Tuesday, December 9, 1941

ROOSEVELT TO SPEAK TONIGHT. In case you haven’t yet heard, President Roosevelt will address the nation tonight at 10 o’clock Eastern time.

"HOSTILE PLANES" NEAR SAN FRANCISCO? The Associated Press quotes Brigadier General William Ryan of the 4th Interceptor Command as saying a "large number" of unidentified planes approached San Francisco from the sea last night, coming as far as the Golden Gate and then turning southwest. The air-raid sirens sounded in San Francisco, amidst a tremendous amount of confusion as authorities alternately said the alert was merely a test, then claimed a real raid had been expected. There’s no proof the mystery planes were Japanese bombers, but General Ryan said, "They weren’t army planes, they weren’t navy planes, and you can be sure they weren’t civilian planes."

If they were Japanese planes, that’s pretty alarming for any number of reasons. San Francisco is 2,408 miles west of Honolulu, and the presence of a sizeable number of Japanese bombers in the area would suggest that Japanese carriers feel comfortable to roam the Pacific virtually at will. Of course, Tokyo’s overall offensive has already shown a massive Japanese capability to press their military strength over a vast area. They’ve attacked Thailand (which according to reports has already surrendered), Malaya, Singapore, Hong Kong, Borneo, the Philippines (six separate air attacks), Hawaii, Guam, Midway, and Wake.

The Japanese war machine is no joke. This fight will go on for a long time.

"INFAMY." I have never heard the President speak with such righteous indignance as he did in the joint session yesterday. His voice turned contemptuous as he recounted the peace talks with Nomura and Kurusu -- negotiations which took place as the warlords of Tokyo cynically planned, "many days or even weeks ago," the massive offensive which has now lit the fires of war throughout the Far East. Congress didn’t need any further encouragement to declare war. The two branches of government set records for efficiency -- the President spoke for about six minutes, then the Senate and House passed the war resolutions within 51 minutes of the President’s address. The Senate voted 82-0, the House 388-1. Let Miss Rankin’s dissenting vote be treated with the lack of interest it was shown by the morning papers, which generally relegated it to the inside pages.

It’s interesting to note that the war resolution was not a "declaration of war" in the straightforward sense. Senator George and several other Congressmen agitated Sunday evening for a resolution that didn’t "declare" war, but instead acknowledged an already-existing "state of war" provoked by Japan’s attack. This, they reasoned, would put the blame for the war where it belongs. Judging from the President’s words, that’s what they got -- a declaration stating simply that "since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan . . . a state of war has existed."

HOW BAD IN HAWAII? It sounds worse by the hour. Both the New York Herald Tribune and Chicago Tribune cite anonymous sources as putting U.S. casualties at Pearl Harbor far higher than what the White House has told us so far -- 1,500 dead and another 1,500 wounded. The Chicago Tribune story, by Walter Trohan, says that according to "unimpeachable sources" the Japanese raiders sunk or disabled six capital ships, an aircraft carrier, and "numerous" support vessels. Another source says told Mr. Trohan that the U.S. "clearly has lost its margin of superiority in the Pacific" in the wake of the raid. "Washington officials" say it’s the "greatest reverse of its kind in history."

Already, amidst the cries for national unity, there are calls for an investigation. Edward T. Folliard writes in this morning’s Washington Post that there’s been at least one call to court martial the Army and Navy commandants in Hawaii. "No one can tell me they weren’t sound asleep," one Congressman said. The chairmen of the House and Senate Naval Affairs Committees, Senator Walsh and Representative Vinson, have called upon the Navy Department to explain how the Japanese struck some 3,500 miles from their home bases without being detected.

I want to hear those answers too -- but wouldn’t Tokyo want most of all to hear about our military weaknesses? This kind of inquiry can wait.

HOW WE COULD LOSE THE WAR. Walter Lippmann’s column in the New York Herald Tribune this morning reminds us that the stakes of this war are the survival of America itself --

"Overnight we have, it is true, become at long last a united people. Yet that alone will not avail us unless we also become an awakened people -- wide awake to the stark truth that the very existence of the Nation, the lives, the liberties and the fortunes of all of us, are in the balance. We are not facing a feeble and contemptible little enemy on the distant shores of Asia but the most carefully prepared, highly organized, and shrewdly directed combination which has ever set out to conquer the world. This is not a separate little war in the Pacific between Japan and the United States. This is the world war in the complete and literal sense of the words -- a war which can only end in our victory or our defeat. If it ends in our defeat, let no one imagine that we shall be treated mercifully, or generously, or honorably. Let no one imagine that the price of defeat is anything less than invasion and occupation upon the North American continent itself -- if ever the bastions of British and American sea power are conquered. The planes which bombed Hawaii could just as easily have bombed San Francisco or Panama if the fleet did not bar the way. The troops which have been landed in Malaya could -- if American and British command of the seas were lost -- be landed in Brazil or Alaska. We are fighting as the British are fighting, as the Russians are fighting, as the Chinese are fighting, for our own survival. Only by opening our eyes to this grim fact can we cast off the deadly delusion that behind the protection of our oceans we could sit around waiting and arguing whether we chose or did not choose to move until our own soil was violated. If we do not purge ourselves absolutely of this delusion, we can lose this war."

One would hope that we realize this by now. But I remember the Congressional debate last year on whether to fortify our outpost on Guam, how the isolationists railed at spending defense dollars on something that was sure to "provoke" Japan. After all, they reasoned, Guam was so far away from U.S. shores, and as Colonel Lindbergh told us again and again, what more do we need than the wide expanses of the Atlantic and the Pacific to protect us?

Yesterday Guam fell to the Japanese. Tokyo says it did so without resistance. Let us never again cede territory, or surrender a battlefield, in order to prop up a delusion.

THREE CHEERS FOR THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE. In a front-page editorial Monday, America’s most rabidly isolationist newspaper offered a message that extremist Roosevelt-haters need very badly to hear right now --

"War has been forced on America by an insane clique of Japanese militarists who apparently see the desperate conflict into which they have led their country as the only thing that can prolong their power. Thus the thing we have all feared, that so many of us have worked with all our hearts to avert, has happened. That is all that counts. It has happened. America faces war through no volition of any American. Recriminations are useless and we doubt that they will be indulged in. Certainly not by us. All that matters today is that we are in the war and the nation must face that simple fact. All of us, from this day forth, have only one task. That is to strike with all our might to protect and preserve the American freedom that we all hold dear."