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Michael, as always very well written. I personally have not the slightest doubts that FDR had an intense desire to enter the European war. At the Atlantic Conference, Churchill noted the "astonishing depth of Roosevelt's intense desire for war." Churchill cabled his cabinet "(FDR) obviously was very determined that they should come in."
FDR however was restrained by his election promises and an anti-war American public. Robert Menzies, the prime minister of Australia, observed that Roosevelt, ". . . trained under Woodrow Wilson in the last war, waits for an incident, which would in one blow get the USA into war and get R. out of his foolish election pledges that 'I will keep you out of war.'"
Back in 1932 in the Grand Joint Army Navy Exercises the attacker, Admiral Yarnell, attacked Pearl Harbor with 152 planes a half-hour before dawn 40 miles NE of Kahuku Point and caught the defenders of completely by surprise. It was a Sunday.
Then in 1938 Admiral Ernst King led a carrier-born airstrike from the USS Saratoga successfully against Pearl Harbor in another exercise.
In spite of this in 1940 FDR ordered the fleet transferred from the West Coast to its exposed position in Hawaii and ordered the fleet remain stationed at Pearl Harbor over complaints by its commander Admiral Richardson that there was inadequate protection from air attack and no protection from torpedo attack. Richardson felt so strongly that he twice disobeyed orders to berth his fleet there and he raised the issue personally with FDR in October and he was soon after replaced. His successor, Admiral Kimmel, also brought up the same issues with FDR in June 1941.
On 11 November 1940 21 aged British planes destroyed the Italian fleet, including 3 battleships, at their homeport in the harbor of Taranto in Southern Italy by using technically innovative shallow-draft torpedoes.
March 1941 - Under the Lend-Lease Act FDR sold munitions and convoyed them to belligerents in Europe. Both were acts of war and both were violations of international law.
31 March 1941 - A Navy report by Bellinger and Martin predicted that if Japan made war on the US, they would strike Pearl Harbor without warning at dawn with aircraft from a maximum of 6 carriers. For years Navy planners had assumed that Japan, on the outbreak of war, would strike the American fleet wherever it was. The fleet was the only threat to Japan's plans. The strategic options for the Japanese were not unlimited.
On 23 Jun 1941 Advisor Harold Ickes wrote FDR a memo the day after Germany invaded the Soviet Union, "There might develop from the embargoing of oil to Japan such a situation as would make it not only possible but easy to get into this war in an effective way. And if we should thus indirectly be brought in, we would avoid the criticism that we had gone in as an ally of communistic Russia."
10 July 1941 - US Military Attache Smith-Hutton at Tokyo reported Japanese Navy secretly practicing aircraft torpedo attacks against capital ships in Ariake Bay. The bay closely resembles Pearl Harbor.
July - The US Military Attache in Mexico forwarded a report that the Japanese were constructing special small submarines for attacking the American fleet in Pearl Harbor, and that a training program then under way included towing them from Japan to positions off the Hawaiian Islands, where they practiced surfacing and submerging.
On 22 July 1941 Admiral Richmond Turner reported to FDR: "It is generally believed that shutting off the American supply of petroleum will lead promptly to the invasion of Netherland East Indies...it seems certain she would also include military action against the Philippine Islands, which would immediately involve us in a Pacific war."
On July 24 FDR told the Volunteer Participation Committee, "If we had cut off the oil off, they probably would have gone down to the Dutch East Indies a year ago, and you would have had war." The next day FDR froze all Japanese assets in US cutting off their main supply of oil effectively forcing them into war with the US. Intelligence information was withheld from Hawaii from this point forward.
Basically true but much more complicated. Ever since Commodore Perry's fleet opened Japan in 1853, in an era of great colonial expansion, the Japanese had watched the European powers dominate East Asia and establish colonies and trading privileges. China, Japan's neighbor, was carved up like a melon as Western powers established their spheres of influence on Chinese territory. After an amazingly short time, Japan was able to develop the economic and military strength to join this competition for dominance of the Asian mainland. Japan defeated China in 1895 and Russia in 1905, in battles over who should dominate Korea. Japan joined the allies against Germany in 1914-18 in a struggle to control a portion of China and then conquered Manchuria in 1931 in an effort to secure a land area rich in raw materials. The Japanese nation and its military, which controlled the government by the 1930s, felt that it then could, and should, control all of East Asia by military force.Nobody forced Japan into WW2.
It wasn't so much the Japanese taking China, it was how they were going about it.
Life was already hard in China with constant warring between area warlords and the political upheaval between the Nationalists and the Communists. *IF* Japan had come into China not as ancestral enemies, but as benefactors, then the U.S. probably would not have had much to say on the matter.
This same mistake was made by the Germans when they rolled into Russia and the Ukraine. German troops were celebrated as liberators, welcomed with open arms and showered with flowers. At that point, the people were ready to follow them, Red Army soldiers wanted to join them and the Germans could have damn-near beat Stalin with hardly a struggle.
Modern day, this is known as "never let a serious crisis go to waste"...Robert Menzies, the prime minister of Australia, observed that Roosevelt, ". . . trained under Woodrow Wilson in the last war, waits for an incident, which would in one blow get the USA into war and get R. out of his foolish election pledges that 'I will keep you out of war.'"
So these exact scenarios were done, one of which was under Roosevelt's term in office?Back in 1932 in the Grand Joint Army Navy Exercises the attacker, Admiral Yarnell, attacked Pearl Harbor with 152 planes a half-hour before dawn 40 miles NE of Kahuku Point and caught the defenders of completely by surprise. It was a Sunday.
Then in 1938 Admiral Ernst King led a carrier-born airstrike from the USS Saratoga successfully against Pearl Harbor in another exercise.
So these exact scenarios were done, one of which was under Roosevelt's term in office?
History is a wonderful thing if only it were true. That History repeats itself and that History never repeats itself are equally true.We don't know or learn history, and of course are doomed to repeat it.