Roosevelt knew before the attack on Pearl Harbor?? Any truth to this?

According to a website called threeworldwars.com, they believe or have evidence that Roosevelt knew about the attack on Pearl Harbor before it started. The story begins on September 1, 1939, when the war started, Roosevelt was asked by a reporter whether America would stay out of the war and Roosevelt replied: '... I believe we can, and every effort will be made by the Administration to do so.'

Not everyone believed that he would remain neutral, one of the German d'affaires in Washington stated that '... if defeat should threaten the Allies, Roosevelt is determined to go to war against Germany, even in the face of the resistance of his own country.'

As the war continued in Europe, American leaders were trying to get Roosevelt involved in the war even though the people did not want to. He kept promising the American people that the administation would remain neutral should he be re-elected. One person knew better.

observer who isn't convinced that, if Mr. Roosevelt is elected (in 1940), he will drag us into war at the first opportunity, and that, if none presents itself, he will make one.'

Roosevelts first opportunity to involve America in the war first came from the war in the Pacific. It was in August, 1940, that the United States broke the Japanese 'purple' war-time code. This gave the American government the ability to read and understand all of their recoverable war-time messages. Machines were manufactured to de-code Japan's messages, and they were sent all over the world, but none was sent to Pearl Harbor. Also, in August, 1940, the National Guard was voted into Federal service for one year. This was followed in September by the Selective Service Act, also for one year's duration.

on September 28, 1940, when Japan, Germany and Italy signed the Tripartite Treaty, meant that should Japan attack the United States, and the United States responded by declaring war against Japan, it would automatically be at war with the other two nations, Germany and Italy. Now all he had to do is provoke Germany or Japan to attack.

In October, 1940, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox advised Admiral J.O. Richardson, Commander-in-Chief of the American fleet, that the President wants to establish a patrol of the Pacific—a wall of American naval vessels stretched across the western Pacific in such a way as to make it impossible for Japan to reach any of her sources of supply. He said that would be an act of war, and besides, we would lose our navy. Of course Roosevelt had to abandon it.

Admiral Richardson visited Roosevelt twice during 1940 to recommend that the fleet be withdrawn to the west coast of America, because: His ships were inadequately manned for war; The Hawaiian area was too exposed for Fleet training; and The Fleet defenses against both air and submarine attacks were far below the required standards of strength.

That meant that the American government had done nothing to shore up the defenses of Pearl Harbor against an offshore attack since the naval manuevers of 1932 discovered just how vulnerable the island was.

Richardson's reluctance to provide Roosevelt's incident for the United States to enter the war, and his concern about the status of the Fleet, led to his being unexpectedly relieved of the Fleet command in January, 1941.

The American Ambassador to Tokyo, Joseph C. Grew, was one of the first to officially discover that Pearl Harbor was the intended target of the Japanese attack, as he corresponded with President Roosevelt's State Department on January 27, 1941.

Roosevelt and Churchill had conspired together to incite an incident to allow America's entry into the war. According to Churchill.

Germany attacked Russia on June 22, 1941, disregarding the treaty signed. This put more pressure to get the United States involved.

Japan, with no oil industry to speak of, had to look elsewhere for its oil, and this was the reason for the proposed embargo. It was thought that this action would provoke Japan into an incident. Ex-President Herbert Hoover also saw the manipulations leading to war and he warned the United States in August, 1941: 'The American people should insistently demand that Congress put a stop to step-by-step projection of the United States into undeclared war... .'

Congressman Martin Dies, Chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities on August of 1941 assembled a large amount of evidence which more than confirmed the suspicions which we had entertained on the basis of surface appearances: It was clear that the Japanese were preparing to invade Pearl Harbor and that they were in possession of vital military information. This information was made available to the Roosevelt administration by Congressman Dies personally. Early in 1941 the Dies Committee came into possession of a strategic map which gave clear proof of the intentions of the Japanese to make an assault on Pearl Harbor. The strategic map was prepared by the Japanese Imperial Military Intelligence Department.

Sorge was a Russian spy who had infiltrated the German embassy in Japan and when Sorge informed the Kremlin [in Russia] in October, 1941, that the Japanese intended to attack Pearl Harbor within 60 days, he received thanks for his report and the notice that Washington — Roosevelt, Marshall, Admiral Stark, et al. — had been advised of the Japanese intentions.

On November 25,1941, the day that the Japanese fleet sailed for Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt convened a meeting of the various Cabinet officers basicly stating that there may be an attack from the Japanese as soon as a few days.

An army Intelligence officer, in service in the Far East during 1941... had gained knowledge of the Yamamoto plan to send a task force to attack Pearl Harbor and sent three separate messages to Washington revealing this information, and at least two of these reached the Army files well before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The Japanese government sent a message to their Washington embassy on December 6, 1941, in essence breaking off all negotiations with the American government After the message was intercepted by the American government, de-coded and given to Roosevelt, he is quoted as saying: 'This means war.'

Roosevelt now knew that Japan planned on attacking the United States, but still he did nothing about warning the American forces at Pearl Harbor.

And on December 7,1941, Japan launched a 'surprise attack.'

I definately reccommend reading the article which can be found at threeworlds.com and clicking on the ww2 link.

This topic has come up on here before, so you can find material via Google's newsgroup search. In any case the problem with that theory, as always, is that Roosevelt didn't need a successful attack on Pearl Harbor to get the US into the war. A repulsed Japanese attack was more than enough, so it seems ridiculous to believe that he would allow Pearl and the ships there to be damaged to get the US into the war. Not to mention the fact that Pearl wasn't the only US base attacked that day, and a successful defense of Guam, Wake Island, and the Phillipines would have been of great military value to US operations against the Japanese.

tim gueguen 101867

This conspiracy theory has been trotted out at intervals ever since 1942. There is nothing to it.

Any man of sense in Washington at the end of November 1941 knew that this country was going to be at war with Japan within six months, and Roosevelt of course was a man of sense. He probably even welcomed the prospect, provided the thing could have been managed 'without too much damage to ourselves,' as one official put it. The general feeling was that war would come in March.

During the first week of December, there were of course plenty of indications that war was imminent. But the fear factor just hadn't reached a high-enough level. Don't ever underestimate the ability of

that Germany invaded, six months after France had declared war, and how surprised Russia was, despite all the warnings. Indeed, think of how surprised the Germans were at Normandy.

And even if Roosevelt had been absolutely convinced on December 6 that Japan would attack next day, he would have expected the blow to fall on the Philippines. Pearl Harbor was such a success (for the Japanese) because nobody expected it.

all the best

The evidence is greatly against such nonsense.

The story begins on September 1, 1939, when the war This may have been the truth at the time, but Roosevelt was determined to support the Allies. After the fall of France, Roosevelt seems to have been cautiously pushing towards war with Germany, to the extent of starting a naval shooting war.

There is some truth to this, but the US public was changing its mind during this period, becoming less isolationist as it looked as if US participation might be necessary.

Opinion polls conducted showed that members of 'Who's Who', which was a collection of assorted leaders in many walks of life, were much more in favor of going to war than the people in general were. Saying 'the people did not want to' is somewhat misleading, in that while the US people would definitely have preferred to stay out of the war, more and more of them were becoming resigned to the possibility that the US might have to go to war.

If I were to go through the remarks of assorted people, I could find lots of quotes. Doesn't mean they knew anything at the time.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding. Roosevelt wanted to bring the US into war against *Germany*. Disregard that at your peril.

The corollary is that Roosevelt did not want a war against Japan. At best, it would divert resources from the war against Germany. At worst, it would focus public opinion on Japan so that he would have to leave Germany alone.

This is shown in the way he lagged behind his advisers in doing anything that might provoke Japan. He was trailing public opinion in taking economic and diplomatic actions against the Japanese, much as he was leading it against Germany.

It was in August, 1940, that the United

This is very misleading as it stands. Ignore the technical point that Purple was not a code, but rather a machine cipher (although this suggests that you don't fully grasp the technical details), but Purple was a *diplomatic* cipher. It gave the US some advantage, but no government keeps their diplomatic staff advised of possible tactical actions.

Purple helped the US track the likelihood that the Japanese would go to war, although in December 1941 it would have been an ignorant or foolish person who would have been surprised by some sort of Japanese attack. There was nothing about actual Japanese war plans in it.

Pearl Harbor had relatively little use for diplomatic decrypts. The Navy had people working hard on Japanese naval codes at Pearl Harbor. They achieved a good deal of success, but far too late to warn of Pearl Harbor.

Wrong. The Tripartite Treaty provided for German and Italian declarations of war in case the US attacked the Japanese, not the other way around. This is another common misunderstanding.

There is also the fact that Hitler used treaties as if they were toilet paper, having no respect for them, and following them only if thought desirable to Germany at the time. Hitler had broken the anti-Comintern pact in 1939, which caused a good deal of consternation in treaty partner Japan. Why would anybody think Hitler would declare war on the US because of a treaty, especially one that did not require him to do so?

Source?

Right. Roosevelt left it there as a political statement, to try to deter the Japanese from starting something.

If you look at a map, you will see that Pearl Harbor is a long way from the areas the Japanese would be interested in attacking. Putting the fleet there was not making much of a threat to Japan.

Actually, it was his publicly complaining about a Presidential decision. Any officer who publicly complains about his or her superior is likely to be in trouble.

Wrong. That was a South American ambassador's report to Grew that he had reasonably good rumors of a planned Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

In fact, the Japanese Navy had no such plans at the time. What was going on was that the Combined Fleet commander was secretly preparing plans. It is possible that these leaked, I suppose, but it was not until much later that the Japanese navy approved those plans. While Combined Fleet was by far the biggest and most important command, it was not the Japanese navy, and Yamamoto could not authorize such an attack on his own.

Source? This doesn't look like the style of his memoirs.

There was more than one embargo. There was a leaky one in response to Japanese actions earlier, that was a harsh diplomatic statement but didn't stop Japan from getting oil. The embargo that actually did something useful was in response to Japan's occupation of southern Indochina.

Japan had earlier occupied northern Indochina, but that was part of the exceedingly brutal war Japan was waging in China. The occupation of southern Indochina was the first step of Japan's Pacific War, securing resources by military force and gaining bases for later moves.

That was the provocation for the real embargo. At that time, Japan had determined on war with the US, and not putting the embargo in place would mean no more than the US arming an enemy.

This stands discredited, since Japan never made serious plans to invade Pearl Harbor. Any analysis that indicated such an act is therefore wrong, and evidence in support of that misleading. In other words, since Dies was so clearly wrong on something you say was so certain, we need consider him no longer.

This information was made Have you any sort of reliable source for this information? It seems unlikely in the extreme.

A strategic map (presumably meaning one large enough to show both Japan and Pearl Harbor) would not need to have Striking Force operations written down on it. Moreover, the Japanese involved planned the attack in conditions of great security, and Western nations were generally bad at putting spies into secret Japanese operations. Information that seemed to come from spies was usually from decryption, and that gave no good warning of the attack.

In other words, I consider this to be a complete fabrication.

It is typical quasi-history stuff.

It reminds me of Carl Sagan and the argument he had with the prolific writer of fanciful 'Bermuda Triangle' stuff, Immanuel Velikovsky

This is a common claim made by many people with a unifying thread, a lack of evidence to back up the claims.

The web site quotes Lyndon Larouche and is dedicated to the

'opportunity to learn about the Conspiratorial Nature of History, and how all events of historical significance have been planned and engineered.'

Of course under those rules then the conspiracy is the web site, since it is all conspiracy, correct?

Since conspiracies cause all the important events presumably we can learn things like FDR wearing green socks is a code for all clear perhaps? There has been a conspiracy to cover up the clothing colour code of course.

Quite correct, if the Europeans could restrict the war to Europe the US could stay out of it, especially an allied victory. Things changed dramatically in June 1940.

It would be nice to have a date for this.

I see the flat statements needed to provide 'proof'. US public opinion changed over the 1939 to 1941 period, as the Nazis and Japanese Militarists made it clear what sort of plans they wanted to impose on the rest of the world.

Only one person 'knew better'? Yet we have all these quotes from people 'knowing better'.

Yes folks, apparently these machines enabled the US to decode Japanese diplomatic messages, IJN messages and IJA messages.

Purple was a Japanese Diplomatic Service code machine, a single code, it was never used by the IJN or IJA, and the Diplomatic Service had other codes in use as well.

The machines were sent to Washington, the Philippines, London and one was on the way/delivered to Singapore as the war began. All over the world appears to mean three locations. The Manila consulate and the Washington and London embassies were using Purple.

The Japanese consulate in Hawaii used older codes, not Purple.

See the pattern? So why should Hawaii receive a machine?

You forgot the two ocean navy bill and the increases authorised for the USAAF. By the way with a significant percentage of the world at war is the idea the US should have done nothing to at least make itself more secure? Especially after the fall of France?

Note these measures were well before the presidential election in 1940.

Yes folks, here comes the fiction, the tripartite pact said
http://wiretap.area.com/Gopher/Gov/US-History/WWII/ tripartite.txt

'ARTICLE THREE

Germany, Italy and Japan agree to co-operate in their efforts on aforesaid lines. They further undertake to assist one another with all political, economic and military means when one of the three contracting powers is attacked by a power at present not involved in the European war or in the Chinese-Japanese conflict.'

Note the US had to attack Japan, not the other way around. Just like Japan did not go to war when Germany attacked the USSR, Germany did not have to go to war if Japan attacked the US.

The tripartite pact was written in English, there are no translation problems here.

The common thread in the conspiracy theories is lack of evidence.

This is a new one, a wall of ships across the Pacific, a distant blockade of Japan. Why? What were the Japanese buying from places in the Americas apart from the US? Surely a US trade embargo would be quite effective and a known diplomatic gesture as opposed to the war measure of blockade.

By the way the Japanese were buying lots of stuff from Asia and even Australia and New Zealand in the 1940 time period. Those oil wells in the Dutch East Indies for example.

In 1936 the US was around 1/3 of all Japanese trade by value. India came in next at 13%, Manchuria 7%, Australia 7%, China 6%. As the world went to war the importance of Japanese trade with the US went up.

In 1940 the IJN could attack Pearl Harbor in one of 2 ways,

1) Four fleet carriers from the mandated Islands 2) One Fleet carrier from Japan.

The IJN did not know how to do refuelling at sea and there were only 4 fleet carriers. In 1940 the IJN was introducing its new fighter, the Zero and dive bomber, the 'Val'. So the threat at the start of the year was weaker than at the end.

Add the USN fleet problem XIX in1938 as well, the defence of Hawaii.

In January 1940 the islands had 1 fighter group defending them, out of 7 USAAF fighter groups, in February a bomber group arrived and in May 1941 a second fighter group, so the islands had 2 out of 24 fighter groups.

In the 1940/41 period the army strength was increased, including reorganising into two 'triangular' divisions.

The USN built more warships and activated reserve ships as well as increasing the manpower levels of the forces. It had enough patrol aircraft to cover the approaches from the Mandated Islands.

The Pacific fleet had three fleet aircraft carriers, versus 4 IJN. Shokaku and Zuikaku were still undertrained during the attack, as they had only joined the fleet a few months previously.

Yes it seems the fictional blockade is to be used as the justification for the Admiral's removal. As opposed to the reality his opposition to staying in Hawaii was a major factor, the usual story the boss is right.

In fact Grew was really one of the first, he did so before the IJN actually found out about it. Since in January 1941 the only thing going around IJN circles was Yamamoto's request for a study, a very much 1 on 1 affair.

No thought given to the fact the Taranto raid had occurred 2 months previously and the lessons learnt had just made it back to Japan? Copycat boast as opposed to plan?

There was Japanese speculation about attacking Pearl Harbor in the mid 1930s as well.

Yes another assertion without any proof.

The fact Japan did not automatically declare war on the USSR should make it clear why the tripartite pact did not mean Germany would automatically declare war on the US if Japan attacked the US.

As opposed to oil being an essential item in Japan's attempts to conquer China.

After reading 'Breaking the Emperor's Codes' (Michael Smith), I had a fresh appreciation of the code-reader's job. It was not like flicking a switch; it was always a work in progress.

And after reading a bunch of Japanese books with a translator, I had a fresh appreciation of the difficulties of reading Japanese, even when uncoded (or unciphered, a better word).

all the best