HISTORICAL NOTES: Liquor & Pearl Harbor

The Women’s Christian Temperance Union, having brewed a new campaign against sale of liquor to the armed forces, last week pulled the cork with a pop. In Boston, Mrs. D. Leigh Colvin, W.C.T.U. president, handed out excerpts from a letter written to an American prohibitionist last January by Mitsuo Fuchida, Japanese naval air captain who led the air attack on Pearl Harbor. Under the heading “No More Pearl Harbors and No More Drinking,” Teetotaler Fuchida wrote: “Because of my subordinate position, I did not know at the time why the Japanese high command chose that day. After the war’s termination, I checked up . . . The Japanese high command expected on Sunday morning the American fleet would be crippled for fighting by the drinking of Saturday. In fact, the Saturday night before the attack, we, aviators, also expected through the Honolulu radio that there would be very much drinking among American seamen and soldiers. It might be payday and the drink-shops would be running full steam. We heard jazz from the Honolulu radio through the night. We smiled because we knew very well for the result . . . There would be oversleeping and unpreparedness.”

Against the Fuchida-W.C.T.U. analysis there still stood the conclusion of the Government’s Pearl Harbor investigation commission: liquor did not play a noteworthy part in the debacle of Pearl Harbor. The sad truth was that the forces on Oahu had been no better prepared Saturday morning than Sunday morning.