, nor in 1940 and 1941 was he confident of Roosevelt’s support. He owed his appointment as Chief of Staff to Harry Hopkins, who became his best conduit for channeling ideas to the chief executive. Later, his close working relationship with Secretary of War Stimson served him well. But before the war,^ uncertainty bedeviled his relations with the President."' Lend- lease and other programs headed by civilians enjoyed Roosevelt’s keenest interest.26
Marshall’s major difficulties with the Army staff aggra-
Admiral James O. Richardson, seen with his flag secretary Commander George C. Dyer, came home to Washington in 1940 to try to get President Roosevelt to bring his battle fleet back from Pearl Harbor to San Pedro. By pushing too hard and saying things FDR could not forgive, Admiral Richardson lost both his appeal and, ultimately, his job.
vated his problems with the White House. The changing world situation threw new strains upon the Army leadership. The staffing system was in a state of rapid evolution. New areas of responsibility such as mobilization, combined operations, and electronic warfare had to be absorbed. Problems with the relationship between the staff and the field commanders carried over from Mac Arthur’s tenure as Chief of Staff. Frustrated by the frequent failure of his subordinates to oversee the execution of key decisions, Marshall called his staff, “the poorest command post in the Army.” Increasingly, in the face of the larger range and growing complexity of problems, Marshall shunned formal staff procedures. To simplify his intellectual tasks and to narrow his span of control, he began basing his major decisions on informal meetings held in his office, a response to the fact that he and his subordinates were stretched very thin.27
Thus, in spite of the fact that Roosevelt had authorized the ABC-1 negotiations underwriting the service positions vis-a-vis that of the State Department (he refused formally to approve the agreement, however), none of his advisors felt confident that policy had been decided. The State Department continued to lobby for a deterrent instead of a defensive posture. In May, in accordance with ABC-1, Stimson failed, with British backing, to get ships moved from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Roosevelt had withdrawn from all but his most trusted advisors.28
In this chaotic atmosphere of frustration, confusion, individual overcommitment, and a general desire to do something, one factor, technological optimism, provided the key catalyst behind America’s diversion from preparing to execute the Germany-first strategy to the acceptance of a posture of deterrence in the Pacific. U. S. planners searched desperately for a way to deal with the Japanese threat. Suddenly, the new B-17 seemingly made feasible a 1939 concept of Philippines defense based on air power and submarines. Shore-based, long-range bombers, they believed, could dominate the nautical axes of advance the Japanese were expected to use to attack Southeast Asia. The advancing enemy force could be destroyed at sea. The Philippines flanking position with its long-range air weapons would thus deter any enemy advance to the Malay barrier.
The train of events by which this idea came to dominate Pacific strategy began with staff work done before 1940 and resurrected by attache reports about air operations against shipping in the Mediterranean. The reports stressed that attacking aircraft had decisively defeated Italian naval units at Taranto and British ships at Crete.29 Both aviators and ground officers in War Plans picked up
the theme in desperate need of new ways of meeting the Axis threat despite U. S. shortages of funds and combat equipment.
On 16 September 1941, Stimson had a long session with Brigadier General Early L. Naiden, Chief of the Air Staff “ . . . to go over the maps of the Philippines ... to see exactly what the situation was which we are in for out there and how far our planes would reach and what could be done to protect them.” At the end of the conference, Stimson summoned Brigadier General Leonard T. Gerow, the Chief of Army War Plans Division, and requested “ • ■ a special study of the strategic positions of the situation.”30 After developing the argument that the Philippines would threaten the flanks of and therefore deter Japanese advances to the southeast Pacific, Gerow concluded in his study:
“Consideration of Japanese forces and her capabilities, leads to the conclusion that the air and ground units now available or scheduled for despatch to the Philippine Islands in the immediate future have changed the entire picture in the Asiatic Area. The action taken by the War Department may well be the determining factor in Japan’s eventual decision and, consequently, have a vital bearing on the course of the war as a whole.”31
The memorandum contained a map (Figure 1) that gives graphic evidence of what this concept meant to these harried planners. Stimson subsequently picked up the theme by sending the paper to Secretary of State Cordell Hull and lobbying the President in favor of the new policy. He attempted to educate Roosevelt about how the new tactics of long-range bombardment would, “revolutionize . . . America’s strategy in the Southwest Pacific, taking her from impotence ... to influence events . . . to a position
of . . . great effective power.”32 Stimson believed that the ability to fly bombers to Manila by roundabout routes obviated the Navy’s position that the fleet be held back and not committed piecemeal to protect an extended line of communications. B-17s could fly to the Philippines independent of what the Navy did. Their presence and striking power would deter further Japanese aggression by dominating the flanks of any advance to the Malay Barrier or Thailand.33
By September, Marshall was squeezing the mobiliz3' tion base dry to get antiaircraft guns (a whole new regiment), tanks, and pursuit planes to Luzon. This represented a major sacrifice of materiel. Only a few months before, he had written to his new commander in Hawaii- Lieutenant General Walter Short, of the binding shortages in antiaircraft weapons and planes and had explained that
the Army staff had already stripped units in the United States to reinforce Pearl.34
The B-17 “Flying Fortresses,” however, made up the rnost important category of reinforcements headed to the Philippines. Planes promised to Great Britain under ^BC-2 were withheld and sent to the Far East.35 In Octo- °er 1941, General H. H. Arnold, then-Deputy Chief of Staff for Air, allocated all but 16 of the 111 B-17s available before March 1942 to MacArthur’s command, in sPite of the Army’s having argued with the President time and again against diversions of these valuable aircraft 'fom the training base. Convinced of the strategic import °f the new concept, Marshall and Stimson had reversed jheir stand opposing the concepts advocated by the State department.36 Deterrence, not preparation for defense, became the order of the day in U. S. military as well as diplomatic strategy.
Caught in the dissonance between two opposing solu- h°ns to the problem of sustaining Great Britain, haunted sentiment, and lacking any strategic doctrine that sPanned the gap between technological innovation and deterrence, U. S. planners seized on an untried use of a new weapon as a cost-free way out of the strategic deadlock. Stimson’s idea of dominating the Western Pacific 'yith Philippines-based strategic bombers pleased all parties to the debate. The State Department got their military obstacle to a Japanese move into Southeast Asia. The J^nvy did not have to divert capital ships into a “central hole” from which they could not escape.37 A relieved Stark therefore supported the idea.
The new strategy appealed to everyone in that it offered a bold response to the Japanese threat while offering to buy time for MacArthur to consolidate his forces for an eventual defense. Frustrated decision makers, faced with uncertain choices and having no doctrinal rules upon "'hich to draw in their selection of alternatives, seized uPon the prospect offered by a new weapon used in a novel way. Dissonance and uncertainty created an envi- r°nment that favored technological optimism.
Stimson and Marshall, once they considered the new concept, gave scant thought to the realities of developing (he military capability necessary to make deterrence credible. Unproven squadrons of bombers operating from extended aerial supply lines against greatly superior forces were to attack and destroy Japanese naval units in the open Sea, as well as to penetrate enemy air cover to bomb distant bases. Assistant Secretary of War for Air Robert Lovett knew of equipment deficiencies on the B-17 that had enierged through British use of the aircraft over Germany, h addition, the Royal Air Force believed the plane was n°t suitable for low-level bombing, the type of tactic necessary to attack shipping. In short, U. S. planners based their ideas of deterrence on an unrefined piece of equipment for which the actual means of employment remained ^determinate.38
This optimistic outlook caused two major problems, because they were so concerned with analyzing Japanese geographic intentions, U. S. leaders completely miscalculated Japanese military capabilities. In the words of an
Army intelligence estimate, “Japan, already extended militarily, has a multiplicity of strategic objectives; but for a variety of reasons, she cannot concentrate the required forces to attack any one of them on a large scale and with assurance of success.”39 Also, the planners could not agree on Japanese intentions; Hornbeck offered 5:1 odds that no attack would be made by mid-December. Roosevelt worried about an attack on the Soviet Union. The Army and Navy planners looked for an offensive in the Far East, probably in Southeast Asia, with the possibility of assaults on Guam or the Philippines.40 No one took seriously the obvious fact that Japan might attack the most important threat to its control of the Pacific—the demonstrated capability of the U. S. fleet, then stationed at Pearl Harbor. These strategists, too preoccupied with the contradictory goals of saving the Philippines and forestalling the Japanese intention to attack, failed to make a realistic estimate of the Japanese military forces and how they could be applied to do the most damage to U. S. interests in the Pacific. They failed to assess probable Japanese responses to their concept, or whether the Japanese shared their appreciation of the significance of forward-based heavy bombers.
Shortly afterward, the shocked U. S. high command awoke to the message that Pearl Harbor was being bombed and that it was “no drill.” Navy Secretary Frank Knox’s reaction to the news epitomized the degree to which these planners had misled themselves. When Stark reported the assault, Knox exclaimed, “My God, this can’t be true, this must mean the Philippines.”41 That the Japanese were doing exactly what their operational capabilities and predilection for aggressive tactics made probable, seemed unthinkable to him.
The evolution of the Philippines decision and the resulting miscalculation on the part of both military and civilian planners offers a prime example of military policy derived from a clash of interests. Lack of direction allowed the State Department’s fixation with deterrence to divert attention from the ABC-1 and Germany first strategy, the approved plan for future U. S. action. This and technological optimism led these planners to overestimate the deterrent effect of a new weapon, boldly deployed. This optimism was based on a failure to realize that conventional deterrence had to be a function of not only the geographical location of forces but their proven operational capability and their likelihood of sustaining a long, hard campaign, not to mention the perception of that capability by the enemy.
'Stanley K. Hornbeck, Memoranda, 4 July and 21 September 1940. Hearings before the Joint Committee on the Pearl Harbor Attack, 79th Congress (Washington. D C.: Government Printing Office, 1946) (hereafter cited as PHR or PHR Exhibits), pp. 1990-91 and 2007-13. Also Homhcck’s Memorandum to the Under Secretary of State. 24 July 1940, Foreign Relations of the United States Diplomatic Papers, 1940, Vol. IV (hereafter cited as FRS), pp. 588-589.
2The Ambassador in Japan to the Secretary of State, 12 September 1940 FRS 1940, pp. 559-603.
\). O. Richardson and George C. Dyer, On the Treadmill to Pearl Harbor (Washington. D C.: Naval History Division. 1973); PHR. pp. 270-72 and PHR Exhibits, pp. 926-68. For the President's ideas, see Francis L. Lowenheim. Harold D. Langley, and Manfred Jonas (eds.), Roosevelt and Churchill: Their Secret Correspondence (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1975), pp. 89-229; President Roosevelt to Ambassador in Japan, 2 January 1941, FRS, 1941, Vol. IV, p. 7. 4Memorandum by the Advisor on Political Relations, 5 September 1941, FRS, 1941, Vol. IV, p. 429.
5Memorandum by the Advisor on Political Relations, 18 April 1941, FRS, 1941, Vol. IV, p. 15; A variety of memoranda in the Foreign Relations Series, 1941, Vol. IV written by Hornbeck, Lachlan Currie, Administrative Assistant to the President, and Sumner Welles, Deputy Secretary of State, provide the foundation of this proposed policy, see pp. 81-95, 147-48, 151-52, 165-67, 168-69, 208, 276-77, 361, and 427-29. See also PHR Exhibits, pp. 1990-91 and pp. 2007-13 for two important memoranda by Hornbeck dated 4 July and 21 September 1940. 6Stark’s testimony, PHR, pp. 2414-15, and his 19 April 1941 memorandum to Husband E. Kimmel, PHR Exhibits, p. 2163. Hombeck’s influence is corroborated in Richardson and Dyer, Treadmill, p. 332.
7Stark, Memorandum for the President, 11 February 1941, PHR Exhibits, p. 2150, compare it to his letter to Kimmel, same date, PHR Exhibits, p. 2147.
*PHR Exhibits, pp. 2212-13.
9Richardson and Dyer, Treadmill. The book tells Richardson's side of the story; for Stark’s view, see PHR Exhibits, pp. 926-68.
l0James Leutze, Bargaining For Supremacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), pp. 181-95; also Maurice Matloff and Edwin Snell, Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare, 1941-1942 (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1953), pp. 25-29.
“Maurice and Matloff, “American Leadership in World War II,’’ Soldiers and Statesmen: Proceedings of the Fourth Military History Symposium (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1970), pp. 79-81; Louis Morton, Strategy and Command, The First Two Years (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1962), pp. 28, 35-36, 70, 76, 80.
,2The Far East-Appreciation by U.K. Delegation, 11 February 1941 in Matloff and Snell, Strategic Planning, p. 37.
‘■’United States-British Staff Conversations Agreement (ABC-1), 24 March 1941, paragraphs 13(a) through (e) in PHR Exhibits, pp. 1491.
“Matloff and Snell, Strategic Planning, pp. 32-48; Louis Morton, “Germany First, the Basic Concept of Allied Strategy in World War II,” Kent Roberts Greenfield (ed.), Command Decisions (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1960), pp. 33-47; Morton, Strategy and Command, The First Two Years (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1961), pp. 67-91. ,5Marshall’s testimony, PHR, p. 1119, Haywood S. Hansell, “Discussion,” Soldiers & Statesmen, p. 114; Mark Skinner Watson, Chief of Staff, PreWar Plans and Preparations (Washington, D.C., Office of the Chief of Military History, 1950), p. 308; Leutze, Bargaining for Supremacy, pp. 203-05.
l6Morton, Strategy and Command, pp. 24-42; Watson, Chief of Staff, p. 105. “Harold Ickes, The Secret Diary of Harold lekes (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1954), p. 13; Morton, Strategy and Command, pp. 150-53.
18Marshall in PHR. p. 1119. ’
“Marshall to Stark, Memorandum, 12 September 1941, PHR, p. 2211; Morton, Strategy and Command, pp. 97-102, 155.
2(,Paul K. Conkin, The New Deal (New York: Crowell, 1971), p. 7.
2lIbid., p. 14.
22Stark to Kimmel, Washington, D.C., 31 July 1941, PHR, pp. 2177, 2109. For Stimson’s analysis of Roosevelt, see his diary entries for 18 April 1940 and 2 April and 1 December 1941.
23See Stark’s letter to J. O. Richardson in PHR Exhibits, p. 961.
24Stimson Diary, 6 May and 1 December 1941; and Stark to Kimmel, 10 February 1941, PHR Exhibits, p. 2148.
25Stimson Diary, 30 October 1941. .
26Forrest Pogue, “The Wartime Chiefs of Staff and the President,” Soldiers am Statesmen, pp. 71-74. Roosevelt to Marshall, 23 September 1941, Elliott R- R°° sevelt, ed., FDR, His Letters (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1950), p- ^ ’ Watson, Chief of Staff, pp. 164-66 and 181-82; and Stimson Diary, 15 and April 1941.
27Ray S. Cline, Washington Command Post (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chie of Military History, 1951), pp. 21-22, 24, 28, 68-69, and 72-74; PHR, p- 1°51; Forrest Pogue, Ordeal and Hope (New York: Viking, 1963), p. .190.
28Stimson Diary, 10 May 1941; Robert Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, An Intimate History (New York: Harper, 1948), pp. 298 and 299. .
■“Memorandum, no subject, no author, 21 August 1939. National Archives an Record Service, Record Group 165, War Plans Directorate Decimal Files; for atta chd reports, see Stimson’s letter to the President, 8 July 1941, with inclosures, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, PSF, Container #9.
30Stimson Diary, 16 September 1941.
3‘Leonard T. Gerow, Memorandum for the Secretary of War, 8 October 194 , NARS, RG 107, Secretary Stimson’s Classified Safe File; see also, Gerow’s Mem orandum for the Chief of Staff, 14 August 1941, NARS, RG 165, WPD Decima Files; Wesley F. Craven and James L. Cate, The Army Air Forces in World War l • (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), pp. 130-32 and 140-46. 32Stimson to My Dear Mr. President, 21 October 1941, FDR Library, PSF, Container #105.
33Stimson Diary, 12 September 1941; Memorandum of Conference of H.L.S. wlt W. Averell Harriman at Luncheon at Woodley, 21 October 1941; Stimson’s letter to the President of 22 September 1941.
mPHR, pp. 1059-60; Marshall to Walter C. Short, 7 February 1941, PHR, PP' 1055-63. A number of memoranda from the files of WPD outline the effort, See- WPD 4559-3, WPD 4561-2, WPD 3489-18, WPD 3633-23, Gerow’s Memorandum for Deputy Chief of Staff, General Moore, 8 October 1941, and Stimson Diary, 23 May 1941.
35Stimson to the President, 22 September 1941, FDR Library, PSF, Container #103.
36H. H. Arnold, Memorandum for the Secretary of War, 8 October 1941, NARS- RG 165, PHR Exhibits, pp. 1061-62.
37Stark in PHR, p. 2415.
38See Stimson’s diaries for the period August to December 1941. These and the correspondence between Stimson and the President and Stimson and the Army Stat^ in NARS, RC 107 and 165 give no evidence of a coherent attempt to validate the concept.
39PHR, p. 1064.
40PHR, pp. 1171, 1177, 1083, 4239. .
41G-2 Army, Memorandum for the Chief of Staff, 29 November 1941, PHR Exhibits, pp. 1368-73.
Colonel Meigs presently commands 1st Squadron, 1st Cavalry station^ in the Federal Republic of Germany. He has served as a regiments executive officer and the operations officer of a squadron and has commanded cavalry troops in Germany and Vietnam. A former assistant professor of history at the U. S. Military Academy, he holds a PhD ,n history from the University of Wisconsin. He wrote this article while a Council on Foreign Relations’ International Affairs Fellow at MIT-
As I Recall . . . End of Peace in the Philippines
By Rear Admiral Charles Adair, U. S. Navy (Retired)
In the summer of 1941, then-Lieutenant Commander Charles Adair was serving in the executive department of the Naval Academy, from which he had been graduated 15 years earlier. He was then ordered to report to Manila as aide and flag lieutenant to Admiral Thomas C. Hart, Commander in Chief of the U. S. Asiatic Fleet. Admiral Adair recounts what happened next in this edited excerpt from an oral history interview conducted 11 February 1975 by Dr. John T. Mason, Jr.
One day in early November, Admiral Hart and I went to a reception at the Manila Hotel. We were introduced to Ambassador Saburo Kurusu by the Japanese Consul. We stood talking for a few minutes, and I remember my impression of the ambassador. He could speak English very well, and he presented a nice appearance, and seemed very friendly. When he shook hands with Admiral Hart, he said, “You know, my mission is to keep you idle.” By that he meant his mission
was to avoid any hostilities between the United States and Japan, and I’m sure he meant it that way. There was no double dealing or anything else. My impression was that he knew nothing about what was about to happen. He was going back to Washington with a11 honest hope that perhaps he could do something to improve the relations between our two countries.
Now after having read and heard more about these things, I believe that the war was inevitable. It had to be,