Betrayed Once, Shame on Them; Betrayed Twice, Shame on Us

By Rick Foley

My father was at Pearl Harbor. Almost everyone in Struthers, Ohio, back in 1941 knew that. After he retired to Vermont in 1959, Walter only mentioned it once, to the longtime waiter at the Quality Inn, a fellow who was a dead ringer for the young soda jerk in the Norman Rockwell painting hanging behind the cash register—the one of the folks at a diner listening to the radio that fateful Sunday morning. What no one knew was that for 55 years my father wrestled with the terrible knowledge that the attack was not a surprise.
On the morning of that “Day of Infamy,” my father, a noncommissioned damage control officer on the Battleship Pennsylvania, had dressed up to attend a gathering on the sister ship, the Battleship Arizona. He never made it. Walter lost more than thirty shipmates during the attack. Most to one bomb that came through one of the Pennsy's imposing stacks. Luckily, she had been berthed in dry dock, so the repairs went quickly and the great battleship sailed into the Pacific theater in time for the Battle of the Coral Sea, carrying Walter and those crew members who realized that the entire Seventh Fleet and the garrisoned army Air Force at Pearl had been offered up to history as sacrificial lambs. They had been betrayed.

Walter, like so many of his World War II comrades, never really talked about his war experiences. Like so many who have survived war's multiple forms of evil, he lived in a prison of secret torment. Only Walter's family and few close friends acknowledged privately that my dad, the man who returned from the war, was not the same person they had known.

The stories I was told agreed that Walter left Struthers, Ohio, in 1939 at the top of his game. Walter was the life of the party. Telling stories, center of attention, just being himself. It didn't hurt that your dad was—whoa—handsome! Better looking than Paul Newman, more like a cleaner, sharper version of Marlon Brando. The Football Star, the gifted, shifty halfback on offense, the hard-hitting safety. He went both ways, back when football was the real deal. He must have had eight scholarship offers, all Big Ten schools. And he had money. He owned a truck for delivering coal. That was during the Depression, mind you. Without him, we don't know how his family got by. His dad only worked then and now. Six children. Your Aunt Micky told me once that if not for Walter, she and her sisters would never have had money for even one new dress. Walter chose the Navy over college because he could send most of his pay home. Steady, one month at a time. And the Navy boasted a couple of dozen football teams that were all tougher than those college kid squads. Men against boys, he'd laugh.

After putting in his twenty years, Walter retired from the USN and atrophied into the anonymity of civilian life. Often in response to annoying but otherwise trivial everyday interactions with preoccupied neighbors, clueless sales clerks, or officious town employees, he groused bitterly why his generation had made its sacrifices. Walter clenched his jaw between short outbursts dismissing the Vietnam War as evidence of “the stupidity and arrogance of armchair generals.” When the gruesome fireworks of sophisticated US military illuminated the television version of the Persian Gulf War, Walter shook his head in pity for the Iraqi soldiers. “That's not a real war. It's a fake. Turkey shoot. The poor bastards don't stand a chance. We're there just to get at their oil.”

By the time cancer had started squeezing the life out of his 72-year-old body, I had only collected bits and pieces of his role in “the action.” But over the course of my last summer with him, in 1997, he opened up. A minute here, days later, four sentences there. So it went for 14 weeks, one continuous stream-of-consciousness with space, often days, for breathing it all in between the sequence of revelations.

Back at sea after the Day of Infamy, Walter and the Pennsy crew sweated out the Battle of the Coral Sea. “No one knows how important it was that we stopped the Japs there.” Then orders sent Walter over to the European theater, starting with convoy escort on the North Atlantic. “Toughest tour for me, ever. Never knew if our little tin-can would make it. Once, all of us below decks, huge storms out there, she rolled to 53, 54 degrees, know what that means?” Walt's forearm mimicked the radical list. “She shuddered, hung there, shuddered again, and ever-so-slowly came back. Some guys, I swear, kissed the deck.” Later he witnessed the landings on D-Day at Normandy from the deck of that same destroyer, the USS Doyle. Her crew launched the first wave of sappers before dawn, fired the first salvos against the German shore batteries, and by noon that day steamed back to England with a ship full of wounded GIs (“the decks were so bloody, you could hardly stand up”) and not one round of ammunition left to defend the ship.

“Pearl? That Sunday morning, I got up early, oh-five hundred hours, not that early back then, showered, shaved, and put on my dress whites. The Arizona football team had invited me to their end-of-the-year banquet. Most respected opponent award type-thing since we beat them for the championship and I scored the two touchdowns. But halfway down the gangplank, I got this funny feeling. I thought it was because I might be acting disrespectful of my teammates. After all, our Pennsy team won because we were a team. So I walked back, put on my khakis and grabbed some chow. Some of us were topside when the first planes flew over. As soon as we saw the markings, we looked at each other and said, “Hell, we've been set up!”

“How did we know? It was no surprise attack. Listen, we were the real Navy, the old-time Navy, we were professional sailors. We knew the Japs had carriers, big battleships and fast heavy cruisers. And submarines. If you knew your stuff, you knew they were very capable sailors. We respected their navy. That and we knew they were coming.”

“Just a few weeks before Pearl got hit, the Pennsy led a battle group out into the North Pacific. We were at General Quarters nearly the whole time. Know what that means? Four hours on, four hours off. Full battle gear, at your station, no matter how cramped. Then grab a few. A cook might bring you some hot coffee and sandwiches every so often. It wears you down. But we all kept our eyes glued to the horizon or looking up for a signal from the lookouts up top. Looking for strange masts or their planes looking for us. Pretty tense. We figured they would be on the lookout for us and they would have the firepower. Geez, huge sigh of relief every time a plane we spotted turned out to be one of ours returning. We had planes out there all the time, beyond the horizon. You couldn't tell us we weren't already at war.

“Then we get orders to return to Pearl. Not from the captain, not from the admiral—it's his flagship remember—but from Washington. Washington! When we get back to Pearl, they empty the ships. ‘Weekend pass? Take as many as you want. Two week pass? Yup. Wanna 30-day leave, wanna go stateside? Sure. Your mom is ill? How about an extended emergency leave? You name it.'

“They put the Pennsy in drydock. They bottle the battleships up in the harbor. No torpedo nets. Skeleton crews. You don't just sail outta there like that. It takes time to build steam, you have to take on a harbor pilot before you make for open water. Even then no destroyers left to run interference for us, to keep the subs away. The carriers were long gone, so forget air cover once we're well out at sea. But at least we'd have a fighting chance. See, we were set up. They lined us up like sitting ducks. When a fleet's in a war, it's gotta be at sea! It can't be sitting at anchor!

“The hardest part for me, for anybody onboard, was that when we got stateside, you couldn't tell anyone what had really happened. I tried with your mother, but . . . and if Maggie [my maternal grandmother] got wind of it, she would have thrown me outta the house! It was the dammed Japs this, sneaky Japs that. Pearl Harbor—the surprise attack. You couldn't say a thing. It was unthinkable. What our guys died for. The truth? They just covered it up.”

In retrospect, I thanked the gods that I had been preparing for that last summer with Walter. As a history buff I had trolled the literature for years to help get my mind around the Great Wars and the controversial aspects of America's subsequent military and economic aggression, especially my generation's war in Vietnam. Along the way I found Admiral Theobald's The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor and John Toland's Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath. Enough information for me to see that the full story around Pearl Harbor had not been reported, that the truth had been suppressed through a series of three carefully compromised hearings. In short, by the time Walter told his story, I was open, if not hungry to hear about his war experiences.
Among the many ironies that haunted my father's life, he passed away before a comrade's reasoned voice corroborated my father's personal story, validated his theory about Washington, and echoed his pain at the betrayal. Robert Stinnett's Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor, a superbly researched book, was published in 2000. Stinnett, a WW II Pacific Theater veteran, conducted an exhaustive, 17-year study of the pre-Pearl intelligence networks—dozens of interviews with radio operators and reviews of over 200,000 original source materials and recently released FOIA records.

Stinnett proves unequivocally that Walter's intuitions were straight on. President Roosevelt, with the support of a small group of confidants, including key military personnel, developed an eight-step strategy to provoke Japan into striking first in order to dislodge the American public's well-documented reluctance to engage in another war overseas. Despite the myth of Japanese “radio silence,” U.S. cryptographers listened to and deciphered hundreds of the enemy's military and diplomatic transmissions. U.S. intelligence tracked the Japanese Task Force across the North Pacific from the time it set sail from Hitokappu Bay on November 26 to its strike position just west of the Classical Composer Seamounts on December 5. FDR and his inner circle withheld this information from Admiral Kimmel and General Short, the officers in charge of Pearl Harbor. The deception worked to perfection. The U.S. forces “got caught with their pants down,” dramatic still photographs and filmed images filled the newsprint and theater screens, and the American majority's isolationism flipped to seamless patriotic outrage overnight. On December 8, Congress declared war on Japan (only one dissenting vote) and three days later on Germany and Italy.

FDR and his inner circle did not limit their action to nuanced suppression of information. On numerous occasions Washington went as far as to directly intervene and compromise the ability of U.S. Pacific forces to confront the enemy. Washington did, in fact, order Kimmel to break off from Exercise 191 on November 24—the tense search that Walter had endured at General Quarters and that had positioned the battle group over the exact same Seamounts from which the Japanese launched their planes two weeks later.

It took 59 years before Stinnett cracked the Pearl Harbor myth of initial deceptions and subsequent cover-ups—a litany of shredded documents, kangaroo-court hearings, intimidated witnesses, and the standard suppression of secrets under the “national security” seal. Not that Stinnett's impeccable research has dinted the Pearl Harbor myth. Yes, the Internet is also chock full of excellent coverage (for example, James Perloff's synopsis at www.thenewamerican.com) awaiting a larger audience. But I wonder what would have happened if the official Pearl Harbor conspiracy had been uncovered in the three postmortem hearings (1942–47) or even the Thurmond-Spence probe of 1995.

What if we Americans had come to grips with FDR's decision to provoke Japan into an overt act of aggression? How would we have regarded subsequent investigative reporting and so-called conspiracy theories in general? Would the American public have bought the subsequent mythic distortions that excused and fueled the Vietnam War (the fraudulent Gulf of Tonkin incident), the first Persian Gulf War (invasion of a sovereign state) or the ensuing UN sanctions against Iraq (WMDs)?

Would the authors of Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy , Forces, and Resources for a New Century (members of the Project for the New American Century and currently top officials in the Bush administration) have dared to label an event equivalent to a “new Pearl Harbor” as the prerequisite trigger to spur public support for their goal of American “full spectrum domination” across the globe and into space?

How would we have responded to the searing images from 9/11? Would we, as a common majority, have considered motivations for attack from both sides of the equation? How would we have assessed the subsequent rush of officialdom's conflicting distortions and the hundreds of profound unanswered questions? The quality of investigations reluctantly implemented, limited in scope, underfunded and squeezed by artificial deadlines? And the Bush administration's call to a “War on Terrorism”? The invasion of Afghanistan? Iraq? Our privacy?

Since my father's passing, Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and December 7 always spun me into uneasy periods of reflection. The events of 9/11 in 2001 stopped me cold in my tracks. The normal alignment of competing regular-life priorities winked off my internal radar screen, replaced with a myriad of 9/11 question marks. While the white-haired shell of a professor attends somewhat numbly to the responsibilities of work, the son-of-Walter doggedly works the galaxy of 9/11 puzzle pieces. For four years now I have watched my rearrangements of the bits of 9/11 information configure themselves around the Pearl Harbor myth, like a loose pile of iron filings spread on a sheet of paper, aligning themselves as a magnet is positioned below their playing field.

All the while my heart whispers, “Deceit, deceit. Welcome to your own Pearl Harbor.”