U.S. At War: Remember Pearl Harbor

Ever since Pearl Harbor, many a U.S. citizen has wondered why the fleet was bottled up, in port, on Dec. 7, an easy target for the Jap bombers. Last week a yellow-haired New Deal Congressman, Warren G. Magnuson, suggested an answer which might have come straight out of the pages of Dr. Fu Manchu—the Japanese, said he, had “made a patsy” out of the State Department. Special Envoy Saburo Kurusu, the story went, had complained to Cordell Hull that the far-ranging activity of the U.S. Navy gave Japanese militarists a chance to block his efforts at preserving peace. As a result, charged Magnuson, the fleet was kept anchored at Pearl Harbor and even air patrols curtailed, to assure the Japanese people that the U.S. planned no attack.

“The story,” Magnuson said, “is circulating in Washington. D.C., and on the Pacific Coast. I don’t know if it is true, but it should be answered.” Promptly and frigidly, the State Department answered it with a complete denial.

But the Magnuson story was only another manifestation of unanswered U.S. suspicions that the Pearl Harbor affair may disclose skeletons in Washington closets. The feeling had been, heightened by Rear Admiral Husband E. Kimmel’s reply to a Collier’s article by Senator Harry Truman (TIME, Aug. 28). Truman charged that Army and Navy commanders in Hawaii had failed to cooperate, implied that both were heavily responsible.

Kimmel denied that the Roberts Report contained the “basic truth” about Pearl Harbor, and coldly accused the Vice Presidential nominee of falsehood: “Your innuendo that General Walter C. Short and I were not on speaking terms is not true.” He predicted that “our people will be amazed by the truth.”

Last week the official Army and Navy Journal went even farther, in an article which demanded a prompt court-martial for Kimmel and Short:

“Unfortunately Pearl Harbor has become an issue in the Presidential campaign, the more so because Mr. Roosevelt is running for re-election as Commander in Chief as well as President. Because of the persistent postponement of the courts-martial belief has grown that Washington was negligent and that the commanders were scapegoats for higher authority.. . .”