2018-08-29
Drawing on a discussion surrounding Soju Watanabe’s The United States’ Defeat in World War II, this chapter examines Harry Dexter White and Alger Hiss, Soviet espionage inside the Roosevelt administration, the Hull Note, economic sanctions against Japan, Yalta, and the creation of the United Nations.
It also presents the author’s criticism of Asahi Shimbun’s wartime reporting and of later reporting by Asahi Shimbun and NHK on the Battle of Okinawa.
The following is a chapter originally published on July 18, 2018
It is a chapter that must be read again not only by the Japanese people but by people throughout the world.
It is also a chapter that proves the correctness of my argument that, because its very foundations were carelessly constructed, the United Nations is an objectionable organization that can be manipulated at will by countries such as China and those on the Korean Peninsula, as well as by radical left-wing activists.
The following continues from the preceding chapter.
Soviet Spies Involved in the World War
Watanabe
I wrote about this in detail in my book The United States’ Defeat in World War II, published by Bunshun Shinsho in June of this year.
During the war, Roosevelt and Churchill portrayed Japan and Germany as totalitarian and militaristic “devil nations,” while explaining the communist Soviet Union to their peoples as a democratic country.
But what happened after the Allies defeated the “two devils,” Japan and Germany?
Neither Roosevelt nor Churchill had any clear plan whatsoever.
Churchill had only one overriding desire regarding the Second World War: to preserve the glory of the British Empire.
Roosevelt, meanwhile, had little more than a fairy-tale vision of reconstructing the world order through the “Four Policemen”—the United States, Britain, China, and the Soviet Union.
He dreamed that when a new collective-security organization based on those Four Policemen—the United Nations—was established, he himself would become its head.
By the time of the Yalta Conference, Roosevelt’s health had deteriorated so severely that death was close at hand.
Stalin calculated that, at the final stage of Roosevelt’s life, the President would make almost any compromise if it would secure the establishment of the United Nations.
One reason was that two Soviet spies, Harry Dexter White and Alger Hiss, had penetrated the heart of the administration and had gained an almost precise understanding of what Roosevelt was thinking.
Of the two, White is also known as the man who drafted the original proposal behind the Hull Note, effectively a final ultimatum to Japan.
Even today, however, there are respects in which his influence is underestimated.
White was the right-hand man of Henry Morgenthau Jr., who served as Secretary of the Treasury for eleven years under Roosevelt.
Morgenthau’s rise began with the fact that his home was near Roosevelt’s.
The essential reason he was treated as the de facto number two in the Roosevelt administration was that he was one of the President’s favorites.
Morgenthau’s own field, however, was agriculture, and because he lacked broad expertise in economics, he often relied on White.
White, who was an exceptionally capable economist, was therefore able to convey his views to the Roosevelt administration through Morgenthau, and those views increasingly came to be reflected in policy.
Although White was merely a Treasury Department official, his influence extended even into foreign affairs, formally outside his jurisdiction, and he came to draft the original proposal behind the Hull Note.
In other words, White, a Soviet spy, was able to act in many parts of the Roosevelt administration’s policymaking process as its de facto number three.
I was once astonished to read an argument that because White was a Treasury official, he could not possibly have intervened in diplomacy, which was a State Department matter, and therefore could not have been an important figure.
Unless one understands the informal personal relationships within the White House at the time—including personal likes and dislikes—there is a danger of misreading historical causation.
Nakanishi
We must not apply the rigidly compartmentalized bureaucratic assumptions of Japan’s Kasumigaseki ministries to Anglo-Saxon government, especially to the United States during the war.
This is one of the serious mistakes into which Japanese historians of the Showa era repeatedly fall, yet there is still little sign that they intend to correct it. (Laughs.)
To explain it in terms even they should understand, we must not forget that the series of economic sanctions against Japan that began with the July 1939 notification terminating the Treaty of Commerce and Navigation between Japan and the United States was led by the U.S. Treasury Department.
The subsequent embargo on scrap iron, the freezing of Japanese assets in the United States, and the complete oil embargo were likewise implemented one after another on the Treasury Department’s initiative.
All of these measures were carried out under Morgenthau, who relied heavily on White as one of his closest aides.
The notification in the summer of 1939 terminating the Japanese-American Treaty of Commerce and Navigation, which became the starting point of economic sanctions against Japan, drove Japan toward the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy in September 1940.
The successive escalation of sanctions thereafter pushed Japan further toward war with the United States.
The Asahi Shimbun must have known clearly what was taking place during this period.
It is an undeniable fact that, in response to the conduct of the United States at the time, it was the Asahi Shimbun itself that agitated the military and encouraged a Japanese-American war.
To cut off the retreat of military leaders who wanted, at all costs, to avoid war with the United States, the Asahi Shimbun fervently stirred up the Japanese public.
“Britain and America are demons and beasts—strike until they are destroyed,” “the entire nation of one hundred million must fight to annihilation,” “never suffer the humiliation of being captured alive,” “we want nothing until victory,” and so on.
Asahi continued publishing propaganda that inflamed the public, and once the war began, instead of reporting the realities of the situation, it repeatedly printed Imperial General Headquarters announcements in huge headlines, ultimately leading the country toward the very idea of “one hundred million fighting to annihilation.”
The work that best conveys the truth of this period is Kappa Senoh’s immortal masterpiece A Boy Called H.
Even today, Asahi Shimbun, NHK, and others continue to report the mass-death tragedies in Okinawa as though they were the work of the Japanese military.
Every August, this is reported almost as an annual ritual.
But Asahi, NHK—unless you realize that the true culprit is none other than yourselves, you have no genuine future.
The Internet, the greatest library in human history, will not allow your falsehoods to continue forever.
This was precisely the outcome Roosevelt wanted, and White, wielding enormous influence as Morgenthau’s trusted lieutenant, played an extremely important role in bringing it about.
Watanabe
Furthermore, it was in fact White who devised the Morgenthau Plan, which was intended to turn Germany, an enemy of the Soviet Union, into an agricultural country.
During the Truman administration, White came under suspicion of being a Soviet spy and was questioned in a closed hearing by HUAC, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, on August 14, 1948.
Two days later, White died under mysterious circumstances.
It has been thought that he may have taken his own life out of despair at the possibility of being indicted for treason, but no conclusive evidence has been established.
Nakanishi
If White was the original drafter behind the Hull Note that drove Japan toward war with the United States and the attack on Pearl Harbor, while another major spy, Alger Hiss, was deeply involved in the secret Yalta arrangements that encouraged Soviet entry into the war against Japan, then the existence of these two Soviet spies must be regarded as having decisive significance in the history of the Second World War.
I believe that historians of the Showa era who deliberately dismiss this as a “conspiracy view of history” are merely trying to defend their own established interpretations.
For precisely that reason, I hope many Japanese people will read Professor Watanabe’s The United States’ Defeat in World War II, which examines the activities of Hiss, White, and the many other Soviet spies who operated within the Roosevelt administration.
To be continued.