BATTLE OF AMERICA: Invasion of the U.S.?

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Any time war breaks out between Japan and the United States, I shall not be content merely to capture Guam and the Philippines and occupy Hawaii and San Francisco. I am looking forward to dictating peace to the United States in the White House at Washington.

The official Japanese news agency Domei last week attributed this statement to Japan's naval Commander in Chief, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, in "a letter which Yamamoto sent to a close friend, dated Jan. 24 this year." In announcing his intention of invading the U.S., Admiral Yamamoto echoed an extraordinary warning issued in 1909 by an extraordinary man named Homer Lea.

Homer Lea was a hunchback who wanted to be a hero. Before he was 18 he had mastered every detail of every battle Napoleon ever fought. While studying law at Leland Stanford University he made the acquaintance of some San Francisco Chinese who set his imagination to sparking on the coming Chinese Revolution. Knowing that he would never be accepted by the U.S. Army, he went to China, offered his services to Premier Kong Yu Wei, who was secretly plotting against the Dowager Empress.

Kong's plot was discovered and the Empress put a price of $10,000 on Lea's head. He made his way to Hong Kong, there met the great Sun Yat Sen, who later made Lea his chief military adviser with the rank of general. Lea went with Dr. Sun into exile in Japan. Then he went back to San Francisco and, after years of travel and study, wrote The Valor of Ignorance.

Its theme, as good in 1941 as 1909: The U.S. was contemptuous of Japan only because it had no idea of the grandiose and fanatical ambitions of the Japanese militarists. It had not learned the lessons of the Russo-Japanese War.

Key to East Asia. "The Philippine Islands," wrote Lea, "bear the same strategic relationship to the Southern Asian coast as the Japanese islands do to the Northern. . . . Without the Philippines, Japan's dominion in Asian seas will be no more than tentative, and her eventual domination or destruction will depend upon who holds these islands." Considering U.S. unpreparedness in the Philippines as of the time he was writing, Homer Lea said the islands could be captured by Japanese as easily as the U.S. took Cuba from Spain. In 1941 U.S. preparedness had begun to be more formidable. But only a few weeks ago, U.S. officers in the Philippines told Author-Correspondent Clare Booth about Homer Lea because his conception of a Japanese attack on the Philippines was still valid even in many details.

Key to Central Pacific. "Hawaii . . . can be considered the most important position in the Pacific." Hawaii, Lea thought, would be assaulted from within by the 1909 version of a fifth column. He asserted that there were more Japanese "immigrants" in the Hawaiian Islands with army experience than there were soldiers in the entire field army of the U.S.