WAS FDR ANTISEMITIC? NO, THE OPPOSITE

What FDR said about Jews in private

His personal sentiments about Jews may help explain America’s tepid response to the Holocaust.

http://latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-medoff-roosevelt-holocaust-20130407,0,581781.story

By Rafael Medoff

April 7, 2013

In May 1943, President Franklin Roosevelt met with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the White House. It was 17 months after Pearl Harbor and a little more than a year before D-Day. The two Allied leaders reviewed the war effort to date and exchanged thoughts on their plans for the postwar era. At one point in the discussion, FDR offered what he called “the best way to settle the Jewish question.”

Vice President Henry Wallace, who noted the conversation in his diary, said Roosevelt spoke approvingly of a plan (recommended by geographer and Johns Hopkins University President Isaiah Bowman) “to spread the Jews thin all over the world.” The diary entry adds: “The president said he had tried this out in [Meriwether] County, Georgia [where Roosevelt lived in the 1920s] and at Hyde Park on the basis of adding four or five Jewish families at each place. He claimed that the local population would have no objection if there were no more than that.”

Roosevelt’s “best way” remark is condescending and distasteful, and coming from anyone else it would probably be regarded as anti-Semitism. But more than that, FDR’s support for “spreading the Jews thin” may hold the key to understanding a subject that has been at the center of controversy for decades: the American government’s tepid response to the Holocaust.

Here’s the paradox. The U.S. immigration system severely limited the number of German Jews admitted during the Nazi years to about 26,000 annually — but even that quota was less than 25% filled during most of the Hitler era, because the Roosevelt administration piled on so many extra requirements for would-be immigrants. For example, starting in 1941, merely leaving behind a close relative in Europe would be enough to disqualify an applicant — on the absurd assumption that the Nazis could threaten the relative and thereby force the immigrant into spying for Hitler.

Why did the administration actively seek to discourage and disqualify Jewish refugees from coming to the United States? Why didn’t the president quietly tell his State Department (which administered the immigration system) to fill the quotas for Germany and Axis-occupied countries to the legal limit? That alone could have saved 190,000 lives. It would not have required a fight with Congress or the anti-immigration forces; it would have involved minimal political risk to the president.

Every president’s policy decisions are shaped by a variety of factors, some political, some personal. In Roosevelt’s case, a pattern of private remarks about Jews, some of which I recently discovered at the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem and from other sources, may be significant.

In 1923, as a member of the Harvard board of directors, Roosevelt decided there were too many Jewish students at the college and helped institute a quota to limit the number admitted. In 1938, he privately suggested that Jews in Poland were dominating the economy and were therefore to blame for provoking anti-Semitism there. In 1941, he remarked at a Cabinet meeting that there were too many Jews among federal employees in Oregon. In 1943, he told government officials in Allied-liberated North Africa that the number of local Jews in various professions “should be definitely limited” so as to “eliminate the specific and understandable complaints which the Germans bore towards the Jews in Germany.”

There is evidence of other troubling private remarks by FDR too, including dismissing pleas for Jewish refugees as “Jewish wailing” and “sob stuff”; expressing (to a senator ) his pride that “there is no Jewish blood in our veins”; and characterizing a tax maneuver by a Jewish newspaper publisher as “a dirty Jewish trick.” But the most common theme in Roosevelt’s private statements about Jews has to do with his perception that they were “overcrowding” many professions and exercising undue influence.

This attitude dovetails with what is known about FDR’s views regarding immigrants in general and Asian immigrants in particular. In one 1920 interview, he complained about immigrants “crowding” into the cities and said “the remedy for this should be the distribution of aliens in various parts of the country.” In a series of articles for the Macon (Ga.) Daily Telegraph and for Asia magazine in the 1920s, he warned against granting citizenship to “non-assimilable immigrants” and opposed Japanese immigration on the grounds that “mingling Asiatic blood with European or American blood produces, in nine cases out of ten, the most unfortunate results.” He recommended that future immigration should be limited to those who had “blood of the right sort.”

FDR’s decision to imprison thousands of Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II was consistent with his perception of Asians as having innate racial characteristics that made them untrustworthy. Likewise, he apparently viewed with disdain what he seemed to regard as the innate characteristics of Jews. Admitting significant numbers of Jewish or Asian immigrants did not fit comfortably in FDR’s vision of America.

Other U.S. presidents have made their share of unfriendly remarks about Jews. A diary kept by Harry Truman included statements such as “The Jews, I find, are very, very selfish.” Richard Nixon’s denunciations of Jews as “very aggressive and obnoxious” were belatedly revealed in tapes of Oval Office conversations.

But the revelation of Franklin Roosevelt’s sentiments will probably shock many people. After all, he led America in the war against Hitler. Moreover, Roosevelt’s public persona is anchored in his image as a liberal humanitarian, his claim to care about “the forgotten man,” the downtrodden, the mistreated. But none of that can change the record of his response to the Holocaust.

The observance of Holocaust Memorial Day begins Sunday night. It is the annual occasion to reflect on the Nazi genocide and the world’s response to it. In the case of the United States, it is sobering to consider that partly because of Roosevelt’s private prejudices, innocent people who could have been saved were instead abandoned.

Rafael Medoff is the founding director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in Washington. His latest book is “FDR and the Holocaust: A Breach of Faith.”Medoff will speak Sunday at the Holocaust Memorial Day service at the Alpert Jewish Community Center in Long Beach.

.

…..MY TAKE ON THIS

PURE BULL. Frankenstein Rosenfeld (as a comrade called him to me today 😉 ) was a deep undercover jew himself, THROUGH BOTH MOTHER (THE SEPHARDIC OPIUM DEALER DELANO) AND THE ASHKENAZI FATHER, Rosenfeld.

To hide his pro-Jew agenda — destroying Hitler and Germany — he merely mouthed the right antisemitic phrases that would ingratiate him with, and reassure, the antisemitic US Army generals and US Navy admirals whom he desperately needed to use (the perfect example being the anti-jewish Army general George Patton) in order to crush Germany.

“See, generals, I’m not for the Jews. I cannot stand the pushy bastards myself! [And I do hope my seemingly off-the-cuff, spontaenous, antisemitic remarks get back to you, as I have designed.]

But that Hitler over there is a maniac — who is planning to conquer Europe and then invade the USA!”

“See, country club Republicans, I know you hate me as a socialist, but I am not working for the Jews, and this war will get the factory you own humming again with war production, and that will means lots of bucks for YOU so you can make your mansion mortgage payments and country-club membership!”

(I can think of an uncle of my late aunt Dorothy, who owned a big wire factory in Warwick, RI, and right after Pearl Harbor this guy was making money hand-over-fist, as much as he hated Roosevelt, and so was not complaining. After 11 years of the Great Depression — 1929-41 — he was quite glad to have full order books.)

And this was the result of FDR pretending successfully to be anti-Jewish but in reality being a Jew HIMSELF:

Antisemitic German woman raped and shot by Patton’s GIs in Zerbst, Saxony-Anhalt,  after she had bravely fired on them in rage, fighting to the death, for having destroyed her city and her country. (Note her not yet fired “panzerfaust,” the “tank-fist,” an anti-tank weapon, seen upper left, near her head.) This woman was not going to let her fatherland be stomped without a fight!  Her soul too went onward and to a higher world!

.

And then right after Hitler the great pro-Aryanist was gone, the Jew governments began massive Third-World immigration to genocide the whites.

.

…..THE CHANGE IN THE GREAT SEAL OF THE UNITED STATES UNDER ROSENFELD

.

1782 SKETCH WITH A REALISTIC RANDOM STAR PATTEN AS APPROVED BY THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS

 

GREAT SEAL IN 1793, WITH A RANDOM STAR PATTERN ABOVE THE US EAGLE

 

3) 1882 https://johndenugent.com/images/1882_US_Great_Seal_Centennial_Medal_Obverse.jpg

4)  1898   https://johndenugent.com/images/1898-quarter-coin.png

And then, under Franklin Rosenfeld in 1935…. the one-dollar bill was re-designed.

The back of the one-dollar bill HAD BEEN, before 1935….

7) 1930 https://johndenugent.com/images/Dollar_Bill_Reverse_1930.jpg

After 1935, with the new Great Seal design added (and you can see the initials of FDR approving it on the lower right; the final design put the Great Seal on the right, however, and moved the Freemasonic pyramid to the left).

8)

 

9) 2013  https://johndenugent.com/images/us-dollar-star-david1.jpg

And there you see clearly the TAKEOVER of America  by the crypto-Jew Roosevelt.

And this is why America went to war on Hitler Germany, so WE would destroy for the Jews their greatest enemy.

 

The Jewish director of the $750 billion TARP bailout reveals to Congress under oath that the Fed is bribing banks NOT to lend out all the bailout money the banks got — so the Great Recession that began in 2007 continues, in now Year Six!

How Hitler saved the working class from poverty and alcoholism, and built pride in family and honest labor· and the need for white unity worldwide.

.

.

* * *

I was sent the article displayed below, about a FDR false-flag attack scheme, by a former classmate at Georgetown. (I am adding to it a general article about FDR’s war-mongering policy and then an article confirming the first one’s assertions by the subject of the first article, that is, by Rear Admiral Kemp Tolley himself. )

FDR in 1940

There is no name for this newspaper, or any date, on the newspaper clipping, which is yellowed and looks to be from the 1970s or early 1970s.

The writer, J. David Truby, wrote several interesting books:

–To prove that gun control is pointless, he wrote this book about criminals making their own guns, especially in prison: http://www.amazon.com/Zips-Pipes-Pens-Arsenal-Improvised/dp/0873647025/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_1

–some others, such as Women at War…. http://www.amazon.com/J.-David-Truby/e/B001KIK1P0

and on silencers….http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Modern-Firearm-Silencers/J-David-Truby/e/9780873646666

..and for Harper’s magazine about Fidel Castro’s curveball. (The future marxist dictator Castro once tried out as a pitcher for the New York Yankees….)

I spoke with Truby on 12 March 2011 —  and he stands 100% by his story, which he says he wrote in the 1970s. Several major military history magazines, he told me, published his longer, 2,000-word-plus version of it, replete with many additional corroborating quotations. Truby conferred with Rear Admiral Kemp Tolley (1908-2000, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kemp_Tolley), who fully agreed with him running the story about the misuse of the USS Lanikai (earlier called the “Hermes”) and her crew (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Lanikai_%281914%29). (Tolley is a Norman name.)

Truby seemed quite unaware of who I was, and in no way should one conclude that he supports any of my views and goals. In fact, he indicated that he basically accepted the government’s version of 9/11, so he is NOT a counter-culture type.

He did show, however, an awareness that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was a false-flag attack.

Mr. Truby is 72 and travels a great deal, and said he would be hard to contact. His phone number in Pennsylvania is now unlisted.

If this story is true, FDR should have been tried for treason, and hanged at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials (which he helped brainchild) for inciting war, a war that killed 400,000 Americans, millions of Japanese, Germans and Russians.

After this article is an excellent short piece on FDR’s rank duplicity.

 

How Franklin Roosevelt Lied America Into War
by William Henry Chamberlin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Henry_Chamberlin)

(source: http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v14/v14n6p19_Chamberlin.html)

JdN: Chamberlin (a Norman name, btw) was a leftist when young, then turned against all forms of totalitarianism of the left and right, and finally, as this sarticle shows, lost all his illusions about F.D. Roosevelt as well.

Chamberlin lived from 1897-1969; here he is depicted an as idealistic young American leftist who supported the purported goal of Soviet communism: a more just society for the common working people.

My own experience has been that sincere liberals like Chamberlin can become excellent white nationalists, or at least antizionists, because their kindness gene is is a good thing when tempered by reality and not completely lost. As this article shows, Chamberlin sure woke up about Franklin Roosevelt, whom I do not hesitate to call a lying psychopath. (See my key article: https://johndenugent.com/psychopaths-in-power) I would not even call FDR “merely” a narcissist, since his destruction of the city of Dresden in February 1945 (upwards of 300,000 dead) demonstrated the most extreme and most deliberate cruelty and sadism toward women, children and refugees in general. Roosevelt (whose ancestors were the Sephardic Jewish Rosso Campos, who in Holland changed their name to Rosenvelt) committed this gigantic war crime at a time when the Allies had virtually already won the war. He just enjoyed KILLING.

Dresden, 1945. the British Royal Air force bombed by day and the Americans by night, and American P-51 Mustang fighter-bombers flew low-level up and down the banks of the Elbe River, strafing evacuated hospital patients and miserable escapees from the burning buildings. Tens of thousands of war refugees were burned alive; hundreds of thousands were blown apart or crushed by debris, or by suffocation from concrete dust. The 1912 Nobel Prize winning playwright Gerhart Hauptmann (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhart_Hauptmann) wrote that “those who lost the ability to cry any more relearned it at Dresden.”

According to his own official statements, repeated on many occasions, and with special emphasis when the presidential election of 1940 was at stake, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s policy after the outbreak of the war in Europe in 1939 was dominated by one overriding thought: how to keep the United States at peace. One of the President’s first actions after the beginning of hostilities was to call Congress into special session and ask for the repeal of the embargo on the sales of arms to belligerent powers, which was part of the existing neutrality legislation. He based his appeal on the argument that this move would help to keep the United States at peace. His words on the subject were:

Let no group assume the exclusive label of the “peace bloc.” We all belong to it … I give you my deep and unalterable conviction, based on years of experience as a worker in the field of international peace, that by the repeal of the embargo the United States will more probably remain at peace than if the law remains as it stands today … Our acts must be guided by one single, hardheaded thought — keeping America out of the war.

This statement was made after the President had opened up a secret correspondence with Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty and later Prime Minister in the British government. What has been revealed of this correspondence, even in Churchill’s own memoirs, inspires considerable doubt as to whether its main purpose was keeping America out of the war.

Roosevelt kept up his pose as the devoted champion of peace even after the fall of France, when Great Britain was committed to a war which, given the balance of power in manpower and industrial resources, it could not hope to win without the involvement of other great powers, such as the United States and the Soviet Union. The President’s pledges of pursuing a policy designed to keep the United States at peace reached a shrill crescendo during the last days of the 1940 campaign.

Mr. Roosevelt said at Boston on October 30:

“I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”

The same thought was expressed in a speech at Brooklyn on November 1:

“I am fighting to keep our people out of foreign wars. And I will keep on fighting.”

The President told his audience at Rochester, New York, on November 2: “Your national government … is equally a government of peace — a government that intends to retain peace for the American people.”

On the same day the voters of Buffalo were assured:

“Your President says this country is not going to war.”

And he declared at Cleveland on November 3:

“The first purpose of our foreign policy is to keep our country out of war.”

So much for presidential words. What about presidential actions? American involvement in war with Germany was preceded by a long series of steps, not one of which could reasonably be represented as conducive to the achievement of the President’s professed ideal of keeping the United States out of foreign wars. The more important of these steps may be briefly listed as follows:

 

1. The exchange of American destroyers for British bases in the Caribbean and in Newfoundland in September, 1940. This was a clear departure from the requirements of neutrality and was also a violation of some specific American laws. Indeed, a conference of top government lawyers at the time decided that the destroyer deal put this country into the war, legally and morally.

2. The enactment of the Lend-Lease Act in March, 1941. In complete contradiction of the wording and intent of the Neutrality Act, which remained on the statute books, this made the United States an unlimited partner in the economic war against the Axis Powers all over the world.

3. The secret American-British staff talks in Washington in January-March, 1941. Extraordinary care was taken to conceal not only the contents of these talks but the very fact that they were taking place from the knowledge of Congress. At the time when administration spokesmen were offering assurances that there were no warlike implications in the Lend-Lease Act, this staff conference used the revealing phrase, “when the United States becomes involved in war with Germany.”

4. The inauguration of so-called naval patrols, the purpose of which was to report the presence of German submarines to British warships, in the Atlantic in April, 1941.

5. The dispatch of American laborers to Northern Ireland to build a naval base, obviously with the needs of an American expeditionary force in mind.

6. The occupation of Iceland by American troops in July, 1941. This was going rather far afield for a government which professed as its main concern the keeping of the United States out of foreign wars.

7. The Atlantic Conference of Roosevelt and Churchill, August 9-12, 1941. Besides committing America as a partner in a virtual declaration of war aims, this conference considered the presentation of an ultimatum to Japan and the occupation of the Cape Verde Islands, a Portuguese possession, by United States troops.

8. The orders to American warships to shoot at sight at German submarines, formally announced on September 11.

[JdN: This was the VERY day that Charles Lindbergh gave his famous speech saying that the Jews, Britain and Roosevelt were trying to get America into the war.

The beginning of actual hostilities may be dated from this time rather than from the German declaration of war, which followed Pearl Harbor.

JdN: I think this point must be highly emphasized. Once Rosso Campo (the original Sephardic form of the name Roosevelt) gave the Constitution-raping order to fire on German U-boats (only the US Congress may declare war), on the date of September 11, 1941, the war between Germany and America was in effect “on.” And as any cognoscente knows, 33rd-degree Freemasons such as Roosevelt always use dates affiliated with the number eleven, for their own kabbalistic and numerological reasons, to launch their attacks and increase the might of the “New World Order.” Exactly sixty years later, we had the Zionist terror regime in Washington launch the September 11, 2001 attacks. On the date of 11-22 of the year 1963, President John Kennedy, who blocked Israeli acquisition of nuclear weapons, was publicly killed, and replaced by the crypto-Jew from Texas, Lyndon Baines Johnson. (See my major blog here: https://johndenugent.com/english/english-russian-and-american-sailors-prevented-wwiii-in-1967-thwarting-israeli-false-flag-attack-coordinated-by-closet-jew-lyndon-baines-johnson)

In an irony of history, US Navy pilot (and later US Navy Commander) George Lincoln Rockwell (also a Norman name) was one of those who helped sink German U-boats, albeit after Pearl Harbor.

9. The authorization for the arming of merchant ships and the sending of these ships into war zones in November, 1941.
10. The freezing of Japanese assets in the United States on July 25, 1941. This step, which was followed by similar action on the part of Great Britain and the Netherlands East Indies, amounted to a commercial blockade of Japan. The war-making potentialities of this decision had been recognized by Roosevelt himself shortly before it was taken. Addressing a delegation and explaining why oil exports to Japan had not been stopped previously, he said: “It was very essential, from our own selfish point of view of defense, to prevent a war from starting in the South Pacific. So our foreign policy was trying to stop a war from breaking out down there…. Now, if we cut the oil off, they [the Japanese] probably would have gone down to the Netherlands East Indies a year ago, and we would have had war.”
11. When the Japanese Prime Minister, Prince Fumimaro Konoye, appealed for a personal meeting with Roosevelt to discuss an amicable settlement in the Pacific, this appeal was rejected, despite the strong favorable recommendations of the American ambassador to Japan, Joseph C. Grew.
12. Final step on the road to war in the Pacific was Secretary of State Hull’s note to the Japanese government of November 26. Before sending this communication Hull had considered proposing a compromise formula which would have relaxed the blockade of Japan in return for Japanese withdrawal from southern Indochina and a limitation of Japanese forces in northern Indochina.

13. However, Hull dropped this idea under pressure from British and Chinese sources. He dispatched a veritable ultimatum on November 26, which demanded unconditional Japanese withdrawal from China and from Indochina and insisted that there should be “no support of any government in China other than the National government [Chiang Kai-shek].” Hull admitted that this note took Japanese-American relations out of the realm of diplomacy and placed them in the hands of the military authorities.

14. The negative Japanese reply to this note was delivered almost simultaneously with the attack on Pearl Harbor. There was a strange and as yet unexplained failure to prepare for this attack by giving General Short and Admiral Kimmel, commanders on the spot, a clear picture of the imminent danger. As Secretary of War Stimson explained the American policy, it was to maneuver the Japanese into firing the first shot, and it may have been feared that openly precautionary and defensive moves on the part of Kimmel and Short would scare off the impending attack by the Japanese task force which was known to be on its way to some American outpost.

Here is the factual record of the presidential words and the presidential deeds. No convinced believer in American non-intervention in wars outside this hemisphere could have given the American people more specific promises than Roosevelt gave during he campaign of 1940. And it is hard to see how any President, given the constitutional limitations of the office, could have done more to precipitate the United States into war with Germany and Japan than Roosevelt accomplished during the 15 months between the destroyer-for-bases deal and the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Former Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce found the right expression when she charged Roosevelt with having lied us into war. Even a sympathizer with Roosevelt’s policies, Professor Thomas A. Bailey, in his book, The Man in the Street, admits the charge of deception, but tries to justify it on the following grounds:

Franklin Roosevelt repeatedly deceived the American people during the period before Pearl Harbor … He was like the physician who must tell the patient lies for the patient’s own good … The country was overwhelmingly non-interventionist to the very day of Pearl Harbor, and an overt attempt to lead the people into war would have resulted in certain failure and an almost certain ousting of Roosevelt in 1940, with a complete defeat of his ultimate aims.

Professor Bailey continues his apologetics with the following argument, which leaves very little indeed of the historical American conception of a government responsible to the people and morally obligated to abide by the popular will:

A president who cannot entrust the people with the truth betrays a certain lack of faith in the basic tenets of democracy. But because the masses are notoriously shortsighted and generally cannot see danger until it is at their throats, our statesmen are forced to deceive them into an awareness of their own long-run interests. This is clearly what Roosevelt had to do, and who shall say that posterity will not thank him for it?

Presidential pledges to “keep our country out of war,” with which Roosevelt was so profuse in the summer and autumn of 1940, could reasonably be regarded as canceled by some new development in the international situation involving a real and urgent threat to the security of the United States and the Western Hemisphere.

But there was no such new development to justify Roosevelt’s moves along the road to war in 1941. The British Isles were not invaded in 1940, at the height of Hitler’s military success on the Continent. They were much more secure against invasion in 1941. Contrast the scare predications of Secretary Stimson, Secretary Knox, and General Marshall, about the impending invasion of Britain in the first months of 1941, with the testimony of Winston Churchill, as set down in his memoirs: “I did not regard invasion as a serious danger in April, 1941, since proper preparations had been made against it.”

Moreover, both the American and British governments knew at this time that Hitler was contemplating an early attack upon the Soviet Union. Such an attack was bound to swallow up much the greater part of Germany’s military resources.

It is with this background that one must judge the sincerity and realism of Roosevelt’s alarmist speech of May 27, 1941, with its assertion: “The war is approaching the brink of the western hemisphere itself. It is coming very close to home.” The President spoke of the Nazi “book of world conquest” and declared there was a Nazi plan to treat the Latin American countries as they had treated the Balkans. Then Canada and the United States would be strangled.

Not a single serious bit of evidence in proof of these sensational allegations has ever been found, not even when the archives of the Nazi government were at the disposal of the victorious powers. The threat to the security of Great Britain was less serious in 1941 than it was in 1940. There is no concrete evidence of Nazi intention to invade the American hemisphere in either year, or at any predictable period.

One is left, therefore, with the inescapable conclusion that the promises to “keep America out of foreign wars” were a deliberate hoax on the American people, perpetrated for the purpose of insuring Roosevelt’s re-election and thereby enabling him to proceed with his plan of gradually edging the United States into war.

JdN: Election results 1940, a landslide for Rosenfeld (blue states)

From The Journal of Historical Review, Nov.-Dec. 1994 (Vol. 14, No. 6), pages 19-21. This piece is excerpted from the anthology, edited by Harry Elmer Barnes, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (1953), Chapter 8, pages 485-491.

* * *

About the Author

William Henry Chamberlin (1897-1969) was an American historian and journalist. He was Moscow correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor in Moscow, 1922-1934, and Far Eastern Correspondent for the Monitor, 1939-1940. He contributed important reports and articles to leading American newspapers and periodicals, and for a time wrote a regular column for The Wall Street Journal. Among his books were Soviet Russia (1930), Russia’s Iron Age (1934), The Russian Revolution, 1917-1921 (in two volumes; 1935), Japan Over Asia (1939), The European Cockpit (1947), and America’s Second Crusade (1950).

 

…..ADMIRAL TOLLEY SPEAK OUT HIMSELF

October 1973 Volume 24, Issue 6

THE STRANGE MISSION OF THE Lanikai

On March 18, 1941, eighty-two days out of Manila, all sails set, rigging taut, a small, green, weathered schooner entered the port of Fremantle, Western Australia. Atop her afterdeck house a small-caliber, slim-barrelled cannon sat on a brass pedestal. Faded, tattered Philippine and United States flags whipped from her spanker gaff. Above them, at the main peak, floated a wisp of bunting that the intrigued onlookers aboard the Allied warships present thought might be a man-o-warsian’s commission pennant.

South China Sea: the CIA map

The windjammer’s name, U.S.S. Lanikai, sparked instant recognition at headquarters—twice during the last three months she had been reported overdue and presumed lost. Chief of staff Rear Admiral William R. Purnell [JdN: another Norman name] met her skipper with appropriate astonishment: “My God! What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be dead!”

My introduction to Lanikai took place on December 4, 1941, when as a young lieutenant I was called into U.S. Asiatic Fleet headquarters on the Manila waterfront and told I was her commanding officer. Orders were oral, informal, and brief.

“Commission her as a U.S. man-of-war, get a part-Filipino crew aboard, arm her with a cannon of some sort and one machine gun,”

said Fleet operations officer Commander Harry Slocum [JdN: http://www.asiaticfleet.com/orbat.htm], adding that she was to be ready for sea in forty-eight hours, provisioned for a two-week cruise.

Having been brought up in a Navy where one planned in detail and requisitioned in quintuplicate after many conferences and much coffee, I was relieved to be set straight on the new, streamlined procedure.

“The rules do not apply here,” Slocum explained. “The Navy Yard has been directed to give you highest priority —anything you ask for within reason—without paperwork of any kind. Of this you can rest absolutely assured; the President himself has directed it.”

Tolley at this time was a lieutenant; this photo shows him in his later rank of commander

Proof that the White House had spoken was soon evident. “Sign this receipt for ‘one schooner’ and tell me what you want,” said Commander R. T. Whitney, captain of the Yard. There was no time for the usual small talk or coffee. Telephone calls to ordnance, supply, hospital, communications, and personnel mobilized the Yard’s resources. A Spanish-American War three-pounder “quick firer” already was being bolted to the afterdeck-house roof, the biggest cannon it was felt could safely be fired without collapsing the twenty-seven-year-old ship’s structure. A half dozen Filipino-American seamen were on their way to the dock. The native crewmen who had come in a package with the ship had just been sworn into the Navy. Speaking little English, they were at a loss to understand what it was all about, but they cheerfully accepted the bags of uniforms, proudly donned the little round white sailor hats, and turned to, loading stores, ammunition, and the bags of rice and cases of salmon that were their bread and meat.

Chief Boatswain’s Mate Charlie Kinsey arrived at the dock with his jaw dropped down. He walked forward and squinted at the ship’s nameplate, then called down to Chief Gunner’s Mate Merle Picking, who already was checking out his “main battery,” the three-pounder.

“I’ve got orders to the Lanikai,” said Kinsey in a thick Georgia drawl, “but this cain’t be it!”

The President’s message, carrying highest-secrecy classification and precedence, had said his order was to be executed “as soon as possible and in two days if possible.” So ready or not, on the forenoon of December 7—still December 6 in the United States—I reported for final instructions. “Open these orders when you are clear of Manila Bay,” said Slocum. “I can say for your ears only that you are headed for Indochina. If you are queried by the Japanese, tell them you’re looking for the crew of a downed plane.”

Lanikai’s radio receiver worked, I reported, but the transmitter did not. The water supply concerned me, too. Aboard a ship designed for a crew of five there were nineteen.

“You have a set of international signal flags, don’t you?” said Slocum ironically. “If you run short of water, signal any passing Japanese man-of-war for some.”

Lanikai sailed the fifteen miles out to Manila Bay’s entrance that afternoon and anchored, awaiting dawn to transit the minefield channel. Her crew, worn out from frantic last-minute preparations for sea, found their bunks early. Topside, in the soft tropical night, I watched the hundreds of lights twinkling in the clear air over the great fortress of Corregidor, “The Rock,” bulking huge and black nearby. Tomorrow those sealed orders would be torn open and the great adventure revealed.

JdN: The American naval base, still in ruins from battles in 1942 and 1945 during WWII, at Corregidor, an islet guarding the port city and Philippine capital of of Manila.

Slocum had confided that Lanikai would relieve the U.S.S. Isabel on station; she had left on December 3 for Camranh Bay’s entrance. “Izzy” was a trim, white, nine-hundred-ton yacht taken into the Navy during World War i. For the last decade she had served as holiday flagship for the commander in chief of the Asiatic Fleet. Her age and flyweight military muscle clearly made her the most easily expendable unit in the Fleet, but she possessed in addition a striking attribute for this mission: as a Navy buff Roosevelt could plainly see, in the copy of Jane’s Fighting Ships he kept handy, that Isabel’s white hull and buff upperworks, configuration, and wholly inconspicuous little battery of four 3-inch guns made her look like any typical small merchantman that used the China coast.

So F.D.R. had designated Isabel as one of the “three small ships” that were to be used—the others to be chartered locally. And, as the President had “suggested,” a token five Filipino seamen were put aboard before her precipitous departure. She was to remain painted white, Admiral Thomas C. Hart [JdN: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_C._Hart], commander in chief, Asiatic Fleet, directed her skipper in a personal briefing. Her running lights were to be dimmed at night to give the appearance of a fishing craft.

USS Lanikai

At 7 A.M. on the fifth Isabel was forty miles from Camranh Bay and its big concentration of Japanese warships when a Japanese plane closed her. Isabel was shadowed the remainder of the day, planes sometimes coming so close that their identification numbers could be made out. At 7:10 P.M., on Hart’s urgent orders, she reversed course and headed back to Manila Bay.

Replying to the President’s message, Hart radioed:

Hart

“HAVE OBTAINED TWO VESSELS. ONE NOW ENROUTE INDOCHINA COAST. SECOND ONE SAILING SOON AS READY. AM CERTAIN SHOULD NOT OPERATE THEM SOUTH OF PADARAN. ISABEL RETURNING. WAS SPOTTED AND IDENTIFIED WELL OFF COAST HENCE POTENTIAL UTILITY OF HER MISSION PROBLEMATICAL. HAVE NOT YET FOUND THIRD VESSEL FOR CHARTER.”

The “one now en route” was Lanikai; the second was never commissioned, the plan having been overtaken by events at Pearl Harbor.

The eighth of December, 1941, was only three hours old when a radioman nudged me awake from fitful slumber on a rubber mat atop the afterdeck house. The message he carried read “ORANGE WAR PLAN IN EFFECT. RETURN TO MANILA,” the “orange” being a supposedly secret euphemism for “Japanese” that was recognized Navy-wide. But there was no need to awaken the crew until daybreak.

In today’s frame of reference, which tolerates the Korean and Vietnam wars having been fought without constitutional legitimacy, it is difficult to appreciate F.D.R.’s dilemma in 1941. He was sentimentally attached to China, whence Grandpa Warren Delano [JdN” a Sephardic Jewish name; the homosexual and Jewish current mayor of Paris, France, is a Delanoe], a traditional Old China hand, had thrilled the young Franklin with tall tales of clipper ships, pirates, mandarins, and perhaps even something of the opium operations that had contributed a million dollars to the family fortune. The powerful China lobby, plus Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, a lifetime Japanophobe, reinforced the Rooseveltian leanings. And with advisers like Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, and man for all seasons Harry Hopkins to encourage the President’s liberal tendencies, he naturally felt deeply opposed to the Nazi-Fascists.

But the President found himself mired in a swamp of national apathy. Army draftees drilled with wooden rifles, stovepipe “cannon,” and “tanks” improvised from trucks. Their typical view of Army life was made clear in messages chalked on the fences and in the latrines: “OHIO”—over the hill in October (i.e., desertion). The general beer-hall and back-yard bull session attitude was “Let those European bastards beat each others’ brains out!”- sentiments strongly reinforced when Germany fell on the U.S.S.R. in June. What ordinary American wanted to die defending Singapore? or Surabaja (if he had ever heard of it), or blitzed London? or even Manila? But Roosevelt was a determined man as well as a consummate political strategist; despite public unconcern he had aligned the nation against Hitler by means of heavy congressional approval of the Lend-Lease Act on March 11, 1941.

On August 3, 1941, F.D.R. left New London, Connecticut, aboard his yacht U.S.S. Potomac, taking great pains to give the appearance of a fishing holiday. Transferred secretly at sea to the cruiser U.S.S. Augusta, he arrived at Argentia, Newfoundland, on August 5 for a four-day initial face-to-face meeting with Winston Churchill, also on a fishing expedition and a desperately urgent one. Britain was broke. Her lone ally, Russia, was reeling backward. It was 1917 all over again.

JdN: US Marines contingent aboard the USS Augusta. America was then 90% white, but the war against Hitler was a war to crush “white supremacy.”

What F.D.R. promised Churchill over the nuts and wine perhaps never will be fully known, but a reference Churchill made in the House of Commons in January, 1942, gives a clue: ”… the probability, since the Atlantic Conference, at which I discussed these matters with Mr. Roosevelt, that the United States, even if not herself attacked, would come into the war in the Far East. …”

Verbal promises to Churchill were one thing, but commitments in black and white were quite another. During mid-1941 the finishing touches were put on Rainbow 5, a world-encompassing war plan hammered out in Washington by American planners after a series of secret Anglo-American military consultations officially referred to as ABC-I (American-British Conversations). The U.S. Congress, which then still jealously guarded its treaty and war-making prerogatives, had no inkling of the plan’s existence, let alone the fact that it gave first priority to the survival of Great Britain rather than to the defense of U.S. territories in the Pacific.

Roosevelt had verbally approved Rainbow 5 for distribution to the major commands, but it was to be inoperative “until we get into the war,” as Chief of Naval Operations [JdN: The CNO is the top man in the US Navy] Admiral Harold “Betty” Stark later testified F.D.R. had said.

Roosevelt also took the precaution, considerably to the disappointment of the British, of not officially approving the ABC reports in advance, instead making this contingent upon a United States declaration of war.

On July 7 the President made a more open move toward war; by executive order, and with the agreement of the Icelandic government, American forces occupied Iceland.

JdN: I added this (as well as all other photos and captions on this blog).

Iceland

Mountainous landscape, glacier formations, and overall rugged and inhospitable terrain as below provided the background to the Marine camps set up in Iceland. Pictured here is a Nissen hut built by Marines after their arrival. LtCol Harold K. Throneson Collection —————————————- Iceland is slightly smaller than the state of Kentucky, and features mountains, glaciers, volcanoes, geysers, hot springs, and lava beds. The southern coastal areas enjoy a temperate climate because the Gulf Stream passes close enough to modify the normal weather of the Arctic Circle which touches the northern coast. In 1941 the island had limited coastal roads, crossed by many rapidly flowing glacial streams. Coastal areas had grassy fields suitable for sheep and pony pasturage and tundra terrain completely devoid of bushes or trees. The population in 1941 numbered 120,000.Fishing in the cold waters around Iceland was the nation’s major industry. Along the 2,300 miles of jagged coastline, there were a number of small fishing villages reached only by sea, as there was no raod network around the island beyond the area of Reykjavik, the capital and main city.Homesteads outside Reykjavik tended to be isolated. Author’s Collection —————————————- At the outbreak of the war, Iceland enjoyed the status of autonomous parliamentary monarchy, sharing the Danish royal family with Denmark. When the Nazis overran Denmark in April 1940, the Icelandic Parliament voted to take over the executive power of the Danish King and to assume control of foreign affairs. The strategic island became an independent republic, but was wholly defenseless. This state of affiars gave rise to considerable concern by leaders in London and Washington, a concern not shared to any degree by the insular-minded Icelanders.The majority of Icelandic citizens accepted the American occupation as a necessary evil. They didin’t care much for the British, but were well aware of the German threat. There was a pro-German element among the populace because, before the war, German engineers had built Iceland’s roads and had piped in hot water from the geysers to heat greenhouses inthe city. As a result, there were some anti-foreign feelings, especially among youth groups.Many of the Icelanders spoke English. They were a well-educated and literate people with a pure and ancient Viking language and the world’s oldest representative government.

 

Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, chief of the Navy War Plans Division, asked the President if this didn’t conflict with his October 30, 1940, speech in Boston, where he had ringingly proclaimed that

“I have said this before, but I shall say it again, and again, and again; your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars!”

According to Turner, the President answered not a word but leaned back, his long cigarette holder elevated at a jaunty angle, and gave vent to a hearty chuckle.

On September 4 the technically neutral U.S. destroyer Greer assisted a British patrol plane in a fight with a German submarine about 175 miles from Iceland. A week later the President issued his “shoot on sight” proclamation, authorizing and presumably legalizing American warships’ firing on German or Italian warcraft wherever met in the western Atlantic.

On October 17, in response to the new doctrine, the U.S. destroyer Kearny attacked a U-boat west of Iceland and managed to survive a German torpedo. Germany did not declare war but countered off Iceland: on October 31 the U.S. destroyer Reuben James was sunk, with the loss of most of her crew [JdN: 115 men]. But to K.D.R.’s discomfiture these events apparently did little to stir the American public out of its lack of interest in Europe’s war.

USS Reuben James

Before the shock of Pearl Harbor finally and dramatically reversed the course of U.S. opinion, before Congress became aroused enough or informed enough to ask embarrassing questions about commitments, much less become aware of such rather informal Naval operations as conducted by Isabel and Lanikai in the western Pacific, a sequence of events had with inexorable urgency filled the five weeks preceding December 7. In the lexicon of a later age the countdown approached zero in the following fashion:

November 5. Unknown, of course, to the Americans, a Japanese combined-fleet operation order directed that war preparations be completed by early December.

A memorandum from Army chief of staff General George Marshall and Admiral Stark warned the President that the U.S. Pacific Fleet was inferior to Japan’s fleet and could not take the offensive.

November 7. Stark wrote to Hart that although the Navy was already at war in the Atlantic, the country didn’t seem to realize it and was still apathetic. November 10. Churchill said in a public speech thai in case of war between Japan and the United States a British declaration would follow “within the hour.”

November 17. United States Ambassador Joseph C. Grew, in Tokyo, warned Washington to guard against “the probability of the Japanese exploiting every possible tactical advantage, such as surprise.”

November 19. The State Department warned U.S. citizens in the Far East to get out.

November 20. Japanese envoys Nomura and Kurusu conveyed to Secretary of State Hull Japan’s demands for the preservation of peace: the United States must keep hands off China, resume trade relations with Japan, help Japan get supplies from the Netherlands East Indies, and stop American naval expansion in the western Pacific.

November 21. Things looked black to Hull, but the day was brightened somewhat by Kurusu’s telling him Japan would not necessarily be bound by the terms of its tripartite mutual assistance pact with Italy and Germany.

The Pearl Harbor attack force assembled at Hitokappu Bay, Kuriles. November 22. Roosevelt suggested a modus vivendi with Japan to last six months, having already been sounded out by Ambassador Nomura on the subject on the tenth. This was to include among other things the resumption of economic relations between the two countries; a suspension of Japanese troop movements to Indochina, Malaya, and the Netherlands East Indies; and American encouragement of non-hostile conversations between Japan and China. Reactions to these suggestions from the Chinese, the British, the Australians, and the Dutch varied from bitter opposition to nervous skepticism.

An intercepted message to the Japanese envoys in Washington revealed that the previous deadline for meeting Japan’s demands, November 5, had been extended to midnight of the eighth, after which there would be no possibility of an extension and “things are automatically going to happen.”
November 24. United States forces occupied Dutch Guiana. All top U.S. military commands were alerted that a “surprise aggressive movement in any direction including attack on the Philippines and Guam is a possibility.”
November 25 The War Council—Roosevelt, Hull, Secretaries of War and the Navy Stimson and Knox, Marshall, and Stark—met for a long discussion. Stimson, the meticulous diarist, noted that Roosevelt felt the attack might come as soon as December `1, “for the Japanese are notorious for making an attack without warning, and the question was what we should do. The question was how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves” [italics supplied].

Nevertheless the modus vivendi’s final terms were smoothed out. The whole show left Stark up in the air. Somewhat distractedly he wrote to commander in chief U.S. Fleet Admiral Husband E. Kimmel at Pearl Harbor: “I won’t go into the pros and cons of what the United States may do. I will be damned if I know. I wish I did. The only thing I know is that we may do most anything and that’s the only thing I’m prepared for; or we may do nothing—I think it is more likely to be ‘anything.’ ”

A very large Japanese expedition was sighted at sea below Taiwan, moving south.
November 26. An intercept from Hanoi to Tokyo, dated the twenty-fifth, ominously noted that “no doubt the Cabinet will make a decision between peace and war within the next day or two.” There was a parade of worried diplomats in and out of the State Department and White House. The Chinese ambassador, along with Chiang Kai-shek’s influential, rich trouble-shooter, T. V. Soong (Chiang’s brother-in-law), called on Roosevelt, bitterly protesting the proposed modus vivendi and threatening that it would wreck the Chinese will to continue resistance. Ignoring all normal protocol and lines of diplomatic communication, the Chinese had been soliciting senators, bankers, and private citizens in their campaign to promote support of Chiang.

Secretary Stimson telephoned Roosevelt the news of the big Japanese force headed south and was nearly blasted loose from his handset. The President “fairly blew up,” Stimson recorded. “Utter lack of good faith. It changes the whole situation!” F.D.R. angrily shouted.

Kurusu and Nomura, invited over at teatime by Hull, no doubt happily anticipated good news on the modus vivendi. But the tea was bitter. Hull handed them what variously has been called a peace proposal, a modified modus vivendi, and an ultimatum. Far from acceding to Japan’s demands of November 20, it called for Japan to get out of China and Indochina and respect the status quo in the Pacific. There was a heated two-hour discussion during which the Japanese envoys said it would be useless to send such a thing to Tokyo. In their message doing just that, they expressed the view that negotiations were a closed issue and that the United States could be expected to occupy the Netherlands East Indies as they recently had Iceland and Dutch Guiana.

The Japanese carriers of the Pearl Harbor attack force were on their way from the Kuriles toward Hawaii.
November 27. Stimson had got wind of something big going on, so during the forenoon he telephoned Hull to find out what it was. “I have washed my hands of it!” said Hull testily. “It is now in the hands of you and Knox—the Army and the Navy.”

That same morning the war warnings that have been the subject of so much dispute went out to the major field commanders. The Army message contained a sentence missing from the Navy warning: “IF HOSTILITIES CANNOT, REPEAT CANNOT, BE AVOIDED, THE UNITED STATES DESIRES THAT JAPAN COMMIT THE FIRST OVERT ACT.”

This was inserted on direct order to Stimson by the President, whose sensitive political nerve ends reminded him that even after the recent destroyer incidents in the Atlantic, the American public was stone cold to the idea of going to war with anybody.

November 28. Having been handed the baton by Hull, Stimson was itching to crack somebody over the head with it and suggested to Roosevelt that MacArthur’s planes bomb the Japanese task forces passing by the Philippines. Stimson never had forgiven the Japanese for humiliating him in 1931, when as Hoover’s Secretary of State he had tried unsuccessfully to fling the Japanese out of Manchuria without the force to turn the trick.

The War Cabinet, totally unaware of the Pearl Harbor attack force, met at noon to discuss the major Japanese expedition now heading south off Indochina. As usual, Stimson recorded the gist of the proceedings; it was the opinion of everyone that “if this expedition was allowed to get around the southern point of Indochina and to go off and land in the Gulf of Siam … it would be a terrific blow at all of the three Powers, Britain at Singapore, the Netherlands, and ourselves in the Philippines. It was the consensus of everybody that this must not be allowed.… that if the Japanese got into the Isthmus of Kra, the British would fight. It was also agreed that if the British fought, we would have to fight.”

There was some chat about the U.S.S. Panay incident, and it may be assumed that the President’s elephantine memory gave him total recall of the worldwide furor provoked when this tiny Yangtze gunboat was sunk by trigger-happy Japanese aviators on December 12, 1937. There was not much hope of inflaming American public opinion or Congress sufficiently to support a declaration of war, judging from their apathetic reactions to the Atlantic incidents. But it was essential that Roosevelt have at the very least a legal reason to commit American forces. Perhaps pondering this, the President left to escape the pressure briefly at Warm Springs, Georgia.
December 1. The Japanese cabinet secretly made the final decision for war. An intercepted Tokyo message told Japanese diplomats in London, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Manila to destroy their code machines.

The Japanese envoys in Washington, following their orders, made one more appeal to an unreceptive Hull, suggesting a second-level meeting at Hawaii—Wallace or Hopkins versus Prince Konoye or Viscount Ishii.

Having been urged by Hull to return from Warm Springs, Roosevelt arrived at the White House from Union Station about noon. Hull was already there. Stark arrived at 12:50 and left at 1:25, overstaying the President’s lunchtime by twenty-five minutes. Obviously what went on was too hot for the telephone, as Roosevelt’s alter ego and prime counsellor, Harry Hopkins, had to come from his U.S. Naval Hospital bed for a belated White House snack and a post-mortem on the conference. He tottered in just as Stark was leaving. There is no record of the proceedings. Roosevelt, Hopkins, Hull, and Stark are not known to have mentioned the matter afterward; Stark adroitly fielded questions in investigations or sat mute when interviewed on the issue.

Admiral Stark hurried back to his office and handed his Assistant Chief of Naval Operations, Rear Admiral Royall E. Ingersoll, the bare, specific requirements laid down by F.D.R. that resulted in the commissioning of the Lanikai, but gave him no background information whatever. By about 7 P.M. the message Ingersoll had labored on and conferred over during the afternoon went to the code machine for transmission to Manila. The events of the week that followed soon became a page of history that closes with those well-remembered words- Pearl Harbor.

Direct hit at Pearl Harbor on USS Oklahoma. Hundreds died.

Following the unexpected outbreak of a very clearly expected war, Lanikai fell into a sort of limbo, her raison d’etre dissolved by the “incident” at Pearl Harbor. A heavy Japanese air raid on December 10 destroyed Manila’s Cavité Navy Yard and ended any possibility of Lanikai’s being fitted with submarine-listening gear. So for a week she patrolled under sail outside the harbor entrance. To everyone’s genuine surprise nothing collapsed when several test rounds were fired from the three-pounder. Monster cockroaches and ancient debris tumbled out of crannies, but if there were any rats aboard, no one saw them. More likely, in the wise ways of ships’ rats, they had got the gist of F.D.R.’s message and left Lanikai for better duty elsewhere.

Blundering through the minefield channel twice daily—even though the mines were “friendly”—clearly was a greater menace to Lanikai than her patrols might be to the Imperial Navy. So on December 24 she was called alongside the pier to help evacuate Navy headquarters.

With the Asiatic Fleet falling back on Java, there was no point in Hart’s remaining; he turned over local Naval command to Rear Admiral Francis W. Rockwell, commandant 6th Naval District, and departed southward on December 26. The day before, a very un-merry Christmas, Hart’s flag lieutenant, Lieutenant Commander Charles Adair, jumped down to Lanikai’s deck and, without much trouble, located me.

“Skipper, I’ve got a proposition,” Adair told me without preamble. “How’d you like to take a crack at running the blockade to Java? The boss is leaving by submarine. No space for staff. It’s a long chance and your ship. What do you say?”

My reply was instant: “When do we start?”

Admiral Rockwell having reluctantly given permission, Lanikai hurriedly took in provisions, fuel, and water. “Go to sea in that thing?” good-naturedly gibed a sailor who was not a member of the crew. “You gotta outboard motor?” There was assorted advice, including a reminder to blow up our water wings before starting.

“Departed Corregidor 1940 [7:40 P.M.], destination unknown”—Lanikai’s log entry for December 26—gave her crew of eighteen and six passengers not the mildest clue that during the next three months four thousand perilous miles would pass under the keel while all hands labored under the well-founded suspicion that the Japanese navy might be expected behind the next island.

It had been a grueling day, rounding up supplies and swabbing on green paint, but there was no lack of eager lookouts straining all senses to catch a whiff of smoke, spot a feather of bow wave, hear the clang of a slammed hatch or a dropped tool. Sounds carry far on a still night at sea, and there was the certain prospect that anything afloat or aloft would have to be enemy. Aboard Lanikai there was only the creaking and groaning of the hull, the slap of blocks and rigging, and the gentle pffut-pffut-pffut of the auxiliary.

So began Lanikai’s hegira, beating her five- or six-knot way south, sailing by night and holing up by day as close to island greenery as depth of water allowed. Her fresh meat was the scrawny chickens bartered for shotgun shells and the fish caught alongside, all washed down with rainwater and coconut milk.

One remembers with a little chill the might-have-beens: the near-miss bullets and bombs—fire on board—passing almost under the Japanese guns at JoIo—groundings that could have been the end of the road—sighting enemy warships against the sunset sky—near-disaster south of Java when a great Japanese carrier force swept around Lanikai, which was saved by her own insignificance, just another slightly larger whitecap on a typhoontortured sea.

There had been good moments too. “Dot Nederlander of yourss hass got a zuspicious aggzent!” bellowed the skipper of a small Dutch warship, her guns trained out, when Lieutenant Paul Nygh, Royal Netherlands Navy, a Lanikai passenger, answered his hail. “Doc” Cossette, pharmacist’s mate, slacked fire during a Surabaja air raid long enough to shake his fist at the Dutch cruiser Tromp alongside. “You squarehead bastards!” he cried, “you’ve cut our foresail halyards with your goddamn popguns!” To engineer Crispin Tipay, a near-miss meant only one thing: “Queek, boyss! Get the dinghy. Thot bomb just keel a lot of feesh!” There was a pleasant interlude on the island of BaIi. Then, at last, Australia, with its hospitality and rough humor. Baskets of groceries came aboard without bills, sometimes with a forbidden bottle of brandy hidden beneath. “Year foitin’ fer us, airen’t ye now, mite? There’s nao price tag to that!” they said.

Fremantle, Australia, in the west of that country near Perth, was nice shore duty.

Over the decades that followed, my suspicions first aroused by Commander Slocum’s apparent cynicism- his suggestion about asking the Japanese for water—continued to grow. A clue here, a conversation there, gleanings from the archives declassified bit by bit, brought into clearer focus the intent that lay behind the President’s message. Over thirty years later SIocum, now a rear admiral, wrote: “I feel sure you realize that when you were ready to sail … most of us understood time had almost run out, and that whatever ‘FDR had in mind’ could in all probability never be carried off.”

What indeed did “FDR have in mind?”

It seems clear that the part of the message beginning with “AT THE SAME TIME” was Stark’s addition, conveying to his close friend and frequent correspondent Hart that he was innocent of any complicity in the actual as opposed to the stated purpose of his assignment. On his own, Hart had commenced overflights of Camranh Bay on about November 23, and on November 30 Ingersoll sent him a dispatch “legalizing” this. His hand-written rough draft bears an “OK, Stark” and “Read to the President and he approved.” The resulting information was flowing in, and it was in fact the abundance of intelligence on Japanese movements that caused Hull’s urgent call to Roosevelt at Warm Springs to hurry back to face the obvious crisis. There was no need for a “defensive information patrol” —but at the same time the almost constant American reconnaissance of the waters in which the patrol was to operate would have produced a quick report if Lanikai (for example) had been attacked by the Japanese.

One of the first in whom suspicions were aroused was Representative Frank B. Keefe, of Wisconsin [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Bateman_Keefe], who told the Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack in 1945:

Keefe, a Congressman 1939-51

… Admiral Hart was already conducting reconnaissance off that coast by planes from Manila. So far as the Navy was concerned, sufficient information was being received from this air reconnaissance. Had the Japanese fired on any of these small vessels, it would have constituted an overt act on the part of Japan.

Grilled by Michigan’s Senator Homer Ferguson before the same body, Admiral Ingersoll repeatedly testified that the message was wholly the President’s idea; that Admiral Stark would not have initiated such a movement and was satisfied with the information Hart already was furnishing; that if the President gave Stark any reasons, including for the “suggested” use of Filipino crewmen, Stark did not pass them on to him. Ferguson’s final question was “Could you tell us whether or not these were really men-of-war, so that if they had been fired on it would have been an overt act against the United States?” “It would have been,” replied Ingersoll.

Admiral Hart testified also. In July, 1967, he wrote me: “I was a full day on the stand before that Committee. In a long forenoon of it, Ferguson, Brewster and Keefe took a lot of time shooting questions at me. All were pretty clumsy, not having much in their minds to go on.” This was unfortunate, as in October, 1970, Admiral Hart wrote me that “only Admiral Stark could have known anything more of the inception—the whys and wherefores—of the picket ship idea [than I].”

Sumner Welles, F.D.R.’s Undersecretary of State, in 1950 pointed up Roosevelt’s agonizing dilemma:
He did, however make it very plain to me that he thought the immediate danger was an attack by Japan upon some British possession in the Far East, or even more probably upon the Netherlands East Indies. What worried him deeply was that, though it might be impossible to persuade either the Congress or the American people … [that] it was tantamount to an attack on our own frontiers and justified military measures in self defense. He felt, however, that Japan would not attack the United States directly until and unless we found ourselves in the European war.

Roosevelt was equally unsure of the Philippines and their mercurial president, Manuel Quezon. So on November 26, 1941, he directed U.S. High Commissioner Francis B. Sayre to consult Quezon “in great confidence” to try to determine if the Philippines would support the United States in the event she found herself at war with Japan. Those Filipino crewmen aboard the “three small ships” might just help Quezon and his countrymen make up their minds in case of any Japanese attack.

Would Roosevelt have gone for an incident? In December, 1971, the British released the minutes of an August 19, 1941, cabinet meeting, indirectly quoting Churchill’s remarks covering his Argentia conference with Roosevelt a week earlier:
He [Roosevelt) obviously was determined that they should come in. … If they were to put up the issue of peace or war to Congress, they would debate it for months. … The President had said that he would wage war but not declare it and that he would become more provocative. If the Germans did not like it, they could attack American forces. … The President’s orders to these [convoy] escorts were to attack any German U-boat which showed itself even if it were 200 to 300 miles away from the convoy. Everything was to be done to force an incident [Italics supplied].

There seems to be no reason to suppose that after Hull’s tough message to the Japanese on November 26 Roosevelt’s idea of forcing an incident was not applicable to the Pacific and the Japanese as well as to the Atlantic and the Germans.

Some respected historians, such as Samuel Eliot Morison, have seized on Roosevelt’s proclivity for dabbling in naval affairs as an explanation of his “three small ships” directive. Morison, using as an example the cruisers that F.D.R. earlier had proposed “to keep popping up here and there, and keep the Japs guessing,” brushes off the “picket boats” episode with a footnote:

The President’s later proposal to Admiral Hart to operate river gunboats [sic] as picket boats in the South China Sea does not stem from the same idea, but from a desire to supplement the work of our patrol planes in reporting Japanese ship move- ments. The suggestion made at the Pearl Harbor Inquiry that this was an international provocation was disingenuous; the United States Navy has a right to send its ships anywhere on the high seas.

Why then “ISABEL … BUT NOT OTHER NAVAL VESSELS”—Only ships that did not look like naval vessels? Why those “MINIMUM” tokens of a Naval vessel that “WOULD SUFFICE”? Why Filipino crewmen when F.D.R. knew that Hart had seven thousand U.S. seamen to draw on? Neither Morison nor any of the many witnesses questioned on the subject before the congressional investigating committee provided any satisfactory answers. And as for silence, it is far more eloquent than words.

In May, 1952, Rear Admiral John B. Heffernan, director of Naval History, asked Admiral Hart to review Morison’s book and offer corrections. Included in the latter was one on the footnote covering the “three small ships” episode: “Footnote 20 should be rewritten to accord with facts or be entirely omitted; it is not a piece of history of which to be proud.”

One spring day in 1970 I was having a pre-lunch sherry with Admirals Harry Hill and Thomas Hart.

“I once had the unpleasant requirement to send this young man on what looked like a one-way mission,”

Hart told Hill in explanation of our past association. Then he recounted Lanikai’s narrow escape from the dragon’s mouth. “Would you tell Admiral Hill if you think we were set up to bait an incident, a casus belli?” I asked him.

“Yes, I think you were bait!” said Admiral Hart. “And I could prove it. But I won’t. And don’t you try it, either!”

We are trying, Admiral Hart. And in remembrance of your near clairvoyance in foreseeing the shape of coming events in the Far East, we can only hope that in looking down from an old sailor’s snug retreat you will approve of setting the record straight.

A 1929 graduate of Annapolis, Admiral Tolley was assistant naval attaché in Moscow from 1942 to 1944. His book, Cruise of the Lanikai, will be published by the Naval Institute Press this month.

 

My commentary:

FDR is still deified today by much of the Jewmerican press. I cannto think of better proof that for generations now a (long word coming ;-)) crypto-pluto-judeo-psychopatho-cracy has run our country. America is anything but a democracy. This regime NEVER does what the American people want. And it kills Americans.

My father as an USMC volunteer fought at Tinian, Saipan and Iwo Jima. Here is a drawing by a Marine of the amphibious landing on Saipan. As the Talmud’s “sage” named Simon Bar Yokhai, who also founded the Kabbalah, said in Hebrew: “Tob shebbe goyim harog.” (In English: “Even the best gentiles should die.”)