Preferring the dark side
John Charmley
DAY OF DECEIT by Robert B. Stinnett Constable, £25, pp. 386 Here is yet another definitive book proving that Roosevelt knew that the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Har- bor — and only nine years after Nave and Rusbridger's Betrayal at Pearl Harbor, also written with the aid of documents newly released under America's Freedom of Information Act, did exactly the same thing. The heart sinks, knowing that after the publisher's come-on there will be end- less unnecessary detail meant to disguise the unverifiable speculation; this is the his- torical equivalent of train-spotting.
There is, in fact, little that is new here. There is the usual obsessional belief that because the Americans were reading Japanese codes, their evaluation of that material must have been accurate; there is the assumption that these correct evalua- tions must have reached FDR, who must therefore have decided to let the Japanese inflict severe damage on the US Pacific fleet in order to convince the US public that it was necessary to enter the second world war. The usual objections apply to these old chestnuts.
The first objection is the obvious one. In what way would the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor help America into the war against Germany? We know that Roosevelt wanted to get into the war against Germany, but a Japanese attack on America would actually have taken him further from that objective. Not even FDR could have convinced the American public that the correct response to a sneak attack from Japan was to declare war on Ger- many; that took Hitler's startling decision to declare war on America. Secondly, we have to ask why it was necessary, in pursuit of this so-called aim, to let the Pacific fleet be so badly damaged? The notion that to have done otherwise would have been to have revealed that America was reading the Japanese codes will only hold a certain amount of water. It would have been sim- ple enough to have arranged for parts of the fleet to have been out on manoeuvres. Then we come to the question of evalua- tion of intelligence. As the author shows, the intercepts were voluminous and not easy to evaluate. Ambassador Dodds was amazed in the late 1930s to realise that nei- ther Secretary Hull nor the President had read his painstakingly detailed reports on German preparations for war; busy politi- cians do not, alas, always master the details; no more do intelligence officers always provide the correct evaluation of the intercepted material which they are try- ing to piece together.
There is something about the world of secret intelligence that breeds authors and books like this. Perhaps the authors cannot believe that the politicians were not as obsessed with espionage as they are; per- haps they need to believe that something kept secret for as long as intelligence reports must contain the real explanation for the mysteries of history. There was a time when historians believed that the opening of the diplomatic archives would do this, and when that turned out not to be so, they have turned to the dark side, so to speak.
Stinnett's treatment of what he takes to be a crucial document may be taken to stand as an example of his methodology. His diligent researches uncovered an eight- point memorandum written in October 1940 by Lt. Commander McCollum, outlining the steps by which America would get Japan into the war. He admits there is no proof this document ever reached FDR, but says that it reached FDR's desk and was 'systematically put into effect'. He says that it would take 'all eight' of McCollum's points before Japan entered the war, but admits that one point, the sending of American cruisers to Singapore, was not taken; he might have added that many of the others were not implemented either, but that would have undermined the con- spiracy theory.
Stinnett would have been better employed examining the unspoken racialist assumptions which guided American policy towards Japan — the evidence is in profu- sion in training manuals and policy memo- randa. The Americans felt that the Japanese were inferior fighters and dis- counted the threat from them. Publishers and train-spotters will continue to peddle conspiracy theories, but, as usual, it is the cock-up theory of history which explains matters most satisfactorily.
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