Pearl Harbor and the Foreknowledge Record
The provocation, the intercepts, and the ships left at anchor
In the autumn of 1940 the United States government possessed a written plan for bringing Japan to attack first, the capacity to read Japanese diplomatic traffic, and a public that would not consent to entering the war. By the morning of December 7, 1941, all three conditions had been resolved.
Segment 01 / 02
The McCollum Memorandum
What were we conditioned to believe?
That the United States was drawn into the Second World War by an unprovoked attack it had no hand in bringing about.
What is the actual truth?
On October 7, 1940, Lieutenant Commander Arthur McCollum of the Office of Naval Intelligence produced a memorandum setting out eight specific actions calculated to provoke Japan into an overt act of war. It recommended basing the fleet in Hawaii, keeping cruiser divisions in the Philippines and the East Indies, aid to the Chinese, and a total embargo on trade — including oil.
The memorandum states its purpose without ambiguity. It concludes that if by these means Japan could be led to commit an overt act of war, so much the better, and that in any case the United States must be fully prepared to accept the threat of war.
Over the following fourteen months every one of the eight actions was carried out. The oil embargo of the summer of 1941 left Japan with a fuel reserve measured in months and a choice between withdrawal from China and seizure of the resource areas to the south.
Secretary of War Henry Stimson recorded in his diary on November 25, 1941 that the question discussed in cabinet was how the United States should maneuver Japan into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to itself.
Why?
A democratic public will not vote for a war of choice, and the administration had campaigned in 1940 on a promise to keep American boys out of foreign wars. A war of necessity requires no vote. Provocation does not create the intent to fight — it creates the permission, and permission was the only missing element.
Segment 02 / 02
The Intercepts and the Harbor
What were we conditioned to believe?
That the attack achieved complete strategic surprise and that no advance warning of the target or the timing existed.
What is the actual truth?
Japanese diplomatic cipher traffic had been broken since 1940 under the designation MAGIC, and the decrypts circulated at the highest levels in Washington. Among them was the September 1941 request from Tokyo to its Honolulu consulate for the exact berthing positions of ships in Pearl Harbor, divided into a numbered grid. No comparable request was made of any other consulate.
The three American aircraft carriers assigned to the Pacific Fleet were not in the harbor on the morning of December 7. Enterprise and Lexington were at sea on ferry missions to Wake and Midway; Saratoga was on the American mainland. The vessels lost were battleships of First World War construction.
Of the eight battleships struck, six were raised, repaired, and returned to service. The Pacific war was decided by carrier aviation, a fact already understood by the naval staffs of both nations before the attack took place.
The Roberts Commission convened within eleven days and assigned blame to the Hawaii commanders, Admiral Kimmel and General Short. Neither had been given access to the MAGIC decrypts. Both were relieved; both spent the remainder of their lives seeking the record, and Congress passed a resolution in 1999 finding that they had been denied the intelligence available in Washington.
Why?
An attack that is permitted and an attack that is unforeseen produce the same casualty list and the same headlines, but only the second produces unanimity. What made December 7 decisive was not the damage — it was that the damage was received rather than sought. The loss of obsolete tonnage bought a declaration of war that no argument had been able to obtain in two years, and the carriers that would fight that war were beyond the harbor mouth when the first wave arrived.