Pearl Harbor Truth Still Hidden

...Congress, reconvening, will find no Issue as pressing and as vital to the welfare of the United States as the Pearl...

...But the' existence of this order has never been officially admitted, nor does it apparently figure in the proceedings of the naval court of inquiry...

...For the Republicans, with their usual cowardice, were afraid to make use of this politcal dynamite for fear of being charged with helping the Japanese and splitting the home front...

...Ol course Forrestal and Stimson were bound to stand by their comrades in the Cabinet, and to defend General Marshall...

...If he failed to inform Admiral Kimmel and General Short that by November 29 he had washed his hands of the whole Japanese entanglement, and, as he told Viscount Halifax, had decided that from then on everything was in the hands of the Army and Navy, the final responsibility is Roosevelt's...

...Again, it was not only Ambassador Halifax whom Secretary Hull notified that diplomatic negotiations had "practically" come to an end...

...Next, on December 1, 1944, the Secretary of War and the Secretary of the Navy declared, on the basis of the reports only now published, that no evidence had been found which warranted bringing the Admiral and General to trial, or any other Army or Navy officer...

...FlRST they were accused in the report of the commission headed by Justice Roberts, and were relieved of their commands with contumely...

...Why has it been suppressed...

...He rightly favors this committee's "going into everything that led up to Pearl Harbor...

...That officer's selection as chief of Staff was Stimson's as well as Roosevelt's...

...I am well aware that most unthinking persons will probably agree with Truman that it is old, dead stuff, so why not drop it...

...What a contradictory record that is...

...Forrcslal —and they have told only oartial truths...

...But whatever their derelictions, they have never yet been allowed to defend themselves, to face their accusers, wjth counsel to protect their rights...

...But the facts in regard to Hull have not even yet been fully brought out...

...He ia not going to order a court martial to give Admiral Kimmel and General Short opportunities to have their days in court for which they have been pressing ever since December 7, 1941, and what is worse, be seeks to stop any further inquiry or investigation by the outrageous statement that it is not Congress nor the Government, nor the Army and the Navy that were to blame, but the American people, because we did not insist upon our being properly prepared for the war with Japan...

...He himtelf told me in tht White House that it would not be fortified, and no measure calling for the fortification of Guam was ever seriously introduced...

...Had he permitted the General to be recorded as failing in his duty without protesting, he would have indicted himself...

...These two men, Secretary Hull castigated after December 7 with a violence of language never before heard within the historic walls of the State Department...

...But the United States Government cannot afford anything of the kind as long as charges ara openly made that these latest reports are whitewashes, that there is a deliberate effort being made to suppress the truth, to shield President Roosevelt, and as long as two high officers are believed by multitudes of people to have had the rawest kind of deal...

...In other words, > this naval task-force under Admiral Halsey had instructions to commit an act of international wrongdoing if It chanced to meet one or more Japanese ships on its voyage, which would hsve been as morally indefensible as was the attack upon Pearl Harbor without warning...

...Whoever heard of any countrn't being to mite that its mattet were, en (table of formulating inter, national policiet and preparing for tht conti* ge neiet of war or peace/ If that had ever been possible there would have been much more peace in the world than there has been...

...Clarence E. Dickinson, one of the flight officers who took part in the expedition...

...It was the indifference of 140,000,000 Americana who were responsible for the success of the Japanese attack, and nothing else...

...But the terrible fact is that from November 29, Hull and the State Department were playing just as much a game of concealment with the Japanese envoys as the Japanese envoys with us...

...He did what he was told...

...They were not ordered to put their forces on a complete wsr footing...

...Now they are again accused and found guilty by the publication of the vary reports which Stimson and Forrestal declared showed that there was no evidence warranting anybody's being tried...

...I am convinced that both Admiral Kimmel and General Short know what is in those papers, and I believe that they will not sit quietly under the stigmas now being passed upon them, and will find a way, if Congress does not act, to bring out these facts themselves...

...That is not only nonsense, but a complete misstatement of fact, besides asking the impossible...

...Actually, it seems to me that thje appeasement was a demand that the Japanese yield ail their conquests achieved from the beginning of the war with China and admit their complete defeat—the same defeat that has now come to them...

...The very fact that Secretary Stimeon differs with the court of inquiry as to the responsibility of General Marshall and the emphatic statement of the Army court of inquiry that the Chief-of-Staff was guilty of failure to notify his subordinate in Pearl Harbor of the gravity of the situation, should have made the President eager to pursue the matter to the proper end...

...If that was their duty, it would certainly seem as if they could logically claim that they were not given the background facta to enable them to make the proper decisions...

...Correct as I believe Secretary Hull's censure by the the Army court of inquiry to have been, Hull was always Roosevelt's errand-boy...

...Let us not have Hull's opinion or Stimson's as to whether the common« ation of November 20 to Tokyo was or was not an ultimatum, but the judgment of impartial civilian judges...

...He also warned "high officials of this government" on November 25 and November 28, 1941, of this fact, and that the Japanese were likely to strike at any moment with a surprise sttack...

...SENATOR TAFT takes the light attitude when he demands, as he did on Labor Day, that there be an immediate Congressional investigation of Pearl Harbor, if only in older that the public shall read the full transcripts of testimony given before the Army and Navy courts of inquiry...

...Thie wot nine dayt before Pearl Harbor, according to l.t...

...What has happened nd\v is that another effort has been made to shield Franklin D. Roosevelt...

...I, for one, am asonlshed to learn from Hull that this w ss an appeasing document, that it wan a very generous offer that he made to the Japaneae giving them "fiubatanial economic and other advantages they Nought in Asia, provided that they would give up their aggresive policies " Why should Hull hare offered the conquering Japanese any help in Asia...

...Is it right that he and his chief should escape moral evaluation of their own acts—a just appraisal of their own contributions to the bringing on of the war with Japan...

...It certainly should go back to the'beginning of the German one...

...It looks from the reports of the two courts of inquiry that both had been somewhat derelict—for example, it ia now known that some of the Japanese midget submarines entered Pearl Harbor, surveyed it at leisure and then retired undiscovered...

...This question of Hull's attitude becomes the more vital because the statement has been published, obviously passed by the censor and with the consent of the' Navy Department since it appeared in October 10, 1942, in The Saturday Evening Pott and again in book form, that the expedition sent to relieve Midway Island had instructions from somebody to sink at sight any Japanese ship, whether passenger-liner, tramp, or fisherman, so that no Japanese on ber would live to return to Japan and report what our navy waa doing...

...Actually this route celebre will no more down than the Dreyfus one...

...Admiral Kimmel replied to Truman that what he said waa "not true," and again repeated his desire for a hearing...

...During the last Presidential campaign it was well-known that the Republican high command had the startling facts which had not yet been brought out—a friend of mine was allowed to have the documents in his hands, but not allowed to read them...

...The fact is, of course, that Congress voted everything that the President asked for after we tiegan rearming, and held back nothing...

...The very differences of opinion among high officials also seem to Senator Taft a reason for the necessary probing of the catastrophe hy a joint Senate and House Committee...

...It was FDR, and no one else, who dictated the policies which led us into war with Japan, which induced Oliver Lyttleton, a member of the British Cabinet, to say that, everybody knew that President Roosevelt was doing his best to get Japan into the war...

...This seemed to set aside the chargaa in the Roberts report which held them guilty of offenses justifying courts martial...

...For example, there was no truth whatever in President Roosevelt's statement at Seattle on his return from the Aleutians, that Congress would not allow him to fortify Guam...

...Yet Admiral Kimmel and General Short were not informed that the Japanese might strike st sny moment—because of the changed situation due to the document of November 26...

...President Truman constantly shows his fealty to Roosevelt, and this is the best opportunity he will have to shie.ld FUR from his share of the blame for what took place at Pearl Harbor...

...In view of the previous Japanese record of attacking the Chinese and the Russians without warning, is it surprising thst they decided to hit us first...

...He adds: "Perhaps it should start back at the beginning of the Sino-Japaneso War...

...Secretary Forrestal and Secretary Stimson, differing from the findings of the court of inquiry and defending Secretary Hull, are defending their own acts—or Secretary Knox's in the case of Mr...

...Almost everybody who has read that communication to the Japanese and has been objective in his consideration of it, believes that it umt an ultimatum and that the Japanese were certain ho to consider it...

...Moreover, Truman himself, when Senator from Missouri, severely censured Kimmel and Short in an article in Col-lier't Weekly, in August, 1944...

...Stimson has given us a letter of Secretary Hull written on Septembeer 28, 1944, in which he denied that his note of November 26, 1941, was an ultimatum which "touched the button" that started the war...

...Both of these matters plainly need elucidation by a competent civilian tribunal...

...Pearl Harbor Truth Still Hidden Congressional Investigation Needed to Reveal Scandalous Facts By Oswald Garrison Villard LET no one believe that the reports of the Army and Navy boards of -^inquiry into the Pearl Harbor disaster have given us all the facta and nothing but tha facts, that the whole catastrophe has now been illuminated and explained, and that there is nothing to do but to say that it belongs to history snd to forget about it.» That is what President Truman asks us to do...

...Truman's only response waa that he had the evidence to support his charges—he was thus committed to a given policy before hs entered the White House to sit as a judge upon these two officers, and now as President he is still not willing that these officers shall have the hearing which they have again and again demanded...