Reply to George Victor’s “Playing God” (March, 2000)

letter to the editor

Richard Morrock

Abstract

This letter to the editor replies to George Victor’s “Playing God” (March 2000), disputing the view that President Franklin D. Roosevelt knew in advance of the December 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and kept his Hawaiian commanders, General Walter Short and Admiral Husband Kimmel, uninformed. The author is sharply critical of historians who hold this view, including John Toland, questioning their credentials and associations. He cites Gordon Prange, Donald Goldstein, and Katherine Dillon’s At Dawn We Slept (1981) as having answered the critics’ arguments. He contends that Roosevelt and his advisers expected an attack on the Philippines, defended under General Douglas MacArthur, and that Victor overlooks this. He further argues that Victor’s comparison with Winston Churchill’s decision not to warn the population of Coventry fails, because an attack on Pearl Harbor would have targeted a naval base outside Honolulu.

Keywords:

The Barnes Review, Franklin Roosevelt, George Victor, God complex, John Toland, letter to the editor, Pearl Harbor, psychohistory, World War II (WWII)

It is astounding that nearly 60 years after the event, scholars are still being taken in by the fable that President Franklin Roosevelt knew in advance that the Japanese were planning an attack on Pearl Harbor in December, 1941. This myth has been fostered by such dubious experts as John Toland, a self-trained historian who has endorsed the Holocaust-denying publication, The Barnes Review.

The leading experts on the subject of Pearl Harbor, Gordon Prange and his associates, Donald Goldstein and Katherine Dillon, have long since demolished every single argument raised by FDR’s critics that he knew that the Pearl Harbor attack was coming and deliberately kept his Hawaiian commanders, General Walter Short and Admiral Husband Kimmel, in the dark. They spell this out in detail in the definitive work on Pearl Harbor, At Dawn We Slept (1981).

Undeniably, Roosevelt and his advisors anticipated a Japanese attack on the United States, but they believed that the attack would come in the Philippines, where about 170,000 military personnel — American and Filipino — were prepared to defend the islands under General Douglas MacArthur. Unless Japan could take out the long-range B-17 bombers in a surprise attack on America’s Philippine bases, it was heading for a humiliating defeat.

In addition to the fact that Victor overlooks the surprise attack on the Philippines, he undermines his own case when he compares FDR’s alleged Machiavellianism at Pearl Harbor with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s painful choice over Coventry. Churchill, as Victor admits, did indeed warn Coventry’s fire department and ambulance corps of the impending German air raid, but declined to warn the city’s population for fear of revealing to the enemy that Britain had broken their codes. Roosevelt had no need to warn the people of Honolulu, even if he knew that Japan was going to attack Pearl Harbor, since the attack would be directed exclusively against the naval base, which was outside the city.

Richard Morrock
Bay Terrace, New York

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