Myth of Controversy:
The Pearl Harbor Question

by V. T.

A student essay from Dr. Elliot Neaman's History 210 class (historical methods - fall 2002)

© Elliot Neaman / PHDN
Reproduction interdite par quelque moyen que ce soit / no reproduction allowed

The Institute For Historical Review has been called into question surrounding many issues throughout our historical research course this semester. Mainly the IHR is scrutinized for their ideas surrounding the Holocaust and their denial of its occurrence. However, this is not the only aspect of history that they write about in their journal. The IHR claims to be a group of historical revisionist whose aim is to open people’s eyes to the truth that is not being taught or that is being withheld from the general public. One such area that these so called “revisionists” argue is not presented accurately in history books and in classrooms across the globe is one of the most important events in United States history, the December 7, 1941 surprise attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor. The IHR is not the first group of people to raise questions about the attack on Pearl Harbor. Although the United States Government did have small pieces of information regarding a possible attack on the island, the attack came as a surprise not only to the American people but to its Governmental leadership as well.

As early as 1944 there have been essays and books written about the supposed cover up of what actually happened that infamous day of December 7, 1941. The main claim of these past and current “revisionists” is that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was not a surprise and that it could have been prevented. This is a controversial idea that has crept up more and more in history classes not only at the college level, but also in high school classrooms throughout the United States. In my US history class in high school, my teacher instructed myself and the other students in his class that Pearl Harbor was indeed a conspiracy by the U.S. Government. He claimed that the government had to have known about the attack and when it was going to occur. However, I was impressionable then and I accepted his every word as truth. Looking back now I realize that he never supported any of his claims with actual evidence. He simply brought up circumstantial claims that most deniers use, including the writers of the IHR. I have always been interested in the attack on Pearl Harbor ever since my high school teacher tried to convince me that there was a U.S. cover up to conceal the facts surrounding the attack, namely that it was not a surprise. Through my own research I have come to find that although the US government was planning to eventually enter World War II, they in no way could have anticipated the attack that surprised a nation into war on December 7, 1941.

One of the most inflammatory articles written in the Institute for Historical Review Journal is an editorial essay entered by Roger A. Stolley, a private citizen from Salem, Oregon. In his article he claims that Pearl Harbor was not a surprise attack and that he knows this because of personal experience. He claims to have worked for a man named Clifford M. Andrew, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer who worked closely with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He stated that one day this former employer related to him a story about how he and several other aides to the President knew about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor prior to its occurrence, and that he had even received a message forty-eight hours before the attack stating the exact time it was going to occur and to not prepare any forces to retaliate or inform Pearl Harbor of the impending attack.[1] While at first glance this sounds like some fairly incriminating information, with a small amount of further research into these claims they appear unfounded. First, there is absolutely no way to verify if what Mr. Stolley is stating is actually true. He did not work under this Clifford M. Andrew during WWII at the White House. Rather, he claims that this was a story that was told to him by this man later. Also, Stolley states that Andrew himself, for national security reasons, destroyed all of the evidence capable of proving his story. For all we know this Andrew could have simply made this story up. Secondly, I ran several searches through the National Archives, Presidential Libraries, and government websites to try and find evidence of Clifford M. Andrew’s employment during the time period before, during, and after Pearl Harbor and there is no evidence of his employment in the U.S. Government.[2] Also, I did a search of the date May 15-16, 1966 of The Oregonian news publication because in Stolley’s essay he also states that Clifford M. Andrew was shot and killed on May 15, 1966. At this time he lived in Oregon and if a murder had taken place, or a death of any kind, it would be in the paper. However, upon searching the publication, there was no record of that shooting.[3] After analyzing all of the information presented in his editorial essay, it becomes clear that this is not a factual document well suited for a scholarly journal, but a personal opinion founded on nothing but hearsay and rumors. In the essay Stolley states, “For the people of the United States both then and now I feel sorrow, for a people to have been so misled, to have been lied to so much, and to have so thoroughly believed the lie given to them.”[4] I feel sorry for Roger Stolley, he cannot even recognize when he has lied and been lied to.

Roger Stolley is not alone in his unfortunately biased beliefs. Many other IHR writers, revisionist as they call themselves but deniers to the rest of the world, make similar mistakes of using misinformation in their proofs of what they believe is the truth behind a situation. For example, Charles Lutton asks many questions in his article that he has about Pearl Harbor.

Who was accountable for the disaster? Was it avoidable? Why had the Japanese attacked? Had there been any American Provocation? And why had Pearl Harbor’s Navy and Army Commanders, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel and General Walter Short, been caught off guard? Why were they quickly retired under unusual circumstances?[5]

Having asked several controversial questions regarding one of the most important events in United States history, one would expect Lutton to answer his questions by researching facts, documents, reports, presidential libraries, and other respected sources that would help him to arrive at logical conclusions. Unfortunately he does not choose this path. Rather, he decides to line up the points of view from several other “revisionists” that he is familiar with. There is not one point in this article in which he answers any of his questions regarding the controversy of Pearl Harbor with actual research. At the end of the essay there are no footnotes or endnotes, no works cited, and no bibliography. All one will find at the bottom of the last page is an explanation stating that the western fleet is still kept on the west coast and that one of the revisionists that he speaks about books is no longer in print, but where a copy can be found. There is no hard evidence of any kind presented to answer these questions. All Lutton does is gather other fellow denier opinions. To answer the question whether or not Pearl Harbor could have been avoided, instead of looking at documents that state whether or not members of the US government knew about the attack or searching through archives, he instead quotes John T. Flynn. Flynn wrote a forty-six-page essay in 1945 entitled, “The Truth About Pearl Harbor.”[6] In this essay Flynn writes a scathing portrayal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. As it turns out, Flynn is a Roosevelt hater from long before Pearl Harbor and this was yet another attempt to attack a political leader he had long hated. It seems that Flynn was a political journalist from the time who always seemed to feel that Roosevelt was doing a terrible job running the country, and blamed him for many of the nation’s problems.[7] It is not that Flynn did not do research for his essay; it is that he was not allowed to view most of the documents that he needed for his paper at the time. Further more, he was simply a political journalist of the day, not a scholar. To compare it to today, it would be like choosing to take the word of Chris Mathews from the news channel MSNBC, and his feelings about how George W. Bush is handling the war on terror. He is entitled to his opinion as a political journalist, and he is very informed on many issues, but he does not decide what is truth and what is not. Flynn took facts that may or may not be detrimental to Roosevelt and turned them against him, which are what deniers such as Charles Lutton from IHR love to do. What is the best way for a denier to prove his point, line up ten other deniers that agree with his ideas. That is precisely what Lutton does in his article “Pearl Harbor: Fifty Years of Controversy.” In the essay he has William L. Neumann, George Morgenstern, William L. Langer, Everett Gleason, Harry Elmer Barnes, and William Henry Chamberlin, to name a few, that he uses to help answer his questions in a manner that states that the United States did know about Japanese plans of an attack on Pearl Harbor but did nothing to prevent it. I should give Lutton some credit because he does at least mention that there are people with opposing views, however he makes it sound like they are few and far between. He comments that Roberta Wohlstetter wrote about Pearl Harbor in defense of Franklin Roosevelt. He then states that,

Percy L. Greaves who, by common agreement, knew more about Pearl Harbor than any man living at the time, wrote a scathing critique of Wohlstetter’s book that should have led to its being quietly removed from library shelves and consigned to the recycling plants.[8]

Fittingly, Lutton does not explain how Greaves disproves Wohlstetter, nor does he mention that this so called “expert” that makes a fool of Wohlstetter’s work is a fellow member of the IHR who wrote for the Journal for a number of years before his death in 1984. Also not surprising, is that while writers such as Greaves have had trouble finding a publisher for their essays and ideas, Wohlstetter comes from the meager establishment of Stanford University. Seems that there may be a slight correlation between doing actual research and getting published, as opposed to gathering all your friends up to support your arguments. By the time I finished Lutton’s article where he claims to have answered all his original questions about how the United States government covered up its prior knowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack, I began to realize that Lutton never seemed to develop any sort of coherent statement about Pearl Harbor. In actuality, the article was nothing more than a long line of revisionist theories that he strung together with absolutely no research involved. For just as many revisionists and deniers as he gathered to agree with his point of view, anyone else could collect just as many people with opposing views to disagree with him that have actually done some research. I think I would have a little more respect for him if he could have at least shown some initiative and done some of his own research to back up his arguments.

Percy L. Greaves Jr. is the one member of the IHR who actually tries to conduct some type of research before he declares his conspiracy theories. In the winter of 1983 he wrote seven different articles for the Journal of Historical Review that all spoke about different aspects of Pearl Harbor that contribute to his assertion that it could have been prevented and was not a surprise. The largest piece of information that all deniers of the attack on Pearl Harbor, including Greaves, use to prove that the White House knew about the impending war with Japan is the message that Secretary of State Cordell Hull sent to Secretary of War Henry Stimson on November 26, 1941 less than two weeks before the attack, “I have washed my hands of it and it is now in the hands of you and Knox—the Army and Navy.”[9] Greaves goes onto state that this was the end of diplomatic talks between the two nations, Japan and the United States. However, that is an incorrect statement. There was continued communication between the two governments up to the day of the attack. While it is true to say that the peace agreement that Hull and Nomura were trying to work out did end on November 26, 1941, there were still messages between the two nations being sent back and forth in last ditch attempts to try and keep peace in the Pacific. FDR and the US government was more concerned with peace in Indo-China and the Philippines, the area where the US had been sending troops for the past few months in response to the Japanese buildup of troops in that area. [10] It was in reference to this troop increase and rising tension in the South Pacific that concerned Roosevelt the most, and he made a request to the Emperor of Japan to attempt to keep the peace in that region on December 6, 1941.

I address myself to Your Majesty at this moment in the fervent hope that Your Majesty may, as I am doing, give thought in this definite emergency to ways of dispelling the dark clouds. I am confident that both of us, for the sake of the peoples not only of our own great countries but for the sake of humanity in neighboring territories, have a sacred duty to restore traditional amity and prevent further death and destruction in the world.[11]

This excerpt from the last peaceful statement ever from the United States to Japan clearly shows that Roosevelt understood that the times were very shaky between the two nations. However, it also illustrates that right until the final hour Roosevelt was trying to find a way to keep the two nations peaceful between each other.

Another reason the deniers’ arguments are unfounded are because they seem to have a misinterpretation of the situation regarding Pearl Harbor. The main point that the deniers all seem to share regarding Pearl Harbor is that they are all upset that Roosevelt lied to the American people, they are just picking the wrong lies to argue about. Roosevelt knew that the U.S. was going to become involved in WWII eventually and he was thinking about how he was going to maneuver the United States towards entering the war.[12] By 1941 Roosevelt and his cabinet had also realized that the U.S. needed to enter the war in Europe very soon. However, no one wanted to fight a two front war, and thus why there were all of the diplomatic efforts undertaken by the United States with Japan late into 1941; the U.S. was trying to hold off war with Japan in the Pacific because they knew that war in Europe was rapidly approaching. Fighting Hitler and his Nazi forces was of much greater concern for the U.S.[13] Consequently, with Roosevelt more concerned with what was developing in Europe, he thought that he would be able to occupy the Japanese with diplomatic strategy rather than war.[14] It would be understandable for deniers to argue that Roosevelt should not have lied to an American public that was staunchly opposed to war pre-Pearl Harbor about how close it was to war, and about how the U.S. was planning on becoming involved. However, to create this idea of a conspiracy that somehow the U.S. Government could have prevented the Pearl Harbor attack from occurring is simply unfounded.

There is one piece of evidence that none of the deniers bring up in any of their essays that directly shows that the United States Department of State knew about the possibility of an attack on Pearl Harbor roughly a year prior to its occurrence. In a telegram from the US Ambassador in Japan, Joseph C. Grew, to the Secretary of State Hull dated January 27, 1941 Grew writes.

A member of the Embassy was told by my…colleague that from many quarters, including a Japanese one, he had heard that a surprise mass attack on Pearl Harbor was planned by the Japanese military forces, in case of “trouble” between Japan and the United States; that the attack would involve the use of all the Japanese military forces.[15]

The next correspondence between the two diplomats mentions absolutely nothing about the warning from the previous day. This may seem strange, but given recent events it is not hard to understand why such a warning was not heeded. It has recently come to light that there was evidence, or at least vague warnings, about terrorists possibly hijacking airplanes and using them as weapons in the United States against civilian targets such as the World Trade Center. Now, any type of a threat or a suggestion of violence by anyone is seen as very serious and something to be pursued. If our national security and intelligence had been operating at the current levels pre-9/11, that infamous day may have never occurred. Of course it is easy to say that now. Pre-9/11 no one ever thought that something like that could ever happen in the United States. Those types of warnings and threats were not followed prior to September 11, 2001 because the claims seemed fantastic and impossible. That was the feeling about the Japanese threat a year before Pearl Harbor. It was just something that they said, not something that they would actually be capable of doing or attempting. It was not seen as a legitimate threat. Still, why have deniers not utilized this clearly stated warning prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor? What it shows is that these deniers are not going through the primary sources thoroughly. It took me quite awhile to find that document, but it was there and I did find it. As I mentioned earlier in this paper, deniers are basing all of their information off of previous revisionist work. They read a few pieces of work from the latter parts of the 1940’s that fit their own denier agenda, and because of this they fail to branch out and do their own research to attempt to prove their own ideas.

In my own research for this paper I found that there is still a lot of red tape surrounding Pearl Harbor. For example, I was looking through the personal papers of Franklin D. Roosevelt and many of the diary entries, documents, and transcripts from important dates near the time of attack are either still off limits or they simply are not there. It is disheartening for someone like myself who is interested in being able to accurately understand what went on when pieces from the puzzle seem to be missing. This was also the case concerning Army and Navy intelligence reports. Many of the days near the attack, including the day of and day before, are available and you can read them. However, there are other days reports that are simply unavailable for no apparent reason. Hopefully these missing or concealed documents will become available in the future, but for now we have to base findings on the information that is available to us. I only hope that when the investigation, intelligence, and documents surrounding the similar recent events of 9/11 are compiled that there is not one thing missing. The truth is the only thing that matters. Once that truth is revealed, whether you agree or disagree, people can learn from that truth both positive and negative lessons. Deniers in the case of Pearl Harbor are not concerned with these lessons. They are grasping at straws and are struggling to understand a painful aspect in their country’s history. Maybe they still do not understand how this could have happened? Maybe they truly do have some unfounded belief that it is one giant conspiracy and that the US government wanted nearly 3,000 of its citizens to be massacred. Regardless of their motivations it is their reasoning that needs to be scrutinized. When their two main ways of supporting their claims are to cite sources that may or may not exist, and to use fellow deniers as authorities to prove that they are right, no one should ever have to consider those thoughts as legitimate. When arguing about an aspect of history one needs to use facts and sources that can be verified as genuine. There needs to be a thesis that is arrived at through careful thought based on evidence. It is not enough to compile a bunch of names from people who agree with your opinion and claim that because they support your ideas you must be right. It scares me that people read things everyday not only from publications such as the Journal of Historical Review, but also from everyday newspapers, magazines, and TV news programs and accept them as truth. When I see a report in the local newspaper or on TV I always make sure that they provide solid evidence to support what they are reporting. Sadly I have noticed a frightening trend in our society that people will believe anything so long as it is on TV or in a news publication. People need to question and to make sure that they are basing their ideas and beliefs on truths. The writers from the IHR prey on this unfortunate symptom of the current society. Most people that read the articles they write probably do not think twice about whether or not their research is valid. It is up to historians and intellectuals to cause a new trend in our society where people will not accept everything that they hear or see as truth. There are always going to be people with agendas pushing ideas that are false; those people need to be exposed for the frauds they are before they deface history. Pearl Harbor was, and still is a day that will live in infamy.


Notes

[1] Stolley, Roger A. “Pearl Harbor Attack No Surprise.” Journal for Historical Review 12.1 (1991): 119

[2] <http://www.state.gov>, <http://www.archives.gov>, and <http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/avalon.html>

[3] <http://www.oregonian.com>

[4]“Pearl Harbor Attack No Surprise.” Journal for Historical Review 12.1 (1991): 119

[5] Lutton, Charles. “Pearl Harbor: Fifty Years of Controversy.” Journal of Historical Review 11.4 (1991): 431

[6] Flynn, John T. “The Truth About Pearl Harbor.” <http://www.geocities.com/Pentagon/6315/flynnfs.html>

[7] McManns, John F. “Principles First.” The New American 16.3 31 January 2000: also at <http://www.thenewamerican.com>

[8] “Pearl Harbor: Fifty Years of Controversy” Journal of Historical Review 11.4 (1991): 443

[9] Utley, Jonathan G. Going to War With Japan: 1937-1941 University of Tennessee Press. Knoxville, 1985. 173

[10] Utley, Jonathan G. Going to War With Japan: 1937-1941 University of Tennessee Press. Knoxville, 1985. 173-175

[11] Roosevelt, Franklin D. U.S. Dept. of State. Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States: Japan: 1931-1941 Vol. 2 Government Printing Office. Washington: 1943. 786

[12] Pelz, Stephen E. Race to Pearl Harbor Harvard University Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts 1974.  83-94

[13] LaFeber, Walter. The American Age: U.S. Foreign Policy At Home and Abroad: 1750 to the Present 2 ed. W.W. Norton Company. London, 1994: 399-402

[14] Utley, Jonathan G. Going To War With Japan: 1937-1941 University of Tennessee Press. Knoxville, 1985: 167

[15] U.S. Dept. of State. Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States: Japan: 1931-1941 Vol. 2. Government Printing Office. Washington: 1943. 133


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