Word: hirohito
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Nobody in Washington knew Hirohito had asked that the warning be delivered before the attack -- 1 p.m. in Washington was 7:30 a.m. in Hawaii -- but an Army intelligence officer, Colonel Rufus Bratton, guessed as much. Bratton telephoned Marshall at his quarters at Fort Myers, Va., but he was out riding. More than an hour later, about 10:30 a.m., Marshall called back and said he was coming to his office shortly. About the same time, Hull was meeting with War Secretary Henry L. Stimson and Navy Secretary Frank Knox. "Hull is very certain that the Japs are planning some...
Japan's navy had already begun planning and training for the attack on Pearl Harbor when Emperor Hirohito startled his assembled advisers on Sept. 6 by asking an imperial question. In the midst of a fervent debate over when and how to go to war, the Emperor, who traditionally never spoke during such gatherings, suddenly pulled out and read in his high-pitched voice a poem by his revered grandfather Emperor Meiji...
Roosevelt, re-elected to a third term in 1940 after pledging that "your boys are not going to be sent to any foreign wars," knew that Hirohito was just a figurehead ruler over a militarist government dominated by the flinty General Hideki Tojo. Still, Roosevelt staked his hopes for peace on a last- minute message to the Emperor. "Both of us," Roosevelt said, "have a sacred duty to restore traditional amity and prevent further death and destruction in the world...
...Togo, in full diplomatic regalia, reached the Imperial Palace. He found the Emperor listening to his shortwave radio. Togo read him the message and then the response that the government had already written for him. It said that peace was the Emperor's "cherished desire." This would "do well," Hirohito told Togo. The Foreign Minister bowed...
Pearl Harbor ignited Bush emotionally, though not yet intellectually. He enlisted and went off to the Pacific as a torpedo-bomber pilot. "It was good vs. evil," he says. "The evil was epitomized by Adolf Hitler and Emperor Hirohito. There was never any second-guessing, never any rationalization about what we might have done differently." Bush was "quite aware" of the cold war. He talked about it with his father Prescott Bush, who was then a U.S. Senator from Connecticut. Bush met Dwight Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, the diplomat who riled the world by suggesting...