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

Army Pearl Harbor Board 453
Grunert: Would it have been reasonable to assume . . . that the
enemy could not well approach with aircraft carriers to make
an attack on the mainland?
Pye: . . . [I]t should be recalled that we were not in a state of
war . . . . [T]he patrol was primarily to determine the possible
presence of submarines. . . . If attacks had been made by submarines,
and the submarine not sighted or sunk or captured, there
would have been no way for us to prove defi nitely that it was
not an internal explosion in the ship rather than a torpedo. In
addition to that there was always the possibility that German
crews might man Japanese submarines or might, in the last
analysis, even bring their submarines to the Hawaiian Islands
in order to try to force us into war. . . . [T]he implication [of the
November 27 “war warning”] was that there was great danger
of a submarine attack.
Grunert: Th en it would appear from what testimony we have
had to date that the Army was sabotage-minded and the Navy
may have been submarine-minded.
Pye: I think there is no question but what the Navy was
submarine-minded. 44
Pearl Harbor Attack Surprised Washington
Officials as well as Hawaiian Commanders
Th e principal task of the U.S. embassy in Japan, particularly of
its military and naval offi cers, was to obtain information concerning
probable action on the part of the Japanese Army and Navy. 45
Yet in the months before the attack the embassy offi cials in Japan
had found this to be increasingly diffi cult. Ambassador Grew
cabled from Tokyo on November 17, 1941: “Th e Embassy’s fi eld
44 Ibid., pp. 539–40.
45 Ibid., p. 62.