The Charlotte News

Saturday, November 22, 1941

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note:

This day, the main part of the Japanese Task Force lay at anchor in Hitokappu Bay. A meeting was held in the morning wherein Vice-Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, in command of the Air Ministry, for the first time detailed the strike plan and the target to his commanders: Pearl Harbor, to be hit from the north. Intelligence had it that U.S. patrol planes left only after sunrise, after breakfast, and patrolled predominantly in the south and southwest region around Oahu, not to the north. The pattern had been consistent since August. Most of the Fleet would be in the Harbor on Sunday, X-Day. A question mark lay in the three carriers stationed there. Their sailings were erratic and it could not be predicted with accuracy when any of them would be present. This news troubled Nagumo who feared an encounter at sea with one of the carriers, alerting the defenses at Pearl of the attack and thereby endangering the success of the whole mission.

Nagumo also explained that if the fleet were discovered in advance of one day before the attack, it would abandon its mission and turn back for Japan, unless fired upon, in which case, it was to fight. If only a portion of the ships were discovered, then the fleet was to change its directions as necessary to lose the scent of the hound. Discovery on X-Day would not alter course or target.

Most importantly, radio communications were to be received from land only, and intercommunication within the fleet was to be by flag in daytime and blinkers at night, otherwise maintaining strict blackout.

Preceding the attack by a half-hour, two seaplanes would reconnoiter ship positions, weather conditions and the like, to assure maximum strike capability. The attack then would take place in a two-wave assault of planes, one launching from 230 miles north of Oahu and the other from 200 miles north. A contingent of fighter planes would remain to protect the fleet. The attack planes, too, would maintain radio silence, except in case of engine trouble--but the pilots themselves agreed this day unanimously to die rather than risk giving away the advantage of surprise for one pilot's emergency and so declared an absolute bond to maintain silence no matter the contingency.

After completion of these missions, the fleet would withdraw and return to Japan for refitting of supplies, a hit-and-run operation. The belief was that such would be sufficient to knock out the U.S. Pacific Fleet for six months, the overall objective.

To achieve this main objective, it was thought necessary to take out the three carriers or as many of them as were in the Harbor on X-Day, at least four battleships, and destroy the air capability on Oahu. Contingencies were also discussed for finding and fighting the U.S. Fleet at sea or finding it instead to be at Lahaina Roads.

Ah, but as we have heard before, those who ride the Tiger often wind up inside.

In a separate meeting, Admiral Yamamoto of the Combined Fleet told his army and navy commanders at Tokuyama this day that if negotiations were successful with the United States, he would order the Task Force to return, giving the order no later than 1:00 a.m. December 7, that is 5:30 a.m. December 6, Hawaii time. The commanders voiced opposition to this plan as not giving them sufficient warning of cessation of their operations.

Foreign Minister Togo, on orders from Tojo, saw the matter differently, insisting this same date to Ambassador Nomura in Washington that he would be given only through November 29 to complete negotiations with Secretary of State Hull. "After that, things are automatically going to happen," he cautioned. Just what was going to happen, however, was still apparently not imparted either to Nomura or Kurusu, though whether they knew of the planned attack is subject to considerable argument. The "hidden word" code utilized by Kurusu on the 27th with the Foreign Ministry, as noted before, indicating the "monkey wrench" being the "southern matter", appears to dovetail the timing of the Task Force moving south in its diversionary pattern, deliberately acting as decoy for the main Task Force heading eastward to Hawaii. This southern Task Force was deliberately maintaining open radio communications to confuse Allied intelligence sources.

So, does the content of the "hidden word" code betray Kurusu's knowledge of the attack before leaving Tokyo, as imparted directly from Tojo? Or, does it say something else entirely?

Dorothy Thompson today draws up a pretty clear-eyed picture of what the post-war world not only ought look like in Europe, but what it would look like within the organization called NATO. That is, that to abolish the conglomeration of mutual suspicions among Continental European nations and the mutual distrust between them and Great Britain, and its Empire interests outside Europe, notably in India, North Africa, and the East Indies, it was necessary to have an organization through which member nations could be assured first of protection by the United States against encroachment by either other members or by interests outside the organization, concomitantly to enable mutual trust among the member nations. Allaying these mutual fears, and the consequent tendency from them toward precipitating Continental division as a weapon historically for British self-preservation against the Continent, as well that tendency of the Continentals to rally around Anglophobia, the notion of perfidious Albion as the bellwether to their own unity, entailing nevertheless strong tendencies to individual nationalism among the sovereignties, creating ultimately the internecine competition which had resulted in Hitler and Mussolini, was the central fulcrum stroke of the genius which ultimately would come to work after the war to spite these centuries-old dominant trends. It is why preservation of the NATO pact was so fundamentally important in the Cold War atmosphere for four and a half decades following the war against the Warsaw Pact nations led by the Soviet Union.

The trick, as the jig for the nonce was up in Hitler's Europe, that is without ultimately a new AEF landing in France, that which would come on D-Day preceded by the Allied invasion of Sicily and Italy from the victories before it obtained in North Africa against Rommel, was to apply a like philosophy to the island nation of Japan versus its historical nemeses and mutual threat dragons-in-the night, Russia and China. That, no doubt, was what Roosevelt and Hull were attempting in very short order to effect with their discussions with Nomura and Kurusu in these shortened days heading into the long winter of discontent. But, of course, the Administration was speaking to the wrong horses--mere pawns sent to offer tricks of sleight to convey the attention to one fixed point on the spectrum, an olive branch, as the blitz on the U.S. counter-offensive Rainbow Plan was largely fixed and steadied on an unalterable course, only now finalizing its bearings, adjusting its rudders, steadying its sights to let go the ways onto the waves of the vast Pacific to its juncture with history, its destinour being Tojo, equipped with no means for compromise once the course was set, any more than Hitler.

Their understanding of the world was from fixed views of history books, unstudied philosophically through the veil of thought and poetics, for application of principles to the advance of man from the lessons learned of past warfare; in consequence, they were poles from the reality of civilized thought enunciated by the twentieth century's creators of progress, still stuck in the warrior acquisitive notions of the past characterized by subjugation of peoples and marking of new territorial lines, stealing the fruit of the labors of other nations, a characteristic which had made the British, French, and Dutch Empires in times past. But those were times past.

The understanding Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo had gleaned was one of competition for this grand illusion of empire, not sharing the wealth and mutually agreeing over time to relax and withdraw empire interests to enable free trade among nations for precious booty.

Ten years ago this day, we first posted the Mercury articles of Cash, some 150 editorials which we happened to have, carefully clipped by Cash's father from The News and preserved for the many decades intervening our discovery of them, the audio and text of the Austin speech of June 2, 1941, and the article on Cash's death on July 1, 1941, plus the great part of the photographic area of this project. That came after six months of work to bring it to you in some reasonably palatable format, begun in early June, 1998, after the thought to do it happened to hit us one night during a basketball game in March of that year, the night, it so happened, Cash's brother Henry had, without our knowing so, passed away, the last of the Cash siblings. We had before assiduously studied the topic, off and on, for seven years, and less assiduously for some decades before that. When we started the project, we had assumed that The News section would be, frankly, the least interesting, and the least complex, and would take at most a year to complete, off and on. Our original notion of that has been turned on its head repeatedly, as we discovered the vast areas into which Cash's editorials delved, and their large number. And so, ten years later, we still plod along--still owing November, 1939 and the last week of September, 1940. We had thought to get to them this fall, but having decided to continue on with the rest of 1941 instead, that plan had to be abandoned for now.

Forty-five years ago this day, our country lost a great American, a student of history, a soldier who did not take himself too seriously for it, a poet and scholar in many respects, an author, a visionary, and finally, least of all of his manifold accomplishments, a politician who was elected to Congress after the war, then to the Senate in 1952 and finally to the presidency in 1960. His term has often been described as "the thousand days", but in fact it was a bit longer than that, 1,036 days and one-half hour. We shall never know what might have been in the remaining fourteen months of that first term or whether he would have been elected to a second, and, if so, what might have been in that term. We may not change history or re-write it to effect that purpose, what might have been. We may only learn the lessons and continually try to apply them with decency and understanding, not only with respect to our internal domestic disputes but also with respect to our international disputes, to avert war and hardship both at home and abroad to the extent possible.

It seems to us that in reading "How Many?" from today's column, finding that in 1941 the FBI, led by Mr. Hoover, had managed to label 2,000 citizens of Charlotte "subversive", The News had it right: that if the FBI's definition of "subversive", that is fomenting hatred against the "Government, employers or other people", was a correct delineation of the intentions of the Founders in the Bill of Rights, then likely, at one time or another, we all would be in a fairly sad kettle of fish, labeled "subversive" by the FBI--not just limiting that descriptor to application to the 2% the FBI sought to set apart, and by it, divide, and by that, conquer the masses into submission to the new Caesar in Washington, Mr. Hoover and his Bureau, but also effectively to use it to chill everyone to obeisance to the standard set by Mr. Hoover and his Bureau. The Constitution, on this view, could go hang if it differed.

Well, that's enough chewing for today. Today is another day. It was not so forty-five years ago. We would as soon forget that, but we never shall, for to forget history, as they say, is to encourage its repetition. And that is a day we shall never desire to repeat, nor should you. For it is a day that, when it occurs in one's lifetime, never really ends.