Tips about the Pearl Harbor Attack 77 years late
In the land of the blind, the wise blind woman is Queen
In September 1945, Mrs. Leota DeCoursey wrote a letter to Senator Homer Ferguson of Michigan.
It sat in a box for many years. It looks like it did get a reply from Ferguson a month later. It was a largely perfunctory reply.
The original letter, in pencil, does not bear the hallmarks of having been reviewed and poured over by the Senator or his staff, who regularly marked up the original copies.
It was just Mrs. DeCoursey writing to an elected official and spouting off what she wanted to say. She thought it would make an impact. I suspect as she wrote it, she wondered whether he would even read it.
“Well I’ll write it anyway and hope for the best.”
I doubt she planned its providence.
Someone filed it in the papers related to Pearl Harbor among the Senator’s things before he left the Senate ten years later in 1955. Someone put those files in a box before Ferguson spent a year in the Philippines and 20 years thereafter in Washington. Someone saved these files. Ferguson died in 1982. His daughter donated his papers to the University of Michigan the year after. They were refiled and put gingerly in folders. They were indexed. They sat on the shelves gathering dust. Waiting for someone, anyone. Bugs crawled into the boxes, died, and were slowly decomposed into dust and ash. Time passed.
In the meantime Leota’s house turned into a parking lot for urinary tract surgeons.
Time is especially unkind to lies. Time seems to abhor lies and loves bubbling up little details, little incongruities, like an ocean heaving up a long-lost body from the deep.
Leota DeCoursey was born in 1894 in Oklahoma. She died there in 1991. In between she lived in Ohio, where she penned the letter below. Her handwriting is hard to read.
I get the impression that no one has read this letter until now. Its contents are not revolutionary, they are her observations combined with common sense and a witness account or two.
They may be worthless, but often they show a spark, a little lead hidden on onion paper found in a folder in a box in a collection in an archive. A little lie waiting to bubble up and be found.
Here are Leota’s main points:
She doesn’t trust Senator Majority Leader Alben Barkley to conduct a fair hearing into the Pearl Harbor attack.
She thinks Sen. Claude Pepper and Tom Connally are war criminals who deserve punishment.
In the summer of 1941 she was visited by a Coast Guardsman serving on the USS Frederick Lee. The ship was regularly raiding Italian, Japanese and German ships trying to provoke a war.
Ships going to Britain were not transferring control as was publicly said according to that witness, they were piloted by American crews all the way through.
Secretary of War Harry Hines Woodring refused to send the country into a pointless war and so was forced to resign.
Woodring gave a speech to Woodbury College where he said there was a small group who is plotting war at any cost, and he did not support them, and paid the price.
The notes between FDR and the Japanese Emperor should be seized and reviewed, she says, because they are likely incriminating.
A witness from Pearl Harbor told her that the Army was too drunk from indulging at Japanese nightclubs the night prior to December 7, 1941 to effectively counter the raid.
Large corporations such as Standard Oil and the Texas Corporation likely had a role in financing ‘hate programs’ that stirred up ‘war fever’ among the public.
If the Pearl Harbor investigation gets too much traction, the media meaning the radio and newspapers will likely smear the effort and the Senators involved.
Tyler Kent would make a good witness, the young man who took messages between Churchill and Roosevelt.
Leota says all these things, having come to these conclusions, despite the fact she claims at the end of the letter to be personally blind.
Here’s what I would make of Leota’s overall claims:
I think that Leota is right about Senator Barkley, as I have found other letters saying that the Committee was hamstrung in their operations, the D’s to R’s were 2 to 1, staff was only minimally allocated to the minority, subpoenas could not be sent out without a majority vote of the committee, and so on.
I don’t have any opinion at the moment about Pepper or Connally.
I had never heard about the Frederick Lee before, though I had heard similar tales.
I did not hear about the ships not transferring control, though that is admittedly a weak lead.
I did not know about Secretary Woodring or his speech to Woodbury College. I am curious if there might be a surviving record of the speech in a newspaper somewhere.
I have run across the notes between FDR and Emperor Hirohito, though I haven’t spent time analyzing or dissecting their substance.
I have heard several other anecdotal reports about the drunkenness on December 6th at Pearl Harbor and the day after. I’m not sure what to make of it, but there’s considerable reports of this in a variety of documents and witness accounts.
I had not heard about the Big Oil involvement before.
Her theory about the media smears seem as true today as they did back then.
I have heard and read about the Tyler Kent case and am always curious to learn more about it.
Overall, it’s pretty surprising that this blind 50 year old woman living in Ohio is this accurate with what’s going on in 1945.
Here’s the Frederick Lee in port.