On December 7, 1941, Japanese aircraft attacked an American military base in Pearl Harbor and the United States turned out to be an active participant in World War II, and ultimately its beneficiary. Minister Knox's report on losses following the attack on Pearl Harbor stated what was apparently intended from the outset: “The overall balance of power in the Pacific in terms of aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers and submarines was not affected. All of them are at sea and are looking for contact with the enemy,”that is, the Japanese attack did not inflict any tangible damage. The fate of the American fleet based in the Gulf had already been decided, but in November 1941, Roosevelt asked about the upcoming events: "how should we bring them to the position of the first strike so that the damage would not be very destructive for us?" entry by Minister Stimpson. Already in our time, a Japanese political scientist and grandson of Shigenori Togo, the foreign minister in the early 40s Kazuhiko Togo, notes with bewilderment: “… there are incomprehensible things. For example, shortly before the Japanese attack, all three American aircraft carriers were withdrawn from Pearl Harbor. Indeed, by order of the command of the US Navy, Kimmel sent two aircraft carriers, six cruisers and 14 destroyers to the islands of Midway and Wake, that is, the most expensive equipment was withdrawn from the attack, which will finally become clear from the commission's report.
To understand how this happened, it is necessary to reconstruct the course of previous events. The first attempt in 1939 to change the US neutrality law, allowing states to go to war, met with opposition from Senator Vandenberg and the so-called National Committee, which included Henry Hoover, Henry Ford and Governor Lafolette. "Post-war documents and declassified documents of Congress, as well as the death of Roosevelt himself" - according to W. Engdahl: "show without any doubt that the president and his defense minister Henry Stimson deliberately incited Japan to war." Robert Stinnett's book A Day of Lies: The Truth About the Federal Reserve Fund and Pearl Harbor says that the Roosevelt administration provoked the Japanese attack, because its further actions could not be called anything other than a provocation.
On June 23, 1941, a note from Presidential Aide Harold Ickes came to Roosevelt's desk, indicating that "the imposition of an embargo on oil exports to Japan could be an effective way to start a conflict." The very next month, Deputy Secretary of State Dean Acheson banned the Japanese from importing oil and oil products from the United States. The Japanese fleet, according to Admiral Nagano, “burned 400 tons of oil per hour,” which the Japanese could only obtain by seizing the oil resources of Indonesia (the Dutch East Indies), the Philippines and Malaysia. On November 20, 1941, Japanese Ambassador Nomura submitted a proposal for a peaceful settlement of the conflict, which included a clause: "The United States government will supply Japan with the necessary amount of oil."
In addition to the fact that the United States interrupted the shipping traffic with Japan and closed the Panama Canal for Japanese ships, on July 26, Roosevelt signed a decree on the seizure of Japanese banking assets for a substantial amount of $ 130 million at that time and the transfer of all financial and trade operations with Japan under the control of the government. The United States ignored all subsequent requests from the politicians of the country of the rising sun for a meeting of the heads of both countries to normalize relations.
On November 26, 1941, the Japanese ambassador to the United States, Admiral Nomura, was handed a written demand to withdraw the Japanese armed forces from China, Indonesia and North Korea, to terminate the tripartite pact with Germany and Italy, such an ultimatum response to Nomura's proposals was unambiguously interpreted by Japan as the unwillingness of the United States to resolve differences peacefully …
On May 7, 1940, the Pacific Fleet received an official order to remain in Pearl Harbor indefinitely, led by Admiral J. Richardson in October, tried to persuade Roosevelt to withdraw the fleet from Hawaii, since there he does not have a deterrent effect on Japan. "… I must tell you that the senior officers of the navy do not trust the civilian leadership of our country," the admiral summed up the conversation, to which, in turn, Roosevelt remarked: "Joe, you didn’t understand anything." In January 1941, J. Richardson was fired, and his post was taken by Husband Kimmel, from whom they not only consistently concealed documents that could suggest that the target of the attack would be Pearl Harbor, but also demonstrated those that created false impression of the impending attack on the Philippines.
William Endgal's book speaks of documents that "prove that Roosevelt was fully aware of the plans to bomb Pearl Harbor several days before its start, down to the details of the movement of the Japanese fleet in the Pacific and the exact time of the start of the operation." Churchill also admitted: Roosevelt “was fully aware of the immediate objectives of the enemy operation. In fact, Roosevelt instructed the director of the International Red Cross to prepare for the large numbers of casualties at Pearl Harbor because he had no intention of preventing or defending against a potential attack."
At least it is known for sure that on November 26, the day after the Secretary of War's record of the imminent attack on Pearl Harbor, the British Prime Minister informed Roosevelt, specifying the exact date. Kimmel. Earlier, when he tried to prepare for a clash with Japanese forces, the White House sent a notice that he was "complicating the situation", and at the end of November he was ordered to completely stop conducting reconnaissance against a possible airstrike. A week before the tragic events, it was decided to leave the sector in the direction of 12 hours out of patrol, anti-aircraft artillery was not alerted, in accordance with anti-sabotage warning No. 1 of the technician, and the ships were herded into dense groups, which made them easy prey for an air attack. The US Army commission that followed the event summed up the situation as follows: "Everything was done in order to maximize the favorable air attack, and the Japanese did not fail to take advantage of this."
Colonel O. Sadtler also tried to prevent an attack on the American fleet, because of his position he was familiar with the contents of the Japanese correspondence and found in it coded words warning of an impending attack. He wrote a warning to all garrisons, including Pearl Harbor on behalf of the chief of staff, General J. Marshall, but he was practically ridiculed, despite the fact that the command knew from secret correspondence about the offensive operation developed in Tokyo under the code name "Magic", and quite may have known that on January 7, 1941, Secretary of the Navy, Koshiro Oikawa, was studying a nine-page rationale for the Pearl Harbor raid. On September 24, 1941, from the incoming ciphers, it became known that the Japanese naval intelligence was requesting the squares of the exact location of US ships in Pearl Harbor.
Regarding the decrypted Japanese codes, it is noteworthy that the head of the then official intelligence structure of the Special Operations Directorate, William Donovan, who placed his office in room No. 3603 of Rockefeller Center, was excluded from the list of recipients of the decrypted materials by Army Chief of Staff, General George Marshall. It is also noteworthy that the machine for decrypting the code was received by separate headquarters of the units, but the Pearl Harbor group did not get the decryption machine, that is: in Rockefeller Center and at the base itself, it was not supposed to know about the impending provocation. It is possible that Roosevelt "did not look surprised" on the day of the news of the attack on Pearl Harbor, as William Donovan later recalled about it, because he himself brought it closer with all his might, for he was worried, according to the head of Special Operations Directorate, only that the public did not supported the declaration of war.
The US intelligence services have been reading the encrypted correspondence of the Japanese fleet since the second half of the 1920s, secretly re-photographing codebooks with the so-called "red code". In 1924, the future head of the intercept and decryption department at headquarters, Captain Laurance F. Safford, joined the decoder team, whose position during the Pearl Harbor hearings would make many doubt the official story. Since 1932, Safford, using IBM equipment, has developed the same decryption machines; in 1937, special radio stations were deployed to intercept radio communications along a giant arc from the Philippines to Alaska.
The efforts of more than 700 employees under the leadership of L. Safford and W. Friedman in August 1940 resulted in the deciphering of the most complex "pink" or "purple code" used to encrypt government diplomatic correspondence in Japan. In addition to the high command, President F. Roosevelt, Secretary of State K. Hull, Secretary of War G. Stimson and Secretary of the US Navy F. Knox, who were not familiar with only four of 227 documents that constituted secret correspondence between Tokyo and the Japanese Embassy in the United States. Accordingly, it is likely that they were aware of the contents of the meeting of the imperial government held on September 6, 1941 in the presence of the emperor, which said that if “there is no substantial hope of reaching an agreement with our demands through the aforementioned diplomatic negotiations, we will immediately take a decision on the introduction of readiness for war against the United States."
Between November 28 and December 6, seven encrypted messages were intercepted confirming that Japan intended to attack Pearl Harbor. Finally, the inevitability of war with Japan became known the day before the attack on Pearl Harbor, six hours before the attack, its exact time became known - 7.30, about which the command of the US Army decided to inform Hawaii not by a phone call, but by an ordinary telegram that reached the addressee when the fleet was already sunk. And just before the attack, two soldiers on duty on the radar noticed Japanese planes, but no one answered the call to the headquarters, and half an hour later, Kimmel's wife, standing in a nightgown in the courtyard of her villa, was reporting to her husband: “It looks like they covered the battleship Oklahoma "!"
In total, during the attack, 2,403 (according to N. Yakovlev - 2,897) base personnel were killed, 188 aircraft were destroyed, the old target ship Utah, the minelayer Oglala, the destroyers Kassin, Down and Shaw, and the battleship Arizona, whose burning image became a symbol of the destruction of Pearl Harbor. The death of "Arizona" brought the largest number of casualties - 47 officers and 1,056 lower ranks, but added a number of questions. According to Nimitz's research, the Arizona was destroyed by the Val -234 dive bomber, but it would not have been able to lift the 800-kg bomb that allegedly destroyed the battleship, and Arizona also did not receive torpedo hits. Moreover, a survey by the divers of the vessel showed that the battleship, considered an impregnable fortress, went to the bottom as a result of a series of explosions that occurred inside the vessel. Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox then concluded that the bomb had hit the battleship's chimney.
Roosevelt himself appointed the composition of the first commission of Chief Justice O. Roberts, which was to find out the circumstances of the tragedy. Her report was published many times, but not once until 1946 were 1887 pages of survey protocols and more than 3000 pages of documents presented to the general public, since their content obviously contradicted the conclusions, nevertheless, the President thanked O. Roberts "for a thorough and comprehensive investigation.", which dumped all the blame on the chief of the garrison, Walter Short and Hasbend Kimmel, who was dismissed on March 1 with a promise to later bring him to trial by a military tribunal. After the fateful tragedy, both worked in the field of military production. In 1943, Kimmel requested materials from the Naval Department, but was refused on the pretext of providing security.
In 1944, presidential candidate Thomas Dewey intended to release the Japanese cipher story, which clearly indicated that Roosevelt knew about the impending operation, but the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General J. Marshall convinced him not to show his cards to the Japanese during the war. The next year, the Senate considered a bill by E. Thomas, which provided for 10 years in prison for disclosing encrypted materials, but the Republicans rejected it, and more than 700 decrypted Japanese documents were presented to the new commission. Although Republican members of the commission showed particular zeal in the investigation, they were forbidden to independently study the archives of government departments, and secretary Grace Tully issued documents from the personal archives of the late president at her own discretion. There were other oddities too
“The testimony protocols are full of contradictions. What was said in the fall of 1945 invariably contradicted the testimony given before the previous commissions of inquiry. In 1945, the documents were either hidden or disappeared, and the memory of the participants in the events was "refreshed", or they completely forgot what was happening. Therefore, in a number of cases, the stereotypical answer followed to persistent questions: "I do not remember." Even the senators who were eager to gain political capital from the investigation got tired and stopped delving into the case. " N. Yakovlev "Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941 - Fiction and Fiction"
The Japanese telegram of December 4, 1941, warning of the beginning of the war, was deciphered and sent to the leading figures of the United States, but already in 1944 the War Department commission stated: “The original telegram disappeared from the naval archives … Copies were also in other places, but now they all disappeared … During the past year, the radio station's magazines, in which the receipt of the telegram was recorded, were destroyed. An army witness testified that the army command never received this telegram. " One by one the witnesses began to get confused in their memories. A. Krammer, who was in charge of the translation and mailing of decrypted materials, who was known as an absolute pedant, always inserted his favorite word "exactly!" After lunch at Admiral Stark's, he suddenly began to give inconsistent testimony. This was achieved not only by having lunch with the higher command, but also by placing him in the psychiatric ward of the naval hospital Bethesda, from where, according to relatively modern research, he was released in exchange for a change of testimony and under the threat of life imprisonment. The head of naval intelligence, Vice Admiral Theodore Wilkinson, presented to the commission 11 radio intercepts that Marshall and others showed did not exist, but in February 1946, during the work of the last commission,the car he was driving rolled off the ferry, resulting in the death of the witness.
Also "tough nut to crack" was the creator of decryption machines Lawrence Safford, who earned the nickname "insane genius" for a reason. In February 1944, he appeared to Kimmel, claiming that he had evidence that the admiral was "the victim of the dirtiest conspiracy in the history of the fleet," which apparently inspired the admiral to declare to the Commander-in-Chief of the Navy E. King on November 15, 1945: "Immediately after Pearl Harbor, I believed that … should take the blame for Pearl Harbor … Now I refuse to accept any responsibility for the disaster at Pearl Harbor. " By this time, at least the ninth investigation had already passed, and it did not clarify the reasons that involved the United States in the world war. The latter was headed in 1946 by a lawyer with the exemplary surname Morgan.
Safford stubbornly insisted that on December 4, having received a telephone message with a code word meaning war, he immediately reported this to Rear Admiral Knox. Safford was the only one who approached the Navy Commission of Inquiry with an indication of the pressure being exerted. Chief Adviser Richardson spent hours pestering Safford, resorting to legal tricks and making his testimony to the point of absurdity: "So you are claiming that there was a widespread conspiracy from the White House, through the War and Navy departments, through Kramer's division to destroy these copies?" To which Safford only retorted that the chief adviser was not the first to try to force him to change his testimony. Conducting correspondence with researchers, he intrigued the public for another three decades, and most of all his wife, who was out of harm's way down the stairs of journalists and burned all the papers found in the house, mentioning Pearl Harbor, as a result of which Safford began to encrypt his notes from her.
Even modern researchers note that it is extremely difficult to investigate the nature of the incident that dragged the United States into the war, since secret dispatches were removed from the materials of the hearings of the US Congress, and later became available only in special archives. One of the researchers, Robert Stinnett, believes that President Roosevelt, Secretary of State Hull, Secretary of War Stimson and nine other people from the military leadership, whom Stimson himself lists in his diary, were behind the deliberate provocation of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Using the Freedom of Information Act, Stinnet spent a long time collecting documents that had escaped censorship and came to the conclusion that the main organizer of the provocation was still Roosevelt, who in October 1940 received a memo from naval intelligence officer A. McCollum (A. McCollum), containing an instruction of eight actions, including an embargo, which were guaranteed to lead to war. However, for obvious reasons, the official version remains different.
