The Charlotte News

Thursday, December 4, 1941

FIVE EDITORIALS

What makes this little tidbit of interest is that it dovetails the "three little ships" order of December 2 to Admiral Hart from the President. As the Isabel sailed from Manila for the area between Hainan and Hue in the Gulf of Tonkin, the other two gunboats were returning from Shanghai moving south along the corridor where the Japanese Southern Expeditionary Force was proceeding. It would appear therefore that, though never mentioned in the histories available on Pearl Harbor, these two gunboats were also performing reconnaissance under the guise of being called away from duty on the Yangtze to return to home port in Manila.

So, now we have to add to the expressly authorized commissioning of the Isabel by the President and the selection additionally by Admiral Hart of the Lanikai as the second ship which never got out of Manila Bay before the attack on Pearl, these two gunboats, the Oahu and the Luzon. And again we ask the question as to whether the President was trying to say something to the Japanese observers, especially by the choice of the ships and their names, a form of symbolic language. In other words, by choosing small ships and gunboats, using names consistent with a dialogue of understanding, using on the one hand retreating gunboats from China, which had served as patrols to allow aid to pass unimpeded to the Chinese along the Yangtze from the Burma road to Shanghai, was the President trying to establish the notion, at least to buy some time, that the U.S. was not begging for war, would not fire the first shot, did not desire war with Japan, and would take no aggressive action toward the Japanese either from Luzon, i.e. Manila, or from Oahu, i.e. the Fleet operating from Pearl? Was he attempting, without having to commit to some agreement on paper, to suggest a form of neutrality to avoid attack on U.S. and British interests, thereby necessitating war?

One could of course conjure a theory from these added facts which bolsters the presupposition of foreknowledge of the eastward moving Task Force and the impending attack on Pearl, that the gunboat Oahu, combined with the little ship Lanikai, confirm such foreknowledge and that the message was an implicit flag to the Japanese to invite the attack. But again, that conjecture makes no sense. Why would the President risk so many lives and so many ships and planes in the bargain? Why would there have been an explicit war warning to Kimmel, a "hostile action" warning to Short? Why would it not have been far more advantageous to encounter the Japanese Fleet at sea and follow it, just as the ships in the Atlantic were doing during convoy? Why would it not have been advantageous heroically to spot the incoming Zeroes and intercept them, averting the disaster to come? There still would have been arrayed an obvious attack on Pearl Harbor even if averted. It would have given the same casus belli for a declaration of war. For obviously the Empire of Japan would not have moved an armada the size of the First Air Fleet loaded with 450 armed bombers and torpedo planes for a routine patrol or war exercise. Nor would it have launched those planes in the direction of Hawaii for war games. And what of the Japanese submarines which began cropping into evidence within a 300-mile radius of Hawaii by December 5, some by the 6th being detected in and around Oahu?

And again, we note those words of the Captain of Delilah, the centerpiece of the novel by Marcus Goodrich, published the last week of January, 1941, two weeks before The Mind of the South, as we abstracted a decade ago in the article on Cash's death, the words of the Captain re Shanghai, Malampaya Sound, and the rest of it, ending the ship by crashing it right into the middle of a couple of Japan's coastal towns.

On a Saturday afternoon, July 18, 1992, we found a copy of Delilah at a used book store in Berkeley. We took it home. It was the first time we had ever peered into this book. Within less than five minutes of thumbing through it, we found the "short, incidental section on the defense of the Alamo", at about page 99, as referenced by Cash at the beginning of the June 2 commencement address in Austin. (The casual listener from outside the South may hear it, incidentally, as "shought". We have no quarrel with your interpretation, but that, not being a word, was plainly not Cash's intended expression. Indeed, we have heard New Englanders, up toward Maine, say something akin to "shirt". So...)

Well, on this Saturday afternoon, we read through that little section, encountering the poetic expressions about the Tower men and Malampaya Sound and the rest of it, the section beginning with a reference to Roland of Roncesvalles, just as Cash had begun his original "Mind of the South" article for the American Mercury:

We found all of these coincidences very moving at the time. And we began to think about it all. For whatever reason, we decided to look at an atlas that evening, searching for this Malampaya Sound. Not finding it in our atlas, we proceeded to look over at Oahu and realized that Mamala Bay surrounds the approach to Pearl Harbor. From there, we determined after a moment that the sound of Malampaya is Mamala Bay. And so...

As we came to these interesting notions, we were sitting in an old barrel-back chair, one in our family for many years, though we had no real conception of its history, as it had been around for as long as we could recall. It had been re-upholstered in 1980, as our mama offered to do to provide us with a refurbished chair of some substance, our particular furnishings at the time not numbering among them any substantial chair of its kind. The chair had theretofore reposited itself in our family's basement for over a decade, and for over a decade before that, since 1958, been in storage, our family's particular abode in the interim not having afforded sufficient space for this particular chair until 1969 when more space consigned it to the basement where it sat for ten and a half years. Formerly, its upholstery had been a flowery affair posed on a black background, appropriate to the 1940's and 1950's. But, by 1980, looking a little withdrawn to another time and place, at the encouragement of our mama, we chose a new upholstery for it and it was consigned to our possession with its freshly covered red naugahyde, a kind of faux leatherette material. Nevertheless, in our estimate, it was a very fine replacement for the flowery cloth which had preceded it, especially as the years thusly in storage and then in the basement had been unmercifully unkind to the cloth upholstery.

Well, we sat there in the red naugahyde chair that evening in 1992 and cogitated on this Malampaya Sound and Mamala Bay business until the thing made some sense on our cortex.

A couple of years later, we were sorting through some family photographs in an old desk, and came across a photograph of our grandmama holding us when we were an infant, indeed barely that, having found the date on the photograph coinciding with our first days on the planet.

The reason we mention all of this business is that, unknown to us in July, 1992 and before, that chair, while we had known it resided in the family for quite awhile, was of some significance of which we were not aware, that revealed by this photograph. For in this photograph, we were being held in the arms of our grandmama while she sat in that same chair.

So, there's a story about Malampaya Sound, Mamala Bay, the three little ships and two gunboats, Pearl Harbor and our chair. Make of it what you will.

We note further from the front page the Washington Merry-Go-Round piece on the uncovering by Senators Tom Connally and Guy Gillette of supposed subversive activities of several thousand Japanese in the country, both in Hawaii and in California. The Senators, the piece suggests, had kept quiet on the matter, not wishing to throw a "monkey wrench" into negotiations between the United States and Japan. Their evidence showed supposedly an army of some 7,200 having been organized in this country under the auspices of the government of Japan with the purpose of committing acts of sabotage. Such may explain both the active fear of sabotage in Hawaii and the reasoning by both Admiral Kimmel and Lt. General Short in preparing themselves for that eventuality rather than the far-fetched notion of air attack, of necessity to be accomplished if at all by traversing over 4,000 miles of ocean. It probably also explains as well the reason why the Rose Bowl was moved from Pasadena to Durham come New Year's Day after the attack. It assuredly explains why the President ordered that Japanese-Americans living in certain areas of California, near military bases, be interned for the duration, and then why California Attorney General Earl Warren complied with that order. Such were the times, full of suspicion and hysterical notions nearly capsizing our democracy in the process.

We note it especially because the informal agreement of removal of the obsolete missiles in Turkey was used, along with a no-invasion pledge with respect to Cuba, as the bargaining chips to effect the end of the Cuban missile crisis and agreement by the Soviet Union to crate and remove the missiles and missile launchers being mantled there in the period of September and October, 1962, threatening in a way not previously threatened within the Western Hemisphere a land-based and highly accurate and short-timed missile strike capability on the United States, one being maneuvered into position by the Soviets to gain leverage in coming talks with regard to missiles aimed at the Soviet Union from the western side of the Berlin wall. But of course that seeming equality of position sought by the Soviets failed to take into account the NATO Pact, including West Germany and the U.S., that any strike by the Soviets from East Berlin missile bases on the West would have led to immediate retaliatory response by the U.S., and the thing would have been afoot to the end of mutually assured destruction on both sides of the wall, including, no doubt, the loss of millions of American lives, regardless of the presence of missiles in Cuba. Fortunately, with higher stakes at work in 1962 than in 1941, for the very concept of mutually assured destruction, that period of negotiation was successfully concluded without a surprise attack of the type launched on Pearl Harbor.

One can make a persuasive argument, indeed, from this array of facts through time that in some sense World War II never really ended until 1989 when Germany was reunited and the Soviet Bloc states began to dissociate from the USSR back into sovereign, independent nations, that 1945 was, like 1918, a sort of armistice only in the fighting, enabling merely a rearrangement of enmities historically maintained, as other enmities became amities with respect and cooperation built out of torturous conflict of the years between 1939 and 1945. Ironically, as the U.S. rebuilt Japan and Germany, its former allies during World War II Russia and China, became avowed enemies, the latter becoming so after the Red Chinese drove Chiang Kai-Shek's Nationalist Chinese from the mainland to Formosa in 1949-50. And from that inimical relationship with former allies came two more wars, that in Korea and that in Vietnam.

That is the long view of history of which we are rarely taught, but nevertheless subject to a persuasive argument as in fact the case. The whole of it spans back centuries, erupting here, erupting there, over empire interests of one corrupt regime or another, seeking power over other peoples, born of petty prejudices, myths and superstitions, as surely as the slavery issue was rationalized in America in the 17th through 19th centuries, and as America's apartheid continued for yet another century and more beyond the Civil War, fought primarily to abandon this pernicious evil of slavery; as surely as the paragraph quoted above from Cash speaks to the heart of that very notion, the ultimate personal reason why it gains strength and eventually comes to be in nearly every culture, in nearly every tongue, in nearly every time, and as surely therefore providing the means by which it might be at the inception of it forestalled--that primitive instinct of id overcoming the healthy ego overseen by a watchful superego, well-constructed from infancy onward.

Whether any of that appertains to cold French logic or anything worthy of Elijah, as foretold in Malachi 4:1-6 at the conclusion of the Old Testament, or even of horseshoe-close Mademoiselle Tabouis, we don't know. But it is simply to use the past as a means of analysis to prevent its worst fonts in the future from arising out of individual and group megalomaniacal notions of empire, bringing about a dream for some at the expense of many, left in nightmare. No human being has that superior right to lord over another, except by mutual consent, as with parent to child, even if in the literal, sometimes the child may wish it otherwise until suppertime when no supper comes and the alternative is to go out and become a slave to a slaver breaking child labor laws in order to acquire supper. Only then does the realization intrude and the pouty-lip recede to its more usual posture.

Incidentally, we find the Bible quote of the day to be at variance with the Bible we have. The version we have states: "Thou shalt not delay to offer the first of thy ripe fruits, and of thy liquors: the firstborn of thy sons shalt thou give unto me." This verse follows, incidentally, by only eleven verses that problematic one with which we have dealt before: "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." Verse 31 states: "And ye shall be holy men unto me: neither shall ye eat any flesh that is torn of beasts in the field; ye shall cast it to the dogs." We point those things out, again as a suggestion, that to take the Bible as being wholly literally applicable to our time, has led, and does usually lead, to malefaction of various sorts, even including murder, even including the atrocities of Nazi Germany. That is not to say that we should throw out the baby with the bath water, but neither do we think it appropriate to sacrifice the first-born son, to kill those thought to be witches, or that eating flesh of the beasts of the fields is necessarily, in an age where we have an FDA which regularly inspects for diseased meat, a practice which will lead to being unholy--a word which, in former times, in certain applications, meant merely diseased or unclean of transmittable germs causing disease--any more than Hitler could pride himself, being a vegetarian, on being holy by strict adherence to these laws set forth in Exodus, cynically turned about on the Jewish people.

Today in history, the Task Force encountered rough seas, forcing abandonment of refueling operations, as ships listed to and fro to 45°. Vice-Admiral Nagumo was concerned that ships, including the carriers Lexington and Enterprise, which had been reported as still being in Pearl Harbor on the 29th, would be forced to sea by an early declaration of war before the attack should hostilities break out early around the Philippines, the Malay Peninsula, or Dutch East Indies. He consequently instructed his commanders to destroy all radio capability of any enemy ship sighted henceforth during the voyage and, if necessary to avoid detection and reporting of the position, to sink it. Effectively, this order meant that there would no turning around, even if the Fleet were discovered. It would destroy any potential for returning news of that discovery. It would proceed to target.

In Washington, the President was informed by an aid that the Foreign Ministry had instructed the embassies in Washington, Manila, Batavia, Singapore, London, and Hong Kong to destroy their codes, indicative of imminent war. Upon inquiry as to when it was to be expected, the President was told that it could happen at any time. Of course, the thinking in that regard still was with respect only to the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, or Singapore, not Pearl Harbor.

Congress meanwhile adjourned for a three-day weekend.

Also this day, the leadership of Japan determined that Foreign Minister Togo should prepare a draft reply to the Hull Ten Points, rejecting same. The Supreme Command of the military would determine the day and hour of delivery. The following day, two days before X-Day, the Supreme Command directed Togo to deliver the response at 1:00 p.m. Washington time on Sunday, December 7, precisely thirty minutes before the zero hour of X-Day when the attack on Pearl Harbor was scheduled to commence.

Obviously, this cynical approach to international comity was nothing, even had it been adhered to as it was not, other than a mere formality worthy of no human being, exhibiting relationship to stupid heathens of the lowest and most primitive rank of humankind. There was no honor in it whatsoever, only bad faith. Indeed, the attack would be seven minutes early and the note of rejection delayed in reaching Nomura or Kurusu by copying, translation, and logistical procedures, and thus in being received from them by Hull until about 2:00, thirty-seven minutes after the attack began.

Of course, in truth, had the rejection come on this day, for instance, it would have done nothing to improve the alertness of defenses at Pearl Harbor. Those defenses, it was assumed by the commanders both in Washington and in Hawaii, were secure, the commanders in Hawaii still believing that local sabotage was the only real worry in that region of the world, with no one else in authority given to dispute it. Nevertheless, with the practical face of uncertainty and faint hope of resolution through diplomatic efforts still being held out to the world in the press, with full knowledge that so doing impeded slow communication to Hawaii of contra indications, the utter abandon of even the face of propriety underscores the criminality with which the military, backed by the Emperor, approached its task in Japan.

That they were out of oil, as they were, as the very design of the route implies on its face as the reason ultimately for the attack, affords no excuse for what was done--any more than were the Arab states to embargo oil to the United States, such would become a proper ground for war against them or afford license to invade other sovereign countries for oil, those deemed weak enough to enable conquering to achieve sustained empire interests.

Finally, we note from the front page that Mexico's Chamber of Deputies determined to demand that the Legislature expel from Mexico the German minister as a Fifth Columnist. He was equated with the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli, identified as the god of war and human sacrifice, especially of prisoners of war, and as the god of the sun. The Aztecs under Montezuma also associated this deity with the god of light, Quetzalcoatl, whose incarnation the Aztecs of 1519 mistakenly identified, much to their eventual grief, as the Spanish conqueror Cortez. It seems that some of their 20th century descendants may have done likewise for a time with respect to Hitler until it became evident that he was, as the Chamber of Deputies determined, more akin to the incarnation as the god of human sacrifice than of the sun or light--the one for whom the Aztecs, by way of satiation of Huitzilopochtli's appetite for blood, laid the human sacrifice on a rock altar and then cut out the offeror's heart, presumably to attenuate warfare. But then came Cortez to refute their beliefs.

And a few months ago, as we made mention shortly thereafter, while on a brief layover in Newark, we took the bus into Manhattan and took a pleasant walk around the block across the street from the Port Authority. We looked up and there was The New York Times.

Come to think of it, the message may have been something like: From the halls of Luzon to the shores of Oahu, nurtured by Ravens, we invite you us to Shanghai; and then find out, Lost Sun, as you hang five on Lanikai multiplied by two, what it will be which happens to you.