Ricardo Rivera Schreiber, a tall man of medium build with balding hair combed straight back, deeply-set eyes, and a tight mouth, was skeptical. In the late fall of 1940, Felipe Akakawa, Schreiber’s chief of staff, gave his boss some startling information conveyed by a Japanese interpreter in Peru’s consulate in Yokohama.
As Peru’s Minister to Japan since 1936, the forty-eight-year-old Schreiber was experienced enough to know that rumors abounded in Japan. It was an inevitable product of a society where open discussion was often discouraged and, in some cases, prohibited. Still, this rumor, if that’s what it was, could not be easily disregarded. Akakawa told the Minister that the Yokohama interpreter was part of Japan’s secret police and that he claimed to have a cousin in the Navy Ministry who had access to confidential information. The cousin said that the “Japanese squadron would, in a surprise move, sink the American squadron.”
The circumstances surrounding the disclosure seemed to support its credibility. The Yokohama interpreter would visit the Peruvian embassy in Tokyo about once a week to report to Schreiber (because the interpreter had apparently been placed in charge of the consulate). In the evening, the interpreter and Akakawa would retreat to the servants’ quarters and get drunk. It was during one of those encounters that the interpreter, feeling no pain, would brag about what he knew. So it did not appear to be a carefully calculated comment.
Schreiber’s concern intensified over the ensuing weeks. On one occasion, Akakawa told the Minister excitedly that the Yokohama interpreter said that the Japanese attack on the American “squadron” would occur in the central Pacific. And on another occasion Akakawa reported that the attack would be “carried out by aircraft.” The Yokohama interpreter added that Japanese aircraft carriers were at that time “steaming toward southern Japan with a view to beginning tests for the air attack which they were planning [to carry out] against the American squadron at Pearl Harbor.”
Schreiber was not sure what he should do with the information. It could be nothing more than wild speculation. Or it could reflect an inadvertent crack in the veil of secrecy that surrounded Japan’s military operations. There was no way for him to refute or verify the claims of the Yokohama interpreter. Or so he thought.
And then the Peruvian minister received a visit on Sunday, January 26 from Professor Yoshuda, a friend who taught courses on South America at the University of Tokyo. After an exchange of pleasantries, Yoshuda said with “great excitement” that “we were on the brink of a great misfortune which would bring everlasting ruin upon his country.” The college professor proceeded to explain that Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku “had already outlined the plan to attack the American fleet in Pearl Harbor,” that a “sham battle” was at that very moment being conducted in southern Japan, and that “the plan was ready to enter into action without the least doubt.”
Some—but not all—of Yoshuda’s information was accurate. Yamamoto had in fact conceived the plan for a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. The Japanese admiral had authored two letters about his proposal in January 1941—one to the Navy Minister and another to Admiral Onishi Takijiro, a friend who espoused the use of aircraft carriers in warfare and would thus be receptive to a proposal to use aircraft carriers to attack Pearl Harbor. However, Yamamoto’s plan had not been accepted by the Navy and would not be for many months. So there were no “sham battles” being conducted at the time. But there was one irony: around the time that Yoshuda was expressing his concern to Schreiber, Yamamoto was meeting with Onishi on a Japanese battleship anchored in southern Japan to discuss the Pearl Harbor project.
The details of that meeting were unknown to Schreiber. But Yoshuda’s remarks did seem to confirm much of the information conveyed by the Yokohama interpreter. And more than that, there was nothing far-fetched about Japan making plans for an attack against the United States.
It was no secret that relations between Japan and the United States were deteriorating. In recent weeks, there had been repeated articles and editorials in the Japanese press decrying the precarious state of Japanese-American relations. In his diary entry for January 7, Grew cited one editorial which warned “the Japanese people that war between Japan and the United States will be necessary because of… Great Britain and America’s entrance into the hostilities [in Europe]” and that these events “will shift the hostilities from Europe to the Pacific.” The New York Times similarly reported shortly before Schreiber’s meeting with Yoshuda that one of the Japanese government’s principal anxieties “is the public’s growing consciousness that relations with the United States have drifted into a dangerous position.”
In light of the increasingly hostile environment, Schreiber decided that he had to convey his information about the possible Pearl Harbor attack to the American embassy. He was sure the American ambassador would be appreciative.
There was ample reason to believe that Grew would regard the information as credible. He certainly recognized the volatile state of Japanese-American relations. “With all our desire to keep America out of war and at peace with all nations, especially with Japan,” Grew wrote in his diary on January 1, “it would be the height of folly to allow ourselves to be lulled into a feeling of false security. Japan, not we, is on the war path, and that path is not a whit the less dangerous to our own future welfare because it is camouflaged in such righteous-sounding terms as the ‘New Order in Greater East Asia including the South Seas’ and the ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.’ ”
Grew was, of course, hopeful that armed conflict with Japan could be avoided. But the ever-optimistic envoy was not blind to undesirable outcomes. “In the meantime,” he confided in that same diary entry, “let us keep our powder dry and be ready—for anything.” He expressed similar trepidation to his friend Bill Castle in a letter on January 7. “As for our getting into war with Japan,” he told the former Under Secretary of State, “that also rests on the lap of the gods.… I do not think that we shall declare war on Japan and I think it is equally unlikely that Japan will declare war on us. A lot of future trouble is, however, on the cards and no one can predict anything whatever with certainty.”
Part of Grew’s concern reflected what was visible on the streets of Tokyo. A pronounced military presence seemed to be everywhere—even on school fields. “[I]t was a common sight in Japan and a startling one to recently arrived Americans,” Grew later said, “[to] see little fellows scarcely big enough to walk togged out in military caps and playing military games. Anyone who passed a schoolyard would be even more startled to hear the blood-curdling yells coming from the throats of twelve-year-old boys as they charged across a field with real guns and bayonets, and in a manner so realistic as to be chilling.”
Military training for Japan’s youth was symptomatic of Japan’s priorities. The country was on a war-time footing. On January 9, 1941, the Japanese press announced that Prime Minister Konoye’s cabinet had decided to discuss the “national situation” informally with a newly-created body in advance of the Diet’s opening session on January 21. As Hugh Byas reported in the New York Times, the purpose of the meeting was to “emphasize that Japan is virtually under a wartime government” and to explain that the government “requires from the nation greater exertions than it has yet made.”
The government’s announcement was hardly surprising. The conflict in China had been in progress for more than three years, and there were now about one million Japanese soldiers stationed there (mostly in Manchukuo and other North China provinces that were rich in the natural resources coveted by Japan). Beyond that, Japan had moved substantial military forces into northern Indochina, a French colony, after striking an agreement with the Vichy government, which controlled unoccupied France but was subject to pressure from the Nazis, who occupied the northern portion of France.
These and other military excursions had taken their toll on the Japanese economy and the Japanese populace. The military budget was enormous and required curbs on non-military expenditures. Rice was becoming more difficult to obtain, and by April 1941, rice could only be obtained in metropolitan areas through ration coupons; beef was almost impossible to find; use of metals for non-essential items was prohibited, and so toys were almost always made of wood; cotton, wool, and other natural materials were in scarce supply, and so clothing as well as shoes were usually made with “sufu,” a wood pulp product that would dissolve in rain and from washing; and fertilizers to nurture over-planted farmland were difficult to secure, and so large trucks loaded with “honey buckets” of human excrement were, as Associated Press correspondent Max Hill remembered, a familiar sight on Tokyo’s streets. “The odor,” said Hill, “as you might well imagine, is none too pleasant.”
The impact of all this was readily apparent to foreigners. “It seemed to me,” said Henri Smith-Hutton upon his return to Tokyo in April 1939 after four years’ absence, “that the people were more somber and subdued. Certainly their clothing seemed more shabby and made of poorer materials. There were shortages of all kinds of articles, especially metals and construction materials. Imported goods had almost disappeared from the stores, and prices were very high; and while vegetables and rice and fish were available, there was little meat, and people had to line up to buy bread.”
The situation had deteriorated that much more by the time New York Times correspondent Otto Tolischus reached Tokyo in early February 1941. He was appalled by what he saw from a British embassy car in the ride from Yokohama to Tokyo. “Both sides of the road were lined with dirty, dilapidated, ramshackle wooden shops and shacks which had nothing in common with the pretty doll houses pictured in Japanese scenes at home,” Tolischus remembered. “The people looked equally poverty-stricken. Most of them shuffled about in dirty kimonos or a bizarre array of Western dress, and most of them, though it was winter, walked about in bare feet shod in wooden clogs. Farmers, driving lumbering oxcarts, were completely in rags, sometimes covered with a raincoat made of straw.” Tolischus had been expelled from Nazi Germany in March 1940 after almost seven years of residence there, and he could not help but make comparisons to wartime conditions in the Third Reich. “There were the same complaints about growing restrictions and declining standards of living,” said Tolischus, “—about shortages of all sorts of things, especially imported goods, about queues before food shops and the scarcity of taxicabs, about the poor quality of ersatz materials and native whisky—that I had heard in Germany.”
The decline in material comforts was accompanied by increased government surveillance and restrictions on speech. The government had taken steps to preserve secrecy and dampen dissent shortly after the China Incident commenced in the summer of 1937. The Military Secrets Preservation Law, as Robert Craigie later explained, “gave the police powers so wide that even the slightest indiscretion could be visited upon the victim with dire penalties.” The law was complemented by new regulations from the Home Ministry designed to “smother anti-war or pessimistic expression” and to ensure that newspapers and other periodicals only included “correct data” that would “inspire an enduring, untiring spirit into the mind of the people.”
These repressive measures were later strengthened by the National Defense Security Law, which was adopted by the Diet in March 1941 and went into effect in May 1941. The Home Ministry issued a warning to the people when the law went into effect “to be careful in their daily speech and avoid being utilized by spies.” That warning was supplemented by a directive from the Justice Ministry that instructed people “to refrain from commenting in public or in newspapers or magazines on what their common sense tells them is unfavorable to the country if known by foreigners.” (Knowledge of that law and those warnings did not help Tolischus or other correspondents for American publications. Almost all of them were arrested after the Pearl Harbor attack. In some cases, the correspondents were subjected to horrific torture, and in almost all cases, they were convicted for having sent information prior to the Pearl Harbor attack “to foreign agents harmful to Japan.”)
The fear instilled in people was pervasive. By the end of 1940, Grew and his staff saw the impact. “[O]ur Japanese contacts, sources of information,” he later explained to the congressional committee investigating the Pearl Harbor attack, “were falling away simply because they were being very carefully watched by the secret police and most of them did not dare come to the Embassy any more. They didn’t dare meet me outside, and even when I went to the Tokyo Club, which was sort of a neutral meeting ground for Japanese and foreigners, I found that the Japanese I knew would quietly slip away into other rooms or corners.” Marshall Green echoed that perception. “For the most part,” said Green, “people were pretty damned super-cautious about expressing their opinions and views, because there was the Kempeitai and other police and thought control organizations.”
Those other “thought control organizations” were not all Japanese. The execution of the Tripartite Agreement in September 1940 resulted in a rapid influx of members of Germany’s Gestapo, who were all too eager to assist their Japanese counterparts in suppressing any dissent. “These Gestapo agents,” said Craigie, “undoubtedly found the officers of the Japanese Gendarmerie apt and enthusiastic pupils in all of the latest Nazi arts of political repression, police intimidation and mass terrorism.” Grew himself soon reported to the State Department that there was “growing activity on the part of members of the Gestapo” and that “these gentry are reporting to the Japanese police the names of Japanese whom they believe to be harboring anti-Axis sentiments.”
The effort to discipline the population was further fueled by a radical change in Japan’s political structure. Political parties had been a staple of Japanese life for decades. But no more. The political parties—which provided at least some outlet for differing views on national policy—were dissolved by August 1940. On October 1, the government announced the formation of a new single party—the Imperial Rule Assistance Association—which would be the sole vehicle for dissemination of views on political issues. To ensure coordination with the government, the Prime Minister would be its president. Although it never achieved the same level of control that the Nazis exerted over the German populace, the creation of IRAA did result in fundamental changes. As Grew observed, the evolution of the new structure promoted “an economical way of life and a general frowning upon most forms of lightheartedness, bright colors, fun, sport, and general gaiety, so much loved by the Japanese, and, of course, ‘dangerous thoughts.’ ”
The consolidation of political power in Japan only heightened American concerns with Japanese policies. All of that was made clear in Secretary of State Hull’s statement before a congressional committee on January 15 with respect to the proposed Lend-Lease Act, legislation that would authorize the President to provide materials and other forms of support to any country—including China—whose needs were deemed vital to the defense of the United States. Hull used that statement to excoriate Japan’s path of aggression, beginning with the invasion of Manchuria and continuing through the China Incident. “It has been clear throughout,” said Hull, “that Japan has been actuated from the start by broad and ambitious plans for establishing herself in a dominant position in the entire region of the Western Pacific.… It should be manifest to every person that such a program for the subjugation and ruthless exploitation by one country of nearly one-half of the population of the world is a matter of immense significance, importance and concern to every other nation wherever located.”
Hull’s statement triggered a flurry of angry editorials in the Japanese press. Mr. Hull’s arguments, said one periodical, are “merely an exposition of American megalomania tainted with a fear complex amounting to phobia.” The hostility of the editorials soon subsided, but on January 21, Prime Minister Konoye told the Diet that “a new order in East Asia” remained the backbone of Japan’s foreign policy and that “Japan is firmly determined to achieve its program by destroying any parties, such as Chiang Kai-shek, who are resisting Japan and by cooperating with those who sympathize with Japan.”
Grew monitored all these developments closely. There were some well-connected Japanese informants who advised him and his staff that they retained hope for improved relations with the United States. But those splashes of hope could not overcome a more realistic assessment of the Japanese government’s perspective. “I have worked steadily during eight years to build up something permanently constructive in the relations between our two countries,” Grew told one Japanese friend on January 13, but “those efforts are being defeated by trends and forces which seem to be beyond our control.” And so, as he pecked out his thoughts on his Smith-Corona typewriter at the end of January, the American ambassador felt compelled to write that “[t]he outlook for the future of the relations between Japan and the United States has never been darker.”
Schreiber was not privy to the comments in Grew’s diary. But he did not need to read Grew’s diary to decide how to handle the situation. The diplomatic community in Tokyo was a small, close-knit group. Schreiber was, Grew later said, “a close personal friend of mine” and someone he knew “very well.” That sentiment was echoed when Grew testified before the congressional committee investigating the Pearl Harbor attack. “I trusted his word and I trusted his judgment,” Grew said of Schreiber. And so conveyance of the information in Schreiber’s possession should have been a simple matter. It was not. Quite the contrary. The sequence of events that unfolded at the end of January 1941 remains shrouded in mystery and inexplicable inconsistencies.
Schreiber recalled that he telephoned Grew immediately after Yoshuda left on Sunday, January 26, and explained that he had some important information to give the American ambassador. Schreiber probably did not describe the nature of the information when he talked with Grew on the telephone. “One has to live in Japan a while,” Grew later confided to his diary, “to realize that we are constantly being spied upon and that telephone conversations are always and inevitably tapped.” Like the American ambassador, Schreiber was very much aware of the ever-present surveillance by the Japanese government. He too would have undoubtedly assumed that their telephones were wiretapped. But Grew did not need to know the subject matter in that telephone call. He told his Peruvian colleague to have his car bring him to the American embassy.
Schreiber remembered that he left immediately and that he and Grew retreated to a small couch in the study of Grew’s residence. The Peruvian minister wasted no time in recounting all that he had learned about the possible attack on Pearl Harbor. Ever the gracious diplomat, Grew listened intently, and Schreiber recalled that his American colleague “appeared to be quite moved” and “immensely grateful” for Schreiber’s visit.
Grew probably did appreciate the gesture. But he may not have attributed any credibility to the rumored attack on Pearl Harbor. As he later explained to the congressional committee investigating the Pearl Harbor attack, the Japanese military seemed to leave no stone unturned in the effort to preserve secrecy over its activities. As one example, Grew pointed out that conductors on trains leaving Tokyo would routinely pull the shades down whenever the train passed a naval yard or other military installation. No risk could be taken that a foreigner or anyone else would see something that the military wanted to keep hidden. Given that obsession with secrecy, Grew thought it “very unlikely” that information concerning the military’s planned attack on Pearl Harbor—or any other maneuver—“would have been allowed to leak out anywhere.” And so it would have been “utterly impossible for any foreigner in Japan to acquire information of something that the Japanese military were going to do.”
Grew recognized of course that the Japanese were capable of surprise attacks on their adversaries. The Japanese surprise attack on the Russian fleet in Port Arthur in 1904—which initiated the Russo-Japanese War—was well known. That attack had occurred after a stalemate in negotiations over the countries’ respective interests in Manchuria and Korea. Grew knew that Japanese-American relations were on a downward slide—so much so that the State Department had issued a warning in October 1940 for all American women and children, as well as men “whose continued presence abroad is not highly essential,” to return to the United States. But he could not yet reconcile himself to the notion that Japan and the United States were on the verge of armed conflict. “[W]ar between Japan and the United States seemed then so cataclysmic,” remembered John Emmerson, “that, although rationally we saw it ahead, in our bones we could not feel that it would ever happen.”
Schreiber recalled that he and Grew had discussed sending a cable to the State Department that would include the information conveyed by the Peruvian Minister. Schreiber said that Grew had responded that the two men should “jointly agree on a cable to be sent to the Department of State,” but it is inconceivable that the American ambassador would have enlisted the assistance of another diplomat to draft any such cable. Not that it would have mattered. There is no evidence that Grew gave any consideration on that Sunday or even the following morning to sending a cable to the State Department about Schreiber’s information. He did not even reference the Schreiber meeting in his diary—a remarkable omission, because the diary is replete with the smallest details of Grew’s life in Tokyo. As one example, the diary entry for January 25—the day before the Schreiber meeting—recounts how a Japanese citizen “strong-armed” Joe out of a ticket line with “a heavy push,” an encounter which led Grew to complain that “roughnecks” in Japan “seem to predominate.” Given this attention to matters of trivial significance, it is difficult to understand why Grew did not include any reference to the Schreiber meeting in his diary—even if he did not attach any credibility to the information that Schreiber conveyed.
Subsequent events appeared to remove any need for Grew to correct the omission. Max Schmidt, the thirty-two-year-old Third Secretary in the Embassy, went to the Tokyo branch of the National City Bank of New York around noon on Monday, January 27. Schmidt (who changed his last name to Bishop after the Pearl Harbor attack) was a language officer who spoke fluent Japanese and was highly regarded by Dooman. He was, said the Embassy Counselor, “a young man of great ability” but “a very junior fellow.” Grew shared Dooman’s favorable opinion of Schmidt and thought it would be useful for him to be on the Japan Desk at the State Department in Washington. So Schmidt was at the bank to exchange his Japanese yen for American traveler’s checks in preparation for his return to the United States.
Schmidt’s later recollections of what transpired at the bank vary in minor detail, but the essence remains consistent. In a 1979 interview, Schmidt said that he saw Schreiber in the bank lobby. The two men were acquainted with each other. They had seen each other at diplomatic functions and even participated in golf outings, which remained a favorite activity of Grew’s and other Embassy staff members. In that 1979 interview, Schmidt said that Schreiber motioned him “over to one corner of the lobby.” (In a 1988 letter Schmidt said that Schreiber tapped him on the shoulder and motioned him to a “side alcove.”) According to Schmidt, Schreiber said that “the Japanese had a war plan involving a surprise all-out attack on Pearl Harbor if and when they decided to go to war.” Schmidt said that Schreiber “did not name” his sources and that Schmidt “did not ask him who they were.”
According to Schmidt, the conversation was brief. Still, Schmidt did not need more information to understand its significance. He raced back to the Chancery and immediately contacted other sources, including the United Press correspondent and other members of the Embassy staff, to try to verify the information conveyed by Schreiber. Although asked about those other sources in his 1979 and 1993 interviews, Schmidt did not describe any information received from other sources. The Third Secretary obviously did not regard confirmation as necessary. He drafted a telegram for Grew’s signature and took it to the Ambassador that afternoon.
Grew discussed the draft telegram with Schmidt and other members of the Embassy staff but apparently said nothing to any of them about any meeting he had had with Schreiber the previous day. Schmidt never referenced a Grew meeting with Schreiber in his various statements about the telegram. Henri Smith-Hutton recalled Grew telling him only that he had “heard the rumor circulating in Tokyo that in the event of a break between the United States and Japan, the Japanese would make an all-out surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.” Grew added, said Smith-Hutton, that “one of the main sources of the rumor was Dr. Rivera Schreiber, the Peruvian Minister to Japan.” John Emmerson had a similar recollection of a conversation with Grew at the time. According to Emmerson, Grew told him that Schreiber had “whispered to an embassy officer that he had picked up a rumor that Japan had planned a surprise mass attack on Pearl Harbor in the case of trouble between Japan and the United States.” When he published his recollection of that conversation in 1978, Emmerson was aware of statements by Schreiber saying that he had given the information to Grew directly and not to an “embassy officer.” Emmerson, however, said nothing to reconcile the apparent discrepancy.
Grew ultimately made some edits to Schmidt’s draft and sent the telegram to Hull on Monday, January 27 (one of Grew’s lucky days). The telegram attributed its content solely to information conveyed by Schreiber to Schmidt, who was not identified in the communication. “My Peruvian colleague,” the telegram said, “told a member of my staff that he had heard from many sources including a Japanese source that the Japanese military forces planned, in the event of trouble with the United States, to attempt a surprise mass attack on Pearl Harbor using all of their military facilities. He added that although the project seemed fantastic, the fact that he had heard it from many sources prompted him to pass on the information.”
Grew did reference the telegram in his diary entry for January 27, but the entry was very vague and provided no additional detail. “There is a lot of talk around town,” the entry read, “to the effect that the Japanese, in case of a break with the United States, are planning to go all out in a surprise mass attack on Pearl Harbor. I rather guess that the boys in Hawaii are not precisely asleep.”
Grew did little to clarify the situation when he was questioned about the telegram at the post-war hearings to investigate the Pearl Harbor attack. When asked about the January 27 telegram by a board of the United States Army, Grew said that “the basis of that message was a statement made to a member of my staff by the Peruvian Minister.” Grew added that “the Minister said that he considered it a fantastic rumor” but “felt that it was sufficiently important to justify his passing it on to me.” In later testimony before the congressional committee, Grew said that the January 27 telegram “was based practically entirely on the report which had been brought to me by my Peruvian colleague.”
Of course, it is possible that Grew’s testimony before the congressional committee was not as precise as he intended and that he had in mind the report that was brought to him by Schmidt. Still, his response could have triggered questions from the congressional committee on the details of how Grew secured the information about the Pearl Harbor attack. But never once did the committee members or its counsel ask Grew to describe any conversations he had had with Schreiber about the rumored attack on Pearl Harbor. And so the hearing records are silent on whether Grew did in fact meet with Schreiber on that last Sunday in January 1941.
Obvious questions thus remained unanswered. Why would a minister from a foreign country—regarded as a friend and held in high esteem by the American ambassador—convey important information about a planned attack on Pearl Harbor to a junior officer in the American Embassy with whom he had only a passing acquaintance? If the information was important—as Schreiber believed it to be—why would he have used a fortuitous encounter with that Embassy officer to convey the information? Schreiber did not acknowledge any meeting with Schmidt in his post-war statements, but even if he did discuss the Pearl Harbor attack with the Embassy’s Third Secretary, why would the Peruvian Minister fail to mention that he had already communicated that same information to the American ambassador the previous day?
These and other questions loom large because Schreiber was upset when he later learned (after the war) that Grew had not sent a telegram to the State Department referencing his meeting with Schreiber but instead had sent a telegram referencing a meeting between Schreiber and a member of the Embassy staff. As Schreiber’s wife later commented, her husband would not have communicated information he deemed important to “a subordinate functionary of the American Embassy” in light of her husband’s “high rank of Minister Plenipotentiary, in addition to his personal friendship with Mr. Grew.”
None of these questions appeared to trouble Hull or his staff. Grew’s telegram was received by the State Department at 6:38 a.m. on that same Monday, January 27 (in light of the time difference with Tokyo). Hull reviewed it but did not see any need to ask Grew any questions about the information referenced in the telegram. Nor did the State Department staff. In fact, Grew never received any response from Hull or the State Department.
When he saw the telegram, Max Hamilton, the Chief of the Department’s Far Eastern Division, decided to convene a meeting with his staff in his office in the State, War, and Navy Office Building. Frank Schuler, who had served in the American embassy and was now part of the Far Eastern Division staff, knew of Schreiber’s high standing in the Tokyo diplomatic community and suggested that the warning “should be taken seriously.” Still, the staff saw no need to press Grew for further information on the source of the rumor.
The staff’s reaction to Grew’s telegram was no doubt dictated, in part at least, by the staff’s assessment of Japan’s military capabilities. The prevailing view in government circles—both civilian and military—was that Japan would never attack the United States. That prevailing view reflected the vast difference in resources between the two countries. Another component of that prevailing view was racism. There was a deep-seated notion—perhaps epitomized by the Immigration Act of 1924 (which prohibited Japanese immigration to the United States)—that the Japanese were an inferior people, generally small in physical stature and incapable of matching Western intelligence and strategy in any armed conflict. “The Japanese are not going to risk a fight with a first-class nation,” Pennsylvania Congressman Charles I. Faddis said around this time. “They are unprepared to do so and no one knows that better than they do.” That sentiment was echoed by Commander Vincent Murphy, the assistant war plans officer for the Pacific Fleet. “I thought,” Murphy later said, “it would be utterly stupid for the Japanese to attack the United States at Pearl Harbor.”
Stanley Hornbeck shared that view. As early as January 1940, he wrote a memorandum to Hull dismissing Grew’s fear that economic sanctions might lead Japan to go “insane,” saying that there was no need to “baby” Japan in order to avoid any conflict with the United States. Grew’s January 27 telegram had no impact on that perspective. The day after the telegram was received, Hornbeck circulated a memorandum to Hull and his State Department colleagues which urged them to “keep all the time in mind… that Japan is not prepared to fight (i.e., carry on) a war with the United States.” And a few months later, the Political Relations Adviser advised the Secretary to discount any suggestion that the United States needed to negotiate an agreement with Japan to forestall any plan by Japanese authorities to attack the United States in the Pacific. The wording of Hornbeck’s memorandum was convoluted, but the message was clear. “[T]hat those authorities will embark upon a war in the southwestern Pacific in the event of and because of lack of success in a ‘negotiation’ with the United States in the near future,” Hornbeck told Hull, “I do not for one moment believe.”
Hull’s staff may have believed that the likelihood of an attack on Pearl Harbor was small, but they could not afford the risk of withholding Grew’s telegram from the country’s armed forces. The recriminations would be so catastrophic if the rumor reported in the telegram proved to be accurate. So Hamilton felt obliged to pass a paraphrase of Grew’s telegram on to the Army and Navy. Ironically, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox had sent a letter on January 24, 1941 to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson saying, “If war eventuates with Japan, it is believed easily possible that hostilities would be initiated by a surprise attack upon the Fleet or the Naval Base at Pearl Harbor.”
Despite that high-level sensitivity to a possible Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Grew’s telegram stirred no interest on the part of either the Army or Navy. The Chief of the Naval Operations’ staff decided that the information in the telegram should be forwarded to Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, the Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet stationed at Pearl Harbor. The task of preparing that message to Kimmel was assigned to Arthur H. McCollum, the forty-two-year-old Chief of the Far Eastern Section in the Office of Naval Intelligence. Like other members of the Navy staff, McCollum believed—without knowing—that the reports were nothing more than unconfirmed rumors with no basis in fact. He therefore prepared a message for the ONI Chief’s signature which said that “[t]he Division of Naval Intelligence places no credence in these rumors” and that “no move against Pearl Harbor appears imminent or planned for in the foreseeable future.”
Army intelligence officers had the same reaction. Brigadier General Sherman Miles, the fifty-four-year-old Assistant Chief of Staff, later testified at the congressional hearing investigating the Pearl Harbor attack that it “was inconceivable that any source in the know would have communicated that [information] to the Latin American Ambassador,” that any attack on the United States by Japan would be “suicidal,” and that, assuming the Japanese used “good sense,” they were not going to risk losing ships they “could not replace” with a surprise attack whose success would depend on an assumption that the United States would be “unprepared to meet the attack.” And so the Army too allowed Grew’s telegram to die a natural death.
The telegram was not given any further consideration until after December 7, 1941.