Page 20 THE VILLADOM TIMES IV • December 22, 2010 Honolulu Advertiser or a number of other newspapers knew that Pearl Harbor was no surprise. Stories describing a probable war between the United States and Japan had been splashed on the front page for five days before the attack. United States News (and World Report) had run a two-page spread showing a map with all the best bombing routes to Japan from U.S. territories on Oct. 31: five weeks before the attack. The “surprise” was a fiction invented by an embarrassed administration. The “sneak attack” and the fake Japanese strafing of civilians were the 1941 equivalent of the non-existent torpedo attack in the Gulf of Tonkin or the weapons of mass destruction supposedly hidden in Iraq. The cover-up took some work: Patrick Chong, the widely respected director of the Library of Hawaii, was also killed by a misplaced U.S. Navy shell. Wally Luke, a Ridgewood Library regular who had lunched with Chong the day before, volunteered to help care for the civilian wounded, who were so numerous they had to be accommodated at a nearby high school. Luke didn’t talk to one person who had been strafed; they were all hit by shell fragments from American antiaircraft fire. Daniel Inouye, later a multiple amputee and winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor, also shook his fist at the sky and cursed when he saw the Japanese aircraft over Pearl Harbor. Later, after he lost an arm fighting the Germans in Italy, and saw his chances for medical school go down the drain, Inouye did some research. He reported that every civilian death in Honolulu, about 67 of them, had been caused by shells from the fleet that either hadn’t been fused or had defective fuses that didn’t produce air bursts. The civilian Americans, decorated American hero and U.S. Senator Inouye said, were all accidentally killed by Americans. Inouye missed one instance of strafing: A Japanese plane fired at some volunteer firefighters who were trying to put out the fires started by Japanese bombing of military targets, and hit four of them. Wholesale strafing of obvious civilians is a myth. When one Japanese pilot reported back to his carrier after shooting up Officers Row – he apparently missed – his own officers slapped him around. They wanted a clean strike because they knew they would have to sue for peace six months or a year down the road and didn’t want civilian blood on their hands. The Japanese also skipped bombing the million-gallon oil tank that could have set the whole harbor on fire, probably for the same reason. Once the Japanese cabinet had received the Hull Note on Nov. 26, they realized the conditions the United States had wanted to impose would be unacceptable to the junior officers and the Japanese public. Riots and assassinations were a staple of 1930s Japanese politics. They knew their own hope for saving the empire, as they said themselves, was to strike back against what they saw as outrageous American oppression, seize as much territory as they could in the first six months, and defend it and inflict as many casualties as possible so the Americans would settle for a negotiated peace that left the core of the empire intact. The Japanese also intended to drop off a formal declaration of war in Washington a half-hour before the attack, but the Japanese Embassy staffers sent their typists home to avoid leaking information about the attack. The diplomats couldn’t get the document through the typewriter in time. Female Japanese revisionists claim the diplomats were so distraught at what they saw as a suicidal move that they all got too drunk to type properly. If you know Japanese culture, without reference to haiku or origami, this is entirely plausible. The Japanese Ambassador delivered Japan’s declaration not a half-hour before the attack but an hour or more after the bombing had started. They looked ridiculous – but no more ridiculous than Franklin Delano Roosevelt did talking about the unprovoked and dastardly attack when he already knew about the formal Japanese declaration of war. Members of his cabinet had deliberately provoked the attack and FDR had seen a deciphered code message and said “this means war” with ample time to warn the fleet – and hadn’t warned the fleet. Last word on the topic goes to the Asian Indian judge at the Tokyo Trials, Judge Rahadbinod Pal. Judge Pal said many of the Japanese Class B war criminals were guilty of “devilish and fiendish” crimes and should be punished. But Pal said the Japanese Class A war criminals – the guys who opted to bomb Pearl Harbor after the Hull Note virtually abrogated Japan’s sovereignty -- could not legally be found guilty. The Americans and the British had created charges such as “waging aggressive war” and “crimes against peace” ex post facto. The French judges and the Dutch judges substantially agreed with Judge Pal and opposed a couple of the death sentences. Most of the Japanese defenders were hanged anyway to shut them up about Hirohito’s complicity, and above all about how the war had been forced on them by the United States. Judge Pal’s book has never been published in English, but there is always hope. Joseph and John Adams, Joe McCabe, David Kahookele, Matilda Faufata, and Patrick Chong were victims of “friendly fire.” As we pull down the curtain on the first decade of the 21st century and celebrate the birthday of the Prince of Peace, we should cease to cherish the lies used to invoke hatred in past wars, and for all we know, used to provoke new ones for corporate or foreign interests. The angels in the New Testament didn’t sing about “peace on Earth and good will to men.” The angels sang about “peace on Earth to men of good will.” Let’s become men and women of good will and stop telling lies because they make us feel better. The call went out for all Pearl Harbor shipyard riggers to report for work, even though it was Sunday. Joseph Adams; Adams’ son John; Joseph McCabe, an Irish-Hawaiian; and McCabe’s nephew, David Kahookele piled into a car and headed toward the noise and the smoke, not realizing they were about to become poster boys for American innocence and Japanese treachery through no fault of their own. They were four brave working men willing to take a risk to defend their country. Twenty-two-year-old Edmond Jones, who admitted he was nursing a hangover from Saturday night, saw exactly what happened. So did Levi Moe Faufata, a 14-year-old Hawaiian who called them all “Uncle.” Faufata watched as his own father also drove toward the smoke and explosions of Pearl Harbor and he saw what happened next. “All of us were watching this Japanese plane fly over,” Faufata said. “And we found out later that Americans were shooting at that plane, and they didn’t fuse one of their shells correctly. So instead of bursting in the air, it hit this car and blew up.” Faufata felt the force of the concussion and saw the car skid violently and come to an abrupt stop. Two of his birth uncles, Joseph and Fata Kekahuna, ran across the street to help their four neighbors. Three of the men had been killed instantly and the fourth man was dying. Levi Faufata had heard his 12-year-old sister Matilda scream. He ran back to the house and found that Matilda had been standing at the front door when a fragment of the same shell struck her near the heart. He found her sprawled on the floor. She died as her mother cradled her in her arms. A few days later, the neighbors who had buried Joseph and John Adams, Joseph McCabe, David Kahookele, and Matilda Faufata saw a photograph of the riddled car in the newspapers, soon followed by LOOK magazine, later followed by dozens of reproductions in magazines, later in history books. Typical captions: “Caught in the attack, a civilian car is riddled with bullets.” “Eight miles from Pearl Harbor, shrapnel from a Japanese bomb riddled this car and killed three (sic) civilians in the attack. Two of the victims can be seen in the front seat. The Navy reported there was no nearby military objective. (AP Photo/U.S. Navy)” Around the 60th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, Will Hoover, a staff writer for the Honolulu Advertiser, interviewed Edmond Jones and Levi Moe Faufata, who had both seen the car hit by a U.S. Navy shell, and got the story from two honest men with no reason to lie. Both had been outraged by the Japanese attack. Both had joined the U.S. Army – Jones within two months, Faufata as soon as he was old enough. Neither was a Peacenik, a commie, a hippie, or a Japanese agent. Neither was of Japanese-American ancestry. Both saw the same thing: Five Americans they loved were killed by an American shell. What are we to make of this story? Why was it necessary to maintain the fiction that Japanese pilots strafed or bombed civilians at Pearl Harbor? For openers, people who read the A bad day on the way to work almost 70 years later Letters to the Editor Dear Editor: John Koster’s contention the “Much of what the Green Party’s platform makes sense to the United States” is completely without merit. Never mind that none of the Green Party’s platform will save the environment from “the blight of man.” Disregard the overwhelming fraud uncovered by this year’s “climate gate” scandal. Forget that the Green Party supports the ever-deteriorating concept that global warming is related to any of man’s activities. The Green Party platform, called by any other name: socialism, communism, fascism, progressivism, totalitarianism, whatever “ism” you want to call it -- is nothing Disagrees with columnist but the same old central planning “statism” that has failed around the world and throughout history. The very idea that the some group of so-called enlightened, intelligent people, located in some office (be it in Washington DC, Moscow, or Havana) can better run our lives than the individual citizens themselves, has been proven demonstratively false. The Green Party platform, in the name of social justice (“economic sustainability” or “environmental fairness”), is nothing more than code for the discredited practice of redistribution of wealth, destruction of individual liberty, and loss of personal freedoms. Tim Fowler Mahwah