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

622 Pearl Harbor: The Seeds and Fruits of Infamy
Questions That Must Be Asked
As the hearings progressed, much time and energy was
devoted to trying to fi nd answers to four major questions:
1. Had top Washington offi cials, including the president, committed
this country to war in support of the British and Dutch
without fi rst obtaining congressional approval as required by
the Constitution?
2. How much was known before the December 7, 1941
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor about Japan’s plans to go to
war against the United States? Had Washington offi cials kept
the fi eld commanders adequately informed?
3. Was there pre-attack evidence to indicate a U.S. territory,
possibly even Pearl Harbor, was a likely target of the Japanese?
If so, were the Hawaiian commanders so advised? If not, why
not?
4. Had the Pearl Harbor commanders made reasonably intelligent
decisions, given the information and resources available
to them?
Joint Congressional Committee Commences
Th e committee opened its hearings on November 15. It
was generally admitted that more intelligence was available in
Washington than in Hawaii. Th us any serious attempt to account
for the tremendous losses at Pearl Harbor would have to start
by exploring the information available in Washington before
the attack and by determining how much of it had been sent to
Hawaii. Th e JCC obtained at the start of its hearings the secret
Japanese dispatches which U.S. cryptographers had intercepted,
decoded, and translated before the attack. Th ese messages, most
of them transmitted on the “Purple” code machine, which U.S.