HOAX: Hitler’s Diaries, Lincoln’s Assassins, and Other Famous Frauds

Their forces are moving across the northern Pacific and I can assure you that their goal is the fleet in Pearl Harbor.

This is monstrous. I think that perhaps I can find a reason to absent myself from Washington while this crisis develops. What I don’t know can’t hurt me.…

December 7, 1941, remains one of the definitive days of the twentieth century. Within the short span of two hours the United States was propelled into a world war that only days before over 80 percent of its citizens had adamantly opposed entering. The surprise attack by the Japanese on the military bases on Oahu in the Hawaiian Islands shocked the nation to its very core. How, people asked, could our military leaders be so utterly unprepared for such a daring undertaking? The core of America’s Pacific Fleet lay smoldering in a mass of twisted metal. The devastation was beyond belief. The attack consisted of two aerial waves totaling 355 Japanese aircraft launched from six Japanese aircraft carriers. Eight battleships, three cruisers, and three destroyers along with eight other ships were knocked out of action. The four American airfields in the islands along with 288 aircraft were destroyed. Most tragic, 2,403 service men and women and sixty-eight civilians were killed. By contrast, Japanese losses were minimal. Only twenty-nine Japanese aircraft and five midget submarines were lost, while sixty-five servicemen were killed or wounded. It was the most lopsided battle of the war.¹

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The American destroyer USS Shaw explodes in dry dock after being hit by a Japanese dive-bomber. She later returned to service and saw action at Guadalcanal. (National Archives)

By the time word reached the American people of the full extent of the damage inflicted by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor, accusations were being made as to just who was responsible for the disaster. How could such an attack with such a devastating effect be possible? A nation that prided itself as being among the elite nations of the world was humiliated by what many believed to be an inferior culture. Someone was to blame. Someone had to pay.

The attack transformed the American people overnight from an isolationist attitude to one of near unanimous support for entering the war, which had been raging in Europe for a little over two years, and in Asia for four. In what appeared to be a partial explanation for the success and devastation of the Japanese attack, virtually every newspaper and magazine in the country characterized it as a “sneak” attack carried out while the two nations were engaged in peaceful negotiations. While the attack was devastating, it was only successful because the United States believed the Japanese were sincere in wanting peace and thus let its guard down. Japanese envoys had been meeting with American representatives in an effort to resolve their differences peacefully, thereby avoiding war. The timing of the Japanese attack led most Americans to the conclusion that the Japanese deliberately lulled the country into lowering its guard in the belief that hostilities were not possible while negotiations were taking place.

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The West Virginia and Tennessee under attack at Pearl Harbor. The West Virginia sank after receiving seven torpedo hits. (National Archives)

Following on the heels of the Japanese attack were allegations that President Roosevelt was aware of the planned attack and that he knew full well that it was about to take place, and that Pearl Harbor was the target. With the great majority of Americans opposed to entering the conflict, President Roosevelt needed a hostile act of sufficient magnitude to justify taking the country to war. The president, his critics claimed, had deliberately allowed the Pacific Fleet to be devastated, with the loss of nearly twenty-five hundred American lives, so he could plunge the country into a war that only he desperately wanted. It was an act nothing short of treason.

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt. (Library of Congress)

Pearl Harbor was chosen as the home base for the navy’s Pacific Fleet, placing it dangerously close to the Japanese sphere of interest. In fact, it was deliberately chosen to put the American fleet closer to Japan and the Pacific sea lanes that would become so important in the event of a Pacific war. Its location led the majority of Americans to believe it had become an “impregnable fortress” capable of defending itself against any sort of attack from without. It was a false impression that would cost the United States dearly.

Just how unprepared the people of the United States were for such an attack is reflected in an article written at the U.S. Navy’s behest in one of the nation’s more popular weekly magazines. In the June 14, 1941, issue of Collier’s, only six months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, journalist Walter Davenport assured Americans not to worry about our military situation at Pearl Harbor. In an article titled “Impregnable Pearl Harbor,” Davenport wrote with some bravado: “The Navy isn’t worrying. … Day and night, Navy and Army planes are droning down warm skies in circles two hundred, five hundred, a thousand miles wide.” The defense of Hawaii may not be one hundred percent impregnable, “but neither the Army nor the Navy believes there is any power or combination of powers existing today that can prove it in the islands (Hawaii). We have nothing to worry about,” Davenport assured his readers, “to the extent that we know how many fighting ships and planes Japan has, we are kept pretty well informed where they are and what they are up to. In the continental United States there may be some doubt about our readiness to fight, but none exists in Hawaii. … All they wait for is the word from Washington or an incident in the Pacific” (emphasis added).²

These incredible words sum up the feeling of assurance the great majority of Americans felt. Davenport was led by the U.S. Navy to believe that “Navy and Army planes are droning down warm skies in circles two hundred, five hundred, a thousand miles wide.” They were, in fact, doing nothing of the sort. Occasional reconnaissance flights did take place, but only in limited sectors well under the one thousand–mile range. Had they been flying such reconnaissance flights they would have detected the Japanese task force well in advance of its attack. The question on most people’s minds was why weren’t the army and navy aware of Japan’s plan to attack Pearl Harbor, and why weren’t both the army and navy prepared to meet the threat and blunt its effect?

The attack came with a fury unlike any experienced before that fateful day in December 1941. It was akin to the German blitzkrieg that devastated much of Europe. It was modern warfare at a new and terrifying level. But Japan’s sudden attack on the United States was not as unexpected as many believed. To the contrary, the majority of Roosevelt’s advisers, including the top army and navy advisers, warned that the United States’s recent embargo policy would lead to war with Japan at a time when neither the army nor the navy was prepared.

Why the attack came requires some background explanation. Japan’s aggressive action in China in 1937 put the United States on alert. Japan had followed an expansionist policy over the preceding decades, looking south for needed resources for its growing empire. While Nazi Germany was scoring impressive victories in Europe, Japan was giving every impression of spreading its military power throughout Asia. In 1940, Japan signed a tripartite pact with Germany and Italy that called for the partners to assist one another if any of the three parties came under attack by any power not currently engaged in war in Europe or Asia. Since the only two major powers not already engaged in war were Russia and the United States, and since Russia and Germany had signed a nonaggression treaty, that left only the United States as the obvious target of the tripartite agreement. The writing was clearly on the wall.

Roosevelt was interested in coming to Britain’s aid, but an isolationist American public was adamantly opposed to going to war in Europe, or anywhere else. With an election pending in November 1940 and the public overwhelmingly against entering the war in Europe, Roosevelt was forced to walk a fine line. He remarked that he could not “bring a divided nation into war … if the United States publicly enters the war, it will enter united.”³ To that end, Roosevelt took calculated steps that placed the U.S. Navy in harm’s way, with Germany increasing the probability of an incident that would propel the country into war, or at the very least justify Roosevelt’s escalating support for Britain. Expanding the United States’s territorial waters by designating sea lanes to Britain as “security zones,” providing U.S. naval ships as escorts to British as well as American convoys, replacing the British garrison on Iceland with U.S. troops, authorizing navy patrol bombers and coast guard cutters to aid in the British navy’s hunt for the German battleship Bismarck and cruiser Prinz Eugen, and the freezing of all German assets in the United States were only some of the provocative actions taken by Roosevelt against Germany in the spring and summer of 1941.

At the same time as the administration was provoking the Germans into an incident in the Atlantic, it also was turning the heat up diplomatically on Japan. In an effort to get Japan to stop its aggressive expansion in China, Roosevelt considered embargoing a series of goods vital to Japan’s war effort. At the same time, Secretary of State Cordell Hull warned Roosevelt that cutting off vital materials to Japan would risk a war with that country, a war the United States was unprepared to fight just yet. Both the army and the navy supported Hull’s conclusion, telling Roosevelt they were not prepared to fight a war in the Pacific because they did not have the necessary planes or ships, let alone men.⁴ Despite these warnings, Roosevelt, in September 1940, ordered an embargo of steel, scrap iron, and petroleum products (other than crude oil and gasoline). Urged by some members of his administration to include oil in the embargo, Roosevelt responded by saying that all of his top advisers, including the military, said that doing so would surely cause the Japanese to declare war.

Not all of Roosevelt’s advisers were timid about the possibility of war with Japan. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes told the president that if the United States waited too long to force the issue with Japan, the United States would wind up going to war with no allies left to join with them. They would have already been defeated by Japan and Germany. Roosevelt was angered by Ickes’s bold position and fired back a letter telling him that foreign policy was none of his business.⁵ Despite his harsh response to his secretary, Roosevelt surprised most of his staff by ordering an oil embargo against Japan just two weeks after admonishing Ickes. It appeared that Roosevelt turned his attention away from the Atlantic and Germany, and toward the Pacific and Japan.

The evidence, in hindsight, appears to support the belief that Roosevelt was looking for that one incident that would cause the belligerents to commit an overt act of war against the United States. Although Roosevelt’s advisers, including the army and navy, were correct in believing an oil embargo was the one aggressive act that would compel Japan to attack, there is no evidence to suggest that the attack would occur at Pearl Harbor or that Roosevelt had any pre-knowledge of an attack. Provoking an attack and knowing precisely when and where such an attack would come are two entirely different situations.

If the United States took provocative steps that many believed would force Japan into an act of war, the question is, why was the military caught so completely off guard at Pearl Harbor? Demands for answers as to why the attack caught the military unprepared came from every sector of American life. Queries were both genuine and, at the same time, spurious. Roosevelt’s political opponents in the Congress wanted to use the failure of Pearl Harbor against the president, weakening his power and eventually driving him from office. If Roosevelt knew the Japanese plans in advance and allowed the attack to take place without alerting the commanders at Pearl Harbor, he should rightfully be removed from office in disgrace. Impeachment was not out of the question. Despite the fact that the United States quickly became engaged in a two-ocean war with Japan and Germany, the president saw his party lose heavily in the 1942 off-year congressional elections. The Republican Party gained forty-seven seats in the House of Representatives, polling 50.6 percent of the popular vote. Despite this major gain by the Republican Party, however, the Democrats retained a slim three-vote majority in the House, 212 to 209.⁶

On the evening of December 7, only a few hours after the Japanese attack, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox asked Roosevelt for permission to visit Pearl Harbor to assess the extent of the damage, and to try and find out why the military forces stationed there were caught off guard. Remember Walter Davenport’s article, “Impregnable Pearl Harbor,” in which he wrote, “We have nothing to worry about.” How could he and others have been so wrong when the threat of a Japanese attack was uppermost in the military’s mind? Secretary Knox and millions of other people wanted to know the answer to that question. The president approved Knox’s request, and the secretary set out on December 9 for Hawaii. He and his party arrived in Honolulu on December 11, just four days after the attack. Rear Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, greeted Knox. Knox set a grim tone when he told Kimmel that because of the nature of his visit “he would not be the guest of any senior officer on Oahu.”⁷ He did not want to be influenced by military personalities. His mission was far too important to be tainted in any way by personal relationships.

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Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, commander in chief, U.S. Pacific Fleet, stationed at Pearl Harbor. (National Archives)

Knox interviewed several people, including the two men responsible for the army and navy units stationed at Pearl Harbor, Lieutenant General Walter C. Short and Kimmel. Both men candidly admitted to Knox that they had not expected an air attack by the Japanese and were caught off guard.⁸ Knox was astonished, especially since he had directed the navy to send a message to Kimmel the day before the attack warning that the Japanese representatives in Washington had received instructions to notify the Americans that negotiations were being terminated. The seriousness of this message was interpreted by most to mean that war was imminent. To Knox’s astonishment, Kimmel told Knox he had received no such message. Kimmel was telling the truth. The dispatch did not arrive at his headquarters until one hour after the attack had begun.⁹

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General Walter C. Short, commander, Hawaiian Department, U.S. Army. (National Archives)

Knox gathered up the grim statistics, including casualty lists, and returned to Washington, arriving on December 14. After reporting his findings to Roosevelt, Knox held a press conference in which he notified the nation that “the armed services were to assume equal responsibility and blame for the damaged caused … and for the failure to be prepared for such an attack.”¹⁰ In response to questions from the press, Knox stated that the president was initiating a formal investigation. “We are all entitled to know,” Knox said, “if (A) there was any error of judgment which contributed to the surprise, and (B) if there was any dereliction of duty prior to the attack” (emphasis added).¹¹ This later point sent chills through the two commands at Pearl Harbor.

Roosevelt decided to establish a special commission consisting of two army officers, two navy officers, and a civilian. On Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s suggestion, Roosevelt appointed U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Owen J. Roberts as the civilian member, and named him head of the commission. All five members were held in high regard. The commission members were accepted by most as outstanding individuals who, in the words of the San Francisco Chronicle, would “learn the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” and the American people needn’t fear a whitewash.¹²

But was it possible to find anyone who was truly independent and without prejudice? There was probably no one in the country who could be completely objective. That stated, someone had to undertake the onerous task of trying to find out exactly what happened and who, if anyone, was to blame for the disaster.

The committee was instructed to carry out an investigation to determine if anyone (principally Kimmel and Short) had shown poor judgment or, worse, dereliction of duty. The commission held three meetings in Washington on December 18, 19, and 20 before heading to Hawaii, where they held a series of meetings between December 22 and January 9. On January 11, upon completion of their study, the members of the commission arrived in San Francisco and then traveled by train to Washington, arriving on January 15. Still seeking information, the commission interviewed members of the military stationed in Washington. It completed its work on January 23, and Roberts handed the finished report to the president on Saturday, January 24. After being assured nothing in the report compromised national security, Roosevelt instructed his personal secretary to distribute it to the press in time for the Sunday papers of January 25.¹³

Examined 127 witnesses and received a large number of documents. All members of the Military and Naval Establishments, and civil officers and citizens, who were thought to have knowledge of facts pertinent to the inquiry, were summoned and examined under oath. All persons in the island of Oahu, who believed they had knowledge of such facts, were publicly requested to appear, and a number responded to the invitation and gave evidence.

Various rumors and hearsay statements have been communicated to the Commission. The Commission has sought to find and examine witnesses who might be expected to have knowledge respecting them. We believe that our findings of fact sufficiently dispose of most of them.

The evidence touches subjects which in the national interest should remain secret. We have, therefore, refrained from quotation of testimony or documentary proof. Our findings, however, have been made with the purpose fully and accurately to reflect the testimony, which as respects matters of fact, is substantially without contradiction.¹⁴

The conclusion of the report came down heavily on both Kimmel and Short. The report found both men guilty of “dereliction of duty,” a harsh indictment that resulted in both men being disgracefully forced into retirement.

In the light of the warnings and directions to take appropriate action, transmitted to both commanders between November 27 and December 7, and the obligation under the system of cooperation then in effect for joint cooperative action on their part, it was a dereliction of duty on the part of each of them not to consult and confer with the other respecting the meaning and intent of the warnings, and the appropriate measures of defense required by the imminence of hostilities.¹⁵

The country had its answer to the critical question of who was to blame for the disaster. On the same day the report was released to the press, Kimmel and Short were asked to submit their resignations, and they were demoted in rank as a result of finding them guilty of dereliction.¹⁶ The verdict of the commission placed the blame for the devastating success of the attack squarely on the shoulders of the two commanders, leaving everyone else free from blame, including Secretary of the Navy Knox, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Harold R. Stark, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and even President Roosevelt. Despite escaping condemnation, however, there were enough errors to taint everyone.

Rather than put the question to rest, the report only added to the firestorm that followed its release. Supporters of Kimmel and Short cried foul. Partisan opponents of Roosevelt charged treason, claiming a cover-up to protect the president, who suppressed important evidence that the administration and the top brass of the military knew in advance of the pending attack and allowed it to take place, impelling the United States into the war. Did not Roosevelt’s advisers in both the administration and the military warn him that an oil embargo would force Japan to attack the United States?

Despite the unanswered questions surrounding the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the demands of war helped to soften criticism and any further inquiry for the next two and a half years, until the election of 1944. With politics thick in the air, the claim that Roosevelt knew about the attack in advance yet allowed it to take place raised its ugly head once again. The Republicans saw a golden opportunity not only to get rid of the hated man in the White House, but also to disgrace him as a traitor to the military and the country. With blood in the water, Republican sharks began circling the president.

Kimmel’s and Short’s requests for retirement posed a problem for the military and for Roosevelt. Kimmel was unwilling to accept the verdict of the Roberts Commission, and requested a court-martial hearing in an effort to gain full disclosure and clear his name. He was asked, however, to wait until the war was over before pressing his case. He was told that information concerning the various Japanese messages that were intercepted and decoded prior to the attack would seriously compromise the war effort if it became known. However, an election year all but guaranteed an inquiry would go forward.

In anticipation of a hearing, Secretary of the Navy Knox appointed Admiral Thomas C. Hart to head up a board of inquiry and collect testimony that could ultimately be used during a court-martial proceeding. In July 1944, Senator Homer Ferguson (R-Mich.), acting on Kimmel’s behalf, introduced legislation establishing an Army and Navy Court of Inquiry into the Pearl Harbor question. Apparently still not satisfied that all the questions concerning the attack had been asked and answered, the new secretary of the navy, James V. Forrestal,¹⁷ asked Vice Admiral H. Kent Hewitt to head up a supplemental inquiry. This became the fifth official inquiry into the Pearl Harbor disaster. By now there should be no questions left unanswered.

It was during the Hewitt inquiry that the question of the code breaking, known as “Magic,” was introduced, raising serious questions as to what was known about the Japanese war plans immediately prior to Pearl Harbor and who knew about it. The Japanese, like the Germans with their Enigma code, operated an extremely complicated code system named “Purple” by the U.S. cryptologists. The so-called “unbreakable” code was broken by the Signal Intelligence Service’s William Friedman in August 1940. From then forward the Signal Intelligence Service had been reading the Japanese diplomatic messages. According to historian Gordon Prange, the Americans knew more about Japan’s diplomatic positions than did its own ambassador to Washington, Kichisaburo Nomura.¹⁸ With the subject of Magic opened up by the Hewitt inquiry, Forrestal felt the subject required further investigation. Rather than have the Hewitt inquiry reopen its hearings, he asked Major Henry C. Clausen of the U.S. Army to hold a new set of investigations, giving rise to the sixth committee to hold formal hearings. Clausen’s investigation was quickly followed by an investigation into the handling of top-secret documents by the army’s Colonel Carter W. Clarke. By August 1945, the hearings, inquiries, and investigations were finally over. They lasted as long as the war.

There is one thing that stood out about all of the investigations: all were conducted by the military and, therefore, subject to charges of bias. After all, the military could not reasonably be expected to indict its own. This coupled with the fact that the Roberts Commission was appointed by (and suspected of being under the thumb of) the president raised concerns among the Republican members of the Congress as to the commission’s veracity. The executive branch, after all, was theoretically in charge of all seven investigations. To ensure “balance,” Congress decided to create an eighth committee and hold its own investigation. Such a committee would not be beholden to the military or the president, or so the argument went. By the time the joint committee began holding hearings Roosevelt was dead and a new president, Harry S. Truman, was in charge. Still, the legacy of Roosevelt permeated every aspect of the government, and the Republican partisans in Congress were not ready to let the former president rest in peace in his grave. Should the joint committee show that the president and the top military in Washington knew of the Japanese attack ahead of time and deliberately failed to act, an outraged American people would turn to the Republican Party for leadership for the next fifty years.¹⁹ The Republican position in the Congress was best summarized by the antiadministration Chicago Tribune in an editorial published on Monday, September 3, 1945: “Never before in our history did a president maneuver this country into a war for which it was unprepared, and then, thru insouciant stupidity or worse, permit the enemy to execute a surprise attack costing the lives of 3,000 Americans, an attack which he and his cabinet members had substantial forewarning 24 hours before” (emphasis added).²⁰ The belief that Roosevelt knew not only when but where the attack was coming would not die easily.

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All of the once–top secret documents sent by the Japanese in the days prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor are available on a CD-ROM provided by the National Security Agency’s Center for Cryptologic History. In their discussion of the deciphered messages, the authors conclude that “there simply was not one shred of actionable intelligence in any of the messages or transmissions that pointed to the attack on Pearl Harbor” (Robert J. Hanyok and David P. Mowry, West Wind Clear: Cryptology and the West Winds Message Controversy—A Documentary History [Washington, D.C.: Center for Cryptologic History, National Security Agency, 2008], 95). (Author’s collection)

The effort by congressional Republicans shifted the emphasis of the inquiries from clearing Kimmel and Short of any blame to attacking a dead Roosevelt and thoroughly discrediting him and his administration. Surprisingly, the Democrats did not oppose a congressional investigation; they welcomed it. Senate majority leader Alben W. Barkley, Democrat of Kentucky, called for a joint committee inquiry, naively believing it would put the question to bed once and for all.

The joint committee held its first hearing on November 15, 1945. At the very beginning of the meeting the committee’s chief legal adviser, William D. Mitchell, introduced an exhibit titled “Intercepted Diplomatic Messages Sent by the Japanese Government Between July 1 and December 8, 1941.”²¹ With this startling revelation it finally became known that the United States had broken the Japanese diplomatic code and was reading the communications between Tokyo and its diplomats during the critical period leading up to Pearl Harbor. It was an opportunity for those who were determined to show that Roosevelt and others in his administration had known beforehand that the Japanese were going to strike, and that Pearl Harbor was the target. The Republicans were sure they would find a smoking gun—or at least a cryptic message—to prove that Roosevelt knew about the planned attack and did nothing.

The hearing, however, ran into trouble from the very beginning. In addition to trying to determine the cause of the Pearl Harbor disaster, and thereby fix blame, the minority members of the committee, hoping to bring about a Republican victory in the upcoming elections, spent considerable time trying to show that Roosevelt knew of the attack in advance. Throughout the entire effort by the Republicans to tie the disaster to Roosevelt not a single document could be found indicating the president or high-ranking members of his administration had any prior knowledge of the Japanese attack.

It is not the purpose of this chapter to review all of the testimony and findings of the various inquiries, including the congressional inquiry of 1946, nor to affix blame for the disaster that befell Pearl Harbor. The Roberts Committee, the first of the investigative committees, came to the conclusion that the two commanders, Kimmel and Short, were responsible for the disaster. While subsequent hearings, especially the navy and army hearings, refuted the charge of dereliction, Kimmel and Short were found to have failed to show due diligence in defending America’s most important military base. While efforts were made by various people throughout each of the eight hearings to place blame on the administration and President Roosevelt in particular, those efforts failed. Even the minority report of the joint congressional hearing failed to produce any documentation that pointed a damaging finger in Roosevelt’s direction. This is not to say, however, that Roosevelt and members of his war cabinet were unaware of a Japanese plan to attack the United States.

Conditions were such in the Pacific that most advisers firmly believed war inevitable. The question that puzzled everyone was when and where the Japanese would strike. It was in America’s interest to somehow control that first strike in light of the overwhelmingly isolationist views of the American people. If Japan could be maneuvered into an attack, the administration would have its necessary incident to enter the war. Secretary of War Henry Stimson wrote in his diary following a White House meeting on Japan, “The question was how we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.”²² On the surface, this sounds like an indictment of the administration. There is no question that the administration had deliberately taken steps that were highly provocative in the Atlantic, where the United States increasingly invited Germany to blunder into attacking American ships escorting convoys to Great Britain. Three such incidents did occur, but for whatever reason the administration did not use the attacks to declare war on Germany, perhaps hoping that Germany would declare war on the United States first.

The failure of any of the eight official investigations into Pearl Harbor to produce concrete evidence indicting Roosevelt has not deterred critics from accusing Roosevelt of treachery in knowingly allowing the attack on Pearl Harbor to take place. In his book The Pearl Harbor Myth, author George Victor suggestively invites his readers to believe that Roosevelt deliberately stationed the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor to lure the Japanese into an attack, thereby satisfying Roosevelt’s desire for war. Victor writes: “Whether intentionally or not, Roosevelt exposed the fleet to a Japanese attack by stationing it in Hawaii. Then he intentionally used naval units as lures by ordering them on various expeditions in the Pacific. Withholding key information from Kimmel and Short increased the fleet’s exposure greatly and it was most glaringly increased by not sending a warning on December 6, 1941.”²³ Surely Roosevelt had a right to station the American fleet anywhere he wished without being accused of provoking an attack. Victor suggests that Roosevelt is somehow at fault for allowing U.S. naval ships to sail in international waters. His criticism is reminiscent of those pro-Confederates who blamed Lincoln for the shelling of Fort Sumter. The mere act of supplying a legitimate Federal facility somehow was considered an act of war. Exposing the fleet, however, is not the same as deliberately withholding knowledge of an impending attack, as some critics claim Roosevelt did.

In their book, Deceit at Pearl Harbor, Kenneth Landis and Rex Gunn take the final step and accuse Roosevelt of deliberate treachery. These authors have produced the smoking gun that shows Roosevelt knew of the pending attack two weeks before it happened and did nothing. Eight investigative hearings failed to uncover any documentation in support of such an accusation. Landis and Gunn, however, came up with evidence in the form of a transcript of a telephone conversation between Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill. In the authors’ words: “The historical role played by Roosevelt as the guilty party who engineered the ‘Causus Belli,’ has been thoroughly uncovered by the release of the telephone warning by Churchill on November 26, 1941. This warning proves that FDR was fully aware of the impending attack and is perhaps the most damning piece of evidence to be revealed in this greatest of American military tragedies” (emphasis added).²⁴ The document is dated November 26, 1941, eleven days prior to the actual attack. It is important to understand what the document is and how it came into the hands of a few historians after the war ended, when Pearl Harbor was no longer a thorn in the side of the American public.

The consensus of most historians is that no wartime leaders shared a closer friendship and mutual trust than Roosevelt and Churchill. Beginning one week after the start of the war on September 3, 1939, until one day before Roosevelt’s death on April 12, 1945, the two men exchanged more than seventeen hundred letters, telegrams, and personal messages. This extraordinary correspondence averaged nearly one message a day for five and a half years.²⁵ All the more amazing is the tone of openness and the sharing of information one finds in the content of these messages. The friendship endured the many petty political trials that constantly pulled at the two leaders from their own generals and political adversaries.

Their first face-to-face meeting occurred August 9–12, 1941, at Argentia Bay in Newfoundland, where the two leaders drafted the Atlantic Charter, establishing a blueprint for the postwar world as well as for the alliance between the two allies. This first meeting was followed by several more over the next four years where the two men hammered out their war strategy as well as their strategy for a postwar Europe.

In the fall of 1941 a radiotelephone link was established between the White House and Churchill’s war bunker in London. This link enabled the two leaders to talk to one another directly by telephone. Although Churchill preferred the written word to the telephone, he used the device on several occasions to talk to his ally in Washington. The Germans, meanwhile, established a radiotelephone listening station on the coast of Holland and were able to successfully tap into the conversations. These conversations were recorded and kept in both English and German. Translated copies were supplied to Hitler and certain of his generals on a regular basis. The monitoring of this important line fell under Hitler’s chief of the Gestapo, Heinrich Müller.²⁶

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President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill during their meeting in Casablanca, January 1943. (National Archives)

Shortly after assuming power as chancellor in 1933, Hitler ordered the formation of a special police force to serve the Nazi Party. The new organization was called the Geheime Staatspolizei (Secret State Police), or “Gestapo” for short. It was over this organization of secret police that Heinrich Müller, a former police detective in the German state of Bavaria, was given full control. Müller was an important part of the Nazi apparatus. He participated in the infamous Wannsee Conference held in January 1942, during which the “Final Solution” of what to do with the Jews of Europe was decided. As head of the Gestapo, Müller was the immediate superior of Adolf Eichmann, who was chief of the Jewish office of the Gestapo during the war.²⁷

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Heinrich Müller, head of the Nazi Gestapo. (Author’s collection)

Müller’s Gestapo fell within the Third Reich’s security apparatus, headed by Heinrich Himmler, who is often confused as being the head of the Gestapo. Himmler was Müller’s boss, but Müller was the man who ran the Gestapo. He was particularly adept at spy investigations against all enemies of Hitler and the Nazi Party, especially the communists. His knowledge of the communist espionage network may well have saved his life at the end of the war.

Müller was last seen alive on April 28, when he visited Hitler in his bunker. Müller apparently fled the bunker that day and disappeared into the fog surrounding the final days of the war in Europe. While many historians believe Müller died attempting to escape, others believe he was captured by the Russians and taken to that country, where he died. Others believe he made his way to Switzerland, where he was taken into custody by Allen Dulles, head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Switzerland.²⁸ The claim that Müller died in his escape and was buried in a Berlin cemetery proved unfounded when the grave marked with Müller’s name and dates of birth (1900) and death (1945) was opened in 1963 under orders from the West German government and found to be empty.

One prominent World War II historian, John Lukacs, believes Müller was captured and secretly brought to the United States in 1948 by Allen Dulles, who later became head of the CIA.²⁹ Dulles’s interest in Müller, according to Lukacs, stemmed from Müller’s extensive knowledge of the Soviets’ spy apparatus, which the Germans dealt with quite successfully. Müller’s whereabouts and handling by the CIA were kept secret while he was housed in the United States. During his house arrest the CIA interrogated him extensively. Somehow these interrogations, along with certain documents including the November 26, 1941, telephone conversation between Roosevelt and Churchill, made their way into the hands of a historian by the name of Gregory Douglas (believed to be an alias). According to Lukacs, Douglas was a “pseudonym of an American of German origin who knew the name of at least one of Müller’s interrogators and got hold of the interrogations and documents.”³⁰ Douglas eventually published the material in a three-volume set, which included the history-revising transcript of the revealing telephone conversation of November 26 between Churchill and Roosevelt.³¹

During his questioning, Müller told his interrogator that the SS had tapped into the radiotelephone transmissions between Roosevelt and Churchill. What is more, Müller claimed to have transcripts of the telephone conversations “put away,” offering to show them to his interrogator.³²

He apparently smuggled a part of his archive out of Germany, believing the documents would serve as an insurance policy guaranteeing him a safe haven with the Americans. According to Lukacs he was right.

The conversation that allegedly took place on November 26, 1941, has Churchill notifying Roosevelt that British intelligence has determined that Japan has a large task force heading for Pearl Harbor and plans a surprise air strike against the U.S. naval base. Müller’s astonished interrogator warns him to “keep the matter very quiet. It would not go over too well in Washington. The subject is absolutely forbidden and we don’t want to upset General [George C.] Marshall. The President [Truman] holds him in very high esteem and the General would be very upset if any of this came out.”³³

The transcript became an important part of the book by Landis and Gunn, supporting their claim of Roosevelt’s treachery. Part of the conversation is reproduced here as it appears in Douglas’s third volume on Heinrich Müller, and in Landis and Gunn’s Deceit at Pearl Harbor. Churchill places the telephone call to Roosevelt at 3:15 a.m., Eastern War Time, on Wednesday, November 26, 1941:

WSC: I am frightfully sorry to disturb you at this hour Franklin, but matters of a most vital import have transpired and I felt that I must convey them to you immediately.

FDR: That’s perfectly all right, Winston. I’m sure you wouldn’t trouble me at this hour for trivial concerns.

WSC: Let me preface my information with an explanation addressing the reason I have not alluded to these facts earlier. In the first place, until today, the information was not firm. On matters of such gravity, I do not like to indulge in idle chatter. Now, I have in my hands, reports from our agents in Japan as well as the most specific intelligence in the form of the highest level Japanese naval coded messages (conversation broken) for some time now.

WSC: It could not be worse. A powerful Japanese task force comprising (composed of) six of their carriers, two battleships, and a number of other units to include (including) tankers and cruisers, has sailed yesterday from a secret base in the northern Japanese islands.³⁵

FDR: We both knew this was coming. There are also reports in my hands about a force of some size making up in China and obviously intended to go (move) south.³⁶

WSC: Yes, we have all of that (Interruption) … are far more advanced than you in our reading of the Jap naval operations codes, but even without that, their moves are evident. And they will indeed move South, but the force I spoke of is not headed South, Franklin, it is headed East.

FDR: Perhaps they set an easterly course to fool any observers and then plan to swing South to support the landings in the southern areas. I have …

WSC: No, at this moment, their forces are moving across the northern Pacific and I can assure you that their goal is the (conversation broken) fleet in Hawaii. At Pearl Harbor.

FDR: This is monstrous. Can you tell me … indicate … the nature of your intelligence? (conversation broken) reliable? Without compromising your sources …

WSC: Yes, I will have to be careful. Our agents in Japan have been reporting on the gradual (conversation broken) units. And these have disappeared from Japanese home waters. We also have highly reliable sources in the Japanese foreign service and even the military …

WSC: One of the sources is the individual who supplied us the material on the diplomatic codes that (conversation broken) and a Naval officer whom our service has compromised. You must trust me, Franklin and I cannot be more specific.

WSC: We cannot compromise our codebreaking. You understand this. Only myself and a few (conversation broken) not even [Roosevelt aide Harry] Hopkins. It will go straight to Moscow and I am not sure we want that.

FDR: I am still attempting to … the obvious implication is that the Japs are going to do a Port Arthur on us at Pearl Harbor. Do you concur?

WSC: I do indeed. Unless they add an attack on the Panama Canal to this vile business. I can hardly envision the canal as a primary goal, especially with your fleet lying athwart their lines of communications with Japan. No, if they do strike the canal, they will have to first neutralize (destroy) your fleet (conversation broken).

FDR: The worst form of treachery. We can prepare our defenses on the islands and give them a warm welcome when they come. It would certainly put some iron up Congress’s ass.³⁷

Toward the end of the conversation Churchill tells Roosevelt his own advisers “counseled against informing” Roosevelt, allowing the strike to go forward unopposed. Churchill had been urging Roosevelt unsuccessfully to enter the war for several months. Roosevelt expresses his concern in case his own people intercept the Japanese plans. He tells Churchill, “I think that perhaps I can find a reason to absent myself from Washington while this crisis develops. What I don’t know can’t hurt me and I too can misunderstand messages, especially at a distance.”³⁸

Here is the long-sought documentary evidence Roosevelt’s enemies so desperately looked for without success. Eight investigative hearings had taken place without turning up a single piece of evidence pointing to Roosevelt’s treachery. The smoking gun had finally been found. Eleven days prior to the attack on December 7, 1941, Roosevelt received confirmation of the planned attack from the British prime minister. How could this critical piece of evidence elude so many historians for so long? One person it did not elude was Kenneth Landis, a naval officer who served on Rear Admiral Husband E. Kimmel’s staff at the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Sixty years later Landis was still smarting from the attack on his commanding officer. In 2001, Landis coauthored a book with Rex Gunn, who was serving with the 7th Army Air Corps stationed at Hickam Field at the time of the attack. The book, Deceit at Pearl Harbor, indicts Roosevelt for treachery in knowingly allowing the attack on Pearl Harbor to take place, based almost entirely on the radiotelephone conversation between Churchill and Roosevelt on November 26, 1941. Secondarily, Landis and Gunn use their book to exonerate Kimmel and Short as “scapegoats” set up by Roosevelt to take the fall for the disaster at Pearl Harbor. The book is the first to use the evidence of the phone call to indict Roosevelt and Churchill. If true, there can be no question of Roosevelt’s guilt, or of Churchill’s complicity in covering up the pending attack. As the authors point out, “even Hitler knew” the attack was coming.³⁹

The transcript, however, appears to be a fabrication. While a radiotelephone link did exist between Roosevelt and Churchill, and several conversations were recorded and transcribed (recorded in English and transcribed into German), there is sound evidence that certain fabrications do exist among some of these transcripts. The alleged conversation of November 26, 1941, has been judged by the eminent American historian John Lukacs to be a fabrication, believed to be manufactured by Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller or members of his staff for the purpose of gaining favor with his American captors.⁴⁰

Lukacs’s exposure of this important transcription as a fabrication has largely gone unnoticed. It appeared in the history magazine American Heritage in 2002 but has not made its way into subsequent writings on the subject of Pearl Harbor to date. While the transcript’s publication in volume 3 of Gestapo Chief and in Deceit at Pearl Harbor may have received little notice, it is a dangerous document in one of the more dramatic and important events in American history and should be exposed as a serious hoax on history.

Lukacs has been one of the leading critics of British historian David Irving, who is described by his peers as having strong neo-Nazi sympathies.

Lukacs’s principal criticism of Irving is with his selective use of personal reminiscences of those who knew Hitler to cast him in a favorable light. Neo-Nazis have attempted to elevate Hitler by tearing down his adversaries, such as Roosevelt and Churchill. Lukacs believes the fabricated transcript is yet another effort to defame the two great war leaders.

A pro-Churchill historian, Lukacs believes that Churchill’s greatest hour came in 1940 when he refused any accommodation with Hitler though urged to do so by members of his own war cabinet, thus laying “the groundwork for the ultimate Allied victory.”⁴¹ Lukacs’s interest in the interrogation of Müller and the telephone transcripts drew his suspicion that all was not right with some of the material. As is almost always the case with fabricated documents, it is the internal inconsistencies that betray them as fabrications. In one example cited by Lukacs, Roosevelt and Churchill discuss at length whether to have Italian dictator Benito Mussolini assassinated. Yet, in the original document located in the German archives there is no mention of Mussolini. In addition, during the same week as the phone conversation Roosevelt and Churchill exchanged nineteen written messages without once mentioning Mussolini.⁴² Lukacs also pointed out that Churchill never called Roosevelt “Franklin,” something he did repeatedly during the alleged telephone call.⁴³

His suspicions aroused, Lukacs searched the German archives for the original transcription or a summary of the November 26, 1941, telephone conversation without success. His real break came when he located one of the women that served British intelligence as a “censor” on the transatlantic phone calls. The British were sensitive to the possibility that the Germans might be monitoring the phone calls between Churchill and Roosevelt and had specially trained women listen in to the conversations and interrupt if either party began mentioning anything that was considered top secret. This woman told Lukacs that the language of the two men in the overall transcript “was far too lurid, too coarse of language, and grammatically incorrect,” and, most importantly, “subjects were discussed that would never have been authorized or allowed on the transatlantic radiotelephone link.” The woman also confirmed Lukacs’s claim that the two men never referred to each other by their first names, Franklin or Winston.⁴⁴

One further item should be mentioned: on the same day that the telephone conversation allegedly took place in which Churchill warned Roosevelt of the pending attack on Pearl Harbor, Churchill wrote a letter to Roosevelt in response to a message from Roosevelt dated November 24, 1941, in which Roosevelt told Churchill that the Japanese government’s response to an earlier message “contains features not in harmony with the fundamental principles which underlie the proposed general settlement and to which each government has declared that it is committed.”⁴⁵ There is no mention of Pearl Harbor or the British intercept of any Japanese message regarding an attack on Pearl Harbor. “In sum,” Lukacs writes, “the entire transcript of the November 26, 1941, phone conversation is completely false.”⁴⁶

Revising history is the natural duty of historians. There is nothing wrong with revisionism per se if the revision results in bringing us closer to the truth. But revising history for the sake of ideology is quite another thing. Franklin Delano Roosevelt has become the target of a small group of revisionist writers intent on destroying the public’s high regard for his presidency. Unable to attack his social programs with any success, these revisionist writers have accused him of “criminal negligence,” and even “treasonable activity,” resulting from the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.⁴⁷ These revisionist historians became advocates when they chose to follow the facts where they wanted them to lead them rather than wherever they may have led them. The case of the transatlantic telephone call between Churchill and Roosevelt is an example of what happens when ideology overcomes objectivity. It is an excellent example of seeking evidence to fit one’s preconceived ideas in furtherance of ideology.

Lukacs sees a sinister motive behind forgeries like the radiotelephone transcript between Churchill and Roosevelt. He points out that certain historians have attempted to rehabilitate Adolf Hitler while “blackening” the images of Churchill and Roosevelt. The 1983 discovery of the Hitler “diaries” is but one example (see chapter 3). Lukacs sees the discovery of the transcript of the telephone conversation as another example of elevating Hitler by tearing down Roosevelt and Churchill. Finding the truth is a very difficult task. As Lukacs so eloquently points out, “the purpose of the historian is not the establishment of perfect truth but the pursuit of truth through the reduction of ignorance.”⁴⁸

2

Pearl Harbor

Treachery in the Oval Office?

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