“Neither Roosevelt nor Hull took Grew’s warnings at face value. To them, like most Americans, it seemed inconceivable that the small island nation of Japan would directly attack the United States.”

By Lew Paper

IT WAS, Franklin D. Roosevelt told Congress, “a date which will live in infamy” – Dec. 7, 1941.  On that morning, said the President, Japanese warplanes had carried out a “dastardly” attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor that was part of a wider “surprise offensive” throughout the Pacific.

The raid was, to be sure, a traumatic event. But it should not have been a surprise to U.S. leaders. More than a month before the bombings, on Nov. 3, 1941, Joseph Grew, America’s ambassador to Japan, sent a telegram to Secretary of State Cordell Hull in which he warned of the growing danger posed by Tokyo.

Washington should not underestimate Japan’s willingness to “rush headlong into a suicidal struggle with the United States,” Grew wrote, and that “armed conflict with the United States may come with dangerous and dramatic suddenness.”

Again on Nov. 17, 1941, the 61-year-old career diplomat repeated his warning to Hull, emphasizing “the need to guard against sudden Japanese naval or military actions.”

Neither Roosevelt nor Hull took Grew’s warnings at face value. To them, like most Americans, it seemed inconceivable that the small island nation of Japan would directly attack the United States – a country with far more resources and a much larger population.

Grew knew otherwise. He’d spent almost 10 years as America’s envoy to the Empire of the Rising Sun. The principal cause of the mounting crisis were the economic sanctions the United States had imposed on Japan in an effort to curb Tokyo’s military aggression in China. Washington’s trade restrictions were crippling the Japanese economy, and the White House assumed that they would eventually bring Japan to its knees.

Grew hoped to disabuse Roosevelt and Hull of that notion. In August, as the sanctions escalated, he advised Hull that “a psychology of despair leads characteristically to a do-or-die reaction.” For the Japanese, said Grew, annihilation would be better than the humiliation of succumbing to American pressure. And so, in his telegram of Nov. 3, Grew explained that it would be an “uncertain and dangerous hypothesis” to believe, as some in the United States did, that war could be averted “by progressively imposing drastic economic measures…”  A Japanese attack on the United States might seem foolhardy, Grew continued, but “Japanese sanity cannot be measured by American standards of logic.”

Grew made a number of recommendations to Roosevelt and Hull to forestall the slide toward war. In the Ambassador’s view, none of these were more important than having Roosevelt accept an invitation of Japan’s Prime Minister to meet somewhere on American soil to resolve the two countries’ differences. The President was in favour of such a summit, but Hull convinced FDR that no meeting should occur unless the two countries first reached an agreement – even though the Secretary of State believed the chances of finding common ground “were no bigger than a gnat.”

Hull nonetheless spent untold hours in talks with Japanese representatives in Washington throughout 1941 to explore a possible agreement – not because he thought an accord was likely but because the United States needed more time to build up its military arsenal. And s, Hull dragged out the discussions with the Japanese representatives to delay any conflict in the Pacific, one that would divert American resources needed to support Great Britain against the Nazi blitz.

Grew knew nothing of Hull’s delaying strategy and reported to Washington Tokyo’s growing sense that the U.S. was playing for time. That perception, the Ambassador said, could be corrected if only the United States would specify the terms it wanted to include in any agreement.

Hull finally offered the Japanese a detailed proposal on Nov. 26, but by then it was too late –the Secretary of State knew full well his terms would be unacceptable to Japan.

The administration’s refusal to accept Grew’s recommendations was a matter of great frustration to the Ambassador. He would later say that American policy in the fall of 1941 was “completely inflexible” and that “reporting to our government was like throwing pebbles into a lake at night.”

Grew was especially bitter about the President’s refusal to meet with the Japanese Prime Minister. While travelling back to the United States in August 1942 aboard the SS Gripsholm (after six months as a prisoner-of-war with the other embassy staff), the Ambassador drafted a letter he intended to give Roosevelt containing a detailed critique of American policy in those months before the Pearl Harbor attack. A principal focus of the letter was Hull’s insistence that a comprehensive agreement be a condition to any meeting between the two heads of state.

“Was the transcendent importance of preserving peace,” the letter rhetorically asked, “to depend on the utterly futile effort to find mutually satisfactory formulas?”

Roosevelt never had an opportunity to respond to Grew. In meeting with Grew on his return to the United States, the Secretary of State demanded that the Ambassador destroy the detailed critique he planned to give Roosevelt. And so Grew never gave Roosevelt the critique or the letter. But even without Grew’s detailed critique or his letter to Roosevelt, questions still lingered whether the American strategy had advanced the country’s interests – or whether that strategy had foreclosed a chance for a resolution that would have avoided the attack on Pearl Harbor.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Lew Paper is the author of In the Cauldron: Terror, Tension, and the American Ambassador’s Struggle to Avoid Pearl Harbor, which was just published and from which this article is adapted.