America at war! (1941– ) (Part 1)

NormanStewart · December 8, 2020, 3:22pm

JAPS HAVE STARTED NEW AIR RAID ON HONOLULU

BULLETINS

Reported ‘dealt successfully’ with

WASHINGTON (UP) – Unconfirmed reports said tonight that U.S. forces “dealt successfully” with Japanese bombers over Hawaii and Manila.

Hull accuses Japanese of outright lies

WASHINGTON (UP) – Secretary of State Cordell Hull tonight angrily told Saburo Kurusu and Kichisaburo Nomura, Japanese negotiators, that their government’s answer to his memorandum was “crowded with infamous falsehoods and distortions.” Hull’s statement was read directly to Kurusu and Nomura after he read Japan’s document handed to him at 2:20 p.m. EST (8:50 a.m. HT).

The State Department thus far had not published the document. However, a department statement described the scene as follows:

Hull carefully read the statement presented by the Japanese ambassador and with the greatest indignation said: “I must say that in all my conversations with you during the last nine months I never uttered one word of untruth. This is borne out absolutely by the record. In all my 50 years of public service I have never seen a document that was more crowded with infamous falsehoods and distortions – on a scale so huge that I never imagined until today any government on this planet was capable of uttering them.”

Attacks on Hawaii understood continuing

WASHINGTON (UP) – White House Secretary Stephen Early issued a statement tonight declaring that Japanese attacks are continuing so far as the United States knows.

Mr. Early said that the Honolulu and Manila attacks occurred when both nations were “at peace” and within an hour or so of the time Nomura and Kurusu handed Secretary of State Hull the Japanese reply to Hull’s memorandum.

Mr. Early said the Army received distress signals from an American vessel, presumably a cargo ship, 700 miles west of San Francisco. Mr. Early said, “This indicates that Japanese submarines are strung out over the entire area.”

U.S. Army transport reported torpedoed

WASHINGTON (UP) – An Army transport was torpedoed 1,300 miles west of San Francisco, it was announced tonight.

Naval engagement reported off Honolulu

NEW YORK (UP) – NBC tonight reported a naval engagement in progress off Honolulu.

6 planes, 4 subs reported sunk

WASHINGTON (UP) – It was reliably reported tonight that anti-aircraft and naval action bagged six Japanese planes and four submarines during the Hawaii action.

Schools closed

All schools on Oahu, both public and private, will remain closed until further notice, Edouard L. Doty, territorial director of civilian defense, announced at 11 a.m. today. This does not apply elsewhere in the territory.

Guam bombed; attack on Manila reported repulsed

Paul Findelsen, radio editor of the Star-Bulletin, while listening in by shortwave this afternoon at his home at 2512 Waolani Ave., reports news items received by broadcast:

The island of Guam was subjected to a bombing attack this afternoon.

The Japanese also attempted to take Cavite in the Philippine Islands, but the attack was successfully repulsed.

Manila denies any reports of damage to that city.

Mokapu attacked

A Mokapu resident reporting at Iolani Palace for emergency duty reported the first bomb at 8:10 a.m. today took NAS Kaneohe Bay there completely by surprise and struck and set fire a large seaplane moored on the eastern side of the hangers in the bay.

Bombers exploded oil tanks causing such a conflagration that the hangers could not be seen but it is certain that they were in great danger.

Another plane was struck and set on fire at Kokokahi near the Coral Gardens.

A witness reported that there was no answering gunfire from the base and no planes went up to drive off the attackers. As the enemy planes swooped low and machine-gunned the base, scattered rifle fire was directed at them.

Witnesses said the Japanese machine gunners’ marksmanship was very poor.

HRT buses run on reduced schedule

Addison E. Kirk, president and general manager of the Honolulu Rapid Transit, reported that although there were several hits by bombs on overhead power wires, the company is running its buses on a reduced schedule.

Parachutists land on Oahu, Army reports

Parachute troops wearing blue uniforms and red shields have landed on Oahu, Army authorities reported to police at 1:10 this afternoon.

Parachutist report is probed by police

An unidentified parachute was seen to land at St. Louis Heights about 2 p.m., it was reported. Lookouts reported to the police within five minutes and an investigation was started.

Sixteen provisional policemen and all regular patrolmen in that district were ordered to proceed to the area behind St. Louis College and make a search.

The landing was made at Makapuu, according to the report.

Suspicious group probed by police

A guard patrolling a water tank at Diamond Head Circle reported he had observed a suspicious group of Japanese at a Monsarrat Avenue address at 2 p.m., and a squad of police was sent to investigate.

Bombs hit many sections of city

Bombs rained from the skies on many sections of Honolulu this morning during the Japanese attacks.

A bomb fell about 200 feet from Iolani Palace during the second bombing raid at 11:30 a.m. Observers estimated it was about a 25-pound bomb.

Names of dead, injured

The city emergency hospital reported at 10:30 a.m. a list of six killed and 21 injured.

The complete list will be carried later. Here is a partial list:

Peter Lopes, 34, of 2641 Kamanaiki St., was reported at 9:30 a.m. to be in serious condition from wounds in the upper abdomen.
Bernice Gouveia, 12, 2708 Kalihi St., is suffering from a mangled thigh, lacerations on the right leg and left arm.
A Portuguese girl, unidentified, 10 years old, died on arrival from puncture wounds.
Another victim who died on arrival was Frank Ohashi, 29, 2705 Kamanaiki St., from puncture wounds in the chest.
Cecelia Broadly, 38, Moanalua Gardens, was released from the hospital after treatment for lacerations.
Three were reported injured and one reported killed from the bomb that fell at Fort and School Streets.

Proclamation by Her Majesty Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands
December 8, 1941, 1 a.m. BDST

London, England

Rijksgenootén,

Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden acht zich in staat van oorlog met Japan. Terwijl de onderhandelingen, die gaande waren tusschen de regeering van de Vereenigde Staten van Amerika en Japan nog niet geëindigd waren, terwijl president Roosevelt zich met het grootste geduld de uiterste moeite heeft gegeven tot het bewaren van den vrede in de Stille Zuidzee en een van Amerika’s staatshoofd uitgaand beroep op den keizer van Japan nog niet beantwoord was, hebben Japansche zee-, land- en luchtstrijdkrachten zonder voorafgaande oorlogsverklaring onverhoeds aanvallen uitgevoerd op Amerikaansch en Britsch gebied. Aan de republiek der Vereenigde Staten van Amerika en het Britsche Rijk is daardoor de oorlog opgedrongen.

Gij weet, hoe Duitschland op dezelfde wijze, welke Japan nu in Azië volgt, tal van landen in Europa de een na de ander overviel. Japan, vervuld van denzelfden geest van agressie en minachting van het recht, volgt ook hierin het spoor van zijn Duitschen asgenoot.

Wij hebben geleerd. Noch de veiligheid van het grondgebied des rijks in het Oosten, noch de banden die ons verbinden aan onzen Britschen bondgenoot, noch de bijzondere betrekkingen die bestaan tusschen Nederland en de Vereenigde Staten, veroorloven de regeering van het Koninkrijk thans werkeloos toe te zien. Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden acht zich met Japan in staat van oorlog, omdat de agressie, welke het er op voorzien heeft de landen die vrede willen, één voor één buiten gevecht te stellen, alleen in hecht bondgenootschap kan, moet en zal worden gekeerd. Nu de met ons bevriende Britsche en Amerikaansche volken worden overvallen, stelt het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden al zijn strijdkrachten en al zijn hulpbronnen ter beschikking van de gemeenschappelijke oorlogsvoering.

Een eeuwenlange lotsverbinding beheerscht de ontwikkeling van ons Koninkrijk. In den orkaan, die deze ontwikkeling bedreigt, richt het zich op om in vastberaden eenheid zijn plaats te handhaven in de wereld. Nederland heeft niet geaarzeld zich onmiddellijk met moed te weren toen het in Europa boosaardig werd overvallen. Indië zal niet wankelen, nu zulk een overval het in Azië dreigt. Indië was Nederland nabij in het uur der beproeving. Nederland en onze West zullen met Indië zijn, nu het de agressie weerstaat.

Ik reken op de vloot, het leger en de luchtmacht, op alle ambtenaren en op alle burgerlijke diensten wier oorlogsstaat begint. Ik en al mijn onderdanen rekenen op den moed, de vastberadenheid en volhardendheid van allen in Indië.

In vertrouwen op God, dien al mijn onderdanen in vrijheid willen dienen, die weet dat onze zaak rechtvaardig is en ons geweten rein is, aanvaarden wij met machtige bondgenooten den strijd. Wij zullen dezen strijd winnen en ons Koninkrijk, beproefd, maar gelouterd en gestaald tegelijk, zal krachtig en meer dan ooit één onder onze vrije vlag in een van agressie verloste wereld, in onaantastbare fierheid staan.

w. g. WILHELMINA

News (NBCB), 6 p.m. EST:

The Catholic Hour (NBCR), 6 p.m. EST:

New Friends of Music (NBCB), 6:15 p.m. EST:

SQUADRON OF PLANES OVER GUAM

GOV. POINDEXTER HAS JUST PHONED PRES. ROOSEVELT & TOLD HIM THAT A NEW JAP AIR ATTACK HAS JUST STARTED ON HONOLULU     MANILA HAS NOT YET BEEN BOMBED     USS OKLAHOMA SET ON FIRE IN HONOLULU HARBOR     USS WEST VIRGINIA SUNK    HMS PETEREL BURNS TO THE WATERLINE AT SHANGHAI

TOKYO ANNOUNCES 1 JAPANESE AIRCRAFT CARRIER IS IN ACTION OFF HAWAII; NAVAL OPERATIONS ARE PROCEEDING SUCCESSFULLY

FBI REPORT FROM HONOLULU: TWO BATTLESHIPS SUNK, ONE BADLY DAMAGED & ARMY AIR BASE BADLY DAMAGED. MANY PLANES WERE DESTROYED ON THE GROUND

THREE BATTLESHIPS HAVE BEEN SUNK     ATTACKS HAVE BEEN MADE ON WAKE AND GUAM SIMULTANEOUSLY     TWO MAJOR RAIDS HAVE TAKEN PLACE ON HONOLULU, THE LAST ONE OF ABOUT AN HOUR’S DURATION     THIRD RAID WAS JUST BEGINNING AS THE TELEPHONE CONVERSATION WAS TAKING PLACE

GEN. GULLION DIRECTS, USING PRES. ROOSEVELT’S NAME, THAT ALL ALIENS BE TAKEN INTO CUSTODY IMMEDIATELY. GEN. BRYDEN AUTHORIZES $500,000 FOR THE CONSTRUCTION OF AN INTERNMENT CAMP

WHEELER STATES CONGRESS MUST DECLARE WAR ON JAPAN

Drew Pearson & Robert S. Allen (NBCB), 6:30 p.m. EST:

The Great Gildersleeve (NBCR), 6:30 p.m. EST:

CASUALTY SUMMARY AT 12 NOON, DEC. 7: HICKAM FIELD: 80 KNOWN DEAD, 250 WOUNDED. WHEELER FIELD: 22 KNOWN DEAD, 10 SERIOUSLY WOUNDED, 50 SLIGHTLY WOUNDED. BELLOWS FIELD: 2 KNOWN DEAD, 6 WOUNDED

BLACKOUT FOR CANAL EFFECTIVE TONIGHT

Roosevelt-Morgenthau Telephone Conversation
December 7, 1941, 6:40 p.m. EST

H.M. Jr. spoke to the president at approximately 6:40 this evening and the following is their conversation:

THE PRESIDENT: Hello, Henry. Cabinet at 8:30.

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: Yes, sir. I have some orders which we are getting out. I cleared all of them with Welles.

THE PRESIDENT: Fine.

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: We are freezing all Japanese funds.

THE PRESIDENT: Yes.

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: We are not going to let any Japanese leave the country or to carry on any communications.

THE PRESIDENT: I see.

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: Well, our responsibility is the border.

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, yes. That’s right.

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: And we’re putting people into all the Japanese banks and business houses tonight and we’re not going to let the Japanese get in there at all.

THE PRESIDENT: That’s good.

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: Now the other thing I would like – Chief Wilson and Gaston are here.

THE PRESIDENT: Yes.

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: We would like permission to put a detail of soldiers on the White House grounds.

THE PRESIDENT: Well, wait just a second. Steve Early said something about that. [Slight pause while President talks aside]

Well, the thing has been suggested by the War Department but I don’t think – my idea is that. Suppose you get some additional White House guards?

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: We’ve done that. We’ve already doubled the guard force.

THE PRESIDENT: You’ve doubled the guard. That’s all you need. As long as you have one about every hundred feet around the fence, it’s all right.

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: But you think that’s enough?

THE PRESIDENT: That’s fine.

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: Well, the guards have already been doubled.

THE PRESIDENT: What you could do is this: Block off both Executive Avenues. In other words, the one on the East and the one on the West. Put up barricades between the White House and the Treasury and also on the one between the White House and State Department.

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: We will do that tonight. All right, sir.

[End of conversation with President Roosevelt]

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: He said Steve Early had suggested it but he said we should close the traffic on both Executive Avenues.

BRITISH SAY BOTH HOUSES MEET 9 A.M. TOMORROW TO PASS DECLARATION OF WAR     JAPS OCCUPY ALLY WATERFRONT AT SHANGHAI     NAVY SIGHTED AIRCRAFT OVER GUAM

Address by First Lady Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt
December 7, 1941, 6:45 p.m. EST

Washington, D.C.

eleanorroosevelt.nbc

Broadcast (NBCB):

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.

I’m speaking to you tonight at a very serious moment in our history. The Cabinet is convening and the leaders in Congress are meeting with the president. The State Department and Army and Navy officials have been with the president all afternoon. In fact, the Japanese ambassador was talking to the president at the very time that Japan’s airships were bombing our citizens in Hawaii and the Philippines and sinking one of our transports loaded with lumber on its way to Hawaii. By tomorrow morning, the members of Congress will have a full report and be ready for action.

In the meantime, we, the people, are already prepared for action. For months now, the knowledge that something of this kind might happen has been hanging over our heads, and yet, it seemed impossible to believe, impossible to drop the everyday things of life and feel that there was only one thing which was important: preparation to meet an enemy, no matter where he struck.

That is all over now, and there is no more uncertainty. We know what we have to face, and we know that we are ready to face it.

I should like to say just a word to the women in the country tonight. I have a boy at sea on a destroyer. For all I know, he may be on his way to the Pacific. Two of my children are in coast cities on the Pacific. Many of you, all over this country, have boys in the services who will now be called upon to go into action. You have friends and families in what has suddenly become a danger zone.

You cannot escape anxiety, you cannot escape the clutch of fear at your heart, and yet I hope that the certainty of what we have to meet will make you rise above these fears. We must go about our daily business, more determined than ever to do the ordinary things as well as we can, and when we find a way to do anything more in our communities to help others, to build morale, to give a feeling of security, we must do it.

Whatever is asked of us, I’m sure we can accomplish it. We are the free and unconquerable people of the United States of America.

To the young people of the nation, I must speak a word tonight. You are going to have a great opportunity. There will be high moments in which your strength and your ability will be tested. I have faith in you. I feel as though I was standing upon a rock, and that rock is my faith in my fellow citizens.

Now, we will go back to the program which we had arranged for tonight.

SAN FRANCISCO: ALL DISPATCHES FOR HAWAIIAN TERRITORY ORDERED HELD UP BY ONI     STATE DEPT.: JAPS HAVE LANDED ON THAI PENINSULA NEAR MALAY BORDER     BRITISH PARLIAMENT CALLED TO SESSION FOR 9 A.M. MONDAY

BLACKOUT HAS BEEN ORDERED IN SITKA, ALASKA

GERMAN DRIVE PREPARING TO TAKE MOSCOW, LENINGRAD AND RECAPTURE ROSTOV WITHIN 2 WEEKS

WAR DEPT. ANNOUNCES PRESS CONFERENCE WOULD BE HELD AT 7:30 P.M. IN ROOM 2804

GUAM ATTACKED AT 6:25 EST     300 MEN REPORTED KILLED AT HICKAM FIELD. 50 TO 70 PLANES OVER WAIKIKI COMING FROM SOUTH FROM ISLAND OF MAUI OR NIIHAU

News Roundup (NBCB), 7 p.m. EST:

The Jell-O Program Starring Jack Benny (NBCR), 7 p.m. EST:

Captain Flagg and Sergeant Quirt (NBCB), 7:30 p.m. EST:

The Fitch Bandwagon: Horace Heidt & His Orchestra (NBCR), 7:30 p.m. EST:

MAJ. DEAN TELEPHONED THAT WHITE HOUSE JUST ISSUED INSTRUCTIONS THAT NO INFORMATION ON CASUALTIES BE GIVEN OUT OTHER THAN THOSE OCCURRED ON OAHU: 104 DEAD, SLIGHTLY OVER 300 WOUNDED. BUREAU OF PUBLIC RELATIONS HAS BEEN SO ADVISED

Roy Shields Revue (NBCB), 8 p.m. EST:

The Chase and Sanborn Hour (NBCR), 8 p.m. EST:

Paul Goo home struck

Damage done by a Japanese bomb when it struck the home of Paul Goo at Liliha and Kuakini Streets in the first raid on Oahu.

DEATHS OVER 400 ON OAHU, LATEST REPORT
Tokyo announces ‘state of war’ with U.S. – Japanese raids on Guam, Panama are reported – Oahu blackout tonight, fleet here moves out to sea

Four waves start at 7:55 a.m., Oahu hit in many places

BULLETIN

TOKYO (AP) – Imperial Headquarters announced at 6 a.m. Monday JST (10:30 a.m. HT) that Japan had entered a state of war with the United States and Great Britain in the Western Pacific from dawn today.

(AP) – Honolulu and Oahu came through a baptism of fire today with calm and determination as wave after wave of Japanese bombers rained missiles all over the island.

At 3 p.m. this afternoon, Army, Navy, the police and various civilian agencies were on a war footing, and faced possible further attacks with undaunted vigor and courage.

The police reported that, based on information from the city emergency hospital and the morgue, there are 25 known dead and 56 known injured in the bombing raids.

In Washington, President Roosevelt announced that the raids were by Japanese bombers.

A United Press dispatch at 3 p.m. said that estimates given out in Washington are that 400 are dead and 300 injured of the Army forces on Oahu alone.

Japanese raiding planes struck hardest at the Army and Navy bases, but the city of Honolulu itself suffered severe damage.

Deaths on Oahu are reported at more than 400, counting Army and civilian fatalities. Navy casualties have not been announced. Estimate of the Army deaths was given out in a White House statement in Washington tonight.

Unconfirmed reports this afternoon, based on fragmentary broadcast reports heard on mainland stations, were that both Guam and Panama had been attacked by the Japanese. Press association dispatches mentioned possible attacks on Manila, but there was no confirmation of this.

WASHINGTON (UP) – The White House tonight issued a preliminary estimate that 400 were dead and more than 300 wounded in the Armed Forces alone on Oahu. Civilian casualties were not mentioned.

NEW YORK (UP) – NBC tonight heard the Panama radio broadcast that a Japanese aircraft carrier was sunk off Honolulu.

SHANGHAI (UP) – The Osaka Mainichi reported from Tokyo today that Japanese Imperial Headquarters announced a naval battle between the Japanese and the British and U.S. fleets is going on “in the Western Pacific.”

(UP) – The U.S. Fleet steamed from Pearl Harbor Sunday after a Japanese dive bomber, torpedo plane and parachute raid on the great American naval and air base, causing heavy loss of life and property damage in an unprovoked assault which precipitated a general war in the Pacific.

Reportedly, the sound of gunfire was heard off Oahu and gun flashes were seen.

The White House confirmed reports of heavy damage and casualties in Pearl Harbor and announced also that the Navy reported to President Roosevelt an unidentified squadron of airplanes was sighted off Guam. The White House said it was unable to confirm reports of an attack on Manila.

Reportedly, Hawaiian officials have been expecting the attack for about a week and gave the raiders a warm reception.

Several planes are shot down

Attacking planes, several of which were reported shot down, clearly bore the insignia of the Rising Sun.

Hickam Field appeared to be the principal objective, but fires were also started on Ford Island in the middle of the harbor.

Reportedly, 50 planes attacked later and parachute troops were sighted. However, the parachutists were believed handled.

NBC said 350 were killed by a direct hit on Hickam Field.

The battleship USS Oklahoma, according to NBC, was also reported attacked and set afire in Pearl Harbor.

Gov. Joseph Poindexter of Hawaii declared a state of emergency and the islands operated under a prearranged plan.

Meanwhile, in Washington, President Roosevelt conferred with the Cabinet and then summoned congressional leaders. It was believed Mr. Roosevelt was preparing a message to a joint session of Congress asking a declaration of war, which was expected to pass as soon as asked.

Complete censorship established

The Navy established censorship immediately on all outgoing cable and radio messages. Army and Navy posts throughout the nation were mobilized. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox ordered Army and Navy men to wear uniforms at all times.

Damage at Pearl Harbor

Huge fires were raging in Pearl Harbor at 1:10 p.m. and five Navy vessels appeared to have been destroyed in the air raids.

One ship had turned over on its side. Fires raging on four other warships appeared to be gaining in intensity and they had settled low in the water.

The base itself apparently was extensively damaged in the raids and great clouds of smoke rose above it.

Patrols were scouring the hills above Pearl Harbor for parachute troops reported to have been seen in the vicinity.

Governor proclaims national emergency

Gov. Poindexter said he would make a full report to President Roosevelt of the bombing attacks on Honolulu by radiophone immediately after his radio message to the people of Honolulu.

The governor said at 11:30 a.m. that there had been no evidence of sabotage by local Japanese residents.

Gov. Poindexter this morning issued the following proclamation declaring a defense period to exist throughout the territory, thereby putting into effect the provisions of the M-Day Act of the special session of the Legislature:

Under and by virtue of the powers vested in me by Act 24 of the Special Session Laws of Hawaii, 1941, and particularly Section 5 thereof, and under virtue of all powers in me vested by law, I, J. M. Poindexter, Governor of the Territory of Hawaii, hereby find that a state of affairs exists arising out of an attack upon the Territory of Hawaii and that all of the circumstances make it advised to protect the territory and its inhabitants as provided in and by said Act 24 of the Special Session Laws of Hawaii, 1941, and all other laws relating thereto; and by reason of the foregoing.

I do declare and proclaim a defense period to exist throughout the Territory of Hawaii.

This proclamation shall take effect upon promulgation thereof by official announcement by me by means of radio broadcast which I do further declare to have taken place at 10 a.m. on the date hereof, done at Honolulu, Territory of Hawaii, this seventh day of December 1941.

JOSEPH B. POINDEXTER
Governor of the Territory of Hawaii

This hereby puts the M-Day Act into full effect.

Known Oahu casualties

With eight persons dead upon arrival at the emergency hospital and at least 20 reported dead at Hickam Field, the death toll from air attacks on Oahu this morning continued to mount after noon.

Two identified bodies, mangled by shrapnel, taken to the emergency hospital about 11 a.m. brought the total number dead there to eight.

Dead:

Portuguese girl (unidentified), 10 years old, puncture wound left temple.
Caucasian male (unidentified), 35, had initials on shirt.
Frank Ohashi, 29, puncture wound in chest, 2705 Kamanaiki St.
Migita Taro, 26, Schofield.
Japanese girl (unidentified), age about 9, fur on coat only identification.
Mrs. White, 44, Dorsett Tract, puncture wound in chest.
Toshio Tokusaki, 5, Peleula Lane.
Unidentified, 30-40.
Patrick J. Chong, 30, 1457 Fort St.

A report to the police early this afternoon was that two members of the provisional police were shot and killed by machine-gun fire from low-flying planes at Wailupe this morning.

Injured:

Joseph Akana, Chinese-Hawaiian, 27, Papakolea.
George Stanley, 4, 1920 Colburn St.
Mrs. Ida Gouveia, 41, 2708 Kalihiuka.
Kaneshiro Uto, 145-A Fort St.
Thomas Fujimuro, 13, 610-I Road, Damon Tract.
Elton Capps, 19, Signal Service Corps, Fort Shafter.
Ruth Sakamoto, 37, 44-C North School St.
Alfred Moniz, 20, Company D, 298th Infantry.
Irene Bradley, 15, Moanalua Gardens.
Cecelia Bradley, 38, Moanalua Gardens.
Harriet Ide, 20, 1332 Nuuanu Ave.
Rudolph Bartels, U.S. district engineer.
H. Dallas, 18, HQ 18th Wing, Wheeler Field.
Eunice Wilson, 22, 1457 Fort St.
George Correa, Company No. 1, Fire Department, was brought in injured from Hickam Field and rushed to emergency hospital.
Albert Fong, 45, 627-E Waipa Lane.
Yoshio Ogura, 23, 1453 Fort St.
Sidney Carlson, 37, 2210 Kuhio Ave.
Glen Hinkle, 21, Fort Shafter.

Hurt in second raid:

Persons injured in the second raid taken to the emergency hospital, were:

Uso Konda, 50, 1630 Leilehua Lane.
Mildred Irvine, 1113 Duval St.
Charles Harkins, no address.
John Kim, 989 Akepo Moana.
Edward Lilikoa, 1262 Ala Moana.
Ceasar Costa, 35, 1821 Colburn St.
Tony Oshiro, 20, 944 McCully St.
Alfred La Forge, 36, 607 Mokauea St.
Unidentified female, no age, no address, both legs amputated.
Yoshiko Konda, no age, no address given.
R. Izumi, 19, Pelehula Lane.
Abel Gleason, 32, Leilehua Lane.
Toshio Tokusato, Pelehula Lane.
K. Yoshiki, no address.
James Konda, Kukui Street.
Matthews Kitchen, 38, 2813 Kamiki St., discharged.
Eishien Tamanaha, 24, 50 Peleula Lane.
Janice Koga, 20, Kukui Street.
Teruya Kenichi, 18, 19 Peleula Lane.
Eddie Sakar, 38, 149 North Vineyard St.
Warren Tong, 18, 911-B Luka St.
Hisao Uyene, 20, 15 Palua St.
Yoshiro Toshisaka, no age, 10 Peleula Lane.
Mida Escoler, 42, 970 Kawaiaho St.
Unidentified female, 25, no address.
Abraham Kulia, 5, 1920 Colburn St.
Ellen Kondo, 11, 1630 Leilehua Lane.
An unidentified 10-year-old Japanese girl with a mangled left leg and shock, in critical condition, was taken to the Children’s Hospital.
Yoicki Tomisaka, 8, was taken from 1497 River St. to the Japanese Hospital.
Fire Chief William Benedict has been injured by shrapnel in his head and legs at Hickam Field.
Frederick Malarsie, Hickam fireman, injured by shrapnel in the legs and stomach, was taken to Tripler Hospital.
Bernice Gouveia, 12, 2708 Kalihi St.
Peter Lopes, 34, 2641 Kamanaiki St.
Mildred Gouveia, 3, 2708 Kamanaiki St.
Unidentified woman, address unknown.
Unidentified Japanese man, 28 years old.
Malani Chun, 21, 2112 Coyne St.
Mildren Irvine, 8, Fort Ruger.
Olive Ishiro, 4, 22 Peleula Lane.
Solomon Napailoea, 4, 1260 Kamanuwai Lane.
Laura Carlton, 4, 714 15th St. Navy housing.
Usa Kondo, 50, 1630 Peleula Lane.
Unidentified Japanese boy, 6, address unknown.
Unidentified Japanese girl, 3, address unknown.
John Hopeau, 23, 2012 Democrat St.
Matilda Faufata, 12, 2009 Oholena St.
K. Horinouchi, 54, 952 Robello Lane. Laceration of the head.
Mrs. K. Horiuchi, 39, 952 Robello Lane. Lacerated wound on cheek.
Yoshiko Harauchi, 26, 952 Robello Lane. Laceration of arm.
Toshimi Harauchi, 952 Robello Lane. Injury of ear.
Ichiko Hiroki 36, 987 Robello Lane. Laceration, right shoulder.
Yoshiko Matsumoto, 20, 952 Robello Lane. Ear injury.
Ventura Mathis, 31, 101 North School St. Concussion, right arm.
Akio Harauchi, 21, 952 Robello Lane. Laceration on right shoulder.

Interisland ships, planes are held up

All interisland sailings to and from Honolulu were ordered cancelled by President Stanley C. Kennedy.

Hawaiian Airlines planes remain grounded until further notice following the strafing of John Rodgers Airport.

Two Japanese fliers captured

U.S. Army intelligence officers said this afternoon that two Japanese aviators were captured and were awaiting questioning by Army officials.

One of the fliers was reportedly captured in the vicinity of Fort Kamehameha and the other at Kahuku.

BULLETINS

By the United Press

WASHINGTON – The White House announced tonight it feared there was heavy loss of life in Hawaii.

NEW YORK – NBC tonight reported 350 men killed in a direct hit on Hickam Field, the Army’s giant airfield on Oahu.

NEW YORK – NBC reported from Honolulu tonight that the battleship USS Oklahoma was set afire during the Pearl Harbor attack.

Military censorship on all messages

Hawaii was under strict emergency rule this afternoon, with close military censorship applied to all outgoing messages.

Gov. Poindexter had talked with President Roosevelt by radio telephone and had acquainted him with all details of the attack on Oahu by waves of Japanese planes.

At least four attacks were made on Oahu. The first was at 7:55 a.m., the second at 11:29 a.m., the third at 11:59 a.m. and the fourth at 12:41 p.m.

The governor received instructions from the president but declined to reveal what they were.

Meanwhile, the death and injury toll increased with incidents being reported from widely scattered areas of the city.

While no information was forthcoming from Army or Navy sources, it is known that many servicemen were killed during the attack on Pearl Harbor early this morning.

An entire family of eight or nine persons was reported killed by a bomb at Nuuanu and Kuakini Streets.

justintgraham12 · December 8, 2020, 4:13pm

I know it may be late for inclusion in an episode before it is over, but the story of Pan American Flight 18602 beginning yesterday on the 7th and ending in the 6th of January is a fascinating example of how civilian air crews will play a part in the supply chain of the conflict.

NormanStewart · December 8, 2020, 4:37pm

For anyone curious:

NormanStewart · December 8, 2020, 5:06pm

WIRELESS BULLETINS

British officials reserve comment

LONDON, England (UP) – News of the attack on Pearl Harbor and Army and Navy bases at Manila tonight electrified British officials who reserved comment on the possibility of British assistance, but one said, “this looks like the real thing.”

Churchill examines Britain’s position

LONDON, England (UP) – Prime Minister Winston Churchill tonight was “examining Britain’s position” in face of the new Japanese outbreak in the Pacific, it was stated authoritatively.

Cabinet summoned

WASHINGTON (UP) – President Roosevelt tonight summoned the Cabinet and congressional leaders.

Radio, cable censorship established

WASHINGTON (UP) – The Navy tonight announced censorship has been established on all outgoing cable and radio messages.

London paper flays attack

LONDON, England (UP) – The London Daily Mail reported tonight that “not even Hitler has yet achieved the infamy of a stab in the back while his envoys were still ostensibly negotiating terms of an agreement with an intended victim… That degradation has been achieved by Japan alone.”

Radio Rome blames Roosevelt

ROME, Italy (UP) – Radio Rome, broadcasting in English, tonight blamed hostilities in the Far East on President Roosevelt.

“Roosevelt’s warmongering program has started the war,” the radio said. “First hostilities have occurred between Japanese and American forces in the Far East.”

Press reaction, however, was reserved.

The first impression after the surprise part was that Italy must wait for the reaction before any clear-cut attitude can be adopted or action taken.

President Harrison believed sunk

SHANGHAI, China (UP, Dec. 8) – The Japanese are believed to have sunk or seized the U.S. Liner President Harrison, according to reports here today.

The Harrison should be off the mouth of the Yangtze en route to pick up U.S. Marines on December 10.

It was expected the Japanese would probably intern and disarm 203 remaining U.S. Marines, except those at Tientsin.

The fate of a group of U.S. Navy men aboard the USS Wake was also not known.

Japanese national arrested in Panama

PANAMA CITY, Panama (UP) – It was announced officially tonight that the Panama government ordered arrest of all Japanese nationals.

Stimson orders Army into uniform

WASHINGTON (UP) – Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson tonight ordered the entire U.S. Army into uniform – 1,600,000 men, including thousands of officers and men on duty in administrative posts who heretofore have been allowed civilian clothes.

Germans report Tokyo war announcement

BERLIN, Germany (UP, Dec. 8) – The official DNB News Agency reported from Tokyo today that “according to the Tokyo radio, Japanese military headquarters announced a state of war exists from Monday at 6 a.m. between Japan and British and United States forces in the Pacific.”

Adm. Hart: U.S., Japan at war

MANILA, Philippines (UP) – Adm. Thomas Hart announced tonight that the United States was at war with Japan and “taking steps accordingly.”

Enemy planes or ships had not yet been sighted.

Streetlights were burning in the capital, but the city was quiet. Newspapers had not yet appeared on the streets.

Sleepy-eyed Army and Navy intelligence officers were informed by the United Press of the Japanese attack on Oahu.

At first, they were doubtful of the report, generally commenting “it doesn’t make sense.”

The United Press flash here was apparently ahead of Army and Navy radio.

Adm. Hart and Lt. Gen. Douglas McArthur immediately issued full mobilization orders.

A Navy spokesman said enemy planes had not yet been sighted in Philippine waters but declined to say whether U.S. warships were steaming out of Manila Bay. The spokesman merely reiterated Adm. Hart’s announcement of existence of a state of war with Japan.

Apparently, Army men suspected something brewing since during the night numerous units were alerted. Heavy troop transport activities were noticeable in the vicinity of Manila.

Tojo reports to Emperor Hirohito

NEW YORK (UP) – A Domei News Agency broadcast heard here tonight said Minister of the Navy Adm. Shigetaro Shimada reported to an emergency cabinet meeting that fighting occurred between the United States and the Japanese Navy.

The broadcast also said that after the cabinet meeting, Premier Gen. Hideki Tojo reported to Emperor Hirohito.

Tokyo radio silent on Japanese attacks

LOS ANGELES, California (UP) – A Tokyo radio broadcast tonight (6:20 a.m. Tokyo Time) did not mention any attack on Hawaii or the Philippines.

Japan consul raided

WASHINGTON (UP) – The Japanese embassy late today started burning secret documents. There was no police protection in front of the embassy.

A dramatic raid on the Japanese consulate this morning by detectives and police caught the staff of the consulate in the act of burning documents and records.

A tipoff from one of the four policemen who had been assigned to guard the Nuuanu Street consulate brought seven men headed by Lt. Benjamin Van Kuren, chief of detectives, and Lt. Yoshio Hasegawa to force their way into the consulate office where a small fire was burning to destroy documents.

Consul General Nagao Kita was being interviewed by a Star-Bulletin reporter on the steps behind the consulate office when the car carrying the detectives entered the grounds at 12:20 p.m.

Lt. Hasegawa rushed up the steps, the men following him, past the consul general and into the hallway of the consulate office.

Inside the building, the smell of burning paper was strong and in a moment, the detectives had forced their way into a rear room, completely surprising three consulate staff members who were grouped around a small fire on which were burning records and documents.

Several safes in this room were wide open and apparently the consulate workers were taking out records and burning them as fast as possible.

A police guard stationed at the consulate said it was the smell of burning paper which prompted him to call the detectives.

Two carloads of detectives were dispatched.

When the detectives broke into a backroom, they found a smoke-filled room with doors and windows tightly locked.

The fire was immediately put out. It was burning on an overturned washtub with buckets of water nearby to extinguish the flames.

Detectives threw water on the burning documents and carefully searched all consulate personnel, including the consul general. Several were in other rooms.

Throughout the raid, neither the consul general nor his staff resisted, though one of them cussed, evidently resenting what he believed was the rough intrusion and handling.

Four regular police and provisional guards were sent at 10:30 this morning to guard the consulate, 1748 Nuuanu Ave.

They patrolled outside the consulate grounds on Nuuanu Avenue and Kuakini Street, and were also stationed on the grounds.

One of them remarked after the raid that, though he suspected “something” was going on inside the consulate office, he did not have authority to break in.

The raid interrupted an interview in which the consul general urged the Japanese people in the islands “to remain calm and law abiding.”

Earlier in the morning, at another interview, he said he had thought the bombing of Honolulu was “maneuvers” by U.S. forces here.

When informed that there were casualties, he remained unconvinced that the bombing by Japanese planes had actually taken place.

Likewise, Vice Consul Otojiro Okuda expressed surprise and disbelief when told that “this bombing is serious.”

All Japanese banks were taken over this morning, it was reported at Iolani Palace.

JAP AIRCRAFT CARRIER SUNK OFF HONOLULU

DUTCH EAST INDIES OFFICE OF THE NETHERLANDS DECLARED WAR ON JAPAN 6 P.M. TONIGHT     NEI GOVERNOR ORDERS COMPLETE MOBILIZATION

GEN. MACARTHUR IN MANILA ORDERS ALL WOMEN AND CHILDREN TO EVACUATE TO INLAND     JAPANESE LANDING PARTIES REPORTED TO HAVE OCCUPIED WAKE ISLAND

COSTA RICA DECLARES WAR ON JAPAN TONIGHT

Inner Sanctum Mysteries (NBCB), 8:30 p.m. EST:

One Man’s Family (NBCR), 8:30 p.m. EST:

REPORTS OF JAP LANDING ON WEST COAST OF OAHU DENIED BY GEN. MARSHALL

The Jergens Journal (NBCB), 9 p.m. EST:

Manhattan Merry-Go-Round: Victor Arden & His Orchestra (NBCR), 9 p.m. EST:

JAP AIRCRAFT CARRIER SUNK OFF COAST OF A LATIN-AMERICAN COUNTRY

The Parker Family (NBCB), 9:15 p.m. EST:

COL. BRINK: SINGAPORE IS BEING ATTACKED BY AIR AND THERE IS HEAVY FIGHTING AT KOTA BHARU, BRITISH MALAYA     LANDING REPORTED IN KEMASSINA     BULK OF AIR FORCE IN SINGAPORE COMMITTED TO ACTION

FCC ORDERS ALL AMATEUR RADIO OPERATORS OFF THE AIR

DEMANDS FROM IMPERIAL JAP ARMY IN NORTH CHINA RECEIVED AS FOLLOWS: IMMEDIATE AND VOLUNTARY DISARMING OF ALL MARINE FORCES IN NORTH CHINA, IMMEDIATE TURNING IN OF ALL ARMS & AMMUNITION, ASSEMBLY OF COMMAND & AWAITING FURTHER DIRECTIONS OF IMPERIAL ARMY HQ

The American Album of Familiar Music: Gustave Haenschen & His Orchestra (NBCR), 9:30 p.m. EST:

Dear John (NBCB), 9:30 p.m. EST:

DUTCH GOVT-IN-EXILE ISSUES STATEMENT THAT IT IS AT WAR WITH JAPAN

japan

Japanese Imperial Rescript
December 8, 1941, 11:40 a.m. JST

詔書

天佑ヲ保有シ萬世一系ノ皇祚ヲ踐メル大日本帝國天皇ハ昭ニ忠誠勇武ナル汝有眾ニ示ス

朕玆ニ米國及英國ニ對シテ戰ヲ宣ス朕カ陸海將兵ハ全力ヲ奮テ交戰ニ從事シ朕カ百僚有司ハ勵精職務ヲ奉行シ朕カ眾庶ハ各〻其ノ本分ヲ盡シ億兆一心國家ノ總力ヲ擧ケテ征戰ノ目的ヲ逹成スルニ遺算ナカラムコトヲ期セヨ

抑〻東亞ノ安定ヲ確保シ以テ世界ノ平和ニ寄與スルハ丕顯ナル皇祖考丕承ナル皇考ノ作述セル遠猷ニシテ朕カ拳〻措カサル所而シテ列國トノ交誼ヲ篤クシ萬邦共榮ノ樂ヲ偕ニスルハ之亦帝國カ常ニ國交ノ要義ト爲ス所ナリ今ヤ不幸ニシテ米英兩國ト釁端ヲ開クニ至ル洵ニ已ムヲ得サルモノアリ豈朕カ志ナラムヤ中華民國政府曩ニ帝國ノ眞意ヲ解セス濫ニ事ヲ構ヘテ東亞ノ平和ヲ攪亂シ遂ニ帝國ヲシテ干戈ヲ執ルニ至ラシメ玆ニ四年有餘ヲ經タリ幸ニ國民政府更新スルアリ帝國ハ之ト善隣ノ誼ヲ結ヒ相提攜スルニ至レルモ重慶ニ殘存スル政權ハ米英ノ庇蔭ヲ恃ミテ兄弟尙未タ牆ニ相鬩クヲ悛メス米英兩國ハ殘存政權ヲ支援シテ東亞ノ禍亂ヲ助長シ平和ノ美名ニ匿レテ東洋制覇ノ非望ヲ逞ウセムトス剩ヘ與國ヲ誘ヒ帝國ノ周邊ニ於テ武備ヲ增强シテ我ニ挑戰シ更ニ帝國ノ平和的通商ニ有ラユル妨害ヲ與ヘ遂ニ經濟斷交ヲ敢テシ帝國ノ生存ニ重大ナル脅威ヲ加フ朕ハ政府ヲシテ事態ヲ平和ノ裡ニ囘復セシメムトシ隱忍久シキニ彌リタルモ彼ハ毫モ交讓ノ精神ナク徒ニ時局ノ解決ヲ遷延セシメテ此ノ間却ツテ益〻經濟上軍事上ノ脅威ヲ增大シ以テ我ヲ屈從セシメムトス斯ノ如クニシテ推移セムカ東亞安定ニ關スル帝國積年ノ努力ハ悉ク水泡ニ歸シ帝國ノ存立亦正ニ危殆ニ瀕セリ事旣ニ此ニ至ル帝國ハ今ヤ自存自衞ノ爲蹶然起ツテ一切ノ障礙ヲ破碎スルノ外ナキナリ

皇祖皇宗ノ神靈上ニ在リ朕ハ汝有眾ノ忠誠勇武ニ信倚シ祖宗ノ遺業ヲ恢弘シ速ニ禍根ヲ芟除シテ東亞永遠ノ平和ヲ確立シ以テ帝國ノ光榮ヲ保全セムコトヲ期ス

昭和十六年十二月八日

內閣總理大臣兼內務大臣陸軍大臣 東條英機
文部大臣 橋田邦彦
國務大臣 鈴木貞一
農林大臣兼拓務大臣 井野碩哉
厚生大臣 小泉親彥
司法大臣 岩村通世
海軍大臣 嶋田繁太郞
外務大臣 東鄕茂德
遞信大臣 寺島健
大藏大臣 賀屋興宣
商工大臣 岸信介
鐵道大臣 八田嘉明

We, by the grace of Heaven, Emperor of Japan, seated on the throne occupied by the same dynasty from time immemorial, enjoin upon ye, Our loyal and brave subjects:

We hereby declare War on the United States of America and the British Empire. The men and officers of Our Army and Navy shall do their utmost in prosecuting the war. Our public servants of various departments shall perform faithfully and diligently their respective duties; the entire nation with a united will shall mobilize their total strength so that nothing will miscarry in the attainment of Our war aims.

To ensure the stability of East Asia and to contribute to world peace is the far-sighted policy which was formulated by Our Great Illustrious Imperial Grandsire and Our Great Imperial Sire succeeding Him, and which We lay constantly to heart. To cultivate friendship among nations and to enjoy prosperity in common with all nations, has always been the guiding principle of Our Empire’s foreign policy. It has been truly unavoidable and far from Our wishes that Our Empire has been brought to cross swords with America and Britain. More than four years have passed since China, failing to comprehend the true intentions of Our Empire, and recklessly courting trouble, disturbed the peace of East Asia and compelled Our Empire to take up arms. Although there has been reestablished the National Government of China, with which Japan had effected neighborly intercourse and cooperation, the regime which has survived in Chungking, relying upon American and British protection, still continues its fratricidal opposition. Eager for the realization of their inordinate ambition to dominate the Orient, both America and Britain, giving support to the Chungking regime, have aggravated the disturbances in East Asia. Moreover these two Powers, inducing other countries to follow suit, increased military preparations on all sides of Our Empire to challenge Us. They have obstructed by every means Our peaceful commerce and finally resorted to a direct severance of economic relations, menacing gravely the existence of Our Empire. Patiently have We waited and long have We endured, in the hope that Our government might retrieve the situation in peace. But Our adversaries, showing not the least spirit of conciliation, have unduly delayed a settlement; and in the meantime they have intensified the economic and political pressure to compel thereby Our Empire to submission. This trend of affairs, would, if left unchecked, not only nullify Our Empire’s efforts of many years for the sake of the stabilization of East Asia, but also endanger the very existence of Our nation. The situation being such as it is, Our Empire, for its existence and self-defense has no other recourse but to appeal to arms and to crush every obstacle in its path.

The hallowed spirits of Our Imperial Ancestors guarding Us from above, We rely upon the loyalty and courage of Our subjects in Our confident expectation that the task bequeathed by Our forefathers will be carried forward and that the sources of evil will be speedily eradicated and an enduring peace immutably established in East Asia, preserving thereby the glory of Our Empire.

(Released by the Board of Information, December 8, 1941)

The Dinah Shore Show (NBCB), 9:45 p.m. EST:

KIRO Seattle bulletins, 9:56 p.m. EST:

CANADA DECLARES WAR ON JAPAN

The Goodwill Hour (NBCB), 10 p.m. EST:

Hour of Charm (NBCR), 10 p.m. EST:

Address by Japanese Prime Minister Tojo
December 8, 1941, 12 noon JST

Tokyo, Japan

tojo

Broadcast (NHK):

ただいま、宣戰の御詔敕が農發されました。精銳なる帝國陸海軍は今や决死の戰いを行いつつあります。東亞全局の平和は、これを念願する帝國のあらゆる努力にも關わらず、ついに决裂のやむなきに至ったのであります。過般來、政府はあらゆる手段を盡くし、對米國交調整の成立に努力して參りましたが、彼は從來の主張を一歩も讓らざるのみならず、かえって英蘭支と連合して、支那より我が陸海軍の無條件件全面撤兵、南亰政府の否認、日獨伊三國條約の破弃を要求し、帝國の一方的讓步を强要して參りました。これに對し、帝國はあくまで平和的妥結の努力を續けましたが、米國は何ら反省の色を示さず、今日に至りました。もし帝國にして彼らの强要に屈從せんか、帝國の權威を失墜し、支那亊變の完遂を朞しえざるのみならず、ついには帝國の存立をも危殆に陷らしむる結果となるのであります。ことここに至りましては、帝國は現下の時局を打開し、自存自衞を全うするため、斷固として立ち上がるのやむなきに至ったのであります。

今、宣戰の大詔を拜しまして、恐懼感激に耐えません。私は不肖なりといえども一身を捧げて决死報國、ただただ宸襟を安んじ奉らんとの念願のみであります。國民諸君もまた、おのが身を顧みず、醜の御楯たるの光榮を同じうされるものと信るものであります。およそ勝利の要訣は、必勝の信念を堅持することであります。建國二千六百年、我等は未だかつて戰いに破れたことを知りません。

この史績の囘顧こそ、いかなる强敵をも破碎するの確信を生ずるものであります。我等は光輝ある祖國の歷史を斷じて行さざるとともに、さらに榮えある帝國の明日を建設せんことを堅く誓うものであります。

顧みれば、我等は今日まで隱忍、自重との最大限を重ねたのでありまするが、斷じて安きを求めたものでなく、また敵の强大を恐れたものでもありません。ひたすら丗界平和の維持と人類の慘禍の防止とを顧念したるに他なりません。しかも敵の挑戰を受け、祖國の生存と權威とが危うきに及でましては、决然起たざるを得ないのであります。當面の敵は物資の豐冨を誇り、これによつて丗界の制霸を目指しておるのであります。この敵を粉碎し、東亞不動の新秩序を建設せんがためには當然、長朞戰たることを豫想せねばなりません。これと同時に、絕大の建設努力を要すること、言を要しません。かくて我等はあくまで最後の勝利が祖國日夲にあることを確信し、いかなる困難も障害も克服して逹まなければなりません。これこそ、昭和の御民我らに課せられたる天與の試練であり、この試練を突破して後にこそ大東亞建設者としての榮譽を後丗に擔うことができるものであります。

このときにあたり、滿洲國及び，中華民國との一德一心の關係、いよいよあつく、獨伊兩國との盟約、益々堅きを加えつつあるを快欣とするものであります。帝國の隆替、東亞の興廢、正にこの一戰にあり。一億國民が一切を擧げて國に報い、國に殉ずるの時は今であります。八紘を宇となす皇謨の下に、この盡忠報國の大精神ある限り、英米といえども何ら恐るるに足らないのであります。勝利は常に御稜威の下にありと確信致すものであります。私はここに謹んで微表を披歷し、國民とともに大業翼贊の丹心を誓う次第であります。

終わり。

BRIG. LETSON: CANADIAN ARMY, NAVY ORDERED TO ENGAGE THE ENEMY WHEREVER FOUND. WORD HAS BEEN SENT TO BRITISH KING THAT CANADA REGARDS HERSELF AT WAR WITH JAPAN AS OF DEC. 7

Sherlock Holmes (NBCR), 10:30 p.m. EST:

PRES. ROOSEVELT TO ADDRESS JOINT SESSION OF CONGRESS AT NOON DEC. 8     JAPANESE ATTEMPT TO LAND ON COAST NEAR SINGAPORE REPULSED BY SMALL ARMS FIRE

TREASURY SECY. MORGENTHAU INVOKES TRADING WITH THE ENEMY ACT     UNDERSECWAR CALLS ON NATION TO PUT PRODUCTION ON 24-HOUR BASIS

AXIS-CONTROLLED RADIO STATION, SHANGHAI: THAILAND STARTS MOVING LARGE NUMBER OF MILITARY FORCES TOWARD SOUTHERN BORDER OF BRITISH BURMA

News (NBCB), 11 p.m. EST:

News (NBCR), 11 p.m. EST:

TWO BRITISH CRUISERS SUNK AT SINGAPORE

RAF CONTINUES SEARCH FOR JAPANESE NAVAL SOURCES WITH WHOM CONTACT HAS BEEN LOST     BRITISH WILL OCCUPY KRA ISTHMUS SINGORA AREA IN CASE JAP CONVOY OR SHOW SIGNS OF INVADING PENINSULA. BRITISH READY TO ATTACK ON MOMENT’S NOTICE

The Legion Answers the Call (NBCB), 11:15 p.m. EST:

REPORT OF ENEMY PLANES OVER LUZON, DAVAO; REPORT OF ATTACK AT CAMP HAY, BAGUIO     AIR RAID ALARM SOUNDED IN BANGKOK

Diary of Agriculture Secretary Claude R. Wickard
December 7, 1941

At about four o’clock on the afternoon of December 7, I received a call from the White House saying that there would be a special meeting of the Cabinet in the President’s study in the White House proper at 8:30 that evening. I had been writing all afternoon and Louise had been busy so we had not listened to the radio, but I immediately concluded that the Japanese situation had taken a turn for the worse. Within a few minutes after the White House call we were able to get from radio reports that Honolulu and perhaps Manila had been attacked. Later the announcers said that Manila had not been attacked but that three or four hundred lives had been lost in attacks in Hawaii.

The Cabinet members were ushered into the President’s study at 8:40. Harry Hopkins was present. The President began by saying that this was the most important Cabinet meeting since 1861. He then told of the attack today in Hawaii. He said the attack was a serious one which he would describe later. He continued by saying that there was no question but that the Japanese had been told by the Germans a few weeks ago that they were winning the war and that they would soon dominate Africa as well as Europe. They were going to isolate England and were also going to completely dominate the situation in the Far East. The Japs had been told if they wanted to be cut in on the spoils they would have to come in the war now.

The President said that it would have been necessary to start making plans for today’s attack at least three weeks ago. He then related how the Japanese Envoys, even today, had asked for a conference with Secretary Hull at the hour when the attack was being made in Hawaii. He said that the Japanese had started a war while carrying on peace negotiations.

The President said that Guam and Wake Islands were also under attack. He said these Islands were poorly fortified and that they would soon be in Japanese hands. He then read a message which he said he was going to read tomorrow at a joint session of Congress. He said that the message was subject to revision as later events might warrant. The message was short and merely stated how Japan had attacked while still carrying on peace negotiations. It ended by stating that he was asking Congress to declare that a state of war had existed since Japan’s attack. He indicated that he did not know whether Japan had declared war or not. He also said there was a chance that the Germans would also declare war. There was considerable discussion of the proposed message. Secretary Hull said that he thought that there should be a complete statement on the events leading up to the attack. The President disagreed but Hull said he thought the most important war in 500 years deserved more than a short statement. Secretary Stimson said that Germany had inspired and planned this whole affair and that the President should so state in his message. The President disagreed with this suggestion.

The President went into the confidential reports of the attack which he said must be kept in strict secrecy. He first indicated that aircraft had been destroyed in large numbers in the attack. He then revealed that six out of seven of the battleships in Pearl Harbor had been damaged – some very severely. I was shocked at the news; so were other members of the Cabinet. The Secretary of the Navy had lost his air of bravado. Secretary Stimson was very sober.

The President said that the Japanese were hoping to bring about the transfer of American naval vessels from the Atlantic to the Pacific. He said he wanted to avoid this if at all possible. He said that he didn’t want to tell Congressional leaders (of both parties – including Senators Barkley, Johnson, Austin and Connally, Speaker Rayburn, and Congressmen Jere Cooper, Martin, Bloom, and Doxey) who were waiting to come in to his study all the things he had told us.

When they came in he said that it was very unpleasant to be a War President and then he recounted the series of events leading up to the attacks of today. He said that he wanted to deliver a message to a joint session of Congress tomorrow. After a short discussion it was decided to have him address the session at 12:30. Some of the Congressmen wanted to know if he were going to ask for a declaration of war. The President said he didn’t know yet what he was going to say because the events of the next fourteen hours would be numerous and all important. The President revealed that at least battleships were damaged. This caused considerable consternation among the Congressional leaders. Connally asked what damage we had inflicted on the Japs. The President indicated he didn’t know but went on to say we had no information to indicate that we had severely damaged the Japs. Connolly exploded by saying: “Where were our forces – asleep? How can we go to war without anything to fight with?” The President told how the Germans might have been five hundred miles away at dark last night since they had twelve hours of sailing in the long darkness.

The President went on to say that the distance to Japan made it very difficult for us to attack Japan. He said that each thousand miles from base cut the efficiency of the Navy five percent. He pointed out that it would be necessary to strangle Japan rather than whip her and that it took longer. He once spoke about two or three years being required.

The meeting broke up about 10 o’clock. Everyone was very sober. The President began to dictate a statement for the press. Some of us stayed around for nearly an hour. I talked to the Vice President who said many times that it was all for the best. I reminded him that he had made a similar statement when we were at the Convention at Chicago last year when it seemed that everything was crashing around us.

Through it all the President was calm and deliberate. I could not help but admire his clear statements of the situation. He evidently realizes the seriousness of the situation and perhaps gets much comfort out of the fact that today’s action will unite the American people. I don’t know anybody in the United States who can come close to measuring up to his foresight and acumen in this critical hour.

As I drove home I could not refrain from wondering at the fates that caused me to be present at one of the most important conferences in the history of this nation.

Roundtable discussion (NBCR), 11:30 p.m. EST:

HAWAII REPORTS FROM MANILA THAT NO OVERT ACTS HAVE YET OCCURRED THERE     AT 11 A.M., ENEMY RESUMED AIR ATTACK OF MUCH LESS INTENSITY THAN PREVIOUS ACTION

MAJOR PORTION OF AIR STRENGTH IN ACTION AS SINGAPORE IS MADE A TARGET FOR JAPANESE AIR OPERATIONS     AN ENEMY LANDING HAS TAKEN PLACE AT KOTA BHARU WHERE SEVERE ACTION IS BEGINNING, AS WELL AS IN VICINITY OF CAPE KAMASSIN.

PRES. ROOSEVELT AUTHORIZES FBI TO PICK UP ALL AXIS NATIONALS IMMEDIATELY. THIS INCLUDES GERMANS AND ITALIANS

NICARAGUA DECLARES WAR ON JAPAN

U.S. Navy Department (December 7, 1941)

December 7, 1941
072252 CR 0102

FROM: CNO                                                                                        

TO: CINCPAC, COM PANAMA, CINCAF, PACIFIC                         
NORTHERN, PACIFIC SOUTHERN,
HAWAIIAN NAVAL COSTAL FRONTIERS

Execute against Japan unrestricted air and submarine warfare. CINCAF inform British and Dutch. Inform Army.

Japan Times & Advertiser (December 8, 1941)

WAR IS ON!

JAPAN’S NAVY PLANES ATTACK HAWAII, SINGAPORE, DAVAO, WAKE, GUAM ISLES
Great successes reported in all areas raided in naval announcement

British troops in Thailand being wiped out – Hongkong heavily bombed by Navy – Landing in Malaya announced – Cabinet meeting in emergency session

The Naval Department of the Imperial Headquarters at 11 a.m. today announced to the effect that the Japanese Navy planes this morning conducted bombings on the air and military establishments in Hawaii.

Further official announcements reported that the Japanese Navy planes early this morning carried out extensive bombings of military equipments and establishments at Singapore, Davao (in the Philippines), Guam and Wake Islands.

It was further reported that the commander of the Japanese naval forces in the China waters early this morning demanded the British gunboat Peterel and the American gunboat Wake both at Shanghai to surrender. The British refused and was sunk. The American gunboat surrendered.

British in Thailand wiped out

BANGKOK (Domei) – The Japanese Army forces are driving the British forces out of the territory of Thailand, it was announced by the Japanese Embassy in Bangkok. The Japanese side was informed December 4 of Britain’s plan of invading Thailand. As expected, the British forces traversed the frontier and invaded Thailand from Malaya at dawn today. The Japanese forces, therefore, started attacks upon the invading British forces in order to maintain peace in the southern Pacific and preserve independence of Thailand. The Japanese forces are now wiping out the British forces, according to the announcement.

Hongkong suffers raid

SOMEWHERE IN SOUTH CHINA (Domei) – Japanese bombers made a bombing attack upon Hongkong at 8 a.m. today. All Japanese bombers safely returned to their base. Japanese planes are now carrying out their second raid upon Hongkong.

Hongkong attacked

The Imperial Army lost no time in commencing attack upon Hongkong as soon as Japan entered a state of war with Great Britain and the United States, it was announced by the Army Information Department of the Imperial Headquarters at 11:40 a.m. today.

Malay landing made

The Imperial army and naval forces in close cooperation succeeded in effecting a surprise landing on the Malay Peninsula at dawn today, it was jointly announced by the Army Department and the Navy Information Department of the Imperial Headquarters at 11:50 a.m. today.

Now in state of war

The Japanese Army and Navy entered a state of war with the United States and British forces in the Western Pacific at dawn today, it was announced by the Army Department and the Navy Department of the Imperial Headquarters at 6 a.m. today.

At 7 a.m. today, the Cabinet met in an emergency meeting at the Premier’s official residence. Premier Gen. Hideki Tojo and all his Cabinet ministers were present at the meeting.

Navy Minister Adm. Shigetaro Shimada, at the outset of the meeting, reported the development of hostilities with American and British forces, on the basis of which the Cabinet decided on the policy to be taken.

Immediately following the close of the Cabinet meeting at 7:20 a.m., Premier Gen. Hideki Tojo proceeded to the Imperial Palace and reported the matter to the Throne.

Prior to the commencement of operations, Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo proceeded to the Imperial Palace at early dawn today and was received in audience by His Majesty the Emperor. Foreign Minister Togo made a detailed report on the final diplomatic step taken by Japan vis-à-vis the United States and Great Britain to the Throne.

Retiring from the Imperial presence, Foreign Minister Togo saw at 3 a.m. Premier Gen. Tojo who had been in his official residence since last night.

Having conducted an important conversation with the Premier, Foreign Minister Togo made his appearance at the emergency meeting of the Cabinet.

The Privy Council was convened in an extraordinary plenary session from 8 a.m. in the Imperial Palace. Premier Gen. Tojo and all his Cabinet ministers were present at the meeting, explained the state of war between the Japanese Army and Navy with American and British forces.

Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo invited American Ambassador Joseph Grew to his official residence at 7:30 a.m., December 8, and handed him a copy of Japan’s formal reply to Secretary of State Cordell Hull delivered through Ambassador Nomura at Washington. At 8 a.m. the same day, the foreign minister invited the British Ambassador Sir Robert Craigie to his official residence and explained the nature of the formal reply to America.

U.S. Marines disarmed

TIENTSIN, China (Domei) – With Japan entered a state of war with British and the United States, the crack unit of the Japanese forces here marched into the British concession at 8 a.m. today and simultaneously disarmed the American marines numbering 63. The Japanese forces took control of the Anglo-American interests here. Similar actions were taken in Tangku, Taku, Chinwangtao, and Shanhaikwan. In the meantime, the Kailan concession was taken up and will be operated as ever under Japanese protection.

Japanese troop transport off Pearl Harbor; Honolulu now in midst of terrific bomb attack

American Army ship reported sunk; Stimson mobilizes army forces to take immediate action Roosevelt orders

SAN FRANCISCO (Domei, Dec. 7) – As the Japanese tightened encirclement around Guam, the fuel tanks and a hotel located on this mid-Pacific island are now enveloped in flames as a result of severe Japanese bombing, according to a report reaching here.

NormanStewart · December 8, 2020, 5:08pm

NEW YORK (Domei, Dec. 7) – A Japanese transport ship loaded with troops has been sighted off Barber Point, just west of Pearl Harbor, according to the latest United Press dispatch from Honolulu today.

Honolulu air-attacked

HONOLULU (Domei, Dec. 7) – Honolulu, for the first time in its existence, trembled to the repeated blasts of heavy bombs as large formations of Japanese naval bombers pounded the city, beginning at 7:35 a.m. today.

Honolulu raid continues

NEW YORK (Domei, Dec. 7) – Japanese warplanes are still hammering at Honolulu, according to the latest Honolulu radio broadcast intercepted by the National Broadcasting Company today.

The report said the Japanese attack from the air has already been continuing for close on three hours.

The Honolulu radio said Japanese bombers staged a heavy air attack on Honolulu and claimed the United States’ army and navy forces “are still able to hold their own.”

Army transport sunk

WASHINGTON (Domei) – A United States Army transport vessel, loaded with lumber, has been torpedoed 1,300 miles off San Francisco.

Orders given forces

WASHINGTON (Domei, Dec. 7) – President Roosevelt today ordered the United States Army and Navy to carry into effect immediately orders for action which had been previously prepared.

U.S. Army mobilized

WASHINGTON (Domei, Dec. 7) – Col. Henry L. Stimson, secretary of war, at 8 p.m. today issued orders for the mobilization of the entire United States Army. The order will be effective from tomorrow, it was said.

Japan’s reply delivered

WASHINGTON (Domei, Dec. 7) – Adm. Kichisaburo Nomura, Japanese ambassador here, and Saburo Kurusu, special Japanese envoy, called on Cordell Hull, secretary of state, at 2 p.m. today and handed him Japan’s reply.

Hull dissatisfied

WASHINGTON (Domei, Dec. 7) – Cordell Hull, secretary of state, today informed Adm. Kichisaburo Nomura, Japanese ambassador to the United States and Saburo Kurusu, special envoy, that he was dissatisfied with the Japanese answer to his document to Japan.

Emergency session called

WASHINGTON (Domei, Dec. 7) – President Roosevelt called an emergency session at 8 p.m. today.

Following the meeting, President Roosevelt is expected to confer with Democratic and Republican Party leaders, it was said.

War chiefs called

BERLIN (Domei, Dec. 7) – President Roosevelt has summoned Col. Henry L. Stimson, secretary of war; Col. Frank Knox, secretary of the navy; Gen. George Cattlet Marshall, Chief of Staff, and Adm. Harold R. Stark, chief of naval operations, for an emergency conference, the official German news agency reported from Stockholm today.

The report indicated that portending problems relative to the opening of hostilities between Japan and the United States were discussed at the meeting.

Japanese being investigated

SAN FRANCISCO (Domei, Dec. 7) – Simultaneously with outbreak of hostilities between the United States and Japan, Pacific coast agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation today began investigation of all alien Japanese activities to prevent possible acts of sabotage.

Litvinov in Washington

WASHINGTON (Domei, Dec. 7) – Maxim Litvinov, Soviet ambassador to the United States, arrived here this morning from Moscow, via Cairo, Manila and Hawaii.

Spokesman explains war move by Japan

Tomokazu Hori, spokesman of the Information Board, at 12:30 noon today issued the following statement:

We have endeavored with all the means at our command to ease the tense situation with a view to securing the peace of the Pacific area. But the best effort on Japan’s part has failed to make the governments of the United States and the British Empire see their way clear to a just and equitable peace. It is very regrettable indeed that Japan has thus been compelled to resort to the only way left to her, regarding which the Imperial Rescript declaring war against the United States and the British Empire has just been graciously granted.

Needless to say, Japan will do everything in her power to crush enemies. But let us emphasize at this opportunity that, this is a war between states and not a war between individual nationals of Japan and the enemy countries. Therefore, the Japanese government will follow the policy of taking every possible precautionary measure in order to assure the safety of those nationals of the United States and the British Empire who are residing in Japan.

News (NBCR), December 8, 12 midnight EST:

USS HELENA AND ONE OTHER CRUISER BADLY DAMAGED (CRACKS IN THE BOTTOM), TWO DESTROYERS BLOWN UP IN HAWAII

JAPS CLAIM LANDING ON WAKE AND SURRENDER OF U.S. FORCE

GEN. GULLION: FBI TELLS HIM THEY HAVE NOT RECEIVED INSTRUCTIONS TO ROUND UP AXIS NATIONALS – AT VARIANCE WITH CAPT. KINGMAN’S PREVIOUS REPORT

REPORTS FROM TOKYO STATE THAT THE JAPANESE HAVE CROSSED THAI BORDER & BRITISH TROOPS HAVE ALSO ENTERED THAILAND FROM MALAYA     ‘INFORMED SOURCES’ IN JAPAN BELIEVE THAT GERMANY WILL DECLARE WAR ON THE U.S. WITHIN 24 HOURS

PAN AM AIRWAYS BASE AT GUAM BOMBED BY THE JAPANESE

Richard Himber and His Orchestra (NBCB), 12:30 a.m. EST:

GEN. GULLION: HE HAD JUST TALKED TO THE ATTORNEY GENERAL, PRES. ROOSEVELT SAID “WE WILL TAKE THEM IN,” APPREHEND ONLY JAPS ON A, B LISTS

OTTAWA OFFICIALS SAY NAVAL SIGNALS SAYING THAT BRITAIN HAD DECLARED WAR ON JAPAN HAD BEEN HEARD IN CANADA

News & music (NBCR), 1 a.m. EST:

Jack Teagarden and His Orchestra (NBCB), 1:15 a.m. EST:

GUAM AGAIN ATTACKED BY SIX SEAPLANES AT 1445 LOCAL TIME

LANDINGS FROM TWO DESTROYERS, LARGE TRANSPORTS AT PATAN SHOWN BY AERIAL RECON

CAPT. WILKINSON: SUSPICIOUS MESSAGES TRANSMITTED FROM JAP EMBASSY, FOREIGN OFFICE TO CONSULATE IN NEW ORLEANS

AFTER BEING REPULSED AT KOTA BHARU, JAPS NOW SUCCESSFUL AT SABAK, 13 MILES SOUTHWARD

Teltower Kreisblatt (December 8, 1941)

Kriegszustand Japan-USA

Berlin, 8. Dezember – As Ergebnis der sich in den Letzten Wochen dauernd steigernden Kriegshetze des amerikanischen Präsidenten Roosevelt ist es heute in Ostasien zu den ersten Zusammenstößen zwischen japanischen und US-Streitkräften gekommen.

Tokio, 8. Dezember – Wie der Sender Tokio mitteilt, gibt das japanische militärische Hauptquartier bekannt, dass von Montagmorgen 6 Uhr ab der Kriegszustand zwischen Japan und von englischen und US-Streitkräften im Stillen Ozean besteht.

NBC NEW YORK: U.S. ARMY TRANSPORT HUGH SCOTT, FORMERLY AN AMERICAN PRESIDENT LINER, SINKS ABOUT 1600 MILES FROM MANILA     FORMER LINER PRESIDENT HARRISON HAD BEEN EITHER SUNK OR SEIZED IN YANGTZE JUST SOUTH OF SHANGHAI

IN JAPANESE ATTACK ON PHILIPPINES, NBC REPORTS SEVERAL LIVES LOST IN DAVAO BOMBING – ESTIMATED AS HIGH AS 50     SEVERAL CASUALTIES REPORTED AT CAMP ORD, 100 MILES NORTH OF MANILA

12 JAPANESE TAKEN INTO CUSTODY IN NEW YORK

CLARK FIELD IN PHILIPPINE ISLANDS REPORTED BOMBED, MACHINE-GUNNED     ATTACK ON DAVAO MADE BY 13 JAPANESE PLANES

FIRE CHIEF IN HONOLULU REPORTS THAT FIRES IN THAT CITY ARE UNDER CONTROL & WERE NOT AS BAD AS HE HAD EXPECTED

News (NBCB), 2 a.m. EST:

POSTAL & WESTERN UNION HOLDING UP ALL JAP MESSAGES     AT&T AGREES TO STOP ALL JAPANESE LONG-DISTANCE CALLS

Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra (NBCR), 2:30 a.m. EST:

BRITISH RADIO REPORTS 10 JAPANESE SHIPS REPORTED SIGHTED IN THE GULF OF THAILAND AND ATTACK OF PALAU

JAPANESE AIRCRAFT CARRIER REPORTED SIGHTED OFF BAY OF DAVAO     NBC LOS ANGELES: TOKYO DISPATCH REPORTS JAPANESE BOMBERS ATTACKING PALAWAN

PAN AM CLIPPER WHICH LEFT MANILA FOR HONG KONG SUNDAY BOMBED IN HONG KONG HARBOR. PASSENGERS, CREW SAFE ON SHORE

Henry Busse and His Orchestra (NBCB), 3 a.m. EST:

JAPANESE PLANES CONTINUING TO ATTACK PALAWAN IN PHILIPPINES

OFFICIAL REPORT FROM SINGAPORE: ALL JAPANESE SURFACE CRAFT IN NORTHERN MALAY PENINSULA FLED UNDER BRITISH FIRE, LEAVING FEW TROOPS ON SHORE

BATAVIA: DUTCH PLANES PARTICIPATE WITH BRITISH AGAINST JAPANESE PLANES     BRITISH INVITED TO OPERATE FROM DUTCH EAST INDIES

SOUTH AFRICA DECLARES WAR ON FINLAND, HUNGARY AND ROMANIA

Stan Kenton and His Orchestra (NBCB), 3:30 a.m. EST:

GERMANY, ITALY “WATCHFUL WAITING,” WAR DECLARATION NOT EXPECTED IMMEDIATELY

CBS MELBOURNE: AUSTRALIA DECLARES WAR ON JAPAN

SINGAPORE: TWO DESTROYERS AND SIX LARGE TRANSPORTERS LANDING AT PATAN

Bill Clifford and His Orchestra (NBCB), 4 a.m. EST:

JAPANESE PLANES BOMB KOWLOON, HONG KONG     GUNFIRE HEARD OFF MERSING, 90 MILES FROM SINGAPORE. SIGNIFICANCE UNCLEAR

Bob Stevens Sings with Harold Curtis at the Organ (NBCB), 4:30 a.m. EST:

Morning Varieties: Al and Lee Rider, vocals by Vi and Vilma (NBCB), 5 a.m. EST:

Morning Varieties: The Lyric Sisters (NBCB), 5:26 a.m. EST:

CBS MANILA: MANILA HAS NOT BEEN BOMBED. OUR FIGHTERS HAVE DRIVEN JAPS OFF. MANILA BEING EVACUATED BY CIVIL POPULATION. NINE KILLED AT DAVAO

CBS LONDON: LANDING ATTACKS ON MALAYA REPULSED

BRITISH REPORT STATES GUAM SURROUNDED BY JAPANESE WARSHIPS

GUNFIRE HEARD WEST OF HAWAII INDICATES LARGE NAVAL BATTLE IN PROGRESS     ATTACK ON OAHU LASTED ONE HOUR AND FIFTY MINUTES      ENEMY PLANES ATTACK WAHIAWA, 20 MILES NW OF HONOLULU. 10 OR MORE PERSONS INJURED

NBC: USS LANGLEY REPORTED UNOFFICIALLY IN MANILA, DAMAGED IN ACTION WITH JAPANESE FORCES

The Andrini Trio (NBCB), 6 a.m. EST:

STATE DEPT.: CABLE FROM U.S. MINISTER AT BANGKOK STATE THAILAND GOVERNMENT NOW NEGOTIATING WITH JAPS ON TERMS FOR CAPITULATION

NBC: JAP PLANES REPORTED TO HAVE ATTACKED BAGUIO, SUMMERTIME MOUNTAIN CAPITAL OF THE PHILIPPINES

Morning in Manhattan (WEAF), 6:30 a.m. EST:

Sunrise Revue (NBCB), 6:30 a.m. EST:

STATE DEPT.: JAPANESE AIR ATTACK ON HONG KONG'S KAI TAK AIRFIELD CAUSED GREAT DAMAGE     SHUTTLE CLIPPER PLANE BETWEEN HONG KONG AND MANILA WAS DESTROYED SHORTLY BEFORE SCHEDULED TAKEOFF     ANTI-AIRCRAFT DEFENSE APPARENTLY NOT SUCCESSFUL

BANGKOK RADIO: JAPANESE HAVE INVADED THAILAND     AUSTRALIAN RADIO: BANGKOK BEING SHELLED BY JAPANESE NAVAL VESSELS, BOMBED FROM AIR

JAPS ATTACK TARLAC, 70 MILES NORTH OF MANILA     13 PLANES TOOK PART IN ATTACK ON DAVAO AND 17 ON BAGUIO

AIR RAID SIRENS SOUNDED SECOND TIME SINCE JAPANESE BEGAN HOSTILITIES IN SINGAPORE     EXCHANGE TELEGRAPH: SINGAPORE GOVERNOR SAYS 60 PERSONS WERE KILLED, 130 INJURED IN JAPANESE BOMBING OF SINGAPORE THIS MORNING

PANAMA DECIDES TO INTERN ALL JAPANESE, AFFIRMS INTENTION TO COOPERATE WITH THE U.S. POLICE REPORT THAT 130 OF 300 JAPANESE IN PANAMA HAVE BEEN TAKEN INTO CUSTODY BY EARLY MORNING

ARGENTINIAN ACTING PRES. CASTILLO: ‘ARGENTINA WILL MAINTAIN STRICT NEUTRALITY IN THE PACIFIC CRISIS’

JAPANESE GOVERNMENT HANDS FORMAL DECLARATIONS OF WAR TO AMERICAN, BRITISH AMBASSADORS IN TOKYO AS WELL AS TO CANADIAN AND AUSTRALIAN LEGATIONS

BRITISH REPORT ATTEMPTED LANDING OF JAPANESE IN NORTH BORNEO HAS BEEN REPULSED

CBS MANILA: 290 PERSONS KILLED OR INJURED IN TWO AIR RAIDS ON PHILIPPINE ISLANDS

Breakfast in Bedlam (NBCB), 7 a.m. EST:

JAPANESE NAVAL FORCE SEEN NEAR COCOS ISLAND IN INDIAN OCEAN

MIDWAY ATTACKED BY SHIPS 12 MILES SOUTH OF REEF; ANOTHER SHIP OPENS FIRE WEST OF ROOF

GUAM GOVERNOR: USS PENGUIN WAS ATTACKED IN GUAM RAID, SINKING HOURS LATER. TWO PAN AM EMPLOYEES REPORTED KILLED

News (NBCB), 8 a.m. EST:

News (WEAF), 8:02 a.m. EST:

JAPAN ANNOUNCES THAILAND HAS QUIT FIGHTING & HAS AGREED TO LET JAPANESE TROOPS PASS THROUGH THE COUNTRY

JAPANESE NAVY ANNOUNCES OFFICIALLY THAT TWO U.S. BATTLESHIPS HAVE BEEN SUNK, FOUR OTHERS DAMAGED, AND FOUR HEAVY CRUISERS DAMAGED AT PEARL HARBOR

News (NBCR), 8:30 a.m. EST:

Studio X (WEAF), 8:32 a.m. EST:

Texas Jim Robertson (NBCB), 8:30 a.m. EST:

JAPAN OFFICIALLY ANNOUNCES 50 OR 60 PLANES WERE SHOT DOWN IN AIR FIGHTS OVER CLARK FIELD IN THE PHILIPPINES; ANOTHER 40 U.S. PLANES SHOT DOWN AT IBA     100 BRITISH, AMERICAN SUBJECTS & OTHER FOREIGN NATIONALS ROUNDED UP BY JAPAN THIS MORNING

Virginia Rounds Round Up of World Wide News (WEAF), 8:45 a.m. EST:

Music by Elwin Owen (NBCB), 8:45 a.m. EST:

JAPANESE IMPERIAL HQ ANNOUNCES U.S. AIRCRAFT CARRIER HAS BEEN SUNK OFF HONOLULU; MANY MERCHANT SHIPS CAPTURED IN THE PACIFIC

The Breakfast Club (NBCB), 9 a.m. EST:

News (NBCR), 9 a.m. EST:

TOKYO: GERMANY SOON WILL FOLLOW JAPAN IN DECLARATION OF WAR ON U.S.

JAPAN IDENTIFIES ONE U.S. BATTLESHIP SUNK AT PEARL HARBOR: USS PENNSYLVANIA. THE PENNSYLVANIA WAS BUILT IN 1916

CHINA DECLARES WAR ON JAPAN, GERMANY & ITALY

AUSTRALIAN PRIME MINISTER CURTIN ANNOUNCES JAPS HAVE ATTACKED NAURU ISLAND

Rhythmic Melodies (NBCR), 9:30 a.m. EST:

JAPAN ANNOUNCES TWO OTHER BATTLESHIPS SUNK AT PEARL HARBOR IDENTIFIED AS THE USS OKLAHOMA (29,000 TONS) & THE USS WEST VIRGINIA (32,600 TONS)

Your Gospel Singer (NBCR), 9:45 a.m. EST:

JAPANESE AIR FORCE ATTACKS FORT STOTSENBURG, NORTHERN LUZON HQ

LIFE (December 8, 1941)

Modern industrial Japan needs steel, oil and machine tools

Japanese-made seven-ton trucks carry troops, munitions and supplies in China.

Japanese lathe cutters peel down 14-inch naval shell to exact size.

840-lb Japanese bombs are piled at Osaka for shipment south to the war zones.

Cadets at Japanese Naval Academy practice on these obsolete guns.

Munitions factory workers swing away a finished 840-lb bomb on chain hoist.

Breech ring, looking like a big bolt, is fitted onto a naval gun.

Tokyo railway to Yokohama and Mississippi Bay curves out of Yurakucho Station and Tokyo’s central shopping district. This stone heart of city is no pushover for bombing.

Tiny new two-man tankettes roll down broad avenue toward Tokyo’s Meiji Shrine.

Japanese Navy medium bomber (1936 model) flies over mountains toward Burma Road.

Emperor Hirohito on favorite horse, White Snow, wearing Orders of the Chrysanthemum, Rising Sun and Golden Kite, reviews fair 15-ton Japanese-made tanks with 37-mm gun.

An ancient 3-inch anti-aircraft gun passes the war dead at Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine.

The troublemaker in the Pacific is not the Japan of lacquered hats on the preceding page, but the modern Japan shown here in stills from Japanese government movies just brought to the United States by photographer Arthur Menken. The tools of the modern Japan are, however, in the hands of soldiers and politicians bred in “heroic” and greedy feudal notions. Under the shadow of this Japan, U.S. Marines and two U.S. gunboats last week left Shanghai, probably for Manila; more Americans sailed from Japan; and the U.S. tightened its defenses of the Philippines, its Tobruk in any Pacific war.

To this Japan, the United States last week announced that it would tolerate no further aggression by Japan, specifically a move across Thailand or China’s Yunnan Province toward the Burma Road. It added:

The policy of this government has been one of infinite patience… The Secretary of State showed even more patience in these negotiations than the president, who has a great store of patience.

The machines on these pages mark Japan’s Achilles heel as well as its strength, for they require steel, oil, tools, things Japan must get from the United States. As Prime Minister Churchill pointed out November 11:

If steel is the basic foundation of modern war, it would be rather dangerous for a power like Japan, whose steel production is only about 7,000,000 tons a year, to provoke a struggle with the United States, whose steel production is now about 90,000,000 tons.

The present U.S. embargo on things like steel and oil is painful for Japan. War and complete embargo would be disastrous, for Japan is desperate and getting weaker every day. It cannot back out of China. It cannot strike at Russia until it is sure of German victory. And it is none too certain of how it will fare in a German victory. It turns a suspicious ear to German attempts to arrange a peace in China so that Japan can fight for Germany. Its only hope, as the Japanese see it, is to concentrate on China and cut it off from democratic aid. If that is suicide, say the Japanese, make the most of it.

The Story of Bess Johnson (NBCR), 10 a.m. EST:

Clark Dennis Sings (NBCB), 10 a.m. EST:

BRAZILIAN PRES. VARGAS: BRAZIL TO STAND FAITHFUL TO U.S. PROMISE

Bachelor’s Children (NBCR), 10:15 a.m. EST:

News of the Day (NBCB), 10:15 a.m. EST:

RADIO ROME: GERMANY, ITALY NOW AT WAR WITH THE UNITED STATES

Helpmate (NBCR), 10:30 a.m. EST:

A House in the Country (NBCB), 10:30 a.m. EST:

STATE DEPT.: ONE SHIP SUNK AT PEARL HARBOR IDENTIFIED AS THE USS TENNESSEE; HEAVY FIGHTING REPORTED IN VICINITY OF KOTA BHARU

The Road of Life (NBCR), 10:45 a.m. EST:

Familiar Melodies (NBCB), 10:45 a.m. EST:

WHITE HOUSE ANNOUNCES 3000 CASUALTIES IN HAWAII, OF WHICH 1500 ARE FATALITIES     WHITE HOUSE ALSO ANNOUNCES SERIOUS DAMAGES TO U.S. FORCES IN HAWAII

VICHY RADIO: CUBA DECLARES WAR ON JAPAN

The Story of Mary Marlin (NBCR), 11 a.m. EST:

Raising the Next President (NBCB), 11 a.m. EST:

Youngstown Vindicator (December 8, 1941)

doro

ON THE RECORD —
Japan and the grand strategy

By Dorothy Thompson

First, let us get absolutely clear in our minds the facts about the war. I am one of the people who has maintained consistently that Japan would go to war. It was impossible to judge whether the negotiations in Washington were for purposes of dragging out and postponing the decision or were a blind. It is now clear that they were the latter. Japan was moving her ships and submarines and preparing her forces all the time Kurusu was talking.

But that Japan would enter this war at a moment agreed upon by the Axis as a whole was never open to doubt. Otherwise why did Japan join the Axis? Nations don’t join in offensive alliances for purposes of peace. They join for war. Hungary joined the Axis and went to war. Roumania joined the Axis and went to war.

All the arguments learnedly advanced by the experts as to why Japan would not fight us were as far from the mark as those advanced by the same experts to prove that Italy would not fight France and Britain. They failed to take account of the Axis policy as one policy – they overlooked the grand strategy. That Italy or Japan was economically weak, or that 90 percent of the people of either country did not want the war was inconsequential. Italy and Japan are weak alone. They are not weak together with Germany.

Japan has entered this war in collusion with Germany and Italy and as part of a thoroughly thought-out plan. Japan’s business is, of course, to divert us in the Far East and so slow up our aid to Britain and Russia. The fact that Japan probably fears that she, as a separate power, may lose the war to us, has not deflected her because she is not a separate power.

Cast lot with Hitler

Japan has cast in her lot with Germany, and a victory for one is a victory for all. Her business is to hold us off while Germany mops up Russia and the Middle East, at which point Germany will join her in finishing Britain and us… Germany and all her European allies.

That is the grand strategy of this war.

Why did Japan declare war on us? Why did she not at least attempt to make it appear that we were the aggressors?

The reason is also part of the grand strategy. Germany wants us to have, together with Britain, a separate war with Japan – for the time being. Had we declared war on Japan, Germany, under the terms of the Axis agreement, would have had to come immediately to the aid of Japan by declaring war on us.

Predicts Lindbergh view

But Germany wants to continue to use her fifth column in the United States, and they will now all begin yelling that we must take our interests away from Europe and fight our own war. I predict that Mr. Lindbergh will begin talking now about the solidarity of the white race, and about the advisability of concentrating all our energies against Japan, letting Europe fall to Germany. That makes it possible for Germany to decide the moment when she will join Japan and strike, and take us unawares in a big way on some part of the planet where we least expect it.

If we are going to win this war, we have got to consider it for exactly what it is, worldwide war waged by a United Axis against everybody else on the planet, and we have got to plan a united strategy on the basis of a worldwide alliance of anti-Axis powers.

The Axis has a common strategy. We must make a common strategy with Britain, Russia, China, the European governments in exile, and the Dutch colonial empire. The place from which Japan is most vulnerable is Vladivostok. All our bases, and those of the British, are for defensive purposes. Only Russia has a base from which an offensive war against Japan can be waged.

Important factors

China is of prime importance in defeating Japan, Russia of even more importance, and Caucasian and Persian oil of paramount importance. Britain’s bases in the Far East are essential. But we cannot ask Russia to declare war on Japan or to grant us rights on her soil, or fight solidly with either Britain or Holland in the Far East, unless we are prepared to fight to the finish in the West as well.

We have got to dispose our common forces in a world war.

Therefore, the only logical answer to Japan’s declaration of war against us, is to reply with a declaration of war against the Axis, for Japan’s war is an Axis war. The best answer to Japan would be to bomb Berlin tomorrow morning. German strategists are planning the eastern campaign with Japan, and Germany will fight it with Japan.

For as sure as God made little green apples, Germany is going to declare war on us, on behalf of Japan, at the moment when it pleases her to do so. We have let Japan choose the moment, and suffer all the disadvantages of those who wait to be called.

Taken off guard

Like all other nice democratic boobs who “won’t make war unless attacked,” we have been taken off guard. Japan has all the advantages of a surprise start. Hundreds of our boys have been killed, without even a chance to fight back. The war begins on our territory instead of the territory we pick, and advances 600 miles from our shores in the first hours. Now let us have learned the lesson.

The Axis is fighting one war. One war, on all the seas, over all the land.

We must fight one war. If Britain, Russia, China, Holland, and the United States fight four separate wars, we have the best chance in the world either to be disastrously defeated or to have a war dragged out through endless time. But if we also fight one war, with a common military and naval strategy, a common economic strategy, and with the complete and immediate mobilization of everything we have got – resources, factories, manpower for work and for war – we have a good chance to win quickly.

The toughest war

But let us not delude ourselves that it will be a walkover. We are in world war and it will be the toughest war in American history. The last world war will be a picnic compared to this one. It will be worse or better wholly dependent upon our mighty solidarity and our most strenuous and total effort. No halfway measures, no part-time war, and no war which is against one member of the Axis and not against all of them can be won.

There is no place in this war for American First committees, soiling with their machinations a great title for a great effort. The time has come to fight for freedom for America first, united with all our allies against our thoroughly united enemies.

A declaration of war on Japan alone will appall Europe, all our allies in Europe, fearing that it means our diversion. A declaration of war on the Axis will blow up Nazi factories all over Europe and put new energy into Russia, Britain, and all the occupied countries.

lawrence

Lawrence: Not only Japan, but Hitler, has attacked United States

War with Tokyo is war with Berlin also – Americans unite under fire for all-out struggle
By David Lawrence

WASHINGTON – Hitler, not just Japan, has attacked the United States. Using the militarists of Japan as his catspaw, he has thwarted the liberals, moderates and peace-loving elements of Japan. The war which for many years has been thought inevitable by many Americans, especially in the Army and Navy, is here at last.

Just as so many Far Eastern experts have always predicted while their fellow Americans scoffed at such a possibility, the attack has come without warning and without a declaration of war.

Under the Constitution of the United States, the president can “repel invasion” without the necessity of action by Congress, but nevertheless a formal resolution recognizing that a state of war exists is planned by Congress.

The direct consequences

The direct consequences of the Japanese attack on the United States may be summarized as follows:

The American people, irrespective of party or faction, will unite as never before behind their government.
The Army, Navy and Air Corps will operate on a war basis without waiting for action by Congress.
Longer work shift and concentrated effort will be the result on the production side as it grows apparent that America will be fighting a two-ocean war.
Russia and China will join America and assist in Far Eastern operations. Arming the Chinese will be America’s paramount task in getting adequate manpower mobilized.
Labor legislation will probably ride quickly through Congress and management will promptly accept the hardships of priorities and allocations as the all-out war effort calls for cooperation on every side.
Isolationists for the most part will drop their feud with the president. For they can no longer say Mr. Roosevelt is violating his campaign pledge wherein he promised not to send American boys overseas “unless America is attacked.”
The theory that America was immune from attack and that those who insisted on building up defense were “warmongering” will have to be abandoned by the group which for two years has fought the president inside and outside of Congress. National unity, long needed but not realized, may come now as factional disputes and party warfare are forced to one side by the greater concern for the nation’s safety.

Whole attitude changed

The whole attitude of the nation toward defense will have been altered overnight. The two years which have passed since the second World War broke out in September 1939 have been fraught with disunity that has made it necessary for the president to proceed in piecemeal fashion to build up America’s defenses. Now that obstruction of every kind has been removed, the war effort of America will reach an intensity far beyond anything known in previous wars.

What may not be realized at first by people generally is that war with Japan means war with Germany, too. For Japan has a sacred treaty with Italy and Germany promising to attack the United States if America attacks Germany. Obviously the action of the United States in warding off German U-boat attacks in the Atlantic could be used by Japan to argue her case, but the chances are that the Tokyo militarists will seek to justify their course not at all by reference to their involvements with Hitler, but on the basis of steps taken by the United States to aid China.

The record for history

Historically the Japanese will contend that the United States violated neutrality by intervening in the war between China and Japan.

The American answer to this for the historical record will be that Japan solemnly pledged herself in the famous Nine-Power Treaty of 1921 to preserve the territorial integrity of China, and that this treaty having been violated, it was up to America to help the victims of aggression in the Far East just as it became American policy to assist the victims of Hitler’s aggression in Europe.

A second World War

Broadly speaking, international law has resolved itself into a program of protective neutrality for democracies which see their treaties ignored as the forces of aggression break loose throughout the world.

Japan under the influence of Hitler has brought America into shooting war. Latin America will join on the side of the United States. The second World War extending to the four corners of the globe is on.

The moral force of diplomacy and reason have again been squelched and the force of brute military power is being mobilized in the greatest conflict of modern times.

NormanStewart · December 8, 2020, 5:31pm

Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People
December 8, 1941, 12:30 p.m. EST

United States Capitol
Washington, D.C.

NBCB broadcast, 12 p.m. EST:

CBS broadcast, 12:15 p.m. EST:

fdr.warspeech

Mr. Vice President, Mr. Speaker, members of the Senate and the House of Representatives:

Yesterday, December 7, 1941 – a date which will live in infamy – the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

The United States was at peace with that nation, and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its government and its Emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific. Indeed, one hour after Japanese air squadrons had commenced bombing in the American island of Oahu, the Japanese Ambassador to the United States and his colleague delivered to our Secretary of State a formal reply to a recent American message. And while this reply stated that it seemed useless to continue the existing diplomatic negotiations, it contained no threat or hint of war or of armed attack.

It will be recorded that the distance of Hawaii from Japan makes it obvious that the attack was deliberately planned many days or even weeks ago. During the intervening time the Japanese government has deliberately sought to deceive the United States by false statements and expressions of hope for continued peace.

The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. I regret to tell you that very many American lives have been lost. In addition American ships have been reported torpedoed on the high seas between San Francisco and Honolulu.

Yesterday the Japanese government also launched an attack against Malaya.

Last night Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong.

Last night Japanese forces attacked Guam.

Last night Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands.

Last night the Japanese attacked Wake Island.

And this morning the Japanese attacked Midway Island.

Japan has, therefore, undertaken a surprise offensive extending throughout the Pacific area. The facts of yesterday and today speak for themselves. The people of the United States have already formed their opinions and well understand the implications to the very life and safety of our nation.

As commander in chief of the Army and Navy, I have directed that all measures be taken for our defense.

But always will our whole nation remember the character of the onslaught against us. No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.

I believe that I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost but will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us.

Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory and our interests are in grave danger.

With confidence in our armed forces – with the unbounding determination of our people – we will gain the inevitable triumph – so help us God.

I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.

FREE FRANCE DECLARES WAR ON JAPAN          BRAZIL INDICATES SOLIDARITY WITH THE UNITED STATES

FIGHTING NORTH OF SINGAPORE CONTINUES

SENATE VOTES WAR DECLARATION, 82-0

**News & Between the Bookends with Ted Malone (NBCB), 1 p.m. EST:**

Let’s Sing and Swing (NBCB), 1:15 pm EST:

REP. RANKIN VOTES ‘NO’ ON WAR RESOLUTION IN HOUSE VOTE

HOUSE PASSES WAR DECLARATION, 388-1

Religion and the New World (NBCB) , 1:30 p.m. EST:

News (NBCB), 1:45 p.m. EST:

Vincent Lopez and His Orchestra (NBCB), 2 p.m. EST:

News (NBCB), 2:21 p.m. EST:

In Care of Aggie Horn (NBCB), 2:45 p.m. EST:

News (NBCB), 3 p.m. EST:

John’s Other Wife (NBCB), 3:30 p.m. EST:

Youngstown Vindicator (December 8, 1941)

eliot

Eliot: Raid on Hawaii aimed to delay American fleet

Calls attack coverup move for action in South China Sea
By Maj. George Fielding Eliot

The war became a world war in grim earnest when Japan struck savagely at the United States.

The Japanese air attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor was apparently launched from aircraft carriers. The number and type of planes reported (fighters, light bombers, heavy bombers) could have come only from carriers, as Japan possesses no land bases near enough to permit such an operation by such types of aircraft.

The first attacks were made on the Naval Air Station on Ford Island, base of the Navy’s big patrol bombers, and on the Army base at Hickam Field, home of the long-range bombardment squadrons of the Army Air Corps. This was of course to impede attacks by these long-range aircraft on the Japanese carriers, so as to allow the latter to receive back their planes for rearming and refueling to carry out further attacks against other objectives.

Parachutists may be bailing out

Reports that the governor has proclaimed a state of emergency, that policemen and firemen have been called to Army stations and that the Japanese are using parachute troops suggest the possibility of a planned rising on the part of the Japanese population of the islands. However, such a contingency has long been expected and provided against by defense plans, and is thought to have little chance of success. The report of parachute troops being used may refer only to pilots and other flying personnel “bailing out” of damaged aircraft; it seems hardly likely that parachute troops could be used from carriers in sufficient force to accomplish anything on the heavily garrisoned island of Oahu, which is very far from being another Crete.

As to the purpose of the Japanese attack, it seems likely on the basis of information now available to be one of delaying the westward movement of the U.S. fleet, which is dependent almost entirely on the naval base at Pearl Harbor. Probably the Japanese desire to cover operations in the South China Sea by which they might hope to establish Japanese dominance in that area before the U.S. fleet could arrive to interfere. Supporting this is the Japanese attack against the island of Luzon.

This theory is also borne out by the reported presence of Japanese submarines on the San Francisco-Honolulu line. The Japanese have about 25 submarines capable of crossing the Pacific and returning without refueling, and their operations will tend to impede communications with Hawaii and the mainland. Also, they can be expected to inflict damage on American warships.

Japs take grave risk

The Japanese have taken a grave risk in sending aircraft carriers to attack Pearl Harbor. The island of Oahu is one of the strongest and most formidable maritime fortresses in the world. Its striking power is enormous. The Japanese carriers attacked in the early morning hours, indicating a high-speed approach during the night; they may have commenced their approach from any point within eight hours’ steaming of Oahu, or a matter of 200-250 miles.

The probabilities are that the Japanese will lose one or more of the carriers, which have launched the attack, if not all of them, and this fact indicates the desperate nature of the whole enterprise.

There is no present suggestion of Japanese troopships or battleships supporting the air attack. However, the air attack would come first in any case, and slower-moving vessels such as troopships and a naval fleet in support may later put in an appearance.

The Japanese might attempt to effect a lodgment on some of the other islands of the Hawaiian group with a view of setting up a base for land aircraft; even though this might not last very long, it would procure further delay, and delay is what the Japanese are playing for.

On the whole, it may be expected that the really decisive moves by the Japanese will be in the South China Sea area, covered by the operations in Hawaii in order to give the Japanese time for gaining their Far Eastern objectives. It is not very likely that the Japanese will succeed in doing enough damage at Oahu to procure any great delay in American fleet movements, nor that they will be able quickly to overwhelm either Manila, Hong Kong or objectives farther south.

The whole Japanese program is one of pure desperation, so far as can now be judged, and the reaction by American, British and other forces will soon take place – so that no snap judgment should be formed on the basis of early accounts of Japanese attacks.

grayknight1781 · December 8, 2020, 7:29pm

Originally it was written as “a date which will live in world history”, But it was changed at the last second. I think it was a good move.

Also, love the work you did on the picture of the speech Norman!

NormanStewart · December 9, 2020, 12:49am

Press Conference by Treasury Secretary Morgenthau
December 8, 1941

Q. Good afternoon, Mr. Secretary.

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: I hope we did not inundate you with too many regulations.

Q. Everything goes smoothly.

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: Who is president of the press room?

Q. Mr. Herman, but he is not here.

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: Everything go all right?

Q. I believe so, sir.

What did you think of the behavior of the government bond market today?

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: I was very pleased, very pleased.

Q. There has been no support, no open market support?

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: I understand there has not. The last I heard, not even a dollar.

BELL: That is right.

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: Not even a dollar natural market.

Q. It did decline a little, didn’t it?

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: Oh, yes, it is off a point and a fraction.

BELL: Back up at the close.

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: Bell says, “Up a little at the close.”

Q. The fact there was no support of the bond market today does not necessarily mean anything in the future, does it?

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: No. The Federal Reserve and ourselves are watching it day by day, but at least it took very good care of itself today when you consider we borrowed a billion and a half on Thursday; and I think it was good that we put in stiffer regulations on Thursday and I think we discouraged some people who wanted to get in on a quick ride.

Q. Mr. Secretary, can you tell us what the quick turn of events means to people in terms of taxes?

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: No, no.

Q. You think you will get your six percent limitation on profits now.

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: I still think – I have not had time to think about taxes. We have been so busy getting out regulations that it took everybody’s time.

Q. Aside from details of taxes, can you tell us whether they will speed up or have any influence at all on your program for taxes?

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: I can only imagine that the-- I think it makes it easier for the Treasury to get the taxes that we need, the revenue that we need. I am sure that people would be more willing to pay their money under war conditions than they would prior to yesterday.

Q. You imply in that, that stiffer taxes are necessary?

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: Let’s put it this way, I think that that will mean certainly greater expenditures for war purposes which will mean a corresponding increase in taxes.

Q. Mr. Secretary, what effect will this have on the Defense Savings campaign?

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: I don’t know of any except that we will certainly increase our efforts.

Q. Do you intend to change the name from “defense” to “war” savings?

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: You men helped me word that originally. We worked it out in a press conference.

Q. Conditions have changed.

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: But I say you boys helped me. I worked that out with the help of you men.

Q. Still “defense” isn’t it?

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: Yes.

Q. Everybody’s calling them “offensive” savings bonds.

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: I hope not.

Q. Did you hear what he said, that they called them “offensive” savings bonds? Somebody suggested just leaving out the word “defense.”

Q. How about the six percent limit now that the country is at war?

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: I am not going to get into details. I am not prepared.

Q. The general theory contained in that statement before the Banking Committee at that time, you still stand by that?

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: I am not going to depart from my plan. As far as I know, I think I will save my statement for the Ways and Means Committee.

Q. Any idea when that will come?

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: No, everybody has been pretty busy for the last twenty-four hours.

Q. Mr. Secretary, I understand that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York asked the banks and the life insurance companies not to liquidate any bonds at this time, government bonds, in order not to disturb the market. Was that at your behest?

Q. The bill is being signed. You can see the flashlights over at the White House.

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: I don’t think, in the first instance, any such instructions went from here and I gravely doubt if any instructions were given.

Q. You doubt it?

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: I know no such instructions were given, and I gravely doubt that any such request was made.

BELL: They did confer with those people this morning, and they may have made some suggestions.

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: I made no such request, and I talked to Mr. Sproul several times and he did not mention it. It was not necessary. Everybody knows what this means, and everybody we have come in contact with is more than willing to do his part and assume his responsibility.

Q. This policy of not throwing any support to the government bond market on the day on which we declared war with the United States, will that policy–

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: Declared war against Japan.

Q. That is right. There are two ways either to support the market or let it alone, and let it decline to its natural level. I remember at the outbreak of the war you particularly favored a natural market at that time.

That was in ’39.

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: Yes, we still do, and two things happened today, decision to leave all markets open worked out well. I mean, nobody has gotten excited, and no necessity to do anything in the government bond market, which I think, through the financial nerves of the country, shows they are in a very good condition.

Q. What was the other thing that happened, Mr. Secretary?

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: Nothing.

Q. You said there were two things: one was the decision to leave all markets open-- And the bond market.

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: I mean exchanges and the bond market.

Q. Did you reach this first decision to leave all exchanges open?

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: That was reached in consultation with the president and the Secretary of Agriculture and myself.

Q. I see Lt. Stevens is back. Any special significance to that?

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: I need a little help, a little extra help, and I asked them until we get over this time, if they would leave him here for a while.

Q. It has nothing to do with liaison between Navy and Treasury?

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: As a matter of fact, for background, actually what happened, I was about to step on a plane for a week’s holiday in Tucson and Stevens was with me, when I got a call from the president to come back. What I said was, “Having been with me, why don’t you stay on,” and this was the way it happened. I mean I was just about to get on the plane.

Q. Where does the House Ways and Senate Finance now stand with regard to taxes? In the exchange of letters between the president and Mr. Doughton they said the tax program had been temporarily deferred. Have you been given any other notice as to when they might take it up again?

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: No.

Q. Are you going to testify before the Senate on price control?

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: I have not been asked.

Q. The decision to leave the markets open, Mr. Secretary, that applied to the securities market too?

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: Securities market.

Q. Was the SEC represented at this conference?

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: No, Mr. Bell talked with Purcell, didn’t you?

BELL: Yes.

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: Last night, and I talked with Mr. Eccles last night.

Q. That for any length of time continuing under present conditions?

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: Just handling the situation for the moment, it has always been my recommendation when anybody gets excited, let’s leave the market open, and I am sure American horse sense will take care of the rest. So far that is proven – you might add, “horse sense and patriotism.” So far, I have not been disappointed. I suppose you should say “patriotism and horse sense.”

Q. Horse sense is a little rare.

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: They are both good qualities. I have not been disappointed.

Q. Doesn’t this thing confirm your utmost fears when you wanted to freeze Japanese assets and your hand was held when the horse had been stolen?

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: Let’s forget all about that, let’s forget all about that. We are facing a new situation.

Q. Would you say that from his point on there will be greater control of capital markets to the extent of being more careful where financing goes for other than defense needs?

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: Yes, but I don’t want to get the impression out that people always think, control and domination, and so forth – I think certainly that any business that needs capital should be encouraged to get it if it is in connection with defense needs, but I certainly think the various financial agencies will be on the lookout for anybody that is borrowing money for purposes other than defense. If you can write it that Washington steps in, and so forth–

Q. There is a lot of disposition under the present circumstances to expect leadership from Washington.

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: I think they will get it. If you can distinguish between leadership and control and the capitalistic system and so forth and so on.

Q. From SEC circles, Mr. Secretary, has come already, I think, in the form of a speech by Mr. Purcell, among others, something called a Capital Issues Committee. How do you stand on that, or do you stand on it?

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: We studied that in the summer of 1939, didn’t we?

BELL: Yes.

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: We started the first studies here in connection with SEC. I think we had studies here in June and July 1939.

Q. You know there was a Capital Issues Committee in the last war?

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: I know there was. Right now, everything seems to be working nicely on an informal basis, just by picking up the phone, and they have been very good in New York. They got together, the Federal Reserve Bank and the Stock Exchange; the whole thing worked beautifully. I think the governor of the Federal Reserve Bank slept here last night.

BELL: The president and the vice president of the Federal Reserve. At least they had a bed; whether they slept, I don’t know.

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: But everybody has a good feeling, good cooperation between Washington and New York. It has been fine.

Q. How about the Pacific coast, have you heard anything from out there?

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: No, but everything as I say, all along the line, banking and financial institutions, the cooperation has been one hundred percent.

Q. Would we expect shortly any financing, in view–

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: No change.

Q. You are sticking to your program of no new money issues in the near future?

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: Nothing has happened in the last couple of days to make me change my mind, but I want to be free to change. I don’t want you fellows to say, “You told us on December 8th you weren’t going to do anything,” but I am not thinking of doing anything.

Q. You say everything has worked nicely on a cooperative basis with regard to supervising capital markets. Will this be a good time to formalize that system and it might be possible we would have a committee?

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: It is working pretty well now over the telephone and sitting down with a fellow over the lunch table, and I personally prefer that to the formal method. If it has to be formal, I will, but right now, between Ball and myself and the telephone and having lunch together with some of these people, it is working very nicely, isn’t it, Dan?

BELL: Very nicely, very good.

SECRETARY MORGENTHAU: I want to thank you fellows for the nice way in which you handled all of our press releases last night.

U.S. State Department (December 8, 1941)

701.6111/1112

Remarks by the Ambassador of the Soviet Union

Washington, December 8, 1941

Mr. President: I have the honor to present you with the letter of credence accrediting me Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to you and also with the letter of recall of my predecessor.

I consider it my pleasing duty at the same time to reiterate and to emphasize my predecessors’ expressions of the friendship and high esteem which the peoples of the Soviet Union entertain for the American people and the unswerving desire of my government for the maintenance of the friendliest possible relations and closest cooperation with the Government of the United States of America. I am proud and happy that the honor of being the interpreter of these feelings and desires, belongs to me.

The Soviet Union has, like other countries, in its turn, been subjected to a treacherous attack by Nazi imperialist Germany and has, for over five months, been waging a determined struggle against the aggressor.

The peoples of the Soviet Union are happy in the realization that they are receiving from the American people not only their sympathy in this struggle, but also substantial material support, and it affords me keen pleasure to express to you, Mr. President, and to your people, the warm gratitude of my government and my country, for this generous support.

The fact that this aid is proffered and being increasingly extended testifies to the growing recognition by the American people of the terrible danger to all nations created by the fulfilment by Nazi Germany of the criminal program drawn up in advance by Hitler for the destruction of the political and economic independence of all countries, and the enslavement of their peoples.

The struggle against the aggression of Hitler and his imitators and against his voluntary and involuntary allies – a struggle in which all the liberties, all the spiritual, moral, cultural and political values, gained by humanity in the course of many centuries, are at stake, is becoming more and more the cause of all honest, liberty-loving, peace-loving people. While the heaviest blows and sacrifices in this struggle have fallen to the lot of the Soviet Union, the part played in it by the United States is becoming more and more prominent and active.

The successful outcome of this struggle in the shortest possible time will to a great extent depend on the coordination of the activities of its more energetic and powerful participants, on the timely and rational use of their resources, and last but not least on the maintenance among themselves of the utmost mutual understanding and confidence, which will be necessary not merely during the struggle itself, but also during the subsequent period.

I shall consider the extent to which I may be able to contribute to the creation of these conditions in the relations between our countries as the measure of the success of my mission. I feel confident, Mr. President, that I may rely upon your support and that of your government in the fulfilment of this mission.

My arrival in Washington coincided precisely with the moment in which American territory and American armed forces were subjected to attack from another state – an attack no less unexpected than that to which, five-and-a-half months ago, the Soviet Union was subjected. This event, arising from the present international situation, was brought about by the same forces and the same ideology which let loose sanguinary war in Europe and other continents. I must limit myself, at the present moment, Mr. President, to the assurance of the best wishes and warm sympathy of the people of the Soviet Union towards the American people in these days of their ordeal. I am convinced that the similar trial of the Soviet and American peoples will rivet still more strongly the bonds of friendship between them.

740.00116 European War 1939/465

The Greek Minister to the Secretary of State

Washington, December 8, 1941
3571

Mr. Secretary: Following my communication dated November 28, 1941, I have the honor to bring to your knowledge that information which has recently reached the Royal Hellenic Government confirms that from the Bulgarian point of view certain Greek and Yugoslav territories are now considered as forming an integral part of Bulgarian State having been virtually annexed to it. Thus King Boris in his speech at the opening session of Sobranye on October 28, 1941, expressing his satisfaction that the foreign policy followed by Bulgaria has yielded the best results for her added:

Thanks to our cooperation with Axis the two Provinces of Macedonia and Thrace have now returned within the frontiers of the Bulgarian Motherland. In this area of the European cooperation under the direction of the Axis powers and their two great leaders truth has been crowned with victory.

These statements by the Bulgarian King which in themselves leave no doubt as to the Bulgarian intentions are supplemented by reports telegraphed from Sofia and widely published by the Turkish press without being denied or refuted by the Bulgarian Legation at Ankara. These reports stated that the Bulgarian Government have decided to proceed to the repopulation of the territories recently restored to Bulgaria and that they intend to see to the establishment of Bulgarian populations in these areas. A decision was recently taken by the Bulgarian Cabinet on the matter and a relative decree stipulates that all real property whether urban or rural as well as all movable property belonging either to Bulgarians who emigrated as the result of the last war or to Greeks who left Thrace during the recent military operations there shall be placed at the disposal of Bulgarian nationals who will settle in Thrace. The decree also adds that Bulgarian peasants to be established there shall enjoy several privileges and that their dwelling places and agricultural implements will be granted to them free. The Bulgarian Premier himself, Mr. Filoff, in an interview with the correspondent of the Borser Zeitung stated:

A big plan of colonization of the Aegean Sea provinces is under consideration and that 1,000 Bulgarian families are shortly to be settled there. To these settlers will be granted all useful facilities, immunity from taxes and loans for acquiring agricultural machines. By a successful solution of this problem of colonization the first step towards the assimilation of these Provinces by the Mother Country will be effected.

The above constituting real confessions of the mainly responsible quarters in Bulgaria give a glimpse of the cynical character of the measures taken by the Bulgarian Government. These aim at a forcible Bulgarization of these recently annexed Greek Provinces hitherto inhabited by an unmixed Greek population who are now suffering the most inhuman and exterminating outrages at the hands of the rapacious Bulgarian hordes.

Accept [etc.]

C. DIAMANTOPOULOS

NormanStewart · December 9, 2020, 1:01am

The Pittsburgh Press (December 8, 1941)

war.banner

U.S. DECLARES WAR!
1,500 die in Hawaii; fleets clash

Tokyo claims sinking of 2 American battleships; Manila bombed
By Joe Alex Morris, United Press war editor

The map above indicates where Japan struck at the United States and Britain in blows from the Hawaiian Islands to Malaya. The U.S. Navy is striking back in a major battle west of Hawaii as the British battle Jap troops on the beaches between Singapore and the Thai border.

The United States and Britain smashed back at Japan today on a 6,000-mile Pacific war front that flamed from Hawaii’s coral beaches to the jungle shores of Malaya and Thailand.

The American battle fleet was reported challenging the Japanese striking force which raided Hawaii with heavy loss of life and naval damage. A great naval engagement was rumored in the waters west of America’s Pacific Gibraltar.

The White House announced that 1,500 persons were killed in the Japanese attack on the Hawaiian island of Oahu yesterday.

Germany announced that the drive to capture Moscow had been abandoned “for this winter” because of the severe Russian weather.

Here is the picture of the war in the Pacific:

LONDON: Prime Minister Winston Churchill carries Britain into war against Japan with a formal declaration before Parliament.

TOKYO: Japanese naval command claims sinking of battleships USS Oklahoma and USS West Virginia; damage to four other battleships; damage to four heavy cruisers; heavy destruction of American planes; probable sinking of U.S. aircraft carrier (rumored to be USS Langley); capture of “many” enemy ships; sinking of minesweeper USS Penguin at Guam.

HAWAII: White House reports 3,000 casualties, including 1,500 fatalities, in Japanese air attack; loss of “old” U.S. battleship and destroyer.

WASHINGTON: U.S. battle fleet is carrying out sweeping operations and has destroyed “a number of” Japanese submarines and planes, it is announced. Congress declares war.

THAILAND: Apparently caves in to the Japanese with little or no fight; Tokyo claims Japanese troops moving into the country under “agreement” reached with the Bangkok government; Japanese reported swarming into southern Thailand in preparation for drive on Singapore.

SINGAPORE: British battle Japanese landing forces which have established series of beachheads along eastern coast; Royal Air Force heavily engaged.

MANILA: Waves of Japanese bombers attack key points in Philippines, including U.S. Army base at Fort Stotsenburg, Davao and the vicinity of Baguio. Japanese landings rumored but not confirmed.

CHUNGKING: China moves to declare war on Germany and Italy as well as to formalize the long-existing state of war with Japan.

CHINA: Japanese attack Hongkong twice by air; take over Shanghai International Settlement; occupy Tientsin British concession and intern 200 U.S. Marines.

PACIFIC ISLES: Japanese attack American islands of Guam and Wake, capture of Wake reported; attack British island of Nauru; Japanese naval squadron reported off Cocos Islands in the Indian Ocean.

AUSTRALIA & DUTCH EAST INDIES: All armed forces on the alert; no Japanese attacks yet reported.

BERLIN & ROME: Indicate Germany and Italy will join their Axis partner in war against the United States but no tangible action yet.

Japanese imperial forces, said to have suffered severe losses of airplanes and several warships, were in action on these fronts:

A major naval battle was reported west of Hawaii, with the U.S. fleet attempting to destroy enemy warships and airplanes that blasted Pearl Harbor Naval Base and Honolulu.
A fierce land battle was in progress on the northeast coast of the Malay States where British defense forces attacked. Japanese troops landed on the beaches despite severe air bombing and machine-gun fire.
About 30,000 Japanese troops in 60 vessels, escorted by warships, were believed to have landed on the Malay coast.
Japanese invasion forces bombed and shelled Bangkok, crashed into Thailand by land and sea, and were reported in a British broadcast to have forced that government to capitulate. The occupation of Thailand would open the way for Japanese drives on Burma and the Burma Road supply route to China and would set up a base for a drive southward against Singapore.
Waves of Japanese bombers battered northern, central and southern areas of the Philippine Islands, reportedly causing several hundred casualties.
The great British naval base at Singapore was attacked from the air, with 60 persons reported killed and 133 injured.
A Japanese landing in North (British) Borneo was reported repulsed with heavy casualties, according to London dispatches, but the same notice heard that the American island of Guam had been attacked from all sides and that aerial bombardment had started several big fires.

Australia and the Dutch East Indies joined in the war on Japan, but there were increasing hints from Berlin that the conflict would become an outright Axis battle against the Allied powers. A Nazi spokesman said that an important statement might be forthcoming later and the Berlin press hinted that Germany would aid Japan. There was still no word of the position of the Soviet Union.

On the Chinese coast, the Japanese attacked Hongkong by air and by land and conquered the International Settlement at Shanghai after sinking the British gunboat HMS Peterel and seizing the gunboat USS Wake. U.S. Marines at Peking and Tientsin were disarmed and interned.

The Emperor of Japan, “seated on the throne of a line unbroken for ages eternal,” declared war on the United States and Great Britain on the grounds that the Allied powers had threatened the existence of the Japanese Empire and the “new order” in East Asia. On the outcome of this struggle, he said, Japan’s rule would rise or fall.

But even before the declaration of war was known, Japanese forces were attacking in blitz fashion.

The first blow fell on the Hawaiian Islands. Japanese four-motored bombers, dive bombers and torpedo planes flashed across the mountains of Oahu Island and swooped down on U.S. warships in the Pearl Harbor Naval Base, the Gibraltar of the Pacific.

Honolulu, target of Japanese bombers

The picture shows part of Honolulu’s extensive waterfront, near Pearl Harbor, both targets of Japanese air attacks. The White House reported a heavy loss of life in Honolulu.

Honolulu was bombed and furious air attacks were launched on Hickam Airfield, Ford Island in the center of Pearl Harbor Air Base and nearby military barracks, while torpedo planes with the red symbol of the Rising Sun on their wings slashed repeatedly at warships in the harbor. More than 100 and possibly close to 200 American airplanes were reported destroyed or damaged, but official sources declined to confirm those reports.

A U.S. Army transport carrying lumber was sunk by a Japanese submarine 1,300 miles west of California, two oil tankers were reported afire at Pearl Harbor and fear was felt for three big American liners – the President Pierce (converted into the Army transport USS Hugh L. Scott), the President Coolidge and the President Harrison. All three were in the war zone in which Japanese warships and submarines were operating and fear was expressed that they had been seized or possibly attacked.

The American fleet, steaming out of Pearl Harbor, was believed to have struck back at the attacking airplanes and the warships on which they were based and some reports – so far unverified – said that a Japanese aircraft carrier, four submarines and at least six bombers had been destroyed.

Heavy gunfire was heard west of Honolulu and both American and Japanese sources reported a major naval battle was believed to be in progress.

In the Philippines, the Japanese Air Fleet struck at Davao, on Mindanao Island, where the greatest Japanese population is centered, and at Baguio, 12 miles north of Manila, on the west central coast of the island of Luzon. Five deaths were listed, but reports that the Japanese population on Mindanao had seized control of the island lacked confirmation.

American defense forces, including airplane squadrons, went into action from bases in the Philippines.

The pattern of the Japanese assault – a blitzkrieg-type series of smashes at rear-line bases over a vast sea area – began to take shape more clearly this morning as British bases nearer to Japan were attacked.

The aerial and naval blows at Oahu Island, the center of American defense in the Hawaiian Islands, had been launched at a distance of about 3,500 miles from Japan and probably 1,800 miles from the nearest Japanese bases in the mandated Marshall Islands. As a result, the assault was regarded to some extent as a suicide raid designed to knock out as much as possible of the main American base and the fleet’s striking power.

Attacks in the Malay States and Thailand, however, were of a sustained nature and carried out by large expeditionary forces assigned to occupy Thailand and attack the British naval base at Singapore, where a strong British fleet, including the 35,000-ton battleship HMS Prince of Wales, arrived last week.

Japanese aerial squadrons raided Singapore and there were some claims that two British cruisers had been knocked out. A British communique, however, said only that slight damage was caused. There were “a few” civilian casualties.

On the northeast coast of the Malay States, however, the Japanese landed from transports despite heavy British air attacks. Some of the landing parties were repulsed, but a British communiquée issued in Singapore said that fighting was in progress on the beaches near Kota Bharu, an important railroad town toward which the Japanese were attempting to fight their way. The British said they had sunk some of the Japanese ships and scored a direct hit on a barge filled with Japanese soldiers in the Kelantan River.

Reported by a Domei News Agency broadcast from Tokyo, a Japanese communique said that Singapore had been “severely” bombed and that the landing operations had been carried out successfully.

Ten Japanese ships in the Gulf of Siam, off Bangkok, were bombed by the British, but later reports said that Bangkok had been bombed by air and shelled by Japanese ships off the coast.

Still another sector of the widespread battlefront was active along the China coast.

At Hongkong, Japanese airplanes attacked the main British defense sector while Japanese troops on the Chinese mainland began an assault on the land defenses. The aerial bombardment of Hongkong was described as heavy.

Britain’s defenses at Hongkong had been described as exceptionally good and it was believed that the island could hold out for some time.

Northward at Shanghai, Japanese guns along the Whangpoo River opened fire as Japanese marines took over the famous waterfront, including all big commercial establishments, in the International Settlement. The British gunboat HMS Peterel went down in flames after her 63-year-old master, Lt. Cmdr. Polkinghorn, opened fire with two machine guns on the Japanese. He was reported lost.

At Tientsin, 63 U.S. Marines were said to have been disarmed and interned.

In the Far North, there was no word as to developments around Vladivostok or the American bases on the Aleutian Islands, extending westward from Alaska, but it was believed likely that the Japanese would act, now or later, to prevent the United States from using any bases on Soviet soil for attacks on Japan. Vladivostok would be the best base for air raids on Tokyo.

No word had come from the Soviet Union in regard to the new war front in the Pacific, although Japanese newspapers had charged last week that the Russian government had joined the “pro-United States” front and boosted its Siberian frontier army to 840,000 men.

Elsewhere throughout the world, the new war front overshadowed the great conflict in North Africa and in Russia, where the Red Army said it had routed the Germans with thousands of casualties on the Mozhaysk sector before Moscow and were gaining ground in an attempt to entrap enemy forces near Tikhvin, southeast of Leningrad. Axis troops were reported forced back 75 miles west of Rostov.

On the diplomatic front, declarations of war against Japan were issued by Canada, the refugee Dutch government and Costa Rica, as Britain went through the formalities of carrying out Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s pledge to join the United States “within the hour” of war with Japan.

In the Dutch East Indies, the governor general proclaimed war on Japan and mobilized all frontier areas while the Dutch Air Fleet joined with the British in fighting Japanese attacks in the Singapore area.

In the Canal Zone, U.S. authorities took urgent precautions against danger to the Panama Canal. All Japanese nationals were being rounded up and it was understood that Italians and Germans would also be arrested.

The fighter planes and anti-aircraft batteries of Pearl Harbor and environs dropped at least six of the Japanese planes. Four Japanese submarines were known to have been sunk.

A Japanese war communique heard by NBC described the attack on Hawaii as a “great success.”

Secretary of State Cordell Hull issued a statement which asserted that “Japan has made a treacherous and utterly unprovoked attack upon the United States” at a time when its representatives were discussing peace.

Washington was on a war footing. Throughout the country, Army and Navy personnel were ordered to their posts and aircraft observers were called to duty to man coastal observation points along the Southern California coast.

Japs seize U.S. vessel, sink British gunboat

By Robert P. Martin, United Press staff writer

SHANGHAI, China (UP) – The British gunboat HMS Peterel sank in the Whangpoo River off the Shanghai waterfront under blasting Japanese fire today and the communications ship USS Wake, its crew overwhelmed as it lay at anchor, was captured.

Lt. Cmdr. John Polkinghorn, 63, commander of the Peterel, was believed, with most of his crew, to have gone down with his ship.

The Peterel opened fire, under odds it knew were hopeless, when the Japanese ordered it to surrender.

The Wake had no chance to fire. The Japanese, in a sudden attack as they took over the waterfront of the International Settlement off which the two tiny gunboats were anchored, boarded it and forced its surrender.

May have sunk liner

American service officers here expressed belief that the Japanese had probably sunk or seized the American liner President Harrison, which was believed to have been somewhere off the mouth of the Yangtze River in the Shanghai area, on its way to Ching Wang Tao in the north to pick up 203 Marines, awaiting evacuation December 10.

It was forecast that the Marines would be interred, the first American prisoners of the Pacific war.

Japanese marines marched out along the International Settlement waterfront, the control of which Japan had long sought, as the Japanese gunboats opened fire on the Peterel.

They strung field telephones along the waterfront as a Japanese destroyer drew up to a dock.

Shanghai banks closed

The American radio station broadcast orders from the U.S. consulate to Americans not to move about the settlement.

The Municipal Council announced that Japanese authorities had asked them to continue their administration for the moment, but to keep banks closed “for a few days.”

Japanese planes flew over Shanghai, dropping leaflets which announced a state of war with the United States and Great Britain.

The leaflets said:

Therefore, Japanese Army and Navy detachments as from today have been sent to the International Settlement to suppress hostile activity and maintain peace and order.

They promised that the Japanese would respect life and property, “including enemy nationals.”

Nazis to join Japs in war against U.S., Berlin hints

By Joseph W. Grigg, United Press staff correspondent

BERLIN, Germany (UP) – An authorized spokesman said today that German relations with the United States were “no longer of any importance” and the press hinted that Germany might aid Japan under the Axis alliance.

Authorized sources said close contact had been maintained between Berlin and Tokyo for the past few days.

These sources refused any comment whether Germany would intervene under the Tripartite Pact, but said a more explicit statement of German-U.S. relations would possibly be available later today.

Called ‘paradoxical’

Asked whether the outbreak of hostilities between Japan and the United States affected relations between Germany and the United States, the spokesman said “it is paradoxical and ridiculous to ask such a question.”

The official news agency, in a dispatch from Tokyo, quoted Japanese Premier Hideki Tojo: “I am happy that the alliance with Germany and Japan is growing ever closer.”

The newspaper BZ am Mittag was the first to suggest that the Axis agreement might be invoked. It recalled an address by Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop November 26 in which he said Mr. Roosevelt would be guilty in any war between the United States and “Europe or Asia.”

It said:

That is still true. The responsibility for this war and all its consequences falls upon Roosevelt. It is true for Europe, it is true for the Far East, it is true for the whole world conflagration.

It said Japan “stands in the strong, insuperable front of young peoples that assures its victory and future.”

Article Three of the treaty provides that signatories shall “reciprocally support one another with all political, economic and military means in the event that one of the three contracting powers is attacked by a power presently uninvolved in the European war or the Sino-Japanese conflict.”

Condemns Roosevelt

The official news agency said:

The war incendiary Roosevelt finally has achieved his goal by also setting the Far East aflame. Next to Churchill, he is the most responsible person who kindled this war.

For years, he has endeavored to hatch a war of Jews and plutocrats against the German Reich born of the Fuehrer’s revolution, and, conscious of his goal, he worked through his agents and middlemen to extend this battle to other countries and other portions of the earth.

The unholy role of Roosevelt’s confidants has become amply clear from German documentary publications. It was he who backed Poland to challenge the Reich. He gave England and France promises of aid. After he broke his election promises by perjury, he permitted the American people to take over the financial burdens of the English war.

Roosevelt sent his special envoy Donovan [Col. William Donovan] to the capitals of the southeast [the Balkans] at the beginning of this year and talked these countries into their unconsidered attitude. Moved by blind hate against Adolf Hitler, he sent arms and material to British assembling areas and finally gave his fleet shooting orders against German warships.

Now the war which Roosevelt chased so long like one possessed has also flamed up in the Pacific. Dollar imperialism has won over the clear reason on wide circles of North American people.

The newspaper Voelkischer Beobachter issued a special edition and carried a similar criticism of Mr. Roosevelt. It said:

This time, the peoples of the earth do not need to wait for history’s verdict in order to know those to blame for the new World War. It is a certainty that without Roosevelt’s intervention, the war in Europe today would have been over a long time ago. Roosevelt attempted to encircle Japan the same as he worked on the encirclement of Germany before 1939. He employed the unworthy weapon of blockade against Japan just as against the young powers of Europe.

The newspaper Zwoelf Uhr termed the new war “a capital crime of the greatest warmonger of all times who thereby crowns his truly-not-small number of crimes.”

It accused Mr. Roosevelt of leading a world imperialistic movement and asserted that Jewry had now declared war against “all the young nations of the globe.”

“The blood of millions sticks to his [Roosevelt’s] fingers,” it said.

The war news was reported first by the German radio, which blamed the conflict on “war agitation by the American President Roosevelt which had been continuously increasing in past weeks.”

Four Philippine towns bombed

Jap planes also attack big Army airfield

While Manila, the capital, thus far has escaped bombardment, other Philippine cities on the map were all reported bombed by Japanese planes today.

MANILA, Philippines (UP) – Japanese airplanes bombed five widely separated points in the Philippines today.

Naval authorities said they had no confirmation of reports that the Japanese had effected troop landings in the Philippines, including reports of the dropping of parachute troops in Japanese-peopled areas.

Japanese planes attacked Baguio, “winter capital” of the Philippines on Luzon Island (125 miles north of Manila); Davao, chief Japanese-colonized center (on Mindanao to the south); Tarlac, 70 miles north of Manila; Clark Field, the great Army air base, and Aparri, chief port of northern Luzon.

Army Maj. LeGrande Diller, aide to Lt. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, commander-in-chief of U.S. forces in the Far East, announced the bombings of Baguio, Davao and Tarlac.

He said 24 Japanese planes bombed Davao at 6:30 a.m. (5:30 p.m. Sunday ET) and others attacked Baguio at 7 a.m.

The Manila correspondent of CBS reported today that two raids by high-flying Japanese planes on Philippine points caused at least 200 casualties. Japanese losses in planes were reported high. The correspondent said Japanese planes also dropped leaflets promising to “liberate” the Filipinos.

Navy officers denied reports that an aircraft carrier had been damaged.

There were other reports that the aircraft tender USS Langley had been damaged.

The Manila Herald, reporting the damaging of an aircraft tender in Malalag Bay, said 13 Japanese planes bombed the area and American planes shot down one of them.

The Manila Bulletin reported the Japanese had bombed Fort Stotsenburg, the second largest fort in the islands, 60 miles north of Manila, at 12:30 p.m. and that pursuit planes from nearby Clark Field had taken off to engage them. The bulletin reported some barracks were afire at the fort.

A Manila Herald dispatch reported a second Japanese air raid on Davao City.

An NBC broadcaster reported from Manila that several persons were killed in the bombing of Davao and that Clark Field, the biggest Army air base in the Philippines, and Camp Ord, 100 miles north of Manila, had been bombed.

NormanStewart · December 9, 2020, 1:09am

3,000 Hawaiian toll admitted

Battleship, destroyer, many U.S. planes lost

WASHINGTON (UP) – Casualties on the Hawaiian island of Oahu in yesterday’s Japanese air attack will amount to about 3,000, including about 1,500 fatalities, the White House announced today.

The maximum casualties for any one 24-hour period in London in the heavy air raids were about 1,200 – 450 killed and 750 injured. That would indicate that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor which resulted in 1,500 killed was exceptionally intense or else the bombs landed on barracks or some other place where many persons were concentrated.

The White House confirmed the loss in Pearl Harbor of “one old battleship” and a destroyer, which was blown up.

Several other American ships were damaged and a large number of Army and Navy airplanes on Hawaiian fields were put out of commission, the White House disclosed.

The Japanese radio heard in New York claimed today that Japanese naval forces have sunk two U.S. battleships – the 20,000-ton USS Oklahoma and the 32,600-ton USS West Virginia – and an aircraft carrier and damaged four other U.S. battleships, four heavy cruisers and inflicted other widespread losses on U.S. sea forces.

The White House also reported that American operations against Japan were being carried out on a large scale, already resulting in the destruction of “a number of Japanese planes and submarines.”

The White House statement said:

American operations against the Japanese attacking force in the neighborhood of the Hawaiian Islands are still continuing. A number of Japanese planes and submarines have been destroyed.

The damage caused to our forces in Oahu in yesterday’s attack appears more serious than at first believed.

In Pearl Harbor itself, one old battleship has capsized and several other ships have been seriously damaged.

One destroyer was blown up. Several other small ships were seriously hurt. Army and Navy fields were bombed with the resulting destruction of several hangars. A large number of planes were put out of commission.

A number of bombers arrived safely from San Francisco during the engagement – while it was underway. Reinforcements of planes are being rushed and repair work is underway on the ships, planes and ground facilities.

Guam, Wake and Midway Islands and Hong Kong have been attacked. Details of these attacks are lacking.

Two hundred Marines – all that remain in China – have been interned by the Japanese near Tientsin.

The Bill of Rights –
U.S. freedoms 150 years old

First Amendment pledges free speech, worship

The war with Japan today placed greater emphasis on the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Bill of Rights, which is being observed for 12 days beginning today.

Strong public demand caused Congress to submit to the states in 1789 proposals to amend the Constitution. On December 15, 1791, the ratification of the first 10 amendments, commonly known as the “Bill of Rights,” was voted by the last state necessary to meet the requirements for amendment.

During the next two weeks, The Press each day will print an installment of the Bill of Rights “primer” prepared by the Pittsburgh Board of Public Education. Here’s the first installment:

First Amendment

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

These Constitutional rights mean you are free:

To speak whatever you wish, subject only to the limitations of truth, of fairness to others, and of ordinary decency.
To write, print, publish, or circulate whatever you wish, subject to the same limitations.
To worship God according to the dictates of your own heart, without interference by other individuals or by officers of the government.
To assemble to public meeting to discuss peaceably community problems and the public welfare.
To request your government without fear of reprisal to relieve injustice or correct conditions believed unsatisfactory.

Mexican border closed

SAN DIEGO, California – U.S. officers at the Mexican border last night were reported detaining all Japanese attempting to enter or leave the United States, no matter what identification or other papers they possess, according to U.S. Consul Gerald Mokme at Tijuana, Mexico.

Army, relatives jam telegraph as war comes

Some wire congressman, others try war zones

Americans of all kinds – politically-minded Americans, business-like Americans and alarmed Americans – gave telegraph offices a busy time once war broke out.

The business-like Armed Forces clogged the wires with calls cancelling leaves.

Worried relatives tried to communicate with Hawaii and the Philippines and some, it was reported, even telegraphed relatives in California to leave the coast and come East.

And politically-minded Americans phoned or wired to the nearest Congressman.

The Polish-American Civil League of Allegheny County announced a telegram it sent to Pennsylvania’s two senators and the county’s four representatives:

By unanimous vote of our 81st General Assembly at the Fort Pitt Hotel on Sunday, we advise the following – American honor demands a declaration of war against the treacherous Japanese. We expect Congress and the Senate to act without a single dissenting vote.

“This is the worst night I’ve had since Hitler invaded Austria,” one telegraph operator.

Frisco calls an emergency

Police on every block in Japantown

SAN FRANCISCO, California (UP) – Mayor Angelo J. Rossi last night proclaimed a state of emergency in San Francisco and the Civil Defense Council ordered its members to take all proper steps to protect the lives and property of San Francisco citizens.

The police department placed a heavy police guard in San Francisco’s Japanese colony centered on California, Geary and Post Streets near the Fillmore District.

The police department said:

Japantown is under strict surveillance. We have patrolmen in every block as a precautionary measure to disperse any crowds and direct traffic. So far there has been no excitement.

Army and Navy observers from stations in Northern California met in the mayor’s office to formulate a far-reaching setup of civilian defense and air-raid warning system at this militarily strategic harbor city.

New Orleans crowd boos Jap consulate

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana – A crowd of approximately 300 booed employees of the Japanese consulate yesterday, while papers were being burned by consular employees in the backyard.

Two Japanese boys and a colored chauffeur could be seen burning papers in two large wire baskets. A 24-hour police guard earlier was placed around the consulate.

NormanStewart · December 9, 2020, 5:01am

Japs, U.S. both have 12 battleships plying Pacific

Combined fleets of Dutch, British and America superior to foe’s

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USS Oklahoma, which was reported set afire by Japanese bombs.

usswv.up
USS West Virginia, reported sunk in radio broadcasts.

WASHINGTON (UP) – Here is a picture of U.S. naval power in the Pacific: The United States is believed to have at least 12 battleships in its Pacific Fleet. Highest estimates give Japan the same number.

Great Britain has two battleships in Singapore which may operate with the Americans in event of joint U.S.-British action against Japan. Japan, on the other hand, may already have acquired use of the German battleship Tirpitz.

Japan, on October 10, had ten battleships built and eight building. Two of these eight are presumed completed and in service. These two – the Nisshin and the Takamatsu – are comparable in battle strength to the newest American battleships – USS Washington and USS North Carolina, all carrying 16-inch guns. The Japanese vessels are reported to be about 40,000 tons apiece, or some 5,000 tons heavier than the USS Washington or USS North Carolina.

Eight aircraft carriers

The other ten battleships of the Japanese fleet are deemed of equal strength to the remaining American battleships.

It is not known exactly how many American ships are in the Pacific, but four battleship divisions, each containing three battleships, are attached to the Pacific Fleet.

The Japanese are credited with eight aircraft carriers built and two building, against a total of seven American carriers built and 11 building. Even the most modern Japanese aircraft carriers are capable of carrying only a fraction as many planes as U.S. carriers.

The five newest Japanese carriers carry 45 planes each, as maximum, while the seven American ships in service carry more than 80 planes each.

Cruisers 46-37

The Japanese are credited with 46 cruisers built and 10 building, whereas the United States has 37 built and 54 building.

The United States now has 170 destroyers built as against Japan’s 125, and is now rushing 192 more towards completion. The Japanese are building 73 more. Japan has 71 submarines, with seven known to be building.

Naval experts cautioned that Japan’s figures on naval building are likely to be inexact inasmuch as she has been secretly constructing warships for some time.

British, Dutch to help

America’s naval strength in the Pacific would exceed Japan’s still further with British and Dutch units.

The Navy has a strong striking force in the Fleet Marine Force, composed of two triangular “streamlined divisions” of highly trained Marines equipped with tanks, planes, armored vehicles, infantry shock troops, and even parachutists. Marine Corps strength was 2,568 officers and 43,180 men.

Trading Act invoked

WASHINGTON – Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. last night invoked vital provisions of the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917 to prevent any commerce or communication with Japan or her allies.

Burch: Jap’s attack follows plan U.S. expected

Narrow, shallow harbor entrance puts fleet in danger
By Wendel Burch, United Press staff writer

The following dispatch by the former UP Bureau manager in Honolulu evaluates the strategic phases of the opening Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Guam.

(UP) – Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States’ great naval and air base in Honolulu, and adjoining Hickam Field, the United States’ largest bomber base outside the continent, followed a pattern long anticipated by the American high command.

For years, Army, Navy, and Air Corps officers have organized Hawaii’s defenses against every conceivable form of attack.

The immediate Japanese objective clearly was to knock out vital installations at Pearl Harbor, and ruin Hickam Field’s vast runways and hangars. This would serve first to immobilize the U.S. fleet and its greatest adjunct – the long-range Navy and Army bombers quartered at Pearl Harbor and Hickman. If the bombers are crippled in their operations, the Japanese fleet will have immediately easier going.

Aimed at confusion

Secondly, the Japanese undoubtedly hoped to produce great confusion in Honolulu. The first bomb possibly was a signal to “fifth columnists” to attempt sabotage. There are about 175,000 persons of Japanese ancestry in the Hawaiian Islands’ 410,000 population. Of this number, scarcely a fourth may be aliens and dual citizens, and the vast majority will be utterly loyal to the United States.

The task of “rounding up” known anti-Americans necessarily may produce a great task for the Army and Marine forces. The longer this confusion and internal type of attack can be prolonged, the greater will be Japan’s chances of upsetting American battle plans.

Pearl Harbor, despite its tremendous defenses, has some vulnerable points to bombing attack. The great oil shortage tanks adjoining the main base probably were a prime object of Japanese “suicide bombings.” First reports indicate that some direct hits may have been scored in this area. Construction of underground tanks has been underway on the island of Oahu for months, and it is likely that vital reserves are safe from attacks such as the Japanese have made.

Narrow entrance

The entrance to Pearl Harbor is narrow – and shallow. One ship down cross-wise in that channel may bottle up major ships for hours. News that the fleet has already left the harbor would indicate that the Navy command is taking no chances on such an immediate development.

The drydock facilities at Pearl Harbor, the most important part of the base, adjoin the central harbor. If any direct hit is scored on the main dock or its companion on which construction was started a few years ago, a serious repair problem may be created.

Ford Island, mentioned as one target of the first Japanese bombers, is the home of giant consolidated “PBY” two- and four-motored bombers.

Hickam Field immediately adjoins Pearl Harbor to the east. Millions of dollars have been rushed into improvement of this establishment. In size, the field may be compared to LaGuardia Airport in New York City.

Scout, attack and reconnaissance planes are mainly based at Schofield Barracks, the central Army post on a plateau overlooking Pearl Harbor, situated some 25 miles from Honolulu to the northwest.

On the island of Maui, 90 miles from Oahu to the southeast; Hawaii – some 200 miles south of Oahu, and Kauai, 80 miles northwest, additional Army and Navy air bases exist. An often used anchorage for the main fleet during battle maneuvers has been Lahaina Roads, just off Maui.

FBI is ready

WASHINGTON – The FBI announced last night that it is “completely mobilized and ready” to deal with Japanese espionage and sabotage.

WAR BULLETINS!

100 casualties reported in Jap raid

MANILA, Philippines – Press dispatches reported that 100 to 200 troops, 60 of them Americans, were killed or injured today when Japanese warplanes raided Iba, on the west coast of the island of Luzon, north of the Olongapo Naval Base.

Haiti declares war on Japan

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – Haiti declared war on Japan today.

Honduras declares war

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras – The Congress of Honduras, by a unanimous vote, declared war on Japan today and ordered martial law for the duration of the war.

Cuba’s Cabinet votes for war

HAVANA, Cuba – The Cuban Cabinet, at a special session today, voted to ask Congress to declare war on Japan. Premier Carlos Saladrigas said the Cabinet would henceforth be “in permanent session.”

Netherlands at war

LONDON, England – Queen Wilhelmina said today the Kingdom of the Netherlands considers itself at war with Japan and puts all of its military and power resources at disposal of the common war effort.

RAF bombs Jap transports

SINGAPORE – Royal Air Force planes today carried out intensive bombing attacks on Japanese transports attempting to land troops along the northern Malayan coast.

Hong Kong beats off raiders

HONG KONG – Two air raids by Japanese planes on Hong Kong were beaten off by anti-aircraft fire today and damage was not important, a British command communique said.

U.S. move to evacuate Grew

WASHINGTON – Secretary of State Cordell Hull told his press conference today that the State Department is seeking to repatriate Ambassador Joseph C. Grew and his staff from Tokyo, as well as other American nationals in Japanese territory.

Japs seize U.S. Marines

LONDON, England – Radio Rome reported today that the Japanese had taken 63 U.S. Marines prisoner in the Tientsin area of China.

British tell Japs to report

LONDON, England – Japanese nationals in Britain who are more than 16 years old have been asked to report as soon as possible to the nearest police station with their registration certificates so that the certificates can be endorsed, the Home Office announced today.

Navy requests blackout

LOS ANGELES, California – Naval authorities early today requested that the Long Beach and San Pedro Harbors be blacked out. The Navy asked that all non-essential lights be turned off, including those at vital industries such as oil plants, wherever possible. Autos and trucks were asked to use only dim lights.

Japs seize British concession

LONDON, England – The British concession at Tientsin, North China, has been occupied by Japanese troops, according to an official German news agency broadcast heard by the United Press listening post.

Japan pledges ‘safety’

LONDON, England – The Japanese radio said today that Tomokazu Hori, spokesman for the Japanese Information Bureau, had announced every possible precaution would be taken to ensure the safety of U.S. and British nationals in Japan. Hori said Japan’s treatment of enemy nationals would be affected by the treatment accorded Japanese nationals by the United States and Britain.

China to declare war

CHUNGKING, China – Chinese Foreign Minister Quo Tai-chi today said China has decided to declare war against Germany and Italy as well as Japan, against which the Chungking regime has never made a formal declaration.

Hong Kong blockaded, Japs say

NEW YORK – The Japanese Navy is completely blockading the British Crown colony in Hong Kong, the Japanese Domei News Agency said today in a broadcast heard by the United Press.

Japan claim pact with Thailand

NEW YORK – The Japanese official radio claimed today that an “agreement” was reached with Thailand at 12:30 p.m. (10:30 p.m. Sunday ET) to allow passage of Japanese troops through that country. The broadcast was heard by the United Press. Japanese headquarters reported that troops started to enter Thailand this afternoon, Radio Tokyo reported.

Air-sea battle reported

NEW YORK – The United Press today heard Radio Vichy broadcast Tokyo reports that a great air-sea battle was in progress off the Philippine coast.

Japs again raid Philippines

LONDON, England – The German radio quoted Japanese Imperial Headquarters today as reporting that Japanese fighter planes made a strong attack on the “most important points” of the Philippines today, inflicting severe damage. No Japanese planes were damaged in the raids, Tokyo asserted.

Japanese troopships hit

SAN FRANCISCO, California – The Singapore radio heard by the United Press here today reported that two American-built Hudson bombers operating off the northern Malayan coast had scored direct hits on two Japanese troopships and another Hudson bomber had scored a direct hit on a barge loaded with Japanese soldiers.

U.S. seizes 736 Japs

WASHINGTON – Attorney General Francis Biddle announced today that FBI agents had seized 736 Japanese nationals in the United States and in the Hawaiian Islands last night.

Mandated islands attacked

NEW YORK – Japanese forces in the Western Pacific have attacked the Australian-mandated Ellice and Ocean Islands, both of which are rich in phosphate deposits, according to a British broadcast heard by NBC. The islands are northeast of Australia.

Rome sees Axis at war with U.S.

NEW YORK – CBS today quoted the Rome radio as saying that Japan’s declaration of war against the United States involves “the existence of a state of war between the two Axis powers and the United States.”

The Manila correspondent of NBC quoted the Tokyo radio as saying Germany will shortly follow Japan in a declaration of war against the United States.

Japs declare defensive zone

BERLIN, Germany – All waters around Japan have been declared a defensive zone by the Japanese Navy, the official German news agency reported from Tokyo today.

Thailand studies Jap ‘proposal’

BANGKOK, Thailand – The Thai cabinet has been in session since 2 a.m. (2 p.m. Sunday ET) studying “Japanese proposals;” it is understood the British have presented “a counterproposal.”

First Lady going to coast

WASHINGTON – Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, an assistant director of the Office of Civilian Defense, will leave for the Pacific Coast by airplane tonight to assist emergency civilian-defense work. The extent of her stay will be determined by the necessities of the situation.

Australia enters war

NEW YORK – Premier John Curtin has announced that Australia is at war with Japan, according to an Australian radio broadcast heard by CBS. NBC said Australia’s decision was taken at an extraordinary cabinet meeting in Melbourne.

NormanStewart · December 9, 2020, 1:45pm

Senate’s vote unanimous; House ballots 388-1 – victory pledged

By Lyle C. Wilson, United Press staff writer

BULLETIN

NEW YORK – An NBC correspondent in Manila reported today that “Manila is now under Japanese air bombardment.”

The Japanese attacked Fort William McKinley, just outside Manila, and Nichols Field on the outskirts of the city, he reported. Another attack was attempted against the RCA transmitter, he said.

TELEPHOTO: President Roosevelt delivers war message

President Roosevelt is pictured here as he delivered his momentous message to a joint session of Congress today, sketching briefly the extent of Japanese attacks and asking the House and Senate to declare that a state of war existed. In the background are Vice President Henry A. Wallace (left) and Speaker Sam Rayburn. To the right is the president’s son, Capt. James Roosevelt. (ACME Telephoto)

WASHINGTON (UP) – Congress today proclaimed the existence of a state of war between the United States and the Japanese Empire 33 minutes after the dramatic moment when President Roosevelt stood before a joint session to pledge that we will triumph – “so help us God.”

Democracy was proving its right to a place in the sun with a split-second shiftover to all-out war.

The Senate acted first, adopting the resolution by a unanimous roll call vote of 82-0, within 21 minutes after the president had concluded his address to a joint session of both houses.

The final House vote was announced as 388-1. The lone negative vote was cast by Rep. Jeannette Rankin, R-Montana, who also voted against entry into World War I.

The resolution now has to be signed by Speaker Sam Rayburn and Vice President Wallace before it is sent to the president at the White House. His signature will place the United States formally at war against the Japanese Empire, already an accomplished fact.

The resolutions were before both houses within 15 minutes of the time Mr. Roosevelt ended his seven-minute, 500-word extraordinary message.

There was a half second of uncertainty in the House when Rep. Rankin objected to unanimous consent for immediate consideration of the war resolution.

Speaker Sam Rayburn brushed the objection aside. It was she who in the small hours of April 6, 1917, faltered, wept, and finally voted “no” against a similar resolution aimed at Germany.

When the clerk came to her name on the roll call today, she voted “no” again.

A chorus of hisses and boos greeted her vote, the first cast against the war resolution.

Rep. Harold Knutson, R-Minnesota, who also voted against American entry into World War I in 1917, said today this nation “has no choice but to declare war on Japan.”

“I do not see that we have any other notice,” Mr. Knutson told reporters. “They declared war on us.”

Miss Rankin and Mr. Knutson are the only present members of the House who voted against war in 1917.

Only Miss Rankin and Rep. Clare Hoffman, R-Michigan, had remained seated when the House gave a standing ovation in response to Roosevelt’s solemn statement:

I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.

In a staccato of short sentences, the president told where the Japanese had hit yesterday throughout the Pacific area and how their representatives here had at the same time been continuing deceptive and false negotiations for maintenance of peace. And he said, simply, that he had ordered “all measures to be taken for our defense.”

The president said grimly:

Always will our whole nation remember the character of the onslaught against us. No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.

Under parliamentary procedure, one chamber must approve the resolution adopted by the other. Since the Senate acted first, its version was substituted by the House for the House resolution which differed in a few minor words.

Emery L. Frazier, legislative clerk of the Senate and a former member of the Kentucky Legislature, took the resolution over to the House after the Senate passed it.

The Senate received the resolution back from the House at 1:37 p.m. EST while Mr. Connally was debating the necessity for strict anti-strike legislation with Sen. James E. Murray, D-Montana. Mr. Murray asserted that strict legislation was unnecessary.

Just as he finished, House Reading Clerk Alney E. Chaffee entered the door and with a stiff bow announced that the House had passed a resolution declaring the “existence of a state of war with Japan.”

“There is the answer to the Senator’s convention,” Mr. Connally said.

The resolution was laid on the table for a while as Mr. Connally and Mr. Murray continued their debate.

Just before adjourning at 2:05 p.m. until noon tomorrow, the Senate gave consent for Vice President Wallace to sign the historic resolution after the session. He planned to do so in a ceremony in his office after Speaker Rayburn signs for the House.

Chairman Tom Connally, D-Texas, of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee introduced the war resolution in the Senate at 12:50 p.m. He asked for its immediate consideration, but Sen. Arthur H. Vandenberg, R-Michigan, asked him to suspend the request so he could comment upon the resolution.

Mr. Vandenberg told the Senate that “when war comes to us… I stand with the Commander-in-Chief, notwithstanding past differences on foreign policy.”

He said that “there can be no shadow of doubt as to our answer to Japan,” and added that, “you [Japan] have unsheathed the sword and by it you shall die.”

When Mr. Vandenberg concluded, the Senate roll call on the Connally resolution was taken.

Democratic leader John W. McCormack, D-Massachusetts, introduced the resolution in the House.

He moved immediately for a suspension of the rules and passage of the resolution.

Miss Rankin rose and said, “I object.”

“This is no unanimous-consent request,” Speaker Sam Rayburn said. “No objection is in order.”

McCormack then yielded himself 20 seconds in which he demanded immediate action on the resolution.

House Republican leader Joseph W. Martin Jr., R-Massachusetts, then obtained the floor.

Cry ‘vote, vote’

Cries of “vote, vote” went up from the Democratic side.

Mr. Martin said he hoped there would not be a dissenting vote cast on the war resolution.

Mr. Martin said:

Our nation is today in the gravest crisis since its establishment as a Republic. All we hold precious and sacred is being challenged by a ruthless, unscrupulous, arrogant foe.

Our ships have been sunk, our planes destroyed, many lives lost, cities and towns under the American flag have been ruthlessly bombed.

We are compelled by this treacherous attack to go to war.

There can be no peace until the enemy is made to pay in full measure for his dastardly crimes.

More cries of “vote, vote” when Mr. Martin concluded.

‘Won’t be long’

“It won’t be long,” said Mr. Rayburn. “Let us keep order.”

The cries concluded, however, when Mr. Martin yielded three minutes to Rep. Hamilton Fish, R-New York, who said the time for action had come.

Mr. Fish said:

There can be only one answer to the treacherous attack of the Japanese, and that is war to final victory, cost what it may in blood, treasure, and tears.

He added:

The Japanese have gone stark, raving mad, and have by their unprovoked attack committed military, naval, and national suicide.

I shall at the proper time volunteer my services as an officer in a combat division, as I did in the last war, preferably with colored troops.

There is no sacrifice too great that I will not make in defense of America and to help annihilate these war-mad Japanese devils.

‘Sit down’

Miss Rankin was standing, seeking recognition, when Mr. Fish concluded.

“Sit down, sister,” someone called.

Mr. Rayburn ignored her and Mr. McCormack yielded to Rep. Sol Bloom, D-New York, and Rep. Luther A. Johnson, D-Texas.

Date to ‘live in infamy’

Mr. Roosevelt promised, in his seven-minute, 500-word address, that we would never forget the treacherous manner of the onslaught and that, before we are through, Japan will be powerless to offend so again.

He said:

Yesterday, December 7, 1941 – a date which will live in infamy – the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

The president, preceded by the escorting Senate-House Committee, went into the House chamber, supported by his son, James, who wore his uniform of a Marine captain. He was greeted by a thundering ovation after he was presented to the assemblage by Speaker Sam Rayburn.

The ovation swelled in volume as the president reached the speaker’s stand and a rebel yell went up from the Democratic side.

War plea cheered wildly

The chamber was jammed. Members of Congress and spectators listened gravely and quietly as the president began his speech at 12:33 p.m.

But there was wild cheering when the president reached the point in his brief state paper asking for a declaration that a state of war exists.

The president did not mention Germany and Italy – Japan’s Axis partners in Europe.

Await further news

Congressional leaders had awaited the president’s message to decide whether to formulate a declaration of war only against Japan, or against Germany and Italy as well.

The president was apparently awaiting further information as to what Germany and Italy will do.

The president spoke to a tense, hushed joint session of both houses less than two hours after he had announced, through his secretary, 3,000 American casualties in the Japanese assault on the island of Oahu in the Hawaiian group. Of those casualties, 1,500 were estimated to have been killed.

Sink Jap subs

U.S. counteraction, the White House announced, has accounted for a “number” of Japanese warplanes and submarines. The Japanese toll of American warships in Pearl Harbor was one unidentified battleship which had capsized and one destroyer, which had exploded. Numerous American planes were destroyed and other warships damaged.

Meanwhile, at a press conference, Secretary of State Hull told reporters that, at the time of his meeting with the Japanese ambassadors yesterday, he heard rumors of a Japanese attack on Hawaii, but had not obtained confirmation.

He said he did not wait to check the rumors but received the envoys on their own representation that they wished to visit him.

The White House reported that one old battleship capsized in the attack on Pearl Harbor, one destroyer was blown up and “several other American ships were damaged.”

Jap subs sunk

It declared that American countermeasures had accounted for “a number of Japanese planes and submarines.”

The president was particularly gratified this morning over the mounting reaction of the country expressed to the White House in hundreds of telegrams and telephone calls.

Express ‘horror’

Secretary Stephen Early told a press conference that the tremendous volume of messages to the president “all express horror at this attack and pledge full loyalty to the president and the government.”

The messages came from governors, mayors, religious leaders, heads of civic movements, newspaper editors and radio broadcasters, many offering their personal services.

Assemble casualty lists

Even as the American armed forces in the mid-Pacific and the Far East defended this country with their lives and blood against the Japanese blitzkrieg, the War and Navy Departments were assembling data for the first casualty lists.

There already were scattered reports throughout the country that relatives of dead or missing men had received private notification of the sacrifice.

Congress, meanwhile, moved on other fronts to speed every facility for the successful prosecution of the war. The House Military Affairs Committee scheduled a meeting for tomorrow to repeal legislation restricting the use of selectees and National Guardsmen to the Western Hemisphere and U.S. possessions.

The action would remove any doubt as to the authority of the president to do away with that prohibition. There had been some belief that he would dispense with it during actual war.

Scores treachery

Symbolic of the unity which had swept a determined nation overnight was the comment of Rep. William G. Stratton, R-Illinois, who hitherto has opposed President Roosevelt’s foreign policy.

He said:

There can be no question as to the stand that will be taken by every true American. This treacherous attack on the United States by Japan will be met and avenged by a united and aroused people. We will not be satisfied merely with victory – Japan must be destroyed as a military power.

To get what he asks for

Congressional leaders said the president would get whatever he asked for today. One high-ranking Democrat said, “It would be difficult to prevent Congress from declaring war today.”

Fighting actually began yesterday. By sundown in the Far East, it extended over a sweeping Pacific area of thousands of square miles from the Asian mainland to a point east of Hawaii where a lumber-laden American transport was torpedoed and sunk between those islands and the American continent.

The president had already ordered our Armed Forces to strike back and the war was on – declared or not.

Police shooed crowds away from the immediately vicinity of the White House. But in Lafayette Park, just across Pennsylvania Avenue, some hundreds gathered and then sang “America” and “God Bless America” as the conferees streamed out of the mansion. There had been a moment of excitement earlier in the day when crowds assembled around the Japanese embassy in Massachusetts Avenue where attaches were firing papers in big packages each equipped with a fuse and powder charge. But there was no violence there and none elsewhere in Washington in the first hours of our active participation in World War II.

Fitting neatly into the spectacular pattern of yesterday’s events was Japan’s final diplomatic move here, a request for an appointment with Secretary of State Hull. The hour was fixed at 1 p.m., just 25 minutes before the bombers zoomed low over Pearl Harbor. Ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura and special envoy Saburo Kurusu actually reached the State Department more than an hour later and some 40 minutes after bombs fell on Hawaii. They delivered their government’s reply to Hull’s November 26 statement of basic principles for peace in the Pacific, a reply which rejected the principles, accused the United States of seeking to extend the war, and so enraged Mr. Hull that he blasted at Nomura that the note from Tokyo was a concoction of “infamous falsehoods and distortions.”

Discloses documents

The State Department immediately made public the American statement of basic principles, the Japanese reply and Mr. Roosevelt’s Saturday peace proposal directed to Emperor Hirohito. There was speculation here whether the president’s message ever reached the Emperor at all.

Mr. Hull is expected to send to Congress today “a white paper” containing a chronological history of U.S.-Japanese relations which preceded yesterday’s attacks. This is customary procedure preceding a formal declaration of war.

Plainclothesmen were sent to the British embassy. British Ambassador Lord Halifax cancelled all engagements and was in constant communication with the White House and London.

The president considered declaring martial law in Manila. This would place the Army in supreme control there.

Chinese Ambassador Hu Shih spent 40 minutes with Mr. Roosevelt. He said the Japanese attack was “sheer madness.”

Playwright Robert Sherwood, who has helped the president to prepare some of his most important papers, was being flown here from New York by special plane. With him were Vice President Henry A. Wallace, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins and Postmaster General Frank Walker.

Not ‘knocked out’

White House conferees, who last night heard the worst straight from the lips of the president, came out acknowledging the force of the Japanese attack, but assuring all comers that we are not being “knocked out” in the Pacific.

Far from it. The U.S. Navy and Air Force are believed to be counterattacking and naval sources said we could carry the war directly to Japan by air.

Those conferees were solemn men as they emerged into night. White House police guards surrounded the mansion. It was no pocket pistol guard, either, but big, brawny bluecoats who had rifles and Thompson submachine guns in the crooks of their arms. This was no night for prowlers at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue or elsewhere in Washington because the Army was on guard too.

Streetlights dimmed at 12:48 a.m. today in a semi-blackout and District of Columbia officials called on all citizens to use nightlights.

Gen. Robert E. Wood, chairman of the America First Committee, climbed out of an airplane on LaGuardia Airport, New York, last night and said, “We will support the war.”

The national board of directors of the America First Committee in Chicago simultaneously urged its members to give full support “to the war effort of this country until the conflict with Japan is brought to a successful conclusion.”

Jap Embassy draws crowd

Staff members remain in Washington building

WASHINGTON (UP) – The handsome Japanese Embassy was converted into a dormitory for staff members today while curious crowds stared at the building housing the emissaries of America’s first avowed enemy in 23 years.

Japanese diplomats and newspapermen preferred to remain in the building, despite lack of bedding.

Hiroichi Takagi, the embassy’s third secretary, said over the telephone that he and his associates considered themselves “out of jobs because we were working for peace and that has ended.”

His first news of the changed situation, he said, was from press-association tickers.

Envoy called tired

Takagi said Ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura appeared to be extremely tired but was otherwise all right. Concern over his health had been expressed by those who thought the action of Japan’s militarists, men he has tried to keep in check, must have been a great shock to him.

The United States sent prompt protection to the embassy and the State Department said protection would be supplied to all diplomatic personnel of Japan in the United States.

But before the police officers arrived, the Japanese staff, on short-sleeves despite the cold weather, had begun the burning of embassy papers. The boxes were equipped with fuses and powder which, when a light was applied, quickly reduced the papers to ashes.

Burned on lawn

Grates of the lawn were used for the burning. An embassy attache wisecracked to photographers, “There go my love letters.”

A crowd gathered and the driveway gates in Massachusetts Avenue were swung shut. There were a few boos for arriving Japanese officials, hastily reporting to the embassy after hearing the news, but the crowd was orderly.

There is expected to be difficulty in arranging safe conducts for Japanese officials to their homeland.

Under international law, the diplomats are entitled to the full protection of the United States while in this country and by custom, they are accorded safe conduct by all belligerents through whose countries they might pass.

Liner en route

The Japanese passenger liner Tatsuta Maru is reportedly at sea en route to the United States and might be used for the return of Japanese diplomats. But they may not be permitted to leave until satisfactory arrangements are made for Ambassador Joseph C. Grew and his staff to leave Tokyo.

There will be efforts to arrange transfers of Japanese newspapermen in the United States and American newspapermen in Tokyo.

Japan’s island position may make the matter difficult and a protracted period of negotiations was expected. The exchanges might be made at some neutral ports in the Pacific in another few weeks.

Men ordered back

SAN FRANCISCO, California – The 12th Naval District headquarters last night ordered all men attached to ships at Mare Island Navy Yard to report to their posts immediately.

NormanStewart · December 9, 2020, 4:06pm

Arnold youth dies in battle

First Pittsburgh District victim of Japs

Pvt. George G. Leslie, 20, USAC, killed yesterday in the Japanese attack on the Hawaiian Islands.

The Pittsburgh District’s first casualty of the war in the Pacific was announced by the War Department today.

The parents of Pvt. George G. Leslie, 20, an enlisted man in the U.S. Army Air Forces, were informed that their son had been killed in the Japanese attack on the Hawaiian Islands.

The following message was sent to Mr. and Mrs. George S. Leslie, of Arnold:

Your son, Pvt. George G. Leslie, died at approximately 10 a.m. Hawaiian Time, December 7, a battle casualty, from gunshot wounds. Any other information will reach you from the War Department.

Pvt. Leslie, who is survived by a brother and two sisters, enlisted in the Air Corps last April and was taking personnel management training in Hawaii. He was a graduate of Arnold High School.

Casualty list

By the United Press

The first U.S. casualties in the Japanese attacks were revealed today in word sent to the parents of the victims by the Navy Department.

An official list of casualties is expected to be issued in Washington later.

The dead:

1st Lt. Hans Christiansen, 21, Woodland, California.
2nd Lt. George A. Whiteman, 21, Sedalia, Missouri.
Pvt. George C. Leslie, 20, Arnold, Pennsylvania.
Pvt. Robert Niedzwiecki, 22, Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Pvt. Dean W. Cebert, 23, Galesburg, Illinois.

NormanStewart · December 9, 2020, 4:07pm

LIFE (December 8, 1941)

MacArthur of the Far East

If war should come, he leads the Army that will fight Japan
By Clare Boothe

Today, when the thunderclouds of war are so low and thick over the Pacific that visiting Mr. Kurusu hardly dares sneeze for fear of precipitating the cloudburst, it is difficult to remember that in 1935, a Japanese-American conflict was no more than a gray little puff over Manchukuo. Men who saw it there and predicted its prodigious growth were accused of being alarmists. In that year in Washington, handsome Gen. Douglas MacArthur retired as a top soldier of Uncle Sam’s Army and, according to TIME, “packed his elegant duffel” and sailed for the Philippines. Nobody much cared why.

In 1935, the barometer of U.S. isolationism was rising rapidly toward its all-time 1939 peak. Public opinion on the Philippines – when there was any – was for “pulling out.” The Filipinos were to have “complete independence” in 1946. It was to protect this glorious independence that President Quezon, with the approval of Franklin Roosevelt, borrowed Douglas MacArthur, who thought he knew a way to do it. Advertising the newly arrived general as “America’s best professional talent,” Quezon promptly dubbed MacArthur “Field Marshal of the Philippines” and assigned to him the task of making those defenseless islands impregnable to attack – by 1946.

Appointed Field Marshal of the Philippine Army in 1936, his job was to revamp, modernize and enlarge the native army. Here he reviews some Filipino troops in ceremony at Manila.

Some people were quick to suggest that either MacArthur was being sold a bill of goods by a busted government, or that MacArthur would bust Quezon selling him a bill of goods, since, they claimed, not even the U.S. Army and Navy units there, together with the Philippine Army, could hope to defend the Philippines. Left-wingers squawked that MacArthur intended to help his old pal Quezon “establish a dictatorship in the Philippines under the protection of American-sponsored soldiers…”

Washington society, after its first snickers over MacArthur’s wonderfully high-sounding title of “Field Marshal,” settled comfortably back to forgetting again about the Philippines – and MacArthur. And even when Americans began to think about the Philippines again this year, they didn’t think of MacArthur. For after all he was only in charge of some half-trained Filipinos, and other U.S. generals and admirals were out there commanding U.S. troops.

And then suddenly one day – the day was July 26, 1941 – the President of the United States dropped a bombshell in the Pacific by appointing Douglas MacArthur to be commanding general of all the U.S. Armed Forces in the Far East, called USAFFE. MacArthur quit being a field marshal and took rank as Lieutenant General USA – next in rank only to Chief of Staff George Marshall in Washington. At the same time, President Roosevelt (1) summoned the Army of the Philippine Commonwealth to the U.S. colors and (2) rushed out to MacArthur one of the biggest forces of bombers and superbombers the U.S. has so far been able to assemble anywhere outside the hemisphere.

With his new staff, MacArthur (seated) posed for this picture after President Roosevelt made him Far East commander last July. He felt like ‘an old dog in a new uniform.’ At left of MacArthur is Gen. R. K. Sutherland, his able chief of staff.

When President Roosevelt chose Douglas MacArthur to be head fighting man in the Far East, he wrote a new chapter head in the history of World War II. Reading the news in the Netherlands Indies, Dutch Chief of Staff Hein ter Poorten must have sighed in sudden relief. In Singapore, weary old Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, air marshal and military commander of Great Britain’s Far Eastern Forces, no doubt snored peacefully for the first night in a long year. In Chungking, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek may have murmured, after four long years of war, “America wakes at last!”

For the Allied powers sensed that in Tokyo this chapter head would cause many a fan-tooth naval jaw to drop and many a military bandy leg to buckle. The warlords of Tokyo knew that MacArthur was not only one of America’s ablest World War I field soldiers, he was also a man who, both before and since 1918, had thoroughly understood the vital importance of the Philippines to Asia and America.

In MacArthur’s luxurious penthouse on top of the Manila Hotel, in the early summer of 1939, an officer then in the U.S. Philippine Department and the field marshal were having a long and painful heart-to-heart talk. As author of the ambitious Ten-Year Military Plan, as perhaps the only American military proponent of the theory that the Philippines could hold their own in any immediate scramble for them, MacArthur sensed that in the telescopic eyes of history, he was already “on the spot.” Pacing in his accustomed leonine style among the tropical potted palms that line like sentinels the penthouse parapets, he faced the unhappy facts: The original brave impetus of the inauguration of the Philippine Commonwealth that had first inspired President Quezon in 1935 to arm his borning nation was rapidly being lost. The $8,000,000-a-year military budget promised him for the building of an army had been steadily whittled. There was political sniping at him from socialistic groups within the country. There was overt pressure to liquidate him by pork-barrel Filipino politicos who wanted more and more money for “public works.” There was pressure from Tokyo to dismiss him. Tokyo constantly reassured the Quezon administration of “friendly intentions,” which were in jeopardy only because of “that leading Japanophobe,” Field Marshal MacArthur. Above all, there was the apathy of Washington and the American public. All these were conspiring to sabotage Gen. MacArthur’s plans.

According to the Philippine Department officer’s report, Field Marshal MacArthur burst into language as colorful as the sunset over Mariveles Mountain. He damned military myopia at home and abroad, and flatly predicted that, if it were not remedied, the Philippines must drop like an overripe plum into the Japanese basket.

The officer asked the field marshal, “Well, what do you care?” thinking, perhaps with a touch of envy, that this 59-year-old retired general had already enjoyed all the honors and excitements that can ever come a soldier’s way: “Personally, you’ve done the best you could.”

MacArthur, with a wife and characteristically dramatic sweep of the arm that embraced not only Manila Bay and its Gibraltar, fortified Corregidor, but the wide China Sea and the entire Malay Archipelago beyond, is supposed to have replied:

Personally – I must not fail! Too much of the world’s future depends upon success here. These islands may not be the door to the control of the Pacific, they may not be even the lock to the door. But they are surely the key to the lock that opens the door – for America. I dare not allow that key to be lost!

MacArthur’s language is sometimes rhetorical but his behavior is usually realistic. From the day he landed in the islands to organize their defense, he had in fact proceeded as though he had seen in a crystal ball the Japanese landing at Hainan. The problem that faced him was technically complex: it was to build in a peaceful agricultural nation of 16,000,000 people an effective modern military machine, to create, literally from scratch, a respectable army, well clothed, provisioned, equipped and housed, as well as a much bigger potential civilian army which could be called swiftly into being at the threat of attack on the Islands. MacArthur worked persistently toward this goal. And last July, it was a pleasant surprise to the American people to learn that by the spring of 1942, the Philippine government would be able to contribute to the United States 125,000 well-trained and fairly well-equipped Filipino soldiers. He had, in addition, founded at Baguio a military academy modeled in miniature on his beloved West Point. He had also informed the nucleus of an air force, turning out 150 Filipino pilots trained by the same rigid methods in force at Randolph or Kelly Field.

Trained in U.S. methods, like the use of pontoon bridges (above), Philippine Army has approximately 1,600 regulars, 125,000 reserves.

American games, like basketball and this intercompany bowling tournament, are played by the Filipino Army which has been Americanized under Field Marshal MacArthur.

In the days of appeasement, all of this received scant recognition. Some Americans living in Manila were even wont to refer derogatorily to MacArthur as “the Napoleon of Luzon.” To many of Manila’s Pacific Appeasers, sitting on fan-cooled porches of the Polo Club and Army and Navy Club, perspiring gently over their iced gimlets, the field marshal and his sweating “little Native Army” may well have seemed opéra bouffe. But MacArthur knew that the Filipino is one of the toughest soldiers on earth. At the turn of the century, it took 100,000 American troops two years to quell the badly equipped, poorly organized Filipino insurgents. And if his equipment was pitiful, the fault was certainly not his. At home, the U.S. Army itself didn’t have the stuff.

By creating his “little Native Army,” the field marshal had rendered an outstanding service to the Philippines and to the USA. MacArthur induced in the Filipinos an active desire to defend the Philippines – which for years it hardly seemed likely an isolationist USA would even in a pinch do for them. He infected them with his own courage and vaulting optimism and won their hard loyalty, and by so doing helped to keep them from sinking, in apathy or terror, into the arms of Japanese diplomats. The president’s appointment was not only a recognition of heretofore publicly unrecognized services to American prestige in the Orient. It was also a notification to the world that in this area of Axis marauding, the U.S. meant business.

‘He’s a hell-to-breakfast baby’

In days of “international amity,” democratic peoples tend to accord professional soldiers the same degree of social respect extended to local fire chiefs. The People’s Army runs down, and the people run down their army. But when the winds of war begin to blow, the people look about them to see who and where their fighting men are. They ask of one another urgently: “Say, have we got any good generals?”

MacArthur’s record might be summarized by the remark of an AEF private made in 1918: “He’s a hell-to-breakfast baby, long and lean, who can spit nickels and chase Germans as well as any doughboy in the Rainbow.”

At West Point in 1903, he graduated with highest scholastic rating attained in 25 years. He was also on the baseball team.

MacArthur graduated as second lieutenant of engineers at the head of the West Point Class of 1903, in which stiff competition had been provided by Ulysses Grant III, grandson of the Civil War general. He piled up the highest scholastic record made at the Point in 25 years and, as a plebe, in spite of the race with Grant for top honors, found time to break another West Point record by getting “engaged” to eight girls at one, seven having been the previous cadet record. MacArthur denies this story, saying he was at noontime aware of having been so “heavily engaged by the enemy.”

As youngest Superintendent of West Point in the Academy’s history, MacArthur was visited by Edward, Prince of Wales, in 1920.

After a spectacular performance as commander of the Rainbow Division in France, in 1919 he was appointed superintendent of West Point, the youngest man ever to hold that position. In 1925, he became the youngest active major general in the Army, and when, in 1930, Hoover made him chief of staff, he was still a military prodigy: youngest chief of staff the country had ever had, the only one to be reappointed for an additional year, and thus the one who held that top-flight Army job longest. Coincidentally, at the age of 50, he was the youngest living U.S. four-star general, a rank therefore held only by Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Pershing, Bliss, March and Summerall.

Like George Washington, who wrote to his mother, “I heard the bullets whistle, and believe me there is something charming in the sound,” MacArthur is a lover of the art of war. This was perhaps childhood condition. He says his earliest recollection is the sound of Army bugles.

He was born January 26, 1880 on his father’s post at Little Rock Barracks, Arkansas, and he claims to remember his mother and a company sergeant protecting him, at the age of 4, from Indians with bows and arrows raiding his father’s Army barracks in New Mexico. As a young boy, MacArthur gobbled up with his breakfast porridge much melodramatic lore of the Civil War, as well as many a sound professional lecture on Civil War tactics and strategy. His father, Gen. Arthur MacArthur, was a Wisconsinite of Scotch ancestry, who in 1861 had joined the 24th Wisconsin Infantry in the Army of the Union as a lieutenant, emerged with four wounds as a colonel (“The Boy Colonel of the West”) and, by that time himself in love with the art of war, decided to remain in the Army. MacArthur Sr. saw action in the Philippines during 1898-1901: in 1900, he was made commander of the Philippine Division.

His father, Gen. Arthur MacArthur, resembled Theodore Roosevelt in looks. Like his son, he headed U.S. Army in the Philippines.

Long before Douglas MacArthur ever dreamed of being a general, much less a field marshal, Father MacArthur was minding his Ps and Qs – Philippines and Quezon – in the Pacific. It was to Gen. Arthur MacArthur that a young Filipino insurgent major surrendered his sword in 1901. Thirty-five years later, this same Filipino, Manuel Quezon, now 1st president of the Philippines, gave the general’s son the gold baton of a Philippine field marshal.

His father’s death was stranger than fiction

In 1900, Gen. Arthur MacArthur was appointed military governor of the Philippines. Almost before the guns stopped firing on the Insurrectos, Arthur MacArthur had begun installing a system of education, law and justice for the Islands. He was perhaps entirely responsible for the fact that Filipinos enjoy that basic right of all free men: the writ of habeas corpus. He also advocated (40 years ago) military training for the Filipinos. The organization of the famous Philippine Scouts of today – the fightingest men in the Pacific – was founded by him.

The circumstances of Lt. Gen. Arthur MacArthur’s death in 1912 outdo in drama anything that even his son has achieved. Against doctor’s orders, he had insisted on attending in Milwaukee the 50th Annual Reunion of his regiment of the Grand Army of the Republic. There, in the banquet hall, he was called upon to make a speech, and minted the platform to deliver what he began prophetically by saying was to be his last tribute to his old comrades in arms. As he reached his fiery peroration, his voice suddenly faltered, he swayed – and he dropped dead. There was a shocked silence in the hall. Then his old adjutant, who stood beside him, took the tattered and blood-stained flag of the regiment, cast it over the dead general – and, piling drama on drama, himself fell lifeless over his beloved chief’s body.

His mother, shown with a photograph of her son, died in 1935 at the age of 82, after medicine flown to Manila failed to save her life.

In the years between his own first service in the Philippines in 1903, and the days of America’s entrance into the World War, the rise of Douglas MacArthur up the military ladder was steady if not spectacular. In 1914, Douglas MacArthur was with Gen. Funston in Veracruz. Disguised as a “Mexican bum,” he reconnoitered voluntarily behind the Mexican lines to locate three available locomotives for his general. He located them. But what he remembers with most pleasure about this incident was that his “liaison” behind the enemy lines was a helpful young German Legation official named Franz von Papen.

During the Mexican campaign, MacArthur (arrow) was a captain. Disguised as a ‘bum,’ he captured locomotives behind the lines.

In World War, he fought alongside French (above), in 1918 became the commander of 42nd (‘Rainbow’) Division which he named.

MacArthur has been called “the D’Artagnan of the AEF,” “the Beau Brummel of the Army,” “the Disraeli of Chiefs of Staff,” “the Buck Private’s Gary Cooper.” One World War reporter in a flight of patriotic fancy wrote: “You could tell he was a soldier, even in a fur coat or a bathing suit.”

Currently MacArthur, dressed in a bathing suit and standing by the blue-tiled swimming pool of the Manila Hotel, might not look obstreperously “military.” White-skinned and lean, his shoulders are narrow and sloping. His nervous hands are small. His hair, once black and thick, is now black and thin, and combed from left ear to right, across the top of a narrow forehead. His face is intellectual, aesthetic, rather than martial. But whether MacArthur in bathing trunks looks like a movie fan’s idea of a warrior is not important. In sharkskin or shorts, khaki or cutaway, MacArthur has a soldier’s courage. It has been written into the record in the form of two World War wound stripes, 13 decorations for gallantry under fire, and seven citations.

His penthouse apartment on top of Manila Hotel overlooks poll in which he swims. His living room is lined with books and autographed photographs of famous soldiers.

While the doughboys were singing in the bloody trenches,

The General got the Croix de Guerre, parley-voo
The General got the Croix de Guerre,
The so-and-so was never there, Hinky-dinky-parley-voo.

…the men of the 42nd Division knew that their Gen. MacArthur was very much there. Wearing an overseas cap instead of the safer (and regulation) steel helmet, “the Fiery Arkansan” was reckless to the point of accompanying his troops on raids into enemy trenches. On one such occasion, he escorted an unwilling German officer back across no man’s land with the aid of nothing more than a riding crop.

His immediate commander, Gen. Menoher, wrote Gen. Pershing:

The contributions made to our military establishment by this General Officer have already had far-reaching effects. He has stood for the actual physical command of large bodies of troops in battle – not for a day but for day’s duration, and I believe has actually commanded larger bodies of troops on the battle line than any other officer in our Army, with, in each instance, conspicuous success.

His eloquence astounds listeners

MacArthur’s gift of words, his flair of dramatizing incidents, as well as his sound military understanding, stood the young officer in good stead as press relations officer on the General Staff in 1915. After World War I, his instinctive preference for ten-dollar words delivered in a million-dollar manner developed rapidly into a penchant for oratory and he speedily became the most effective and spectacular speaker and writer the Army had. Rumor in the Philippines has it that his reports from 1936-41 to the War Department made such good reading by contrast with duller reports that in simple gratitude for a few literate hours he got command of the USAFFE. His knowledge of military history is profound and his memory of that prodigious sort that gives a man’s subordinates the creeps, so accurately can he quote, days later, a report, a record, a book, a conversation. In conversation, the general is positively pyrotechnic. Changing at will from a mellifluous melodramatic whisper to a fiery snort, from brutal fact to flight of sheer rodomontade, he uses phrases like “We must foil the enemy,” “We stand on the eve of a great battle,” “We must not spill our precious blood on foreign soil in vain, in vain!” Intelligent listeners, however, rarely fail to perceive that beneath this baroque façade of rhetoric, MacArthur’s ideas generally make shattering sense. His eloquence – and his wisdom – reached a peak during the years from 1930 to 1935 when he was chief of staff. Winston Churchill’s compilation of his own unheeded warnings to the Empire, While England Slept, could be, if not matched in literary style, surely surpassed in military value by a compilation of MacArthur’s warnings to the Senate, the Congress, the public, while America was not only sleeping, but snoring.

He returned to Philippines for the second time in 1925 when, like his father, he was the commander of Philippine Division.

As Army chief of staff from 1930 to 1935, MacArthur saw much of Roosevelt and Secretary of War Dern (above). ‘It is undefended riches which provoke war,’ he warned.

In 1930, everywhere in the Western world, even in Germany, military ardor was at a low ebb. Nevertheless from 1930-35, as U.S. chief of staff, he repeatedly and eloquently warned private Senate or congressional committees, the president, the State Department and the public, that American defenses had fallen into an abysmal state of obsolescence and disrepair, and that projected economies would deliver them a death blow. Long before Goering or Goebbels had become words with which to frighten naughty children, at West Point graduation exercises, MacArthur was bitterly counseling against “retrenchment which cripples national defense and ceases to be economy.” He said that unless “an effort is made to curb or combat the unabashed and unsound propaganda of the peace cranks… a score of nations will soon be ready for the sack of America.”

He visited Europe in 1931 as chief of the U.S. general staff. Here he is shown while visiting the Tomb of the Polish Unknown Soldier.

He was kissed by Maginot, builder of line, in French ceremony (1931).

MacArthur foresaw not only the inevitability of war, he also foresaw the kind of highly mechanized war it would be, and projected in exact specification after specification the sort of equipment and training a nation would need to win such a war. With Cassandra-like insistency, he warned Congress that the next war would be mobile warfare. He pled unceasingly for a giant air force, for tanks, trucks and motorized columns.

With national pacifism rampant, the typical reaction to MacArthur’s preparedness campaign was that of a wag who suggested that his eagerness to motorize the Army was due to the well-known fact that the general, from his cadet days, has always hated to ride a horse. MacArthur, however, backed by President Roosevelt, managed to do some Army modernizing. He fought for and achieved the General Headquarters Air Force.

The Bonus Army collides with MacArthur

MacArthur has always been too colorful and controversial a figure not to have acquired some enemies. He has been accused of being a swaggerer, swashbuckler and a backslapper; dictatorial, self-opinionated, austere, obstinate and aggressive. He has been criticized for his long matinee-idol cigarette holders (which in later years he has abandoned for Corona Coronas), for his sartorial effects when in mufti and the plum-colored ties he wears when in khaki (he promoted the introduction of the open-jacket and soft collar into the Army), for the consciously rakish tilt at which he wears his heavily-brassed hat. The late Floyd Gibbons wrote that it was “just the tilt which permitted his personality to emerge, without violating Army regulations.”

Even in the muck and grime of the French front, MacArthur always managed to look as though he were on dress parade, often wearing Errol Flynnish black turtleneck sweaters which did not show trench mud. One colleague remembers that in France, when he climbed over a barbed-wire fence in a raid and returned with a rent in the seat of his britches, even the tear seemed either slyly or luckily contrived to expose one thigh and half a rump, rather than the whole of man’s most ridiculous aspect. MacArthur’s detractors also like to dwell upon the only incident in his whole career which seems to reflect discredit upon him: “the only time,” according to a brother West Pointer, “Doug ever took his finger off his number.” This was the inglorious “Victory of Anacostia Flats” in 1932 when, on horseback at the head of his troops, Four-Star General MacArthur drove the ragged Bonus Army out of Washington.

After ‘Victory of Anacostia Flats’ when he evicted the Bonus Army from Washington in 1932, he drank coffee with tired troops.

The true story of the eviction of the Bonus Marchers has never been written. MacArthur could, if he would, write it but neither at that time, nor since, has he ever publicly sought to defend himself, or “pass the buck” to Hoover. A true record would show that at no time did Hoover consult MacArthur about the eviction, nor was there any military precedent by which MacArthur could “advise” Hoover. It was at the urgent direct request of the “City Fathers,” the District of Columbia commissioners, to President Hoover – and over the previous advice of Gen. MacArthur, who had strongly urged against the use of force – that the president was obliged to call out the troops. The Bonus Marchers, claimed the City Fathers, had not only become a public nuisance, but their ranks were being daily swelled by organized communist groups of demonstrators and street brawlers, and they had gotten entirely out of the hands of Glassford’s local police force. When Secretary of War Hurley told Gen. MacArthur that, following the demand of the City Fathers to restore public order, a telephone call had come from the White House, he coupled this brief information with a military order to “act at once to clear them out.” MacArthur did not pause to weigh any political scruples he may have had, nor even to point out that a soldier is supposed to have none. That the ensuing action was accomplished without a shot fired by MacArthur’s troops, although there were two dead, 55 injured, is something MacArthur is still proud of.

During the actual eviction, although it had been prearranged with MacArthur that he and Walter W. Waters, the Bonus Army leader, would keep in touch, so “no one would be hurt,” Waters had been “shoved out,” evicted himself – by the communist elements in his own “army.” MacArthur says no orders existed, or were given, to burn the Bonus Marchers’ shacks, and in his army, he says coldly: “Nobody acts without orders.”

He lays this to the organized demonstrators in the Bonus Army… Having lost contact with Waters, MacArthur did not see him again until two years later when his orderly announced to the chief of staff, “There’s a bum outside, but he says he’s an old soldier.” MacArthur, whose standing order was never to close his door to any old soldier, said, “Show him in.”

Waters entered, down-and-out and hungry. MacArthur found a job for him.

Most criticism of MacArthur boils down to the accusation that he is “ambitious.” Those who envy him have accused him of political wire-pulling and putting pressure on friends in high places. One friend of MacArthur in a “high place” was certainly Newton D. Baker, to whom MacArthur undoubtedly owes more than to any other man – except his father. But the only “pressure” MacArthur used on Newton Baker was the impact which his brilliance and organizational ability made on the World War secretary.

Reaching France ‘fastest with the moistest’

When Baker made Maj. MacArthur a colonel, and entrusted to him, as chief of staff, the formation of the famous 42nd, or Rainbow, Division, he was not deceived in the young officer’s ability. The word Rainbow was of MacArthur’s own coining: as a description of a division drawn from every state in the country, it instantly caught the popular imagination. Formed at Camp Mills, Long Island, in August 1917, the Rainbow arrived in France in October 1917, one of the first American divisions to land on French soil. But anxious though MacArthur was to get there first – and despite the fact that he was being raced by Gen. Edward’s New England 26th Division – MacArthur refused to embark until his division was completely equipped for a long, hard winter in the trenches. In fact, so well was he equipped that he had to cough up equipment to the not-nearly-so-well-turned-out 26th Division.

Another “friend in a high place” was MacArthur’s belligerently Republican multimillionaire father-in-law, Edward T. Stotesbury. In 1922, while MacArthur was superintendent of West Point, he met and married that old tycoon’s only stepdaughter, socialite Louise Cromwell, sister of politico-playboy James (“Doris Duke”) Cromwell. Seven years of being married into the upper reaches of the social register may well have given MacArthur some of the social ease more often found among European soldiers than American ones. But it is hard to prove that the Stotesbury influence helped rather than hurt his career. And the fact remains that it was a good year after Louise Cromwell divorced him amicably in 1929 in Reno that Herbert Hoover made him chief of staff. And the Stotesburian era was an echo from the economic grave when Franklin Roosevelt reappointed him for an additional year in 1934. He has been accused of trying to wangle his own reappointment for a second tour. It was precedent-busting Franklin Roosevelt himself who wanted to keep MacArthur. Apparently, even in those days, President Roosevelt did not entirely believe in the Dämmerung of World War heroes. After MacArthur’s retirement as chief of staff to what, so far as the U.S. was concerned, looked like military obscurity, made doubly obscure by his leaving for the Philippines, Roosevelt still continued to muse nostalgically over his departed soldier. The president was quoted as having said, “I must always find a way to keep MacArthur close to me. If we ever have another AEF, he’s the man to take it over…”

NormanStewart · December 9, 2020, 4:08pm

‘The Knights of MacArthur’s Round Table’

Today at the general’s headquarters, in the steamy tropical heat, hardly stirred by lazy propeller-bladed fans, the lights burn long and late. And when they are turned out, the general carried away a fat briefcase of “homework,” the contents of which he digests while pacing up and down in his bedroom and bathroom, much to the annoyance of tenants on the floor beneath. In his headquarters, surrounded by his new and locally created staff of nine, called by Filipino wits the Knights of MacArthur’s Round Table, he works feverishly over plans for hospitalization, supplies, barracks, transportation, depots, for the combined Filipino and American forces. It is no secret that U.S. white troops have been quadrupled since the MacArthur appointment; that tanks by the dozens have rolled off ships and clanged up Manila boulevards on many a moonless midnight in the last rainy season; that at least nine Flying Fortresses have zoomed to roost at Clark Field, and that a great bomber command is being built up at Philippine airfields. The general’s long-cherished plans for the defense of the islands are daily being implemented. There are constant conferences with Four-Star Adm. Hart, with American military missions en route to Chungking and Moscow, with bomber-commuting Brooke-Popham from Singapore, and with President Quezon and High Commissioner Sayre, ironing out difficulties that arise between civilian and military needs and interests. And there are maneuvers at strategic “invasion points” on Luzon, at Forts Stotsenburg and McKinley. Gen. MacArthur has already begun his long-planned “war games” in the Philippines.

Strategy of the Pacific was recently discussed in Manila by Quezon (left), MacArthur (in the background) and Air Chief Marshal Brooke-Popham, British C-in-C at Singapore.

MacArthur lives in a big, showy, air-conditioned apartment in top of the five-story Manila Hotel. For an aspiring politician it would be a fine place to throw parties for visiting firemen and local bigwigs, but the general, when he entertains, entertains unobtrusively and choosily. Only good friends, Filipino and American, know his great living room, lined with rich books and personally inscribed photographs of most of the famous soldiers of his times, in wide, rich silver frames, or have dined at his great mahogany table, heavy with old-fashioned silverware. An omnivorous reader, his other pleasure is attending the Manila movies with his wife.

Jean Faircloth MacArthur is the general’s second wife. They were married in 1937.

Arthur MacArthur, the general’s only son, is 3 and is going to be a soldier too.

The second Mrs. MacArthur, the former Jean Faircloth of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, whom he met in Manila in 1935, is a small, attractive woman many years his junior. To the casual observer, the MacArthurs’ married manners are a trifle Victorian. She calls him, not “Douglas,” but always, with soft Dixie infliction, “General.” He calls her, with kingly courtesy, “Ma’am.” They have a sturdy, handsome 3-year-old son, named after his grandfather, Arthur MacArthur, whose Chinese amah has strangely bequeathed him a British accent. But the general says, whether little MacArthur says “bawth” or “bath,” he’s still going to be an American soldier.

One wonders if MacArthur, the crystal gazer, can look into his own future as clearly as he has his son’s – and his country’s. At 61, he is leaner in fiber and tougher in spirit than most Army men ten years his junior, and he could spot the average politician 15 or 20. Come peace, he may well be forced into that innocuous desuetude democracies reserve for their professional soldiers. But come war…?

Today, Gen. MacArthur at his headquarters of the Army of the Far East stands on the ramparts of an old Spanish fort looking out over Manila Bay where 43 years ago Dewey said so quietly: “You may fire when ready, Gridley.” That shell raised the American flag over an outpost 6,000 miles from American shores. It still waves there. But for how long? Will the Japanese try to land at the strategic spots on Luzon, Subic, Lingayen, Batangas Bay, or will their Navy try to force that tight little rock of Corregidor in the harbor? Will this island of Luzon then become a great theater of war, and Gen. MacArthur the outstanding khaki-clad figure in it? Or will peace descend upon the Pacific while the U.S. plunges into the war across the Atlantic? But come war and greater renown, or come peace and obscurity, leaving the general on this last rung of the military ladder he has climbed swiftly, but not unlaboriously, the world knows it can truly be said of him what an old sergeant said to a recruit he was instructing when he heard of MacArthur’s retirement from the U.S. Army in 1937, “Son, there goes a soldier.”

Meanwhile, the American flag, a pretty object, still snaps in the wind over the barbed-wire-fenced headquarters of the USAFFE.

Fort Drum at the narrow entrance to Manila Bay has a cage mast similar to a battleship’s, which is equipped with searchlights and fire-control platform for its 14-inch guns.

On Corregidor, Filipinos man a 12-inch gun with range of 16 miles. Another 12-incher is visible in the background. Island fortress has underground food, water and shell stores.

The Pittsburgh Press (December 8, 1941)

editorialclapper.up

Clapper: Japan doomed

By Raymond Clapper

WASHINGTON – Americans can be proud today. We can be proud that we tried to the bitter end to avoid war.

In the face of advancing savagery, the government of the United States continued to labor for peace. We tried to throw our moral weight against aggression and for the protection of all nations and for equal opportunity. We can be proud that we continued to do this until Japan struck.

Twelve hours before Japanese planes appeared over Honolulu, President Roosevelt appealed personally to the Emperor of Japan to join him in a peaceful adjustment. Even as the news of the attack was flashed to Washington, Secretary Hull was talking with the two Japanese representatives in his office. We were shot at while still in the act of seeking peace.

A strong nation can take pride in that, and in the record of patience and fair dealing. We can be proud of President Roosevelt and Secretary Hull, and of their cool and steady loyalty to those basic principles that must, after the last drop of blood has been spilled, rise again to guide nations. Our efforts were made, and that no American gun fired before we were attacked. Only today have we put on the uniform of war.

Japan’s attack united U.S.

Japan has made our decision for us. This nation hates war so deeply, is so convinced of its futility as a method of adjusting differences, that we could not take the initiative. Within the last few days, I have heard diplomats, who have participated in some of the Far Eastern discussions, express doubt that the United States would go to war even if Thailand were attacked by Japan. It would have been easy for Japan to avoid war with the United States.

But now all of our doubts, all of our reluctances, all of our hesitations have been swept away for us. Practically every leading isolationist has already been heard from. Their answer to the attack on Honolulu is that we must fight. Wheeler and Taft and McNary, leader of the Senate Republicans, have taken their stand with the government. Japan has united this country for war. Congress will very soon register the unity of this nation.

This is suicide for Japan. A desperate fourth-rate nation, the spoiled little gangster of the Orient will have to be exterminated as a power. Japan has asked for it and now she will get it.

Victory must bring new era

Japan could have joined the United States and Great Britain as one of three controlling sea powers of the globe. Her geography and economic situation made that her logical course. Japan can live only by sea trade. But she has chosen to war with the two other sea powers. She preferred to take her chances with armed force just as Germany has done.

Japan chose to live by the sword and she will die by the sword. Japan will be blasted, bombed, burned, starved. Her people will suffer ghastly tortures. A nation which had possibilities of becoming one of the rulers of the world will be reduced to a pitiful huddling people on a poor little group of islands.

The modern world can no longer tolerate the anarchy of conquest by force. The two nations most addicted to this barbarism are Germany and Japan. They must be disarmed. Force must be hereafter kept in the hands of nations that will use it to bring about a peaceful world.

We will come out of this war with fighting strength the like of which has never been seen. We will have plenty of it for our protection. I hope we will use it also in cooperation with other nations so that no power can again commit such an assault against the peace as Japan has just been guilty of.

This war must be fought until Japanese military strength is exterminated.

But more than that must come out of it. Our victory must be used to bring about a new era of benevolent force which will secure for all men and women and their children a new kind of peace in which the human race can progress toward that happier life which science and industry have made possible.

America can open that door.

Los Angeles mans anti-aircraft guns

LOS ANGELES, California (UP) – All aircraft observation posts and anti-aircraft guns were ordered immediately manned by observers in an order issued last night by Brig. Gen. William O. Ryan, commanding general of the 4th Interceptor Command, which has jurisdiction over the southwestern portion of the United States.

The statement said:

To chief observers of all observation posts AWS:

You are directed to activate your observation posts immediately and to see that the posts are fully manned at all times.

By order BG WILLIAM O. RYAN
Commanding General
4th Interceptor Command

Declarations of war

By the United Press

Declarations of war since Japan’s attack on the United States:

United States on Japan.
Japan on the United States and Great Britain.
Great Britain on Japan.
Nicaragua on Japan.
Canada on Japan.
The Netherlands on Japan.
Honduras on Japan.
Costa Rica on Japan.
Manchukuo on the United States.
Free France on Japan.
Haiti on Japan.
Belgian government-in-exile on Japan.

Imminent declarations:

South Africa on Japan.
Australia on Japan.
Chungking on Japan and the Axis.
Cuba on Japan.

This war different; not started in April

Active entrance in World War II marks the first time since the War of 1812 with Britain that the United States has begun a war in any month other than April.

Starting dates for the six previous wars were:

Revolution – April 19, 1775
War of 1812 – June 18, 1812
War with Mexico – April 15, 1846
Civil War – April 15, 1861
War with Spain – April 21, 1898
World War I – April 6, 1917

NormanStewart · December 9, 2020, 5:57pm

Isolationists change views as Japs attack

Wheeler: Bombs mean war and we’ll have to see it through
By John R. Beal, United Press staff writer

WASHINGTON (UP) – Isolationist sentiment in Congress disappeared today almost without a trace.

The men who have fought President Roosevelt’s foreign policy joined his supporters in calling for war in answer to Japan’s attack.

Sen. Burton K. Wheeler, D-Montana, spearhead of congressional opposition to President Roosevelt, said the Japanese bombs dropped at Pearl Harbor “mean war and we’ll have to see it through.”

Sen. Gerald P. Nye, D-North Dakota, said in a speech at Pittsburgh that “if the facts are presented, there is only one thing for Congress to do – declare war.”

Mr. Nye, however, was critical of administration conduct of the negotiations with Japan, accusing the government of “doing its utmost to provoke a quarrel” with her.

Party lines erased

But most members of the non-interventionist bloc put aside recriminations as out of place now that attack has come to the United States. One after another, wherever the news reached them, those who have been associated with opposition to the government’s program of aid “short of war” urged that the nation use its resources to the utmost to defend itself.

Party lines were declared erased for the duration of the war. Senate Republican leader Charles L. McNary of Oregon said as he left last night’s White House conference that “the Republicans will go along on whatever is done.”

House Republican leader Joseph W. Martin Jr. of Massachusetts added that the minority members of the House “naturally resent the cowardly attack by Japan and will support the president in his effort to maintain the integrity of the United States.”

Attack aids unity

The consensus was that the method of Japan’s attack amounted to invasion and could not have brought greater instant unity to the nation than if it had been calculated for this purpose.

This is how some of the outstanding congressional foreign policy opponents reacted to the Japanese bombings:

Chairman David I. Walsh, D-Massachusetts, of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee said:

The unexpected and unprovoked attacks upon United States territory and ships and the formal declaration of war by Japan leave Congress no choice but to take speedy and decisive measures to defend our country. We must promptly meet the challenge with all our resources and all our courage, and place our faith in God to protect us in this hour of national peril.
Rep. Hamilton Fish, R-New York, one of the bitterest of the President’s opponents, said he intended to appeal in the House for complete support from all factions.
Sen. Robert A. Taft, R-Ohio, said, “Undivided and unlimited prosecution of the war must show that no one can safely attack the American people.”
Sen. Arthur H. Vandenberg, R-Michigan, called for “a victorious war with every resource at our command.”

NormanStewart · December 9, 2020, 7:07pm

After America was at war –
America Firsters jeer President as Nye and others conceal awful truth

Army colonel ejected as he tried to tell of Jap attack
By Adam Smyser

(SHS) – The Japanese attack edged dramatically into a three-hour meeting of the America First Committee yesterday, but even when the strained session ended, the audience was still applauding declarations for peace.

The America Firsters hardened to hecklers by this time – even booed a colonel in the U.S. Army (wearing civilian clothes) out of their meeting when he tried to break the news of the Japanese attack, and it was a full hour later that they finally heard the news in a brief note read by Sen. Gerald P. Nye, one of the isolationist leaders.

The weird meeting started in the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Hall at 3 p.m. EST, just early enough for the audience of 2,800 not to have heard radio flashes of the attacks on Hawaii.

But the full retinue of speakers knew the truth – newsmen had rushed up to them with press-association and radio flashes and had quizzed them for reactions that were guarded and cautious.

“If Japan attacked, there is nothing left for Congress to do but declare war,” Sen. Nye said, adding that, “It wouldn’t change my non-interventionist opinions materially on the European war.”

When the meeting started, the audience was still unaware that the United States had been attacked.

American flags waved from all corners of the hall. “NO WAR,” said a sign on the speaker’s podium. And on the wall over the heads of the speakers, in strong red letters, was Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

With no hint of the startling news, the meeting proceeded on its strained way.

Through choral selections by the Bellevue Methodist Church choir; an invocation by Rev. John McKavney of St. John The Evangelist Church; an appeal by Attorney John B. Gordon, Pittsburgh America First chairman, not to be afraid to stand for peace, “This is America. All shades of opinion are entitled to be heard.”

Irene Castle McLaughlin, dancing widow of dancing Vernon Castle, knew the startling news when she took the stand for her first America First talk, but she didn’t mention it.

While she spoke – telling of her husband who was killed in World War I and of a son she doesn’t want to sacrifice in another war – a U.S. colonel, Enrique Urrutia Jr., and his wife walked into the meeting.

Col. Urrutia, executive officer of the Pittsburgh military reserve area, had heard of the Japanese attack before he started out on a Sunday stroll. He sat inquiringly through the talk of Mrs. McLaughlin and through the opening remarks of the next speaker, ex-State Sen. C. Hale Sipe, D-Freeport.

When Mr. Sipe wound up a denunciation of Stalin and Harry Hopkins with the dramatically intoned statement that “the chief warmonger in the United States is the president of the United States,” the audience broke into wild applause and Col. Urrutia exploded.

He bounced up from his seat:

Mr. Speaker, please, can I ask a question? I wonder if the audience knows that Japan has attacked us and that Manila and Pearl Harbor have been bombed by the Japanese.

The boos and jeers that America First is accustomed to give to those who interrupt drowned out most of his words.

“Get out, you don’t belong here,” the crowd shouted.

Police and ushers hustled down the aisle to the colonel, who was not in uniform.

He told them he was an Army colonel. They told him to get out. Outside, he showed them his credentials and they changed their attitude. He left anyway, after explaining that his wife and he merely had been on their daily walk and dropped in on the meeting out of curiosity.

Before he left, the colonel exploded once more: “This is a meeting of traitors.”

But that had happened in the lobby and the audience for the most part was still ignorant of the amazing news the speakers kept to themselves.

Ex-Sen. Sipe went on with his talk, still blasting the interventionist leaders. He called Wendell Willkie “the mouthpiece of Roosevelt” and Secretary of War Henry Stimson, he said, “sleeps at Cabinet meetings.”

America First passed its collection baskets, asking for a dollar from each person. Frank T. Stockdale, treasurer of the Pittsburgh chapter of America First, said, “If it had not been for the America First Committee, we would be in the war at this time.”

When Sen. Nye, the featured speaker, finally got a chance to talk, the meeting was almost two hours old. It was 4:50 p.m. (and for two hours previously, the speakers knew that America had been attacked).

Wild cheering greeted his announcement that, “Never, never, never again must America let herself be made such a monkey of as she was 25 years ago.”

Newsmen who knew what had happened kept asking themselves what he would say of the Japanese attack. The answer seemed like “nothing.”

The isolationist senator hit at the church for denouncing war six years ago and condoning it now. He called The Chicago Tribune’s story of a five-million-man AEF an “accurate revelation.”

He said:

Crush Hitler if you will, but what will you have destroyed? You will have destroyed a result, not a cause. We went forth and crucified Kaiserism and got Hitlerism.

He lampooned the national debt, said America was fighting Britain’s war, quoted figures to show Britain had suffered fewer casualties than any of its important allies and hit at the American draft.

Finally – at 5:20 p.m. – a reporter walked to the stage with a note for the senator. It told of the Japanese declaration of war.

The senator looked at it, took off his glasses, nodded his head, and kept on with his peace speech. He seemed frustrated.

He laughed at the U.S. destroyer-base deal, talked about Canadian hog prices and said:

We are scared to death that if the British Navy falls, we are done for. The only navy on earth that we have ever had to prepare against is that same British Navy. May God forbid the day that ever finds us placing dependence on any other nation than our own.

Then he veered toward Japan.

He talked of British propaganda in the last war. The English propagandists concluded, he said, that “perhaps the only way we can get the United States on our side in the next war is to make certain that Japan is against Britain.”

“You have seen,” he told the audience, “a studied effort to pick war with Japan.”

He paused, and then picked up the note.

Mr. Nye said:

I have the worst news that I have had in 20 years to report this afternoon. The Japanese imperial government at 4 p.m. announced a state of war between it and the United States and Britain.

The audience was stunned.

Only one voice was heard: “Throw the president out!” The senator said, “I am going to withhold any comment until I can find out what this is all about.”

He switched to a talk on the USS Greer torpedoing, which he said was provoked by the United States. He said President Roosevelt had misled the American people into believing it was unprovoked.

He shouted:

I don’t know what I may be privileged to say to do tomorrow. But today I can say it and I am going to say it – THAT IS CHEATING!

The audience broke into applause and it cheered again as he said that “Christianity and intervention are as completely opposite as anything under God.”

Crowds buzzed up to talk to the senator after the closing services.

A newspaperman cornered him first: “Do you think Britain will help us now, Senator?”

“Yes,” said Sen. Nye. “The same way she helped Poland and Czechoslovakia.”

“That was a wonderful talk, Senator,” said the smiling friends. “Will there be printed copies of it available?” “I want to congratulate you, Senator.”

It looked as though it was going to take the Monday newspapers to prove the jolting truth – America was at war.

NormanStewart · December 9, 2020, 7:19pm

Nye says Roosevelt ‘cheats’ U.S.

(UP) – Five hours after Japan declared war upon the United States, Sen. Gerald P. Nye, R-North Dakota, chief senatorial isolationist, told a Pittsburgh audience President Roosevelt’s address on the Greer incident was “cheating.”

The utterance was made last night before more than 600 persons in the First Baptist Church, Bellefield Avenue, after he had been introduced by its pastor, Rev. Dr. Bernard C. Clausen.

‘Why, he’s pro-Nazi’

In closing his talk, however, Sen. Nye left off from his blasting of Roosevelt and the policies which the speaker said had led us to war by saying that if the facts are as presented, there is but one thing for Congress to do: Declare war against Japan.

Not once was there a protesting note struck while Sen. Nye spoke. Afterward, when he had retired to Rev. Dr. Clausen’s study preparatory to leaving for Washington with his wife by train, many of those leaving the church were outspoken in their comment.

“Why, he’s pro-Nazi,” one woman was heard to exclaim. Another remarked, “He should be ashamed of himself, in times like these.”

‘Never such betrayal’

Sen. Nye said:

The president told you the Greer was attacked. He said the Greer was on the way to Iceland with mail for our sons. That was cheating. Write to your senator and have him send you a copy of this letter, of Adm. Stark, which shows the Greer, informed by a British airplane, hunted down the submarine until it fired twice blindly.

I feel I have the right to say this without injuring my country. This country has been doing the utmost to provoke a quarrel with Japan. Negotiations for peace? At every turn our negotiators denied the Japanese representatives a chance to “save their face.” They wouldn’t give them a chance to agree with the U.S.

If we were bluffing, then our hands have been called. Now we have war there and it will be only a backdoor to war elsewhere. There never has been such betrayal; there never has been such cheating to accomplish what has been accomplished in the last two years.

Sen. Nye mentioned how, years ago, a young Under Secretary of the Navy, referred to war with Japan as preposterous. “Unthought of; both sides would drop from exhaustion and it would be folly,” Sen. Nye quoted the writer as saying. Then he said, “That writer was Franklin Roosevelt.”

Jap attacks rile isolationist senator

(UP) – Passing through Pittsburgh today on the way to Washington, Sen. Bennett Champ Clark, D-Missouri, was so riled by the Japanese attacks that he could not eat his breakfast.

The Missouri senator’s previous appearance in Pittsburgh was as a speaker at a rally of the America First Committee broken up by a heckler who insisted on questioning the isolationist.

With Sen. Clark today were Sen. Clyde M. Reed, R-Kansas, and Rep. Clinton P. Anderson, D-New Mexico. They arrived at County Airport and after a brief stopover, flew to Washington.

Planes guard Canal

PANAMA CITY, Panama – Dozens of deadly P-40 pursuit planes droned back and forth across the Isthmus of Panama today, protecting the Panama Canal from attack. Coastal batteries are ready to go into action at a moment’s notice.

NormanStewart · December 9, 2020, 7:20pm

America First asks support of war

AFC

CHICAGO, Illinois – The national board of directors of the America First Committee today urged its members to give full support “to the war effort of this country until the conflict with Japan is brought to a successful conclusion.”

The America First statement was issued by Clay Judson, a national director, after it had been approved by all other executive heads of the committee.

The statement:

Today the military forces of Japan have without warning attacked this nation and the Japanese government has formally declared war upon us. This must be followed by a similar declaration on the part of the United States and by all-out hostility.

The America First Committee urges all those who have subscribed to its principles to give their support to the war effort of this country until the conflict with Japan is brought to a successful conclusion.

In this war, the America First Committee pledges its aid to the President as commander in chief of the armed forces of the United States.

NormanStewart · December 9, 2020, 7:21pm

U.S. urges relatives to withhold inquiries

WASHINGTON (UP) – The Navy and War Departments today received numerous inquiries from all over the country as to casualties in the Japanese attacks, particularly in the Hawaiian Islands area.

The Navy advised against sending of individual inquiries at this time. It said casualties would be announced and families notified as quickly as information is received.

1,600,000 men now serving in U.S. Army

WASHINGTON (UP) – The outbreak of hostilities in the Pacific finds the United States with an Army of 1,600,000 men as compared with only 200,000 at the outset of World War I.

The 1941 Army consists of Regulars, Selectees, National Guardsmen and Reserves. About one-third of the 1917 Army consisted of National Guardsmen.

The Army has more than 3,600 combat planes on hand, according to testimony before a congressional committee November 18 by Gen. George C. Marshall, the Chief of Staff.

In addition, the Air Corps program is being stepped up rapidly from 54 to 84 groups. This involves training about 30,000 pilots and 110,000 mechanics and technicians annually.

Military planes are believed rolling off the production lines at a rate of more than 2,000 a month, but many of these have been diverted to Britain, Russia and China.

House-approved legislation provides for an Army of more than two million. This can be expanded rapidly since draft machinery has long since been in motion, whereas, during World War I, the draft was put into operation after the conflict began.

Before the close of World War I, more than 2,800,000 were inducted under the draft out of a total of 24,234,021 registrants. The peak of the U.S. World War armed strength – the Army, Navy and Marine Corps – was 4,800,000.

‘Save our Republic’ slogan appears on Tribune now

CHICAGO, Illinois (UP) – The Chicago Tribune, outspoken foe of the Roosevelt administration and voice of isolationism, today replaced Stephen Decatur’s famous slogan “Our Country, Right or Wrong” on its masthead.

After breaking with President Roosevelt, the Tribune had replaced the words of Decatur with “Save our Republic.”

In a front-page editorial, the Tribune asserted that war had been forced upon America by “an insane clique of Japanese militarists.”

The editorial said:

America faces war through no volition of any American. Recriminations are useless and we doubt they will be indulged in. Certainly not by us… all of us from this day forth have but one task. That is to strike with all our might to protect and preserve the American freedom that we all hold dear.

Editorial: War!

It came, not by attack from Europe as so many feared, but in the Pacific, which most Americans believed impossible.

Japan has attacked us without cause. The United States was still pleading for peace, still offering Japan honorable friendship, when she struck without warning.

The bombing of Hawaii, the torpedoing of ships on this side of the Pacific, were not acts of irresponsible commanders or even the result of some sudden decision by the Tokyo government. The orders must have been issued, and confirmed by the Mikado, many days ago to permit the aircraft carriers and submarines to reach these battle stations so many thousands of miles away.

Thus, the treachery was complete. It was premeditated. It was carried out while the United States government, in patience and good faith, listened to long professions of friendship masking her plans for surprise attack.

So be it.

The Japanese found us slow to wrath. They will yet find us mighty in wrath. They found us unwilling to strike the first blow. They will yet find us striking the last blow.

They have played us for suckers. So, we have seemed to them – for did we not supply them with the steel, oil, and other war materials to fight us?

Yes, we paid that price for peace. And we lost.

But in the losing, we gained something which Japan lacks – something essential to give a peaceful and democratic people the will to fight and the will to win. That essential is clear proof to Americans that their nation is not the aggressor but the defender.

Japan has provided that proof. The attack on Hawaii united America in a common horror and in a common resolve – a unity as grim and complete as if Japan had struck individually at 130,000,000 Americans.

She has thereby eliminated our chief dangers – indifference and division. Whatever the initial military and naval gains from her betrayal, they are insignificant beside the defense spirit and untapped power which she has heedlessly provoked.

As this newspaper for many months has called for concentration on Pacific defense, for all-out preparedness, for an end of strikes as usual, business as usual, luxury as usual, so today we repeat those now-too-obvious necessities.

The losses suffered in the battle of Hawaii will not have been in vain if they turn Americans from fears of Atlantic invasion in some distant future to the Pacific reality ignored so long. At last, we may stop underestimating the Japanese. Hitler is attacking, indeed; but through the Japanese, as he has so long tried to do.

We must fight with everything we have. It will not be easy. But the greater our concentration and the greater our sacrifice, the sooner the victory.

America salutes the president, who fought so nobly for Pacific peace, and who now leads us in the just cause of self-defense. America salutes the armed forces, who have never lost a war.

America at war! (1941– ) (Part 1)

BULLETINS

Reported ‘dealt successfully’ with

Hull accuses Japanese of outright lies

Attacks on Hawaii understood continuing

U.S. Army transport reported torpedoed

Naval engagement reported off Honolulu

6 planes, 4 subs reported sunk

Schools closed

Guam bombed; attack on Manila reported repulsed

Mokapu attacked

HRT buses run on reduced schedule

Parachutists land on Oahu, Army reports

Parachutist report is probed by police

Suspicious group probed by police

Bombs hit many sections of city

Names of dead, injured

Proclamation by Her Majesty Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands December 8, 1941, 1 a.m. BDST

News (NBCB), 6 p.m. EST:

The Catholic Hour (NBCR), 6 p.m. EST:

New Friends of Music (NBCB), 6:15 p.m. EST:

Drew Pearson & Robert S. Allen (NBCB), 6:30 p.m. EST:

The Great Gildersleeve (NBCR), 6:30 p.m. EST:

Roosevelt-Morgenthau Telephone Conversation December 7, 1941, 6:40 p.m. EST

Address by First Lady Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt December 7, 1941, 6:45 p.m. EST

Broadcast (NBCB):

News Roundup (NBCB), 7 p.m. EST:

The Jell-O Program Starring Jack Benny (NBCR), 7 p.m. EST:

Captain Flagg and Sergeant Quirt (NBCB), 7:30 p.m. EST:

The Fitch Bandwagon: Horace Heidt & His Orchestra (NBCR), 7:30 p.m. EST:

Roy Shields Revue (NBCB), 8 p.m. EST:

The Chase and Sanborn Hour (NBCR), 8 p.m. EST:

Paul Goo home struck

DEATHS OVER 400 ON OAHU, LATEST REPORT Tokyo announces ‘state of war’ with U.S. – Japanese raids on Guam, Panama are reported – Oahu blackout tonight, fleet here moves out to sea

BULLETIN

Governor proclaims national emergency

Known Oahu casualties

Dead:

Injured:

Hurt in second raid:

Interisland ships, planes are held up

Two Japanese fliers captured

BULLETINS

Military censorship on all messages

WIRELESS BULLETINS

British officials reserve comment

Churchill examines Britain’s position

Cabinet summoned

Radio, cable censorship established

London paper flays attack

Radio Rome blames Roosevelt

President Harrison believed sunk

Japanese national arrested in Panama

Stimson orders Army into uniform

Germans report Tokyo war announcement

Adm. Hart: U.S., Japan at war

Tojo reports to Emperor Hirohito

Tokyo radio silent on Japanese attacks

Japan consul raided

Inner Sanctum Mysteries (NBCB), 8:30 p.m. EST:

One Man’s Family (NBCR), 8:30 p.m. EST:

The Jergens Journal (NBCB), 9 p.m. EST:

Manhattan Merry-Go-Round: Victor Arden & His Orchestra (NBCR), 9 p.m. EST:

The Parker Family (NBCB), 9:15 p.m. EST:

The American Album of Familiar Music: Gustave Haenschen & His Orchestra (NBCR), 9:30 p.m. EST:

Dear John (NBCB), 9:30 p.m. EST:

Japanese Imperial Rescript December 8, 1941, 11:40 a.m. JST

詔書

The Dinah Shore Show (NBCB), 9:45 p.m. EST:

KIRO Seattle bulletins, 9:56 p.m. EST:

The Goodwill Hour (NBCB), 10 p.m. EST:

Hour of Charm (NBCR), 10 p.m. EST:

Address by Japanese Prime Minister Tojo December 8, 1941, 12 noon JST

Broadcast (NHK):

Sherlock Holmes (NBCR), 10:30 p.m. EST:

News (NBCB), 11 p.m. EST:

News (NBCR), 11 p.m. EST:

The Legion Answers the Call (NBCB), 11:15 p.m. EST:

Diary of Agriculture Secretary Claude R. Wickard December 7, 1941

Roundtable discussion (NBCR), 11:30 p.m. EST:

Proclamation by Her Majesty Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands
December 8, 1941, 1 a.m. BDST

Roosevelt-Morgenthau Telephone Conversation
December 7, 1941, 6:40 p.m. EST

Address by First Lady Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt
December 7, 1941, 6:45 p.m. EST

DEATHS OVER 400 ON OAHU, LATEST REPORT
Tokyo announces ‘state of war’ with U.S. – Japanese raids on Guam, Panama are reported – Oahu blackout tonight, fleet here moves out to sea

Japanese Imperial Rescript
December 8, 1941, 11:40 a.m. JST

Address by Japanese Prime Minister Tojo
December 8, 1941, 12 noon JST

Diary of Agriculture Secretary Claude R. Wickard
December 7, 1941

JAPAN’S NAVY PLANES ATTACK HAWAII, SINGAPORE, DAVAO, WAKE, GUAM ISLES
Great successes reported in all areas raided in naval announcement

ON THE RECORD —
Japan and the grand strategy

Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People
December 8, 1941, 12:30 p.m. EST

**News & Between the Bookends with Ted Malone (NBCB), 1 p.m. EST:**