Discussion for article #230135
Just how does this excerpt discuss how FDR “wrangled” the US into WW2? It deals mostly with domestic politics and doesn’t even discuss the efforts to rearm the nation. Besides, FDR never did “wrangle” the US into WW2 but was thrust into by the actions of the Japanese. Even after Pearl Harbor the US did not declare war on Germany until after the Germans had declared war on the US. The Isolationists were mostly winning right up to December 7, 1941. Had Germany done nothing post December 7th, all US attention would have been focused on the Pacific, leaving Germany a much freer hand in the Atlantic and in Europe and Africa. We need either a better excerpt to explain the headline or a headline which describes the excerpt. For now, it’s bait and switch.
Gotta agree, the headline is really crappy click-bait. I wonder how much time Mr. Wapshott spent reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s far superior “No Ordinary Time,” which should be a must-read for FDR junkies.
Is this long book excerpt meant to be a hint and nudge about how Obama should proceed to revitalize America’s involvement in the Levant and southern Russia?
The isolationists were winning in public opinion, but Roosevelt was winning in terms of supplying Britain and France behind their backs (sometimes in defiance ofthe law or his own cabinet secretaries) prior to Pearl Harbor. Of course, if things had gone worse, he would be reviled as a lawbreaker rather than hailed as a hero for that. US attention was always focused on Europe first and foremost.
Rendezvous with Destiny: How Franklin D. Roosevelt and Five Extraordinary Men Took America into the War and into the World by Michael Fullilove (Author) also addresses this situation and time period.
“The Levant” and “southern Russia?” Really?
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News about Obama’s engagement with ISIL and Putin hasn’t gotten to NC yet, eh?
If we got no news, I wouldn’t have recognized the “hey, look at me, I’m willing to signal my solidarity with ISIL and Putin by adopting their terminology” thing. And we certainly got news of this, anyway:
But I guess that’s just western corporate media propaganda, just like all that ridiculous talk of Russia being involved in the forcible annexation of a part of a neighboring state.
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If it’s true that FDR knew about Pearl Harbor and let it happen, it was one of the best decisions in American history. The isolationists would have let things drag out until the war was unwinnable
Roosevelt knew the Japanese were going to launch a lot of big attacks somewhere on the 7th because we’d cracked the Japanese diplomatic code, signal intelligence was tracking a lot of movement (though the Japanese First Air Fleet, steaming to Hawaii, was maintaining radio silence) and knew the text of the ultimatum they were supposed to present right before the attacks almost before their ambassador did. They sent a warning that war was imminent to Husband Kimmel, commander of the Pacific Fleet and to the Army commander there as well as to MacArthur in the Philippines, though was bureaucratic breakdown in the delivery caused, in large part, by the fact that the communications system was shot through with peacetime thinking.
No one knew they were going to bomb Pearl except the Japanese. If FDR had known, we would have started the war with both a causus belli, a battle outcome a lot more like what happened at Midway, and far less pressure to go on the offensive in the Pacific early on. The Pacific War was not the war FDR wanted. The war he wanted was the one he was trying to provoke HItler into declaring with deliberately provocative convey protection operations in the Atlantic. FDR knew Hitler was under no obligation under the 1940 Tripartite Pact to declare war on the U.S. if Japan was the aggressor and thus had no reason to believe letting Japan destroy the Pacific Fleet would get us into the war against Germany. Indeed, after Pearl, there was some consternation in the White House about how to get a declaration of war against Germany out of Congress given the rage focused on Japan until Hitler, in one of those acts of reckless stupid impulsiveness he considered genius, did FDR the favor of declaring war first on December 11.