Pearl Harbor Investigation

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PEARL HARBOR INVESTIGATION

On Sunday, December 7, 1941, Japanese naval and air forces attacked the United States Pacific Fleet and nearby army installations in and around Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The Japanese attack killed over 2,400 people, sank four battleships, damaged ten other warships and destroyed almost 200 warplanes.

Two days after the Japanese attack, the first formal inquiry into the disaster began when Navy Secretary Frank Knox flew to Hawaii to see the damage firsthand. While noting that neither the army nor the navy had adequately prepared for a carrier-borne assault, Knox credited the disaster to superior Japanese planning rather than negligence on the part of American commanders. A second committee, chaired by Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts, blamed Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, Commander of the Pacific Fleet, and General Walter C. Short, Commander of the Hawaiian Department, when it issued its findings in January 1942. While exonerating senior leaders, including Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, and Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, the Roberts Commission concluded that Kimmel and Short received adequate warning of a possible Japanese attack but failed to act accordingly. Both Short and Kimmel were demoted and relieved of command. Both men subsequently retired from the military within months.

While Kimmel and Short received the bulk of the blame in 1942, subsequent investigations spread fault more evenly. In June 1944, Congress ordered concurrent army-navy hearings into the Pearl Harbor disaster. The army hearing, which concluded in October 1944, noted, for example, that Hull's decision to effectively terminate talks with the Japanese on November 26 ran counter to the military's goal of delaying hostilities for as long as possible. The committee also rebuked General Marshall for neither clarifying his orders to General Short nor contacting him on December 6 to notify him that Japan would soon sever relations with the United States. For its part, the Navy Court of Inquiry, which also adjourned in October 1944, found significant fault with top Navy officials. In particular, the inquiry found fault with Chief of Naval Operations Harold Stark's failure to keep Admiral Kimmel fully informed of the latest intelligence.

The Joint Congressional Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack, the final official investigation into the attack, concluded in 1946 that Kimmel and Short made "errors of Judgment [and] not derelictions of duty" (U.S. Congress, p. 252). The report, however, mirroring the earlier army and navy hearings, cast a wider net when it concluded that "high authorities in Washington" failed to adequately inform Kimmel and Short of the immediacy of war and the possibility of a Japanese strike at Pearl Harbor. The Committee also noted that military intelligence analysts consistently underestimated Japanese capabilities and intentions and therefore discounted the likelihood of a strike against Hawaii.

At the same time that the various hearings rebuked Kimmel, Short, and leading figures in Washington, rumors surfaced of a conspiracy reaching all the way to the Oval Office that sought to bring on a Japanese attack in order to pave the way for American entry into the Second World War. The conspiracy theory clearly originated from the search for a plausible explanation for the greatest military disaster in American history and was no doubt fed by the findings of the final Congressional hearing. Given that most Americans deprecated Japanese military capabilities in December 1941, many could not fathom that Japanese skill and training, rather than duplicity on the part of senior leaders, led to the debacle. There is no doubt that many of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's domestic opponents sought to link the commander in chief to the disaster. Moreover, isolationists, who had long charged that Roosevelt's polices would lead to war, saw proof of their own prescience in the Japanese attack. The conspiracy theory persisted long after the death of President Roosevelt and the end of the war. Since the 1948 publication of Charles Beard's book President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941, in which the author argued that the president hoped to use foreign policy crises to divert attention away from the failure of the New Deal, myriad historians have attempted, with limited success,

to connect the president to the destruction at Pearl Harbor.

The Pearl Harbor disaster continues to hold America's attention. In 1999 the spotlight once again shone on the leading actors in the Pearl Harbor drama when the House voted to posthumously reverse the wartime demotions of Admiral Kimmel and General Short, and the latest conspiracy history, Robert Stinnett's Day of Deceit, hit the shelves the following year.

bibliography

Beard, Charles. President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1948.

Prange, Gordon; Goldstein, Donald; and Dillon, Katherine. Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986.

Stinnett, Robert. Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor. New York: Free Press, 2000.

U.S. Congress. Joint Congressional Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack. Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack: Report of the Joint Congressional Committee, part V. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946.