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"Throughout 1941," wrote Stinnett, "provoking Japan into an overt act of war
was the principal policy that guided FDR's actions toward Japan." And
Stinnett's documentation is persuasive.
Perhaps the most shocking of Roosevelt's actions was the
deployment of American cruisers and submarines to the Far East, adjacent to
Japan's vital shipping lanes. But in strategic terms, the significant
discovery was Stinnett's documentation of how Roosevelt conspired to clear
the Northern Pacific of American ships and planes to shield the advance of
the Japanese Navy against detection. Had the Japanese been detected, they
might have withdrawn their carrier strike force and refused to start a
conflict without the advantage of surprise.
In 1986 I had the opportunity to ask President Roosevelt's son, James
Roosevelt, about the strategy the U.S. government had followed in 1941.
James had worked on his father's staff at the time, and openly admitted that
Japan was provoked intentionally with the embargo (Japan had almost no other
sources of oil).
"Why did your father provoke Japan with the blockade," I asked, "when all
Japan had to do was attack Britian and the Dutch East Indies, leaving our
forces alone?"
James Roosevelt smiled faintly and replied, "We were confident how they
would react."
This answer puzzled me at the time, but after reading Stinnett's book the
answer falls neatly into place. The Japanese militarists were fools who did
not understand America's isolationist character. President Roosevelt's
intelligence officers, on the U.S. side, had intercepted all of Japan's
vital communications. If the Japanese did not understand us, we certainly
understood them. Japan's codes had been broken. The White House was reading
the Imperial mind, anticipating every Japanese move.
Japan's intelligence failure was fatal to her miltiary ambition. If
Stinnett is right, the United States led Japan into a trap which also caught
up Hitler and Mussolini, destroying the Axis completely. All that was left
of the dictatorships was Stalin, who had fallen out with Hitler in 1941 and
ended up joining the Allies.
Was Roosevelt an evil man for the way he conducted U.S. foreign policy in
1941?
I doubt that a Jew, whose parents died at Auschwitz, would say so. I doubt
that the suffering Chinese would say so. And from Roosevelts action America
emerged to be the world's leading power, providing a stable basis for peace
and development across the planet.
Do the ends justify the means?
This is something Americans will have to think about.
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