Today marks the anniversary of Imperial Japan’s attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor. The late and very great blogger Neptunus Lex (Captain Carroll LeFon, USN) wrote about entering Pearl Harbor aboard the USS Constellation, when returning from his first cruise in 1987.
4 thoughts on “December 7, 1941”
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It’s practically impossible to think of anything to say about Pearl Harbor that hasn’t been said a thousand times before, let alone new. I won’t presume to, but will exploit combinatorics to attempt something interesting.
My first observation is that the only surprising thing about the attack was that anyone was surprised. Gordon Prange’s “At Dawn We Slept” lays this out in detail. Superficially, this would seem counterintuitive. There was no war in the Pacific. Japan’s adventures were almost entirely confined to the Asian mainland. America as well as Russia were providing some aid to the Chinese forces while the Nationalists and Communists were spending nearly as much effort fighting each other as the Japanese. The Communists would eventually sit out most of the war, husbanding their resources for the coming fight with the Nationalists. America had ceased to supply Japan with oil and scrap steel, but only a madman would have attacked such an overwhelming power over that. The parallels to 9/11 are striking and not in any way flattering to the American intelligence apparatus.
By late 1941, Roosevelt had been unsuccessfully inviting some pretext for entering the war for more than two years. Many have argued that his willful inattention to the Pacific while ratcheting up pressure on Japan was just another facet of this strategy. The problem with this is that a war with Japan was not the war he wanted. He was almost completely focused on the war in Europe and it was far from clear that a war with Japan was bound to spread in that direction. Specifically, nothing committed Germany and Italy to supporting Japan’s aggression. Hitler’s mistake was to declare war so promptly, certainly unsurprising after so much provocation, when delaying it, even for a few months, might have allowed so much American momentum in the direction of the Pacific to build up that the Europe first and foremost strategy might have been impossible.
MCS: “My first observation is that the only surprising thing about the attack was that anyone was surprised. Gordon Prange’s “At Dawn We Slept” lays this out in detail.”
Robert Stinnett covered the same ground in his 2000 book “Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor”. The evidence is compelling that FDR did everything he could to encourage a Japanese attack, including ensuring “surprise” by deliberately preventing US observation of the Japanese fleet as it crossed the Pacific. Sean McMeekin’s 2021 book “Stalin’s War” lays out how much effort FDR put into supporting Stalin to make a world safe for communism, even to the extent of short-changing US forces.
This raises one of those interesting historical “What Ifs”. What if Hitler had been Machiavellian and had not immediately declared war on the US, as required by the German-Japanese treaty?
Re: Stinnett’s book. I found it convincing. I recommond reading the paperback edition, which has more FOIA corroboration of his hypothesis.
And also read the McCollom memo from October 7, 1940, which lays out the actions taken by the Roosevelt administration.
• McCollom memo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCollum_memo
• Full text: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/McCollum_memorandum
• McCollom career: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_H._McCollum
The treaty between Berlin and Tokyo only required the Germans to jump into a defensive war, and despite FDR’s provocations (sanctions, arms and volunteers for the Chinese) the Japanese hadn’t actually been attacked by the Americans.
That’s one of the reasons the German declaration of war comes up so often in “what if” scenarios.