Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Resilience: Japan Attacks Pearl Harbor

Episode Date: October 3, 2022

Today on our series, Resilience, we are going to hear more from author Craig Nelson, who shares insights on what exactly happened during the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is John Daly speaking from the CBS newsroom in New York. Here is the Far East situation as reported to this moment. The Japanese have attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and our defense facilities at Manila, capital of the Philippines. The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor from the air and all naval and military activities on the island of Oahu, the principal American base in the Hawaiian Islands. A second air attack has been reported.

This one has been made on the Army and Navy bases in Manila. A naval engagement is in progress off Honolulu with at least one black enemy aircraft carrier in action against the Pearl Harbor defenses. The planes are officially described so far as unidentified in these messages, although later reports that have come in from the press associations definitely identify at least two of these planes as carrying the emblem of the rising sun, the emblem of Japan. Hello friends, friends. Welcome. Welcome to another episode in our series,

Resilience, the Wartime Incarceration of Japanese Americans. In order to fully understand the events that led to the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans, most of them citizens, 120,000 Japanese Americans, most of them citizens, we have to understand Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor didn't come out of nowhere, but it was a shock. And today we'll be hearing from historian Craig Nelson, who led a research team for years that produced over 1 million documents related to the attack on Pearl Harbor. And he has written a seminal book on this topic, Pearl Harbor from Infamy to Greatness. His book about Pearl Harbor provides a blow by blow account from both the Japanese and American perspectives. It provides a lot of context about all of the terror, chaos, violence, tragedy, and heroism in the attack on American military installations in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. So let's hear from Craig Nelson as we learn more about the events that led to incarceration.

I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. After World War I, the United States sunk into a deep isolationism. Soldiers had never left American shores and headed overseas before, and the Great War was particularly brutal. Millions of people died in trenches and in very, very gruesome circumstances. And so the United States was very loath to interfere in the conflict between China and Japan. And what it finally did, it did so in the form of economic sanctions, particularly economic sanctions related to American oil, which Japan had come to rely on. to American oil, which Japan had come to rely on. We learned in a previous episode that Japan invaded a portion of China, and as a result, tens of millions of Chinese people were killed.

But that wasn't what caused the United States to leave its state of isolationism. It was Japan's desire and eventual invasion of French Indochina. France was our ally, and we felt that this was a step too far. One of the things is finding out once again how much disrespect takes part in world history. You can say, in fact, that the whole reason there was an American Revolution was because the colonials felt disrespected by the British. And in this case, the Japanese felt disrespected by the Western nations. They had helped win World War I.

They were on our side in World War I. And they were very upset when the Treaty of Versailles happened and they didn't get what they thought they deserved, which was a lot of colonial power in Asia. And they were then a series of governments taking them over. They had a very severe form of the Depression in their country. You know, we have people remember pictures of the Dust Bowl and of people in bread lines in the United States. People were literally starving in the streets in Japan because their economy was based on exports.

And for the Depression, everyone stopped buying silk. And so they really had to collapse. And so they had 14 governments in 11 years. So think of if our government changed every nine months or so. And what happened was the army was able to take over the country and pick who the government was. And so they had this giant rise in militarism. And what the army wanted to do was to invade as much as possible the rest of Asia and take it over so that they would have the natural resources and the room for their population to grow. And the Japanese felt very superior to the other Asian countries,

and they thought they were doing a benefit to them doing this. So they began in China. They used an incident in 1931 in Peking to take over parts of China. And then they started taking over more and more part of it. And they actually treated the Chinese pretty much the way the Germans treated the Jews. And 10 years before Pearl Harbor, they were already invading and taking over parts of China. And then they decided that with the fall of France and the Netherlands and Belgium, that they deserve to take over all of those colonies in Asia. But it wasn't just the political factors that led the United States to step up its involvement in Asia. There was also xenophobia involved. And if you're not familiar with the word xenophobia, it's spelled X-E-N-O-P-H-O-B-I-A. is the fear of something that is foreign, fear of something that is unknown.

And we spoke in previous episodes about how xenophobia and racism was very prevalent amongst Americans towards anyone from Asia, whether that was China, Japan, or any other country. And it was a culmination of all of these factors. There was an incredible racial component in the Pacific War

where Americans thought the Japanese were cockroaches. That led Japan to plan an attack on the United States. The entire operation was run by a guy named Admiral Yamamoto, who's one of the great figures in world history because it was really his idea entirely. The Japanese had an idea of the United States as being people who were lazy and cowardly and only in it for money. They literally had the idea that all of us look like monopoly banker people, that we're all like sitting there, sitting there only engaged in the world to make money so if they did this terrible strike they were convinced or at least yamamoto was convinced that he could terrify the united states into giving up entirely on coming after the

japanese he oversaw the entire operation and he ended up using a great deal of innovations to make it happen for example part of the reason that Pearl Harbor thought it was impregnable was because they didn't think you could use torpedoes to sink the ships in the harbor because the water was so shallow, a torpedo couldn't run. And the Japanese invented these wooden fins that the torpedo would drop out of the plane, it would hit the water, the fin would break off, but that fin had slowed it down enough that it could strike ships in shallow water like Pearl Harbor. They also thought that their torpedo nets would work against all this, but in fact,

because they were sort of lazy and had a sort of a jungle fever that they didn't think anything was going to happen to them, the Americans left their torpedo nets down all the time. And also of these hundred thousand troops, a great many of them were little kids. The median age of the soldiers and sailors of Pearl Harbor was 19, meaning that a lot of people there were 16, 17, 18 years old. So all of the officers were living on the land. They all had apartments and housing on the land. And it were these little kids that were on the ships when the attack actually came. So when you hear stories of, there are famous stories of Pearl Harbor that one sailor tried chasing after the zero attack planes on bicycle, and another one tried throwing kitchen utensils at them.

Well if you think it's 17 year olds it all makes sense. We couldn't afford for people to train with actual weapons so when we trained bombers how to drop bombs they use sacks of flour instead of actual bombs and they were so common that they called them Betty Crocker bombs and then they actually trained tank units to march in formation like they were pretending they were in a tank because they didn't have enough tanks to train the people who were going to run the tanks. So they actually had them march as though they were sitting in the tank down the road. And then the next step in training the tanks,

they trained in abandoned Good Humor ice cream trucks and pretended those were tanks. They trained in abandoned good humor ice cream trucks and pretended those were tanks. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind the scenes stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve!

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They spent almost two years planning this mission. They did an incredible job investigating where the traffic was. So they figured out how to travel across the North Pacific during a fall period when no one did that because the weather was terrible. And then they went straight down to attack Hawaii. So instead of going straight across, as you would expect, they went way up north and then came down to avoid all the traffic. And finally, they learned how to refill everything that ran out of fuel quickly, like submarines and aircraft carriers with, they were called milk cows in German, but with tanker ships that went alongside them. And this was pretty much the first time that an entire armada, four destroyers, two heavy cruisers, six aircraft carriers.

It's 240 planes. It's 60 per carrier. Three submarines, an assortment of tankers and destroyers, two battleships and an oiler had their gas tanks refilled while they were traveling. It was a Sunday, so Americans didn't work on a Sunday, and they did it at dawn, so no one was up yet. And it was really a harbor full of little kids that were going to meet the most powerful fighters in Asia. And no one believed it was coming, and they couldn't imagine it. And it was just devastating how much they were able to destroy so fast in fact the japanese couldn't believe it they looked at what had happened they destroyed so many ships that they couldn't launch a third attack because so many things were on fire and there was so much smoke

going up that they couldn't see anything there were assaults. And so it was a little over an hour and a half. And they just streamed in one after the next, one after the next, one after the next. And it was torpedoes and bombs. And they had an incredible piece of luck where the head of the bombers was a guy named Genda, and his nickname was Mad Dog Genda. And he said, you know, I want you to drop your bombs

right next to the smokestacks of these ships, because then it'll penetrate into where the battleships store their munitions and turn the battleships into bombs. They would actually strike an explosion that would take over huge amounts of the harbor because they would turn the battleships themselves into bombs. The water was on fire. You would jump off the ship to get out of it into the water, but then come up and the oil had leaked over all the water. So the water itself was on fire. And of course, the Arizona is the most famous one that this happened to.

But also there's a spectacular picture of the Shaw that's exploding because the Japanese bombs had penetrated into its storage for where it stored its own munitions. The civilian casualties were pretty low. It was pretty much all military, 2,400, because it was so concentrated there at that harbor. The first thing that happened was the commander's, Admiral Kimmel, was told that he had to go outside because he didn't know anything about it. He lived so far away from the harbor, they didn't even hear it. And he had to run outside and watch it from his front lawn.

And the second thing that happened was the FBI agents in Hawaii called J. Edgar Hoover. agents in Hawaii called J. Edgar Hoover. And he so didn't believe what they were telling him that they had to hold the phone out the window so he could hear the attack on the phone. And finally, when it hit the White House, no one could believe it except FDR, who was barreling through the White House with unconstrained fury because he felt personally betrayed that the Japanese had done this. He had actually sent a letter to Emperor Hirohito two nights before, trying to keep things from going forward. But the people in charge of the telegrams to the palace delayed it until after Pearl Harbor. So Hirohito didn't even know that FDR had written to him.

President Roosevelt had just been having a meeting in his office when he received the news that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. Secretary of the Navy burst in and let him know that Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor and that more than 2,000 Americans were dead. and Americans were dead. FDR had been working for weeks to negotiate some kind of peace in the Pacific. And now it was clear that none of that had worked. Immediately after,

FDR got the idea that we should attack Japan on its home island and show them what's what. And everyone said, oh, we can't do that. There's no way we can do that. Oh, you can't do that. But the guy who was head of the Air Force at the time really thought this was a great idea. His name was Hap Arnold. So he decided this was a great idea. And he came up with the idea of launching army bombers off a Navy aircraft carrier led by a legendary daredevil pilot named Jimmy Doolittle.

This is known in history as the Doolittle Raid. And they had a very hard time doing this. They had to find the best pilots in the United States to pull it off. But 80 guys in 16 planes took off and succeed in attacking Japan. But they were seen by a Japanese spy boat before they could actually get to the point where they're supposed to launch. So they ended up crashing

in Japanese-controlled territory of China. And they literally woke up in the middle of the night on the other side of the world, hanging from the trees on their parachutes on the edge of a cliff. The pilots were found by Chinese villagers who brought them back to their homes. And they quickly discovered that they were being hailed as heroes. A small parade was thrown for them in the town the villagers lived in.

lived in. FDR really wanted people to be inspired instead of demoralized. So he tried to cover up, and then he was very successful at this cover-up, how bad things really were. To such an extent that the journalists would later get mixed up with the numbers. They would report on various numbers of ships. Some of them were being reported as surviving Pearl Harbor, but they would report on them having been sunk. And they got confused about what was sunk and what was destroyed because it was so devastating that they didn't think the American people could handle it. Eleanor Roosevelt heard what happened she had been hosting a luncheon and she walked into FDR's study just as she had received a phone call informing her of the attack and she described her husband as being deadly calm but that he spoke on the telephone to somebody and she heard him say,

the final blow had fallen and we've been attacked. As the day went on, Roosevelt spent much of his time consulting with military advisors, speaking by telephone to people like British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Winston Churchill, by the way, told him, we're all in the same boat now. And he began to dictate a speech to his secretary, Grace Tully, that he would deliver the next day. We will hear more about that in an upcoming episode. It's interesting to note that Eleanor actually addressed the nation on the Pearl Harbor attack before her husband did. The evening of December 7th, 1941, Eleanor Roosevelt had a scheduled weekly radio broadcast

in which she told listeners that even though the United States had been forced into this war, that she was confident that whatever is asked of America, we shall accomplish it. We are the free and unconquerable people of the United States of America. FDR stayed up very late that night speaking to members of his cabinet and talking to members of Congress, and he told his cabinet that this is probably the most serious crisis any cabinet has confronted since the Civil War. One of his cabinet members later noted that FDR was visibly distraught while telling the story about what had happened in Pearl Harbor, the sailors who had been killed and the destruction of the Pacific Fleet.

A lot of people in Washington thought that every Japanese person in Hawaii needed to be interned. But the Japanese population of Hawaii was one third of the whole population and it was just physically impossible. So there became this enormous debate primarily the army wanted to intern the Japanese and primarily the army on the West Coast. And there was the guy who is the head of defense for the West Coast

General DeWitt who was the most outspoken and the most demanding about this and he basically pushed it through. He got the Attorney General of California, Earl Warren, on his side in doing this. He convinced Henry Stimson, the head of the War Department, it should be done. He convinced the upper echelon of all of the Army that it should be done, even though Eleanor Roosevelt, J. Edgar Hoover, Biddle, who was the Attorney General of the United States, and many other people were against it. And at the end, FDR said that if this is what the Army thinks they need to defend the West Coast, then he would approve it. He didn't think it was a great idea either, but he felt

like if the Army said that it had to happen, then he couldn't stand in their way. If there was one thing Americans could take away from Pearl Harbor, it was this. I think that we got attacked because we treated people with disrespect. That we treated people not as equals, but as people who were inferior to us, and they got fed up. I think that we still live in what was used to be called a first world, second world and third world culture where we look at Europe meaning Britain and France and the Europeans who are sort of white Europe as being aligned with us and then we see eastern Europeans and Russians as still being somewhat of the communist bloc. And then we see the third world is sort of not worth knowing a lot of details about. We don't really know that a lot

about Africa. We don't know a lot about South America. We don't know a lot about Asia. So I think it's just a sort of a tier of information that goes on that may have to do with prejudice. So we all know that the attack on Pearl Harbor is a day that will live in infamy. But what happened next should also be at the top of our minds. I'll see you again soon. Thank you so much for listening to Here's Where It Gets Interesting. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. If you enjoyed this episode, would you consider leaving us a rating or a review or sharing

a link to it on your social media? All of those things help podcasters out so much. Here's Where It Gets Interesting is written and researched by executive producer Heather Jackson. Our audio engineer is Jenny Snyder, and is hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. See you again soon.