All Rights Reserved.
(for Stanley K. Hornbeck, political adviser to Secretary of State Cordell Hull).
They thought Japan would attack Thailand On the other hand, the Japanese were trying to bluff the United States into thinking they were prepared to limit their demands in Asia.…”The following excerpt from a personal 1971 letter from William (Bill) Turner to Schuler provides specifics about a colleague who was required to participate in falsifying the records to remove evidence of his superior’s “gross miscalculations” prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. And they felt they had to do something about that.”Thomas: “Olive told me you had said that they rewrote documents from hindsight, that, in fact, you did the retyping.” Their motive for this was to erase any trace of culpability in the attack that could be attributed to their intelligence failures. Others have claimed he tricked the Japanese into starting a war with the United States [see sidebar on the McCollum Memo] as a “back door” way to go to war with Japan’s ally, Nazi Germany.“However, after nearly [75] years, no document or credible witness has been discovered that prove either claim. Did State Department employees falsify the historical record to cover up evidence that would blame them for intelligence failures before the Pearl Harbor attack?“The alteration of the U.S.-Japan documents after Pearl Harbor became something of a legend among the old Far Eastern hands. They thought he was interfering.”Shaffer: “That was the problem! The "moving wall" represents the time period between the last issue “She stated she clearly recalled shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack being required to retype memoranda and communications ‘as though from hindsight,’ isolated in a room made inaccessible to others with the explanation that her assignment was highly confidential.”Although these accounts from Helen Shaffer are documented in several affidavits, Shaffer herself would not go on record. In this same affidavit, Olive Schuler recalled that when she asked Shaffer about this, “She advised me that under no circumstances did she want to become involved. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20045008 You have javascript disabled. The intelligence failure at Pearl Harbor was one not of analysis, as Wohlstetter implies, but of collection.
Mr. Ballantine will have special charge of the data relating to the exploratory conversations of this year.” [A note on the document indicates that Alger Hiss initialed the document for Hornbeck. Ambassador Joseph C. Grew in Tokyo; Stanley K. Hornbeck, Political Advisor to the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull; and Maxwell Hamilton, Chief of the Division of Far Eastern Affairs, and Joseph W. Ballantine, Advisor on Far Eastern Affairs, totally misread the Japanese threat.“These men were duped by the Japanese into thinking that they could secure a secret, negotiated détente with the Japanese. Before the attack on Pearl Harbor the American military planners were looking to try to figure out where the Japanese might attack U.S. forces and possibly when such an attack could happen. No intelligence agency had prepared a report for the possibility of an attack there, although everyone talked about it. It read: “Mr. Vol. Both were found guilty of “dereliction of duty” by the Roberts Commission in 1942.The Dorn Report in 1995 later concluded, “The responsibility … should not fall solely on the shoulders of Admiral Kimmel and [General] Short; it should be broadly shared.” While all eyes were on the commanders of the fleet after the attack, a “project” was put into motion that flew completely under the radar.The individuals involved were diplomats who took matters into their own hands by literally rewriting history. In a showdown with Admiral Chester Nimitz (Woody Harrelson), Layton calls Pearl Harbor "the greatest intelligence failure in American history" (up … During the evening he told me in some detail and with unconcealed wrath that after the Pearl Harbor debacle he, and as I remember, other subordinates in FE had been required by Dr. Stanley K. Hornbeck, the then-Chief of FE, to comb through the office files and to extract copies of all Dr. Hornbeck’s memoranda to the Secretary of State dealing with Japan.“At this point of time my memory is not clear as to Hornbeck’s intended disposition of these papers, but my impression is that, according to Max, he meant to expunge from the files the record of his [Hornbeck’s] gross miscalculations as to Japan’s intentions and capabilities in the pre-Pearl Harbor days.“I would suggest that if you want to pursue this matter further, you might get in touch with Max, who I feel sure, would be glad to give you a first-hand account of his unwilling part in an episode which aroused in him so much chagrin and ire.…”The discovery of the documents in the Schuler Papers held at the Roosevelt Presidential Library revealed bombshell after bombshell about Bally’s Project. No. 138-152 Pearl Harbor Attack As dawn broke on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese struck the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, pushing a once-reluctant America headlong into World War II.