- [Narrator] Japanese Consulate, Honolulu.
Tuesday, December 2nd, 1941.
Japanese spy Takeo Yoshikawa senses war closing in.
A delegation of Japanese specialists had come
to survey Pearl Harbor,
leaving him a list of questions.
And he found the answers to them
via observation, gossip, and local media reports.
But now, a message comes from Tokyo,
ordering him to report daily what ships are in port,
whether the harbor has barrage balloons,
if there are any anti-torpedo nets.
Yes, his mission is definitely nearing its end.
He even passed some espionage duties
to a German-American agent, loyal to Nazi Germany.
Still, each day he listens to the weather report
on Radio Tokyo waiting to hear these specific words,
"East wind, rain."
The coded message that meant Japan was at war
with the United States.
And he won't have to wait long
for Admiral Nagumo's strike force
is already a third of the way to Hawaii.
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Wednesday, December 3rd, the Oval Office.
Roosevelt has been meeting regularly with Navy leadership.
Japanese fleets are moving into Southeast Asia,
but no one knows what the target is.
One group of six carriers has simply disappeared.
The general consensus is the Japan will strike Malaya,
Hong Kong, or the Dutch East Indies within days.
Some even fear that they're planning a surprise attack
on the Philippines, though that's a minority opinion.
Roosevelt then meets with the British ambassador
and finally gives him the answer he's been begging for.
"If Japan attacks British or Dutch territory,
America will support their fight."
Later that day, Stanley Jones,
an old friend of Roosevelt and a missionary to Japan,
visits him and in his pocket is one last gambit for peace
cooked up by Ambassador Nomura
and Special Envoy Kurusu
using Jones to get around the increasingly hostile
Cordell Hull.
Kurusu wants Roosevelt to go
over the heads of the militarists
and cable the Emperor directly
offering to negotiate and end to the war in China.
Hull dislikes this idea.
The FBI has reported, "Smoke at the Japanese Embassy.
They're already burning documents.
War could start any minute."
Though after considering,
Roosevelt decides he will send the cable,
one last chance at peace.
And if he had sent it that day,
it might have arrived in time to make a difference.
Instead, he'll send it the evening of December 6th.
Thursday, December 4th. Tokyo.
For hours, Tojo's cabinet has been drafting a response
to Hull's list of demands that we mentioned last episode.
And the reply they're crafting is a 14-point statement
of grievances with the last one being the most crucial,
saying "America's position
has made further negotiation impossible."
It severs diplomatic relations with war inferred
rather than declared.
The Foreign Minister hates this.
He insists, "The statement be delivered before the strike.
The honor of Japan depends on it."
Yeah, the Navy says "They'll get back to him on timing.
The timing of the attack is still secret after all."
And then, a full day later, they finally respond.
"The statement must be delivered
at precisely 1:00 PM Washington time."
They also say, "The Foreign Ministry should wait
and send the 14th part, the one breaking off relations,
until just hours before the attack."
Saturday, December 6th. Washington.
Dorothy Edgers is a Japanese translator
in the Navy's Cryptographic Section
and is working the weekend to catch up on Magic intercepts.
The program is understaffed,
subject to Army-Navy turf battles,
and, frankly, intercepts more than they can decode
and translate.
Now there's some low-priority messages out of Honolulu
that need seeing to.
Of course, those communications
are probably mostly commercial rather than diplomatic,
but she's not one to let things stack up.
She sees one from December 2nd
where Tokyo asks about barrage balloons and torpedo nets.
Then a reply the next day about a German agent in Hawaii.
Huh?
But when the head of the Translation Section,
Lieutenant Commander Alvin D. Kramer,
arrives that afternoon, he isn't alarmed.
Edgers is new to this work.
He's seen stuff like this before.
Japanese consulates monitor ship traffic at every port.
He mostly nitpicks her rough translation
then decides it isn't good enough to pass on.
"Go enjoy your weekend," he says,
"We'll finish this up on Monday."
Meanwhile, across town at the Japanese Embassy,
the first 13 parts of the statement start to come in.
But there's a goodbye party for one of the embassy staff
and the senior secretary only gets partway
through the decryption before he's pulled
into a ping pong tournament.
And the history books don't tell us whether he won or not.
But back at the Navy Cryptographic Office,
Kramer now also receives the 13-point statement,
intercepted when it was sent to the Japanese Embassy.
Recognizing its importance, he jumps up.
And not having a staff car, gets his wife to drive him
to the White House.
Reading the statement and its belligerent tone,
Roosevelt then says, "This means war."
As emergency calls go out,
with military officials being pulled out of theaters
and called away from dinner parties,
everyone in Washington now knows something's up.
Sunday, December 7th, around 8:00 AM Washington time.
The 14th and final part of the statement
breaking off relations and the instructions saying
"It must be presented to Hull at exactly 1:00 PM"
arrives at the Japanese Embassy.
And as before, it too is intercepted
and Kramer gets a decrypted copy.
And when he sees there's a delivery time
specified in the instructions,
his bad feeling gets much worse.
Meanwhile, at the Japanese Embassy, Nomura is freaking out.
The decryption staff has all gone home to nurse hangovers,
and it's 10:00 AM before he can get anyone back
to decrypt the instructions.
And that's when he finds out
about the 1:00 PM delivery time.
That is not enough time to work this document.
He has to carefully translate this formal declaration
to English before presenting it to Hull.
(sighs) Okay.
Panicking, he calls Hall's office.
Can he please get a 1:00 PM appointment?
"Ooh, sorry sir. Secretary Hall has a lunch meeting.
Could you possibly do 2:00 PM?"
"No," he insists, "It must be no later than 1:00 PM."
And with that gets the appointment.
Nomura hovers over his senior secretary
as the man, who can't type mind you,
it's more of a hunt-and-peck kind of action,
translates the first 13 parts of the statement
from Japanese to English.
He finishes, but there are so many errors,
it's nearly illegible.
They start retyping the entire thing.
Meanwhile, American leaders are frantic
over the possible significance
of the 1:00 PM delivery of that last ominous message.
"Why so specific? Was an attack imminent? Sabotage perhaps?"
They send warnings to the Philippines and the Panama Canal,
but weather conditions mean that Hawaii can't be raised.
And with phone messages possibly being tapped,
exposing the fact that the purple code is broken,
they instead opt to send a Western Union telegram.
They forget to mark it urgent.
At 6:30 AM Hawaiian time, at the mouth of Pearl Harbor,
a destroyer spots the conning tower of a submarine.
They sink it and then send a warning to headquarters.
Though it's dismissed.
After all, jumpy captains were always mistaking driftwood
or turtle heads for periscopes.
Then at 7:06 AM Hawaiian time,
a radar unit picks up a wave of airplanes inbound.
They call it in and are told not to worry.
"It's a flight of B29s transferring in. They're just early."
Meanwhile in Washington, it's 12:30 PM
and Nomura is losing his mind.
It's only 30 minutes until they're meeting with Hull
and he's just been handed the decrypted 14th part
breaking off relations.
In addition, Tokyo has just sent corrections
to the first 13 parts of the statement
and now multiple pages have to be retyped.
They're going to be late for their 1:00 PM delivery.
In Honolulu, civilians wake in confusion.
Smoke rises over Pearl Harbor
and airplanes buzz across the sky.
"Okay, what idiots scheduled a big naval exercise
on a Sunday morning of all times?"
Yoshikawa knows different.
He rushes to the consulate
just in time to hear the weather report,
"East wind, rain."
Ten minutes after he's done torching his code books
and all evidence of espionage,
armed FBI agents break down the door.
He raises his hands and identifies himself as a diplomat.
Now much later, he'll return to Japan
on a diplomatic exchange,
his activities not revealed until decades later.
Rather, Japanese-Americans who he never enlisted as agents
because he found them too loyal to the US
will be blamed instead.
Washington, 2:20 PM.
Nomura and Kurusu enter Hull's office.
They don't know that 15 minutes earlier,
Roosevelt had informed Hull
of the ongoing attack at Pearl Harbor,
an attack neither diplomat knows about.
Nomura stretches out his hand,
but Hull does not take it.
Instead, he flips through the 14-point statement
and icily asks why it had to be delivered at 1:00 PM.
Nomura, apologizing for being late says, he doesn't know.
And it's at this point that Hull launches into Nomura.
"In all of their dealings," he says,
"he's always been honest and straightforward"
And you know, he'd hoped Nomura did the same.
Yet now, here he brings this statement full of lies
and distortions.
Then Hull dismisses them.
Nomura, still confused, reaches out his hand
to shake once more.
This time Hull accepts.
Then they exit the office into a mob of press.
The next day, Roosevelt would use their late delivery
of the statement as part of his Day of Infamy Speech,
a speech that created a clean, righteous narrative
out of the complicated, multi-decade breakdown
of American-Japanese relations.
A story that began in the 19th century
as two Pacific Empires took their first tentative steps
towards each other in a dance of imperial cooperation
and collision,
and a story that would be burned
into the popular consciousness under three powerful words,
"Remember Pearl Harbor."
Ah, Zozo.
Another completed history series
for the Extra History books.
Say, when exactly do we have to start work
on the next patron-voted topic of, ooh, Frederick the Great?
That's it. (cat meowing)
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(door bell rings)
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