Pearl Harbor: The Seeds and Fruits of Infamy - Ludwig von Mises ...

302 Pearl Harbor: The Seeds and Fruits of Infamy
By noon Deane had fi nished the one-page statement he had
been preparing for Marshall to use that afternoon at his meeting
with FDR and/or for testifying the next day before Congress.
Marshall called him into his offi ce, and he handed Marshall his
memorandum. As Marshall read it, he said to Deane, “it looks as
though the Japs were going to issue an ultimatum about 1:30.”
Deane had not known of the information that administration
and top military offi cials had been learning during recent months
from MAGIC, so was not aware of the signifi cance of Marshall’s
announcement. 86
Sunday Morning at the State Department
Hull went to his offi ce that Sunday morning “as [he] had done
almost every Sunday since [he] entered the State Department in
1933.” Because of the Japanese situation, however, this one was a
little out of the ordinary. Hull talked fi rst with the department’s
Far Eastern experts—Stanley K. Hornbeck, adviser on political
Relations; Maxwell M. Hamilton, chief of the division of Far
Eastern aff airs; and Joseph W. Ballantine, an expert on Japan. 87
Hull had asked Stimson and Knox to meet with him at the
department at 10:00 a.m. to discuss “the situation created by the
movement of the huge Japanese armada southward and westward
of the southernmost point of Indochina.” 88 Th e administration
offi cials “were striving to ascertain the full signifi cance of those
military movements, their probable destination, etcetera.” 89
86Deane interview.
87Cordell Hull, Th e Memoirs of Cordell Hull (New York: MacMillan, 1948),
vol. 2, p. 1095. See also Julius W. Pratt, Cordell Hull: Th e American Secretaries of
State and Th eir Diplomacy (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1964), vols.
12 and 13, p. 517.
88Joint Committee, Pearl Harbor Attack, part 11, p. 5393, Hull’s reply to Joint
Committee interrogatory.
89Ibid., p. 5394.