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

Joint Congressional Committee, Pearl Harbor Attack: Part 3 735
about declaring war. Th e Navy’s position would have been
exactly the position of the United States. 7
Ingersoll did not believe the United States would go to war in
the Pacifi c “without any recommendation to the Congress,” as they
had in the Atlantic. Th at was “not a legal war. . . . [T]he Germans
were still here in Washington and they had not declared war on
us for all that we had been doing to them in the Atlantic.” 8 Th e
next day Ingersoll half-apologized for this remark. He had
almost humorously called the war in the Atlantic as illegal. It
was more in the nature of irregular. . . . In the Atlantic we were
doing some things which only a belligerent does. Th ere had
been no declaration of war. We had done a great many things
that under international law, as it was understood before the last
war, were unneutral. . . . It was apparently to her [Germany’s]
advantage to have us as a nonbelligerent rather than as a full
belligerent. 9
President Orders “Defensive Information
Patrol” in South China Sea
Th e U.S. government was receiving information on Japanese
ship movements in the southwest Pacifi c and China Sea from
our daily overfl ights as well as from reports from the British.
Yet at about 7 p.m. on December 1, the “president direct[ed]”
Admiral Th omas Hart, commander-in-chief of the Asiatic Fleet
in Manila, to charter “3 small vessels to form a ‘defensive information
patrol’.” 10 Th e three small ships were to be manned by a
U.S. naval offi cer and equipped with one small gun and a machine
7 Ibid., p. 4246.
8 Ibid., pp. 4246–47.
9 Ibid., p. 4249.
10 Ibid., part 14, p. 1407, OPNAV Dispatch #012356.