I watched Tora! Tora! Tora! again this weekend, and they made a big deal about the fact that the Japanese declaration of war was not delivered until after the Pearl Harbor attack. In the last scene, Admiral Yamamoto said he could not imagine anything that would make the Americans more angry.
To my mind, I don’t think that it would have made any difference at all in American public opinion whether the declaration was delivered an hour before or an hour after the attack. Especially considering that the intelligence people had advance notice of the contents and still weren’t able to get the word out in time to do any good.
Am I missing something here? Had you been living in 1941 (or if you were), would you have said, “Well, they declared war first, so that’s OK?”
That was 20 years before I was born, so I can’t claim personal knowledge. However, I’ve seen several documentaries, and they had the same conclusion: attacking Pearl Harbor before the war declaration was delivered was an affront to Japaneses honor, and created a huge morale problem with their troops, not counting that the attack was a big victory.
As it was, it was viewed as an act of cowardice. Had the declaration been delivered even 30 seconds before the first shot was fired, the honor code would have said “That’s war. Tough” and everything would have been fine.
I agree 100%. Attacking Pearl Harbor basically was a declaration of war, making any paper declaration immaterial. And if it created a “huge morale problem” for the Japanese, it’s not all that apparent from the way they conducted the war. It sounds like revisionist thinking – an attempt to explain away the Japanese defeat.
A declaration of war would have been the “proper” way to conduct diplomacy. Remember that during that period the world’s diplomatic corps still dressed in morning coats and ambassadors called on the heads of state to present their credentials and be officially welcomed.
Without a formal declaration of war, Japan’s attack would be considered an ambush and the Japanese would be seen as an outlaw nation. This didn’t matter to the U.S., but it could conceivably affected Japanese relations with neutral nations.
Remember, even Hitler observed diplomatic nicities when it suited his purposes. Germany formally declared war on the U.S.
Has there ever been a specific ‘fair play’ definition of how much advance notice you should give a declaration of war with? Is 30 seconds really perfectly cricket (assuming you can time it out that well,) or were you supposed to give the other country enough time that they could actually be expected to make some preparations? (Yes, I know that there are a whole range of historical and cultural contexts this question could probably be answered in - would appreciate responses about any of them.)
Is there any truth to the idea that the Americans knew that the Japanese might be declaring war, and purposefully stonewalled their ambassador, figuring that they would never attack before they got through with the formal declaration??
