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By Susan Zimmerman
BACKSTORY: Although for the past 75 years history has had little to say about “Bally’s Project,” an effort to falsify State Department records to remove evidence of gross miscalculations prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor—the author recently discovered a small file of documents in the Frank A. Schuler, Jr. Papers, 1932-1991, at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York, that corroborates the existence of Bally’s Project and details the deception that went on behind locked doors.
“The alteration of the U.S.-Japan documents after Pearl Harbor became something of a legend among the old Far Eastern hands. Diplomats who had knowledge of the scheme to varying degrees are no longer alive. I was told about the ‘project,’ as it was referred to, by an old friend and senior colleague from my Japan days, William Turner. Bill, both taciturn and cautious, would never have disclosed unsubstantial information.”
So wrote Frank A. Schuler, Jr., a former U.S. foreign service officer in pre-World War II Japan, in his unpublished 1980 memoir, Pearl Harbor Myths and Realities.
This bombshell statement was a long time in coming. It was 1946 when Schuler first learned
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“During Senator Joseph McCarthy’s hunt for communists within the government, Hiss was accused of being a Soviet spy in 1948.” Not accurate; the Alger Hiss conviction was the result of the HOUSE Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Senator McCarthy began his communist hunt in 1950.
A couple items of note. Although he said little publicly, Roosevelt was less than pleased with the state department’s actions. One result was the establishment what was essentially a semi-independent division under William “Wild Bill” Donavon known as the OSS and later the CIA. In the mind of reputable historians, blame for Peral Harbor has largely, though not completely, been removed from Kimmel and Short. Their failure to be read into intelligence reports by Washington is well accepted today though it must be also be acknowledged that the two commanders did not exactly act with alacrity and initiative with the information they did have. Today, the “swamp” still acts in a self serving manner as exemplified by the WMD intelligence failure in Iraq that led to the disastrous Gulf War II and the tragic departure from Afghanistan. Finally, as WW II progressed, both Roosevelt and Churchill tended to rely more on field commanders for military information in contrast to Hitler, who trusted only himself. The results speak for themselves.