FDR & WWII

The preponderance of citizenry in the USA was decidedly against entering into WWII; from after WWI until 1941, US foreign policy was dominated by isolationists determined to prevent entry into another European war. Opinion polls conducted just months before Pearl Harbor show that 70 to 80% of Americans opposed entering the war in Europe.
With the Neutrality Act of 1935, Congress had passed a series of laws designed to minimize American potential involvement with belligerent nations. Shipping arms from the USA to any combatant nation was banned (in 1937, Congress passed an even more stringent act). As WWII began (with Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939), Congress and most of the American public continued to favor neutrality. President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed that peace-loving nations quarantine aggressors, but his proposal created such alarm that he quickly backed off from it. Although well aware that the public wanted America to stay out of the war, Roosevelt was determined to do all he could to thwart Hitler. In October, 1938, he held secret talks with French officials on how to bypass the neutrality laws and allow purchase of US aircraft (which the French couldn’t even pay for). Inadvertent disclosure of these talks led to major isolationist uproar against Roosevelt, and a Senate probe. Because of the prevalence of isolationism, Roosevelt made a series of contradictory statements to the American people. In the winter of 1939 he warned that France and Britain were America's “first line of defense”, and required American aid; meanwhile he also claimed that he was following an isolationist foreign policy that would do nothing to involve the US in another war. When the French offered up colonized islands in the Caribbean and Pacific to pay for aircraft, orders were placed; when the aircraft were ready, they were diverted to the British, as France had already been overrun by Germany. FDR continued in secret negotiations to assist Britain and France, against the wishes of the public and laws passed by its other representatives.
After France fell, FDR pursued his policy by aiding the British against Germany, facilitating the placing of British orders for munitions and making various arrangements for the transfer of surplus American war matériel to them. On September 2, 1940, FDR openly defied the Neutrality Acts by passing the Destroyers for Bases Agreement, which gave Britain 50 WWI-era US destroyers in exchange for 99-year leases on 8 British naval and air bases in the British Caribbean Islands and Newfoundland. British PM Churchill believed that that exchange set in motion a process towards US entry into the war which no one could stop, and indeed, soon FDR had persuaded Congress to revise the 1935 Neutrality Act. By December, ’40, Britain had placed orders for war materials far in excess of what they could possibly muster the dollar exchange to finance, and in March, ‘41 a Lend-Lease agreement began to direct massive military and economic aid to Britain and the Republic of China. Before long the Soviet Union was included in this. The Lend-Lease Act empowered FDR to transfer defense materials, services, and information to any foreign government whose defense he deemed vital to that of the United States, and left to his discretion what he should ask in return. From the time of the German invasion of the USSR, FDR was clearly determined to aid the Soviet Union, but the American public’s suspicions of that country, and Communism in general, delayed his declaring that country eligible for lend-lease - until November 1941. American deliveries of aircraft, tanks, and other supplies to the USSR began shortly thereafter.
By raising the specter of a German invasion of the Western Hemisphere, FDR convinced Congress to enact the first peacetime military draft, a decisive step in preparing the United States to enter the war. As opinion polls showed the American public heavily favoring a policy of “all aid short of war” to Britain, at least, and isolationist sentiment remained strong, FDR's campaign for US intervention had to remain deceptive. He made an unqualified promise to a Boston audience on October 30, 1940: “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” When the Japanese sank an American gunboat on the Yangtze River early in December, ’41, most Americans feared that the attack would lead to war, and were pleased that FDR accepted Japan's apologies. Meanwhile he secretly stepped up a program to build long-range submarines that could blockade Japan.
By December 1941, the Axis Powers of Germany, Italy and Japan were doing well; Hitler’s troops dominated most of Western Europe and were attacking Moscow. Japan had control of the islands of the South Pacific. Germany had colonies in the Congo, Togoland and Cameroon. Italy controlled an “empire” in East Africa (Tripoli and much of Libya, Somaliland, Eritrea and parts of Ethiopia, plus the Juba (Giuba) Valley on the Kenya-Somali frontier). Fascist Spain had its Río de Oro protectorate to the southern frontier of Morocco. The rise of factories, mass urbanization and coordination within world markets had made for a world economy, and the Axis Powers developed a new colonial doctrine (“living space” in German geopolitics, the “co-prosperity sphere” in Japan) aiming at the repartition of the world's colonial areas, justified by the supposed racial superiority, higher birth rates, and greater productivity that the Axis Powers enjoyed as against the “decadent” West. To this the Japanese added a slogan of their own, “Asia for the Asians.” The Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, Japan's new order, amounted to a self-contained empire from Manchuria to the Dutch East Indies, including China, Indochina, Thailand, and Malaya as satellite states. Japan intended to exclude both European imperialism and Communist influence from the entire Far East, while ensuring Japanese political and industrial hegemony.
There was enormous pressure on the US to enter the war. When, on July 26, in pursuance of a new agreement with Vichy France, Japanese forces had begun occupying bases in southern Indochina, FDR froze Japanese assets under US control, imposed an embargo on oil to Japan and restricted exports to Japan of other supplies essential to making war. Dismay at the embargo drove the Japanese naval command, which had hitherto been more moderate than the army, into collusion with the army’s extremism. Japan tried to negotiate restoration of trade in curtailed supplies, particularly petroleum products and scrap metals (which Prescott Bush was still supplying to Germany). Negotiations failed, and Japanese leaders planned an attack on the United States - which may have been exactly what Roosevelt wanted. By backing Japan into a corner and forcing it to make war on the US, he’d become able to enter the European war. He’d pushed Japan into a corner, provoking it into attacking enticing bait at Pearl Harbor. Some even say the attack was seen by the Japanese as a preemptive strike to prevent an imminent US assault.
This was done using “8 insults”, including a total blockade of Japanese oil imports, forbidding Japan use of Panama canal (impeding Japanese access to Venezuelan oil), freezing all Japanese assets in the United States; making public loans to Nationalist China, and supplying military aid to the British (in violation of international war rules). Also, keeping the U.S. Fleet in the vicinity of Hawaii rather than returning it to San Diego, and sending two divisions of submarines into the Orient. Demands that Japan could not concede included renunciation of the Tripartite Pact (which would have left Japan not only diplomatically isolated, but economically, as the Triartite Axis powers had gained control of about half of the world economy) and withdrawal of Japanese troops from China and Southeast Asia (to which it had invested in an overt commitment of over four years' standing). The success of the Flying Tigers (a volunteer air group) in downing about 100 Japanese military aircraft, mostly bombers, was seen by the Japanese as part of these insults. The Japanese could see no point in continuing the talks; peace with the US seemed impossible, so Japan set in motion plans for war, which would now be waged not only against the USA, but also against Great Britain (the Far Eastern colonies of which lay within the orbit of the projected Japanese expansion) and the Dutch East Indies (the oil of which was now essential).

In the ’30s, factions in Japan argued that rapid population growth and industrialization necessitated large imports of food and raw materials (to produce merchandise to export for funds to pay for the imported food). The notion that expansion through military conquest would solve
Japan's economic problems gained popularity. This was exactly what the newly powerful Western Barbarians had done. Chinese and Japanese efforts in the League of Nations, towards securing racial equality, had been rejected by Western statesmen; Western tariffs limited exports, and it became easy to argue that Japan had no recourse but to use force. Rightist theorists found ready audiences, eager to hear about preparing to take the leadership of a revolutionary Asia. Japanese action in Manchuria began in 1928, unauthorized by government. On September 18, 1931, the Mukden (or Manchurian) Incident, launched Japanese aggression in East Asia. Manchuria was soon occupied, and an emboldened military plotted governmental control. After terrorist attacks in Tokyo, murders of important statesmen and a military revolt successfully put down, the influence of young extremists gave way to more conservative officers less concerned with domestic reform, but still sharing many of the foreign-policy goals of the young fanatics. The only possible source of prestige sufficient to thwart the military lay with the throne. The young emperor Hirohito, enthroned in 1926, had taken as his reign name Shōwa (“Enlightened Peace”); his outlook was relatively progressive. His interests lay in marine biology, and he’d traveled in the West. But international criticism of Japan's colonialist aggressions caused many Japanese to support the army. Japan poured technicians and capital into Manchukuo (its name for Manchuria), exploiting its rich resources to establish the base for the heavy-industry complex that was to undergird its “new order” in East Asia, and by 1934, Japan had made it clear that it would brook no interference in its China policy. On July 7, 1937, Japanese troops engaged Chinese units at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing. Japan soon took Nanking, Han-k'ou and Canton (Kwangtung), while also invading some of China's northern provinces and Inner Mongolia.
In November 1936 Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany, which replaced by the Tripartite Pact of September 1940. In this, Japan, Germany, and Italy agreed to assist each other in event of attack, and recognized Japan as the leader of a new order in Asia. The Soviets were invited to sign this agreement later in 1940, but Japanese relations with the Soviet Union weren’t so good. The Soviets had sold the Chinese Eastern Railway to the South Manchurian Railway in 1935, thus strengthening Manchukuo, but in 1938 and ’39 Soviet and Japanese armies fought in full-scale battles along the border of Manchukuo. In April ’41 a neutrality pact was signed with the Soviet Union, with Germany acting as intermediary.
Japanese-German ties weren’t very close or effective, as distance, distrust, and claims of racial superiority greatly separated them. The Japanese were uninformed about Nazi plans for attacking the Soviet Union, and the Germans weren’t told of Japan’s plans to attack Pearl Harbor. Nor, despite formal statements of rapport, was Japan nearly as totalitarian as the Nazis. The emperor was largely a symbol, albeit an increasingly military one; no other leader could compete without endangering the national polity. Much social and economic thought retained important vestiges of traditional agrarianism and familism; Japan’s interest in a New World Order was not complete.
To a sophisticated Japanese, a 1930s European can no more have seemed an exemplar of civilization than did the Incas or Aztecs, even those at the top levels of their society, to the Spaniards with their blunderbusses, or politically and agriculturally advanced Iroquois to the superstitious English colonialists. The Japanese had been as civilized as any for millennium. Babylon, Persia, Constantinople, Egypt, China, Angkor, the Moguls, the Mongols, had all had their day and more – and like these many others, and even the French and English, the Japanese felt they had a mission to civilize. And a duty to themselves to return upstart Europeans to a more proper place in the system of things. Asians had no need to tolerate European disdain, the Japanese surely felt. And were they not the best of the Asians?
In its article on all this, used here, Encyclopedia Britannica claims that “Japan was the only Asian country to escape colonization from the West.” This simply isn’t so: Siam wasn’t either. And as everyone else does, the author forgot Mongolia. But Japan HAD beaten an European power in war, in 1905, and by any unprejudiced standard, the Japanese were more civilized than most Europeans. That they were also at least as arrogant is another matter. Japan had successfully resisted the kind of subjugation, informal or formal, to which the rest of Asia succumbed. It had also industrialized, as much as Europe and the United States. Instead of being colonized it became one of the colonial powers.
The Japanese, well aware of the implications of foreign penetration (especially through observing events in China), had tried to limit Western trade to two ports. For years, only the Dutch and Chinese were allowed trading depots, each getting access to but one port. No other foreigners were allowed to land in Japan, though Russia, France, and England tried and tried. The USA’s Commodore Perry, in effort to guarantee and strengthen US shipping interests in the Far East, led successful naval expeditions to Japan (1853, 1854), and in 1858, a full commercial treaty with the USA was signed. Similar treaties with the Dutch, Russia, France and Britain followed. The pattern was familiar: more ports were opened; resident foreigners got extraterritorial rights; and import and export duties were predetermined, removing control that Japan would otherwise exercise over its foreign trade. But the invasive foreign powers had become preoccupied with other affairs, including quite pressing ones: the 1857 Indian mutiny, the Taiping Rebellion, the Crimean War, French intervention in Mexico, and the US Civil War. Dangers from foreign intervention, the rise of commerce, and a disaffected peasantry disrupting traditional feudal society contributed to an intense Japanese power struggle, and to revolutionary change. In a thoroughgoing modernization program, railways, ships, modern communications and machinery were built, bringing Japan the economic and military strength to continue resisting foreign interference. A concentration of resources in the industrial sector was matched by social reforms that eliminated many feudal restrictions, accelerating mass education and encouraging development of skills useful with Western technology.
As Japan followed the Western path of internal industrialization, it also began an outward aggression resembling that of the European nations. First it colonized the neighboring Ryukyu Islands (including Okinawa), Kuril Islands, Bonin Islands, and Hokkaido. Next was Korea, but opposition by other powers postponed the transformation of Korea into a true colony. The pursuit of influence in Korea got Japan in war with China (1894–95), at the end of which China recognized Japan’s interest in Korea and also ceded Taiwan, the Pescadores, and southern Manchuria. At this point rival powers interceded to force Japan to forgo taking over the southern Manchuria peninsula. While France, Britain, and Germany were involved in seeking to frustrate Japan's imperial ambitions, the most direct clash was with Russia over Korea and Manchuria to Japan. Japan became able to hold its own in modern warfare and in 1905 thoroughly humiliated Russia in war. This got Japan a lease of the Liaotung Peninsula, the southern part of the island of Sakhalin, and recognition of its “paramount interest” in Korea. Japan began colonizing Korea and Taiwan.

Even with war breaking out in Europe in 1939, the US public resisted involvement abroad. From 1934 to 1939, the Soviet Union had been the most uncompromising opponent of Nazi Germany. Moscow's desire for a broad antifascist coalition was made most manifest during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), when the Soviet Union was the only country besides Mexico to in any serious way aid the Spanish Republicans against the armies of Franco (supported by Hitler and Mussolini).
The European war presented the Japanese with tempting opportunities. After the Nazi attack on Russia in 1941, the Japanese were torn between German urgings to join the war against the Soviets and their natural inclination to seek richer prizes from the European colonial territories to the south. In 1940 Japan occupied northern Indochina in an attempt to block access to supplies for the Chinese Nationalists, and in July 1941 it announced a joint protectorate with Vichy France over the whole colony. By late 1941 the USA had severed practically all commercial and financial relations with Japan; Japan continued to negotiate with the US, up to the day of the Pearl Harbor attack, but was regularly and severely rebuffed.
To achieve its aims, Japan needed oil; with the cut-off by the USA, the Japanese determined to seize sources of oil production in the Dutch East Indies.
Japan’s war aims were to establish a “new order in East Asia,” built on a “co-prosperity” (including a “yen bloc”) and “East Asia for the Asiatics,” concept that placed Japan at the centre of a huge economic empire that would draw on the raw materials of the rich colonies of Southeast Asia while inspiring these to friendship and alliance not only by freeing them from imperialism, but by destroying their previous masters. That they went about this with extreme brutalism is not going unchallenged here, it is simply not the point (whether US brutality in its bombing and other campaigns can be excused, or not). The Japanese claimed that Asians had been weakened by colonialism, and it was Japan’s place to “make men of them again.” It’s been argued that, if the Japanese had only been more respectful of other Asians, no military defeat could then have taken away the trust and gratitude gained, and that that would have mattered a great deal in making a postwar world in which Asia could come into her own, but again, that’s getting a bit off-track from the main subject here, which is whether the US was forced, or led, into the war.
With the aim of securing the Pacific, an attack on Pearl Harbor was launched from 275 miles north of Hawaii, with 360 torpedo planes, bombers, and fighters. A US Army private who noticed this large flight of planes on his radar screen was told to ignore them (purportedly as a flight of B-17s from the United States was expected). The ships resting in the harbor were easy targets, as it was Sunday morning, they weren’t fully manned. US military aircraft were lined up on the airfields, and very few were able to take off and resist the attack. Most of the damage to the battleships was inflicted in the first 30 minutes of the assault. Eight battleships, three cruisers, and three destroyers were sunk, and other vessels damaged. More than 180 aircraft were destroyed. U.S. military casualties totaled more than 3,400, including more than 2,300 killed. The Japanese lost maybe 15% of their planes, plus five midget submarines, a fleet submarine or two, and fewer than 100 men. However, the three aircraft carriers attached to the Pacific Fleet weren’t at Pearl Harbor at the time. They escaped and six of the eight battleships were repaired and returned to service. Strangely, Japanese had failed to destroy the important oil storage facilities on the island. Although it’s said that Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, the commander in chief of Japan's Combined Fleet, had planned the attack against the US Pacific Fleet with great care, the attack appears to me more as impetuosity in response to provocation; as often is the case with an angry response to provocation, the air-raid was hardly as effective as it could have been: shipyard facilities, a power station, a submarine base, and signals intelligence units remained unscathed.

The very next day, both the US Congress (with but one dissenting vote by Representative Jeannette Rankin of Montana, who’d also voted against U.S. entry into WWI) and the Netherlands declared war on Japan. The day after that, Australia did. After 4 days, Germany and Italy had declared war on the USA.
Admiral Husband Kimmel and Lieutenant General Walter Short, the Navy and Army commanders on Oahu (where Pearl Harbor is), were relieved of duty; official investigations were begun at once, and accusations against President Roosevelt of having invited the attack (or at least done nothing to stop it) ensued. It was subsequently proclaimed that, while US officials had been aware that an attack by Japan was likely, they’d no knowledge of when or where it would occur. Decoded Japanese cables had asked for specific locations of US ships at anchor, and for the dispositions of warships and airplanes guarding Pearl Harbor; US Naval listening posts plotted Japanese movements across the Pacific towards Pearl Harbor. The Japanese admirals, for whatever strange reason, engaged in extensive radio communications with one another as they were approaching Pearl Harbor, and these were intercepted. But this information wasn’t given to Admiral Kimmel and General Short. On November 27th President Roosevelt had had a message to his Hawaiian and Philippine commanders: Don’t interfere with Japan’s overt act of war. He didn’t want Pearl Harbor adequately defended. And so, the first entirely carrier-based air assault in military history destroyed much at the US base at Pearl Harbor. By December 19, a Senate investigation into the “unprepared” state of the US Navy had been proposed, but FDR headed off investigation by appointing a board of inquiry, headed by a Supreme Court Justice. It charged Kimmel and Short with dereliction of duty. Key evidence as to what really happened was ordered destroyed on December 11, 1941, but enough remains to fully substantiate what really happened (see “Day of Deceit, the Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor” by Robert B. Stinnett, © 2000, Touchstone Books of Simon & Schuster, Inc., NY). In September 1944, less than two months before Roosevelt stood for his fourth election, Republican Representative Forest Harness of Indiana made the first congressional charge about a Pearl Harbor conspiracy, saying that three days before Pearl Harbor, the Australian government had warned Washington of a Japanese aircraft carrier headed towards Hawaii, but that information was kept from Kimmel and Short. As significant information was kept from view, again, nothing happened.

During the Pearl Harbor raid, the rest of the Japanese Navy was supporting the army in a “Southern Operation”: 11 infantry divisions and seven tank regiments, assisted by 795 combat planes, undertook two drives: one from Formosa through the Philippines, the other from French Indochina and Hainan Island invaded Thailand and started through Malaya to Singapore. They were to converge on the Dutch East Indies, with a view to the capture of Java as the culmination of a campaign of 150 days, during which Wake Island, Guam, the Gilbert Islands, and Burma were to be made into outer bastions. Soon the Japanese had Hong Kong (attacked December 8, it fell the 25th), Manila was taken in January 1942, Singapore on February 15, and the Dutch East Indies and Rangoon (capital of Burma, not all of which has ever been under central control) in early March. The Allies lost ability to easily maintain communications with Australia. Japan invaded the Dutch East Indies on 10 January 1942, with the rubber plantations and oil fields of the Dutch East Indies, which were crucial for the Japanese war effort, as their main objective. Allied forces were quickly overwhelmed by the Japanese and on 8 March 1942 the Royal Dutch East Indies Army surrendered. The Japanese had expected to fortify their new holdings, making re-conquest so expensive that it would discourage the “soft” democracies. Instead, the US fleet was quickly rebuilt, and defenses of newly conquered territories were soon breached. The Battle of Midway in June 1942 cost the Japanese fleet four aircraft carriers and many seasoned pilots, and the war went downhill for them from there. The Japanese had regained access to oil, but were never able to effectively tap the riches of the newly conquered territories. Ambitions towards Australia, New Zealand, India and even Alaska were clearly grandiose, but with a less duplicitous US leader, who knows how far the Japanese could have gone – at least for a while… Japan thought that since it made successful inroads with some Islamic peoples, it should issue "A message to all Muslims in China from the Chinese Islamic Association for National Salvation" – but propaganda like that wasn’t found convincing.
My interest here isn’t in justifying the Japanese, or even excusing them, nor in disparaging FDR (whom overall I rather approve of, as far as Presidents go). My interest is in disrupting the illusion of democracy, and also of justifiable war. It’s become clear to me that the USA has always gone to war for the same reasons the Japanese did – it’s just business. As it was to Babylonians, Persians, Aztecs, Incas, Pharaohs, Moguls, Mongols, and a horde of others. Sometimes, maybe, war has been about matters other than keeping the tribe healthily fed, but as our new wars with no clear justification stretch on and on, it behooves us to look closely at precedents, to seek out parallels and better answers than we’re getting. We’ve never fought for peace or democracy, or even justice. There’s no real reason to think that’s what we’re doing now. And the soldiers who die, die for no more than pay, while “collateral damage” occurs so that we can indulge ourselves. We’re still a long way from civilized. We’ve insufficient mechanisms of community to take care even of our own – the mentally ill, imprisoned and impoverished are all at record levels. We’re just about business, and so uncivilized as to say that’s OK.

FDR and his advisers knew there’d be important Japanese military action on December 6–7. Most historians say that they didn’t know where the attack would come, that intercepted Japanese diplomatic and military messages indicated an attack somewhere, but that information suggested the target would be British, Dutch, or French. The British, Dutch, French and American military forces in the entire Pacific region west of Hawaii amounted to only about 350,000 troops, most lacking combat experience (and including many disparate nationalities). Allied air power in the Pacific was weak, consisting mostly of obsolete planes. If the Japanese, with their large, well-equipped and battle-hardened armies could quickly launch coordinated attacks, they could overwhelm Allied forces and overrun the entire western Pacific Ocean as well as Southeast Asia. Then those areas’ resources could be used to Japan’s military-industrial advantage. The Japanese planned to establish a strongly fortified defensive perimeter extending from Burma to the southern rim of the Dutch East Indies and northern New Guinea and on to the Gilbert and Marshall islands. The Japanese believed that any American and British counteroffensives against this perimeter could be repelled, after which those nations would eventually seek a negotiated peace that would allow Japan to keep her newly won empire. The only truly important impediment to this plan was the American fleet at Pearl Harbor.
The US had broken Japanese encryption codes in 1940, and knew what was going to happen, when and where: US Naval intelligence intercepted and translated hundreds of transmissions to the Japanese attack fleet while it was en-route to Hawaii, dispatches which left no doubt that Pearl Harbor was to be the target of a Japanese attack. US casualties of 2476 people could have been prevented, but triggering US entry into the war had been deemed more important. Despite giving the information to the British, FDR didn’t give it to his troops in Hawaii. His administration failed to notify the military of decoded Japanese messages indicating that an attack would take place on December 6–7.
Interestingly, despite the amazing lack of military preparedness at Pearl Harbor, enough of the Pacific Fleet, including 3 aircraft carriers, remained available to enter into war. The aircraft carriers were out of port, at sea, at the time of the attack, and so escaped harm and became the nucleus of US military action in the Pacific. The Japanese attack also failed in other crucial respects: Pearl Harbor’s shore installations and oil-storage facilities also escaped damage. Oil stores of 5 million barrels, plus dry docks and repair facilities like machine shops, and the electrical grid all remained unharmed, and quite useful to the US military. Also, the attack unified the American public and swept away most remaining support for American neutrality.
Clearly, FDR had used deceitful tactics to increase US involvement gradually and to stir up pro-war sentiments in the American public. He obviously believed - with good reason - that he could obtain a public consensus in favor of war only if the country were attacked by a foreign power. Circumstances surrounding the attack on Pearl Harbor, when interpreted in light of Roosevelt’s behavior in preceding years, strongly suggest that he intentionally provoked the Japanese attack. Perhaps it was right of FDR to carefully not commit the USA to greater involvement in fighting than public opinion would support, while doing all he could to contain the Axis powers, but he clearly did not stay within the letter of the law, nor adhere to clear public sentiments. The people of the US were deceived, treated as if their opinions were uninformed, and democracy is but a process of choosing who is to be informed. Democracy may indeed be but a process of choosing who is to be informed, but I, for one, don’t much like things that way.