“The German and Italian propaganda ministries did their customary sister act today, shrieking in unison that it was Franklin Delano Roosevelt who started the war in the Pacific. But they didn’t accuse the President of bombing Pearl Harbor.”
Listed herein are 17 events that transpired between the U.S. diplomatic corps and their opposite numbers representing the Empire of Japan.
“The news of [the Pearl Harbor] attack broke out at a time on Sunday afternoon when a comparatively few newspapers in the U.S.A. were being published (there were no evening papers on sunday). The result was that the nation learned of the war and its immediate developments almost entirely by radio. The National Broadcasting system held the bulletin for a few minutes, and at 2:30 gave the news simultaneously to its Red and Blue networks, and subsequently to the whole world over its international short-wave system.”
“Don’t believe that the Japanese ordered their dawn assault only yesterday. The fact is that they ordered it not days ago but weeks ago. While Japan’s special envoy, Saburo Kurusu, was busy talking in Washington, the ships that were to attack us were already on their way. While he was staling and waiting ‘for instructions’, they were getting into position. More than that: they had their orders before Kurusu even started talking.”
Six months before Japan’s devastating assault on Pear Harbor came this article concerning how remarkable the Navy’s defensive measures were and how unlikely it would be if the installation was ever to be attacked. A large part of the article concerned how overwhelmingly Japanese the Oahu population was, and the many steps taken by the Army and Navy to keep them off-base. How terribly unimaginative of them to think that Japanese Naval Itelligence wouldn’t think to farm-out spying to an Englishman like Frederick Rutland – which they did.
One year after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor the Navy released its report to the press with updates on all the various repairs that were put into effect.
A year after the Pearl harbor attack, one of the PM journalists recalled for their readers how many Americans in the lower 48 had heard the news on the radio that evening.
When this article went to press the Pear Harbor attack was already over a year old – and like the articles that came out in ’41, these two pages capture much of the outrage that was the general feeling among so many of the American people. The article serves to give an account as to how the ships that were damaged that morning have largely recovered and were once again at sea (excluding the Arizona).
Five months after the Pearl Harbor attack the United States Navy defeated the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Coral Sea, click here to read about it…
It now becomes apparent that the U.S. Government, long before Pearl Harbor, knew Tokyo’s war plans almost as thoroughly as did the Japanese. To all practical purposes, Washington had ears attuned to the most intimate, secret sessions of Japan’s cabinet.
A year and a half before the Pearl Harbor attack, Naval Intelligence sold a Japanese agent some bogus plans of the naval installation – more about this can be read here.
Out of the Pearl Harbor investigation last week came a decoded telephone conversation made on November 27, 1941, two weeks before the Japanese attacked, that had all the elements of a penny-dreadful spy thriller… On the Washington end of the trans-pacific phone call was Saburo Kurusu, Japanese special envoy to the United States; on the Tokyo end, Admiral Yeisuke Yamamoto, Chief of the American Division of the Japanese Foreign Office.
The conversation guaranteed Yamamoto that the negotiations between the two sides were proceeding smoothly and that the attack on Pearl Harbor would be a surprise.
