Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor (3 page)

Air raid on Pearl Harbor. This is not drill.

—U.S. NAVY RADIO MESSAGE, DECEMBER 7, 1941

PRESIDENT
FRANKLIN
ROOSEVELT
WAS
enjoying a late lunch in his White House study Sunday afternoon, December 7, 1941. The fifty-nine-year-old three-term president had transformed the parlor off his second-floor bedroom—a room where Thomas Jefferson played his violin and Abraham Lincoln read the Bible—into a cluttered study that reflected his lifelong love of the sea. Model ships ranging from river packets and square riggers to a modern destroyer adorned tables and the fireplace mantel, while Currier and Ives lithographs crowded the ivory walls, depicting life along the Hudson River, whose muddy banks formed the western boundary of Roosevelt’s native Hyde Park. A portrait of Revolutionary War naval hero John Paul Jones—rescued from a second-hand shop for twenty-five dollars—kept watch over the president as he worked at his oak desk, crafted from timbers salvaged from the ill-fated Arctic explorer HMS
Resolute
, an 1880 gift from Queen Victoria to the then president Rutherford Hayes.

With its commanding views of the White House’s south lawn and the Washington Monument in the distance, the oval study had become the center of Roosevelt’s presidency during his nine years in power. The wheelchair-bound leader, who had battled polio two decades earlier, often preferred the study’s
convenience to his more formal office downstairs in the executive wing. He not only conducted the nation’s business from the comfort of the study’s worn leather sofa and chairs—hand-me-downs from Theodore Roosevelt’s old presidential yacht
Mayflower
—but hosted a 7:15 p.m. cocktail hour for his senior aides, pouring bourbon old-fashioneds and martinis on a tray atop his desk, often flavoring them with a dash of absinthe. “He mixed the ingredients with the deliberation of an alchemist,” recalled his speechwriter Robert Sherwood, “but with what appeared to be a certain lack of precision since he carried on a steady conversation while doing it.”

Roosevelt’s Sunday lunch capped a week made stressful by the deteriorating situation in the Pacific, so much so that the president decided to pass on a luncheon hosted by his wife, Eleanor, for thirty-one people, including his own cousin Frederick Adams. Instead, he chose to dine in his study at 1:15 p.m. with his longtime friend and trusted aide Harry Hopkins before he planned to settle in for a quiet afternoon of work on his treasured stamp collection. Despite the demands he faced as the nation’s commander in chief, Roosevelt carved out time each week to sort, clip, and affix stamps into more than one hundred hand-tooled leather albums. The collection would grow over his lifetime to number 1.2 million stamps, including ones from countries as far-flung as Haiti and Hong Kong and even a few of the last twenty-cent Confederate stamps believed ever sold at a postal station. Roosevelt’s boyhood hobby had over the years evolved into a form of occupational therapy, which the president needed now more than ever.

Roosevelt had long struggled to prepare the American public and lawmakers for war, many of whom argued that the vast Atlantic and Pacific Oceans served as natural barriers against foreign aggressors. He focused much of his attention on Europe. Adolf Hitler’s Germany had invaded Poland in September 1939. Denmark and Norway soon fell, followed by the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France. Hitler unleashed his bombers on Great Britain in September 1940, in an eight-month assault known as the blitz that killed 43,000 and left another 1.4 million homeless. Roosevelt had watched the destruction with horror—and an eye toward the future. The broad expanse of the oceans, he warned, was not the same as in the days of clipper ships. America’s best hope to remain on the sidelines was to arm friendly nations now at war. “No man
can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it,” he declared in a December 1940 fireside chat. “We must be the great arsenal of democracy.”

Much to the frustration of the president, who hoped to forestall a fight in the Pacific, Japan had continued on a collision course with the United States, triggered in part by unique social and geographical challenges. The island nation, whose population had tripled to seventy-three million in less than a century, was materially bankrupt, forced to import even its most basic food source—rice. The military only increased Japan’s dependence on foreign resources, from the bauxite needed to build fighters down to the cotton to sew uniforms. But the oil that powered battleships at sea and bombers through the skies topped Japan’s list of critical imports. Japan could produce a mere two million barrels a year, a figure equal to just 0.1 percent of the world’s oil output. The United States by comparison—the world’s largest producer—delivered seven hundred times that amount. “Napoleon’s armies moved on their stomachs,” observed a
New York Times
writer. “Modern motorized armies move on gasoline.”

The hunger for natural resources had led Japan to invade Manchuria in 1931 and push into northern China six years later. Roosevelt had watched Japan’s aggression with alarm, but just as in Europe he found his options limited. He sent bombers and fighters to the Chinese, hoping to bog down Japanese forces. In an effort to better project American power in the region—and over the fierce objections of some of the Navy’s top admirals—Roosevelt ordered the Pacific Fleet redeployed from California to Hawaii. These token measures, however, failed to dissuade the Japanese, who sided with Germany and Italy to form what the president called an “unholy alliance.” Japan invaded southern French Indochina in July 1941, a clear prelude to the capture of Hong Kong, Singapore, and the Dutch East Indies. Roosevelt felt he had no choice but to retaliate. He ordered Japan’s assets frozen and shut off oil exports, a devastating blow since America supplied more than 80 percent of the empire’s oil.

Roosevelt knew Japan promised a formidable fight even though the four-year war with China had proven costly. Japan had stockpiled raw materials, from iron ore and rubber to a two-year supply of oil. To stretch supplies it had ordered gas rationed and later halted all civilian traffic, including buses and taxis. Essential vehicles burned charcoal or wood. Workers punched out more than 550 planes a month, boosting Japan’s
air forces to some 7,500 aircraft; a figure that counted some 2,675 Imperial Army and Navy tactical planes, like fighters and bombers. But Japan’s muscle spread beyond the skies. Aggressive recruitment would soon swell the Army’s 1,700,000 soldiers to 5,000,000, while the Navy’s register listed 381 warships, including 10 battleships, 10 aircraft carriers, 18 heavy cruisers, and 112 destroyers. The Japanese Navy not only outgunned American forces in the Pacific but proved more powerful in that ocean than the combined navies of the United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands.

These issues weighed upon the president this first weekend in December. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. had asked Roosevelt only a week earlier, as his office prepared a $1.5 billion bond offering, whether he foresaw a crisis that would disrupt the financial markets. “I cannot guarantee anything,” Roosevelt had replied. “It is all in the laps of the Gods.” But the president still clung to the hope that he might avert war. In a move just the night before that reflected his sense of urgency, he had ignored Japan’s political protocol and fired off at nine a message directly to Emperor Hirohito. “Only in situations of extraordinary importance to our two countries need I address to Your Majesty messages on matters of state,” Roosevelt began. “Developments are occurring in the Pacific area which threaten to deprive each of our Nations and all humanity of the beneficial influence of the long peace between our two countries. Those developments contain tragic possibilities.”

Roosevelt’s message would be too late.

THE BLACK PHONE ON
the president’s
Resolute
desk rang at 1:40 p.m. on Sunday, interrupting his lunchtime conversation with Hopkins, Roosevelt’s closet adviser, whose chronic ill health and shriveled stature led others to describe him as resembling “a strange, gnomelike creature” and even “a cadaver.” Dressed in an old gray sweater given to him by his eldest son, James, Roosevelt polished off the last few bites of an apple as he took the call from Navy Secretary Frank Knox.

“Mr. President,” Knox began. “It looks like the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor.”

“No!” Roosevelt exclaimed.

“It’s true,” Knox replied. “I’ll read you the message.”

Knox had no formal report yet of the attack, just a nine-word radio message from the Pacific Fleet’s headquarters alerting all stations of an air raid and warning that the assault was no drill. Hopkins protested that the message must be a mistake, arguing that surely Japan would not attack Hawaii, but Roosevelt was more pragmatic. His long wait for when and where Japan might strike was now over; the empire’s elusive carriers had been found. “It was just the kind of unexpected thing the Japanese would do,” Hopkins wrote, summarizing the president’s views. “At the very time they were discussing peace in the Pacific they were plotting to overthrow it.”

Roosevelt called Secretary of War Henry Stimson. The seventy-four-year-old New York native, who had begun his career as a Wall Street lawyer and federal prosecutor, had served as war secretary for President Howard Taft and later as Herbert Hoover’s secretary of state. The tensions with Japan had prompted Stimson to spend the morning with Knox and Secretary of State Cordell Hull. When the trio broke, Stimson hustled home for a late lunch at Woodley, the twenty-acre Rock Creek Valley estate that he had purchased for the princely sum of $800,000 and that had once been home to Presidents Martin Van Buren and Grover Cleveland as well as General George Patton.

“Have you heard the news?” the president asked.

“Well,” Stimson replied. “I have heard the telegrams which have been coming in about the Japanese advances in the Gulf of Siam.”

“Oh, no,” Roosevelt stated. “I don’t mean that. They have attacked Hawaii. They are now bombing Hawaii.”

Chief of naval operations Admiral Harold Stark phoned at 2:28 p.m. to confirm the attack. The four-star admiral had spent the morning downtown at the Navy Department on Constitution Avenue. Soon after news of the raid reached Washington, Stark had jumped on the phone with Rear Admiral Claude Bloch in Hawaii, demanding a damage report. Even though he used the conversation scrambler, Bloch feared the call might not be secure. His vague assessment had only irritated his boss.

“Claude,” Stark finally barked. “How about it?”

“Well, Betty,” Bloch said, referring to Stark by his nickname. “It’s pretty bad. I don’t know how secure this telephone is.”

“Go ahead,” Stark demanded. “Tell me.”

Bloch did as ordered.

The attack by Japanese fighters and bombers, Stark informed the president, had caused severe loss of life and damage to the Pacific Fleet. Though the precise details would emerge only in the days and weeks ahead—once crews could extinguish the flames and tally the dead—the raid had destroyed or damaged eighteen ships, including eight battlewagons, three cruisers, and several destroyers. Attackers also wiped out 188 planes. The human toll would prove horrific. Casualties among soldiers, sailors, marines, and civilians would soar to 3,581, a figure that counted 2,403 killed. Roosevelt directed the bespectacled admiral to execute the Army’s and Navy’s agreed-upon orders in the event of an outbreak of hostilities in the Pacific.

The president hung up the phone with Stark and called Press Secretary Steve Early on the private line that connected his Morningside Drive home in northeast Washington to the White House. Early had hosted an uneventful news conference the day before with reporters, assuring them that there was no exciting news to anticipate this weekend.

“I think the President decided you fellows have been so busy lately and Christmas is coming so close that he would give you a day off to do some shopping.”

“I suppose he is over at the House writing a declaration of war, isn’t he?” one of the reporters had joked.

Other than a meeting with his budget director to sign routine papers, Early promised, the president had nothing newsworthy planned. “No appointments for today and none tomorrow,” he had told them, “and I don’t assume there will be.”

That was about to change.

“Have you got a pencil handy?” Roosevelt asked.

“Do I need it?” Early replied, suspecting a joke.

“Yes,” the president said. “I have a very important statement. It ought to go out verbatim.”

Early knew nothing yet of the attack, but sensed a crisis from Roosevelt’s serious tone. The press secretary summoned his wife, who retrieved a pencil and a few scraps of lined notebook paper. Early instructed her to write as he repeated the president’s twenty-eight-word message. Within minutes Early placed a three-way call via the White House switchboard to the Associated Press, United Press, and International
News Service, preparing to deliver the first news of the attack to the wire services.

“All on?” he asked, making a quick roll call. “This is Steve Early. I am calling from home. I have a statement here which the president has asked me to read.”

The quiet Sunday afternoon was over.

America was at war.

Secret Service agent Mike Reilly was swapping fishing stories with chief usher Wilson Searles when news of the attack reached the White House. The second-in-command of the president’s nine-member security team—and senior agent on duty this Sunday afternoon—Reilly darted from the usher’s office down to the switchboard. “Start calling in all the Secret Service men who are off duty,” he ordered the operator. “Don’t tell ’em why, just call ’em in. All the White House police, too.”

Secret Service chief Frank Wilson, who had attended church and enjoyed a nice drive through Rock Creek Park, had just sat down to dinner of roast pork, mashed potatoes, and hubbard squash when the phone rang.

“Why don’t they let us eat in peace!” Wilson griped.

His wife returned moments later with a grim look on her face; the White House operator was on the phone.