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

456 Pearl Harbor: The Seeds and Fruits of Infamy
Philippines Considered the Most Likely Target
Relations between the United States and Japan were deteriorating
in October and November 1941. Washington was
expecting a Japanese strike somewhere in the western Pacifi c
or southeast Asia. It seemed logical that she would attack
the Philippines to keep the United States from intercepting
Japanese ships and planes bound for southeast Asia. Th us, the
War Department had been trying desperately to build up U.S.
defenses there. According to Marshall, “we were pouring through
Hawaii, on the way to the Philippines, convoys [with men and
materiel for the Philippines], rushing everybody. Everything was
being pushed to the last extreme.” 56 “[F]rom the information that
we were receiving,” Marshall felt “that they [the Japanese] were
now getting in a highly nervous state because of the arrival of
supplies in the Philippines.” One MAGIC message had asked
the Japanese Consul General in Manila “to check up immediately
on the presence of Flying Fortresses in the Philippines.” Th e
Japanese consul in Manila was also reporting “the tremendous
unloading procedures being carried out at night and the movement
of things at night from the docks, and everybody barred
from the vicinity.” Marshall concluded that the Japanese were in
“a critical posture as to what they must do to prevent us from
building up further in the Philippines.” 57
“Our own belief,” Marshall said,
was that, once we got the planes out there, and particularly
these convoys that were then on the Pacifi c, which had, compared
to what the Philippines already had, a wealth of material
. . . the Japanese would be in an extremely delicate strategical
56Ibid., part 29, p. 2329.
57Ibid., p. 2326.