The Hull note

Late on the afternoon of Wednesday 26 November 1941 the Japanese ambassador, Admiral Kichisaburō Nomura, and the special envoy Saburō Kurusu arrived at the State Department for an arranged meeting. Secretary of State Cordell Hull handed each of them two documents: an oral statement and an “Outline of Proposed Basis for Agreement Between the United States and Japan”. The second text went down in history as the Hull note. In it the United States proposed a broad settlement of all Pacific questions, but at a price Japan had no intention of paying: it was to withdraw all military, naval, air and police forces from China and from French Indochina, and to support no government in China other than that of Chiang Kai-shek. Having read the text, Kurusu said that when they reported it to Tokyo, his government would be likely to “throw up its hands”. He was right. Eleven days later Japanese carrier aircraft attacked Pearl Harbor.

The Hull note is often called an ultimatum. Formally it was not. Its first page was marked “Strictly Confidential, Tentative and Without Commitment”; it set no deadline and threatened no consequences if it were rejected, and the oral statement presented it as “one practical exemplification” of a programme on which the two sides were to work in further conversations. Japan’s leaders, however, saw an ultimatum in it, and it was their reading, not the form of the document, that weighed on what followed. It is also often said that on 17 November the ambassador in Tokyo, Joseph Grew, cabled the State Department about Japanese plans to attack Pearl Harbor and that the cable was ignored. That claim, too, needs correcting.

A deadline from Tokyo

The Imperial Conference of 5 November resolved that Japan would prepare for war with the United States, Britain and the Netherlands, and that the negotiations in Washington would continue only until early December. Foreign Minister Shigenori Tōgō, who had been brought into Hideki Tōjō’s government as an advocate of agreement, was given two proposals. Plan A, a compromise on the troops in China, was presented to Hull by Nomura on 7 November. The Americans did not accept it, because it provided for Japanese garrisons to remain in northern China, Inner Mongolia and on Hainan for many years. Plan B was to be the last attempt.

The Americans knew the Japanese deadline. Since the autumn of 1940 their cryptanalysts had been reading the Japanese diplomatic cipher, and the word “final” kept recurring in the signals from Tokyo. On 5 November Tōgō wrote to Nomura that all arrangements for signing an agreement had to be completed by 25 November. On 22 November he moved the date to 29 November and added a sentence that was remembered in Washington: this time the deadline really was final and could not be changed, and after that “things are automatically going to happen”. What was to happen, the signal did not say.

Kurusu, a former ambassador in Berlin who had signed the Tripartite Pact in 1940, flew into Washington on 15 November. On 17 November Hull took him and Nomura to see President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. According to Hull’s record, Kurusu said that the whole Pacific was “like a powder keg”, while Hull replied that no agreement with a Japan that clung to its alliance with Hitler would be taken seriously in America.

Grew’s warnings

On that same 17 November Ambassador Grew sent a cable from Tokyo to the State Department. In it he referred to his cable of 3 November and stressed the need to guard against sudden Japanese naval or military action in areas not hitherto involved in the war with China. The Japanese, he wrote, would probably exploit every tactical advantage, such as surprise and initiative. The embassy, however, could not take responsibility for giving advance warning of such a move: the control of military information in Japan was extremely effective, and the embassy’s field of observation was restricted “almost literally to what can be seen with the naked eye”. Washington should therefore not rely on it for timely warning.

The cable of 3 November was longer and more important. In it Grew argued that neither he nor his staff believed the theory, held by many American economists, that Japan, cut off from trade and raw materials, would soon collapse and be incapable of war. If the negotiations failed, Japan might make a desperate attempt to render itself independent of the embargo, even at the risk of “national hara-kiri”, for Japanese sanity could not be measured by American logic. The cable ended with a warning that Japan might resort “with dangerous and dramatic suddenness” to measures that would make war with the United States inevitable.

Neither of these cables mentioned Pearl Harbor. Grew wrote of a plan to attack the Hawaiian base only once, on 27 January 1941: a colleague in the diplomatic corps – according to the ambassador’s later account, the Peruvian minister – had heard from many sources, including a Japanese one, that in the event of a conflict with the United States the Japanese armed forces planned a surprise mass attack on Pearl Harbor. The informant himself thought the idea fantastic. The report was passed to naval intelligence, and on 1 February the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Harold Stark, forwarded it to Admiral Husband Kimmel, commanding the Pacific Fleet. He attached, however, the intelligence assessment that the rumours deserved no credence, since nothing in the disposition of the Japanese fleet suggested that an attack on Pearl Harbor was imminent or planned. In January 1941 Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s plan was still only in embryo.

The word “ignored” is therefore too strong for the November cables as well. Hull read them, and by his own account he told a cabinet meeting as early as 7 November that the United States must be prepared for a Japanese attack anywhere and at any time. Grew’s warnings showed that Japan might strike suddenly, but not where, and in Washington a move against Thailand, Malaya, the Netherlands East Indies or the Philippines was expected rather than one against Hawaii.

Proposal B

On 20 November Nomura and Kurusu presented Plan B to Hull as an interim agreement intended to ease the situation while negotiations continued. Japan and the United States would undertake not to make an armed advance into any country of South-East Asia or the southern Pacific, apart from the part of Indochina where Japanese troops were already stationed. Japan would withdraw its forces from Indochina once peace with China had been restored or an “equitable peace” established in the Pacific, and until then it would move them from the southern part of the colony to the northern. The two sides were to cooperate in obtaining raw materials from the Netherlands East Indies and restore commercial relations to what they had been before the freezing of assets, and the United States would supply Japan with “a required quantity of oil”. The last point was the least conspicuous and the most important: the Americans were to refrain from measures “prejudicial to the endeavors for the restoration of general peace between Japan and China” – that is, to stop helping Chiang Kai-shek.

Hull judged the proposal unacceptable. Oil and the abandonment of China in exchange for a redeployment of troops that could return south at any moment would, in his view, have meant consenting to Japan’s conquests. Breaking off the talks, however, would mean war within days, and the chiefs of the Army and Navy, General George Marshall and Admiral Stark, asked for time. The Philippines were only just being reinforced, above all with new B-17 bombers, and every week of peace was precious to them.

The modus vivendi that never was

The State Department therefore prepared a reply in two parts. The first was an interim agreement, a modus vivendi, for three months with the possibility of extension. Japan was to withdraw its troops from southern Indochina at once, limit its forces in the northern part of the colony to 25,000 men and undertake not to advance by force in any direction. In return the United States would relax the freeze on assets and permit limited trade: exports of cotton, food and medicines, and also of oil, but only for civilian needs and in monthly allocations. The second part was a plan for a general, lasting settlement, for which material was also provided by a Treasury memorandum drawn up by Harry Dexter White and forwarded by the Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau. The State Department reworked it thoroughly.

On 22 and 24 November Hull presented the draft modus vivendi to the ambassadors of the countries it concerned: Lord Halifax for Britain, Hu Shih for China, and the envoys of Australia and the Netherlands. The Chinese reacted most sharply. Hu Shih objected to leaving as many as 25,000 Japanese troops in Indochina, while Chiang Kai-shek, through his American adviser Owen Lattimore and his brother-in-law T. V. Soong (Song Ziwen), warned Washington that the Chinese would read any relaxation of sanctions as proof that America was sacrificing them for a deal with Japan, and that the morale of a country which had been fighting for four years might collapse. Hull was embittered: as he told it, the British, Dutch and Australians had backed the draft half-heartedly, while the Chinese had attacked it without understanding that its purpose was to gain time.

During the night of 25–26 November a message from Winston Churchill reached Roosevelt. The Prime Minister left the decision to the President and assured him that Britain did not want a new war, but added: “There is only one point that disquiets us. What about Chiang Kai-shek? Is he not having a very thin diet?” If China collapsed, the common danger would grow enormously. On the morning of 26 November Secretary of War Henry Stimson informed the President of an intelligence report that a large Japanese troop convoy was sailing south of Formosa. According to Stimson’s diary Roosevelt “fairly blew up”: the Japanese were negotiating a truce and a withdrawal from Indochina while sending a new expedition south, which to him was proof of bad faith. The day before, at a meeting attended by Hull, Stimson, the Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, Marshall and Stark, the President had said that the Japanese might attack as early as the following Monday. Stimson then wrote in his diary a sentence that has since been quoted many times: the question was how to “maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot” without exposing the United States to too much danger. Most historians read it as anxiety about the political consequences should America itself have to start a war in defence of other countries’ colonies, not as evidence of a conspiracy.

On the morning of 26 November Hull proposed to the President that the modus vivendi be dropped. He cited China’s opposition, the lukewarm support of the other allies, and the fact that the public would not understand the resumption of oil sales to a country that was at that very moment sending troops south. Roosevelt agreed. Historians still argue about what tipped the balance: the Chinese protests, the news of the convoy, or Hull’s conviction, drawn from reading the intercepts, that Japan would in any case accept nothing that did not give it oil and a free hand in China. What is certain is that the Japanese received only the second part of the reply.

Ten points

The note consisted of two sections. The first was a draft joint declaration in which both governments renounced territorial designs in the Pacific and adopted the principles Hull had been repeating for years: the inviolability of the territorial integrity and sovereignty of all nations, non-interference in their internal affairs, equality, including equality of commercial opportunity, and the peaceful settlement of disputes, together with freedom of trade and equal access to raw materials.

The second section listed ten steps. The United States and Japan were to seek a multilateral non-aggression pact including the British Empire, China, the Netherlands, the Soviet Union and Thailand, and an agreement under which the interested powers would undertake to respect the territorial integrity of French Indochina. Japan was to withdraw all military and police forces from China and Indochina. Neither government was to support – militarily, politically or economically – any government in China other than the National Government of the Republic of China with its temporary capital at Chongqing, which meant abandoning the Wang Jingwei government in Nanjing that Japan had recognised a year earlier. Both were to give up extraterritorial rights in China, rights in the international settlements and concessions, and rights under the protocol that ended the Boxer Rebellion. In return the United States offered a new trade agreement on a most-favoured-nation basis, with raw silk, Japan’s chief export, placed on the free list, the lifting of the asset freeze, and a joint fund to stabilise the dollar–yen exchange rate. Point nine stipulated that no agreement concluded by either country with a third power should be interpreted in a way that conflicted with the purpose of the settlement. It did not name the Tripartite Pact, but everyone understood that this was what was meant.

The document lacked one word that mattered enormously in Tokyo. The note did not say whether “China” included Manchukuo. American scholars and some Japanese ones point out that Manchuria had not been a point of contention in Hull’s talks with Nomura, and that in the State Department the word “China” was understood without it. In Tokyo, however, the worst interpretation was adopted: that Japan was to give up its conquests of 1931 as well.

The conversation at the State Department

According to Japanese sources the conversation of 26 November lasted about two hours. Kurusu first asked whether this was the reply to the Japanese proposal for an interim agreement. Hull explained that in view of the “bellicose” statements coming from Tokyo and the confusion in public opinion, it had been necessary to present the full picture of the American position. Kurusu saw in the declaration of principles a restatement of the Stimson Doctrine of non-recognition of territorial conquests, objected to multilateral pacts and declared that his government could not consider points three and four: if the United States expected Japan to “take off its hat” to Chiang Kai-shek, agreement was impossible. When he returned to the abandonment of Wang Jingwei, Hull replied that Chiang Kai-shek had awakened a national spirit in China, while the Nanjing government had made no impression on the world.

Hull also said that if he were to allow oil to flow freely to Japan, the public would almost lynch him. Kurusu observed that the document was tentative and non-binding and asked whether the Americans had no interest in an interim agreement. Hull replied briefly that he had explored that possibility and had done all he could. Nomura asked to see the President. Roosevelt received both envoys the following day and spoke of his hope for peace, but changed nothing in the American position.

Tokyo reads the note

It was already the morning of 27 November in Tokyo when the text of the note reached the Foreign Ministry. Tōgō wrote after the war that he was overcome by a despair that made everything “go dark before his eyes”. In his view the note demanded that Japan write off the sacrifices of many years and renounce its position as a great power in the Far East, which would have been tantamount to suicide, and it was at the very least an “ultimatum without a time limit”. Tōjō is said to have told his ministers outright that it was an ultimatum. For the advocates of war the note was a godsend: it silenced the waverers in the government and the navy. Tōgō did not resign, and the Finance Minister, Okinori Kaya, ceased to oppose war.

Years later Kurusu recalled that he had not regarded the note as an ultimatum, although “in the circumstances of the time it might have looked like one”: the Americans had not given an inch, and on many points they had gone back to where the negotiations began. On 28 November Tōgō informed the envoys that after receiving this “humiliating” proposal the negotiations would in effect be broken off, but instructed them not to give the Americans the impression that the talks were over. The signal was read in Washington. The real decision was taken in Tokyo at the Imperial Conference of 1 December, which found that the negotiations conducted on the basis of the resolution of 5 November had produced no result and resolved to begin war with the United States, Britain and the Netherlands.

Place in the war

The Hull note did not cause Japan’s decision for war, although it sealed it. Preparations had begun after the Imperial Conference of 6 September, and the resolution of 5 November provided for war if the Americans did not accept Plan B, which nobody in Tokyo expected them to do. The Japanese carrier force that was to strike Pearl Harbor sailed from the Kurils on the morning of 26 November, Tokyo time – still the afternoon of 25 November in Washington – roughly a day before the note was handed over. It could have been recalled had the negotiations brought a breakthrough. On 27 November Hull told Stimson that he had “washed his hands of it” and that the matter was now in the hands of the Army and the Navy. That day Stark sent the commanders of the Pacific and Asiatic Fleets a signal that opened with the sentence that it was to be considered a “war warning”. Japan, however, was expected to strike in the Philippines, Malaya, Thailand or Borneo, not in Hawaii. On 7 December 1941 Japanese aircraft attacked Pearl Harbor, and an hour after the attack began Nomura and Kurusu brought Hull Japan’s reply to the note.

After the war the note became the subject of a dispute that continues to this day. Before the Tokyo tribunal Tōgō’s American defence counsel, Ben Bruce Blakeney, cited a remark attributed to the essayist Albert Jay Nock that even Monaco or Luxembourg would have taken up arms on receiving such a note. The Indian judge Radhabinod Pal repeated it in his dissenting opinion. Japanese nationalists present the document as an ultimatum that forced Japan into a defensive war, while proponents of the theory of Soviet inspiration point to White, whom signals decrypted under the Venona project revealed as a source for Soviet intelligence. Most historians reject both readings. The note’s chief demand, the withdrawal of troops from China, had been put forward by the Americans from the start of the talks, long before White had any part in them, and Japan’s decision for war had been taken conditionally weeks earlier. The Hull note expressed Washington’s conviction that no agreement could be made with a Japan ruled by soldiers that would not amount to consent to the conquest of China. Each side knew that the other would not give way, and both were reckoning with war.