The Evening Star (December 7, 1945)
Editorial: Four years later
This fourth anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor finds a nation which, with its allies, has fought and won the greatest war in history engaged in an effort to fix responsibility for the losses which the United States sustained on the Sunday morning of December 7, 1941. And many Americans are asking themselves whether the game is worth the candle.
Lt. Joseph L. Lockard, the then sergeant who picked up the incoming enemy planes on his radar set only to have his superiors at Pearl Harbor misconstrue the significance of what he had seen, does not speak for himself alone when he expresses impatience with the congressional investigation now underway. He says that the Japanese were responsible for Pearl Harbor, and, that being so, he wants to know what the shooting in Washington is all about. A good many people seem to feel the same way, and would prefer to have the investigation dropped.
This, however, is a point of view which can only arise from a misunderstanding of what is, or what should be, the real purpose of the congressional inquiry.
Of course the Japanese were responsible for the attack on Pearl Harbor, and while one might infer from some of the questions asked at the hearing that an attempt is being made to place that responsibility on our own officials, no sensible person will be deceived by such transparent political maneuvering. The real issue, the question which is vitally important to our future military security, has to do with placing responsibility, not for the attack itself, but for the success of the attack.
Gen. Marshall has testified that a vigilant defense at Hawaii would have enabled our forces to break up the attack with a minimum of damage, and that this, in turn, might have materially altered the course of the war to our advantage. In other words, had it not been for the human or the organizational errors which made it possible for the Japanese to score such a smashing initial triumph, the probability is that today there would be far fewer crosses marking American graves throughout the Pacific.
It is upon the ferreting out of these errors that the investigating committee should concentrate. We must know what they were and how they were made, for without this knowledge there is small chance of erecting effective safeguards against repetition of the errors in some future crisis, when we may or may not be able to redeem our original mistakes.
The real hope of the American people should be that this can and will be done quickly, without any excursions into political bypaths, and that when it is done the Pearl Harbor books will be closed and the animosities forgotten.