Eisenhower and Pearl Harbor: The Sunday That Changed Everything

For Dwight Eisenhower, as for the country and the world, December 7, 1941, was a day when everything changed.

A quiet Sunday

That December, as Christmas neared, Americans worried about rising tension with Japan and the war in Europe. On the evening of Saturday, December 6, President Franklin Roosevelt wrote directly to Japan's Emperor Hirohito, seeking a way to keep the peace.

Eisenhower, 51, was a brevet brigadier general and chief of staff of the Third Army at Fort Sam Houston, outside San Antonio. That fall he had helped plan and run the Louisiana maneuvers, the largest U.S. exercises before the war, preparing the Army and giving him a chance to stand out. Tired, he went home around noon, ate lunch, and lay down for a nap with strict orders not to be woken. What was on his mind, he later recalled, was a Christmas trip with Mamie to see their son John, a cadet at West Point.

Fort Sam Houston was familiar ground. In 1915, fresh from West Point, a 25-year-old Eisenhower got his first assignment there — and on a Sunday afternoon that October he met Mamie Doud, visiting friends with her family. Within a year they were married.

The news

By 1:00 p.m. Texas time, Japanese planes were bombing Pearl Harbor — in the words of Admiral Yamamoto, waking the sleeping giant of the United States. An aide, orders or not, woke Eisenhower with the news. Thousands of Americans had been killed, and thousands more wounded; war had come.

Twenty years later, in a December 7, 1961, speech to the Century Association in New York, Eisenhower recalled that his first thoughts were not of war but of the Christmas trip he'd now have to cancel — and a fleeting hope that the report couldn't be true. He had no "four-year panoramic view" then of the effort that would carry American forces across two oceans to victory.

Fort Sam Houston saw two great beginnings in his life, each on a Sunday afternoon: meeting Mamie in October 1915, and learning of Pearl Harbor in December 1941. His marriage and the war were perhaps the defining threads of his life — without either, his road to the White House might have looked very different, or never happened.

"Give me a few hours"

Within days, Washington called. Eisenhower had served on Douglas MacArthur's staff in the Philippines in the 1930s and knew the Pacific up close; with his record as an excellent officer, that made him the man the War Department wanted. By trains and planes he reached Washington by December 14, and went to the desk of Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall, who laid out the situation and asked what the country should do.

Eisenhower — who had always been on the outside of major opportunities — was now exactly where he wanted to be. His parents had told him before West Point that opportunity was all around him, and he should reach out and take it. That Sunday morning, one week after Pearl Harbor, he told Marshall: "Give me a few hours."

He drafted steps to stop the Japanese advance, holding ground in the South Pacific from which to push back, and wrote:

"We must take great risks and spend any amount of money required…. We dare not fail."

Marshall agreed, and put Eisenhower in charge of the War Plans Division's section for the Philippines and the Far East, where the need was most urgent. After a long, winding career, history had given him his moment — the start of the role that would help build and lead the nation's war effort across two oceans.

Looking back in 1961, Eisenhower drew a lesson for the country: whatever a nation's resources and strength, unity — its people working together — always makes it stronger.

More in the series: Eisenhower in World War II.

Sources

Based on "A Day When Everything Changed- Dwight Eisenhower and the Attack on Pearl Harbor," National Park Service, Eisenhower National Historic Site, drawing on biographies by Stephen Ambrose and Susan Eisenhower, Eisenhower's At Ease, Craig Shirley's December 1941, The Washington Post, and papers at the Eisenhower Presidential Library; a work of the United States government in the public domain. Eisenhower's later recollections are paraphrased, and photographs held by the Library of Congress and the Imperial War Museum are not reproduced.