An inveterate memo-writer, Hornbeck reacted in pedantic writing to almost anything that came to his clutterpiled-high desk. These indiscriminate memoranda on matters trivial as well as weighty fluttered back to FE throughout the day.
Hornbeck had some academic background in China, but little grounding in Japan. He was morally indignant over Japan’s invasion of China and sympathized with the Chinese. But in that he was no different from most of us in the China service.
As assistant to Hornbeck, a studious young man named Alger Hiss read and screened stacks of papers coming to Hornbeck’s office. I did not envy him his job, working exclusively with the ponderous fussbudget. Alger was amiable, but as he was not in the channel of communication between Hornbeck and the FE, those of us who were junior officers in FE had relatively little contact with him.
Roosevelt had delegated to Hull the tedious and, in terms of domestic American politics, risky business of negotiating with Japan for a lessening of tension between the two countries. The Secretary’s principal adviser in this crucial endeavor was Hornbeck. Also participating in the negotiations, but subordinate to Hornbeck, was the man who had been my chief at Mukden, Joseph Ballantine, a rumpled, nervous and rather engaging Japan specialist.
The May to December 7, 1941 negotiations with the Japanese Ambassador took place at the State Department in strict secrecy. My fellow junior officers and I were in uneasy ignorance of what was transpiring. We drew up a statement expressing our opposition to any deal with Japan at the expense of China. This we presented to the Chief of FE, Maxwell M. Hamilton. In considerable agitation he told us, in effect, not to meddle in matters beyond our province and intimated that the Army and Navy (both urgently trying to strengthen themselves) wanted the State Department to play for time, at least to delay if we could not avoid hostilities with Japan.
My colleagues and I had acted on a misapprehension. The risk was not a sell-out of China. Rather, the risk was cornering Japan so that it had no alternative but to fight. Hull and Hornbeck were rigidly pro-Chinese and, both temperamentally and as a matter of principle, incapable of making a compromise deal with Japan for a modus vivendi, or what is now called peaceful co-existence. While I doubt that such a deal was then possible, given the rising antagonism in the American public toward Japan in 1941, the Hull-Hornbeck combination ensured that no compromise could be negotiated. And so the United States and Japan moved inflexibly, almost as if they were predestined to do so, toward war. And the American Armed Forces did not get the time that they wanted for preparation.
I was off on a blithe fortnight’s vacation when the Japanese attached Pearl Harbor. From Texas eastward was unknown territory to me. So I had eagerly embarked on a scanning tour through the south. Roark Bradford introduced me to the unique charm of his New Orleans, to pleasant but vapid bayous (lacking the redolence of similar Asian waterways), and to the improbable settlement of Chinese and Slovak shrimpers on the Grand Isle of the Cajuns.
By comparison, the Gulf coast eastward was bland. And then Charleston, South Carolina, more coherent and sedate than New Orleans, architecturally harmonious, a graceful city on a personal scale. It was in this agreeable setting, on a placid Sunday midday, from excited conversations on the street and turned-up radios, that I heard the news of Pearl Harbor.
I was surprised, but not astounded, and reproached myself for not having anticipated something like this—at least as to timing. For the previous year in Hankow at a Sunday luncheon at my apartment for three American and two Japanese naval officers, a Japanese captain, exhilarated by gin and beer, had knotted a table-napkin around his head and proclaimed to the hung-over American gunboateers, “When we attack you, it will be on a Sunday morning.” And of course they would, I thought at the time.
Back at FE I encountered a hushed, frantic search of records—had we passed to the military all of the messages from the Embassy at Tokyo that might have warned us of the attack? Two were of importance. One in mid-November was a general reminder that the Japanese were accustomed to strike first and then declare war. The other, earlier, relayed a report from the Peruvian Ambassador in Tokyo that an inebriated Japanese naval officer had told a member of his staff that should war come, it would begin with a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. FE had not been remiss, as I recall, in keeping the military informed.
Responsibility for the United States being caught napping went, of course, beyond slighting unverifiable warnings from the American Embassy in Tokyo. The disaster of Pearl Harbor occurred because American officials, civilian and military, and the American people did not sense the desperate daring of the Japanese, underestimated Japanese power, assumed near-invulnerability, and thought that if Japan expanded its China war into a Pacific war, it would strike only southward to Malaysia and the Dutch Indies.
Stimson, then Secretary of War, and Frank Knox, Secretary of the Navy, belittled the danger from Japan. And ten days before Pearl Harbor, Hornbeck offered five to one odds that Japan would not be at war with the United States by December 15. General Douglas MacArthur in the Philippines earlier in 1941 had assured Washington that he could defend the islands. The Army persuaded itself that the newly developed B-17 bombers could not only rout any attack on the Philippines but even interdict an attempt by the Japanese to advance southward toward the Indies.
Although American deciphering of Japanese cables revealed to the very few at the pinnacle of American authority that after November 29 Tokyo would abandon attempts to find peaceful accommodations, the President and his high command did not interpret this ominous intelligence as indicating that the powerful American military complex in mid-Pacific was under threat of imminent attack. To suggest that a Japanese task force might venture undetected halfway across the Pacific, with a surprise attack cripple the American fleet and air units in the Hawaiian bastion, and then get away with slight losses—such a scenario, if presented before December 7, would have been dismissed as preposterous.
CHAPTER V
TO ASIA WITH STILWELL
Almost a year before Pearl Harbor, Stilwell wrote to me on New Year’s Eve wishing me a happy 1941, and passed on a message from Pinky Dorn: “if you can get us sent to China you can come along.”
Well, things did not work out quite that way. Stilwell, a Major General in command of the Seventh Division at Fort Ord, California, when he wrote to me, and seven months later Commander of the III Corps, was called to Washington a fortnight after the Japanese attack. Pinky accompanied him as aide de camp. At the War Department Stilwell learned that he was to lead what was then planned as the first American offensive, a landing somewhere in French West Africa, code-named GYMNAST.
I was unaware of this when the General, Pinky, and I dined together shortly after Christmas. They intimated that they would be going overseas, but not to China. After dinner I asked Dorn if, even though they were not sent to China, I could come along.
Pinky said that he thought this could be arranged. I had suggested that my role might be something like a diplomatic attaché to the General, a mirror role to that of a military attaché to an Ambassador.
Early in January the American high command began to doubt the timing and feasibility of GYMNAST and frantically conceived alternatives to it. Meanwhile Roosevelt and Stimson, now Secretary of War, felt a pressing need to exhibit American military support of China. In impotent disarray from Hawaii to the Philippines to the Java Sea, the United States was not in a position to dispatch either troops or significant quantities of materiel to China. The best that could be done was to present Chiang Kai-shek with a high-ranking American military officer as adviser, representative of the American high command, and an earnest of large support to come.
General George C. Marshall, Chief of Staff of the Army, with whom Stilwell had served in China in 1926, asked Stilwell on January 1, 1942 to recommend someone for the China assignment. Although Stilwell himself was
