Did Franklin D. Roosevelt have prior knowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack?

Answer 1

There's none, absolutely none nor will there ever be because the theory doesn't make any sense. Why would FDR risk losing the Pacific Fleet? If the Japs attack Pearl, that means war, regardless of the body count. Theories that talk of enticing the Japanese face two problems - 1) every message that went out to Pacific commanders warned them not to do anything to give the Japanese an excuse for war, to the extent of not carrying out intellignece gathering by aircraft. Those messages and orders are part of the historical record and cannot be explained away by revisionists. 2) All of the diplomatic and historical record clearly shows that FDR (and everyone else in the military) did not want war in the Pacific and a two ocean war. Nor did Churchill want any such thing. Only those ignorant of pre war activities in Washington are in the weak position of being susceptible to the various flat-out lies pushed by the revisionists. Prange's The Verdict of History is a good book to learn who knew what, when and what actions they took. It also destroys several of the more prominent revisionists books, chapter and verse.

AnswerThe "hardest" evidence is FDR's own decisions!

He made a whole string of what I would call "goading actions" that he perfectly well knew would hem in the Japanese leadership and drive them towards war with the USA/Western powers. He boxed them in. Will anyone claim it was an "accidental" boxing in, or completely unintentional?

Oil. On FDR's oil decisions alone, he KNEW Japan would have to take action, sooner rather than later. Iron.

Then there's the little matter of FDR openly violating the USA's self-declared "neutrality" by supplying war materials and arms to Britain, which was already at war with Japan in Asia over British colonies and Empire territory/armies!

Could any reasonable person take that kind of action and NOT expect (or want) the obvious result?

AnswerThe eyewitness account of Tyler Kent is hard to dismiss.

Tyler Kent was the code operator at the American embassy in London who was taking messages in 1940(!) between FDR and Churchill (who was NOT even prime minister yet!).

Whether Pearl Harbor itself or some other ruse/provocation, the evidence is there that FDR wanted war and fully intended to goad Japan into it. (He probably thought, accurately enough, that the American public would never go along with a declaration of war on Germany under any other circumstances.)

Get the book, __The Case of Tyler Kent__, if you can find it, for the whole background on the coded messages.

AnswerSuggest you read two selections from historians. The first historian is Charles Callan Tansill who wrote: "Back Door to War: The Roosevelt Foreign Policy, 1933-1941," published in 1952. Tansill argued that the President "deceitfully orchestrated a series of moves to bring a reluctant nation into war, creating circumstances in which U.S. entry became unavoidable. Historian Robert A. Divine, on the other hand, in his book, "Roosevelt and World War II" (1969, John Hopkins University Press), rejects the isolationist argument advanced by Tannill and others. Divine argues that Roosevelt was not inclined to put the U.S. into war, rather as events impinged on American security, Roosevelt moved incrementally towards belligerency. Is there a definitive answer? Read these books, compare and contrast in your own mind what these and other historians have to say. The question is ongoing, and no doubt will be debated for many years, as I suspect the leveling of the Twin Towers buildings will be. Hope this helps. AnswerI am not an expert,but I do have a history degree and a flat full of books,but the ignorance of some people is amazing. Britain was not at war with Japan until 7/12/41 when the the Japanese attacked Malaya via Thailand. Japan had been behaving badly in China since the 1930s and America had reacted to this with the oil boycott. I have put an answer elsewhere about whay America took so long to get involved in world war 11. To repeat FDR, one of my heroes saw that America actually existed in the same world as all the other states of the world and it would be bad for America if they tried to sit out world events. The neutrality act is complicated but if you say that America should not have gotten into World War 2 you have to be ignorant of the facts or a nazi. It could be seen that war was coming between the big powers in the pacific but exactly when could not have been seen. Conspiracy theory does not fit the facts. Try and imagine that Pearl Harbor did not happen, America would have got involved in the end. ANSWERSource:

WWII Collector's Edition of the Pearl Harbor Magazine's

Official 50th Anniversary Magazine, 1991, written by Blaine Taylor

Ever since December 7th, 1941, revisionist historians of WWII have posed the question: Did President Franklin Delano Roosevelt know in advance of the top-secret Japanese plan to assault the United States Pacific Fleet based at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii? And if he did, why didn't he issue a warning that would have saved not only the Fleet, but thousands of American lives? I believe that FDR did know. This is my reasoning: by Blaine Taylor

Throughout the 1930s, Japan was open in its admiration of Nazi Germany and in 1940 joined Adolph Hitler and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in the Axis Pact. Roosevelt was convinced that Hitler's regime was morally corrupt. Germany had already gobbled up Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, France, Belgium and Holland and by June 1941 had invaded the Soviet Union and was pounding Britain from the air. The President feared that without immediate American aid, both Russia and England would fall....and he knew from secret reports about the factory-like death mills the Nazis had set up in conquered Poland.

FDR's problem was how to persuade the American people that they should enter the war. Polls showed that 80% of Americans were opposed to any involvement in what was seen as a European problem. Only a year earlier he had won an unprecedented third term in the Oval Office as a peace candidate. But now time was running out. Soon America would stand alone, without allies. Facing the combined resources of Europe and Asia, how could the United States hope to survive?

The Axis powers had to be goaded into attacking the United States first. Only this, Roosevelt felt, would persuade the American people to join in the fight against fascist dictators. And his advisors agreed with him.

With this goal in mind, starting in 1940, FDR waged an undeclared naval war against German U-boats in the North Atlantic. but this was not enough. He also sent the American Pacific Fleet from the West Coast to Pearl Harbor, hoping its easier access would tempt the Japanese. He figured correctly.

The United States had broken the Japanese code in 1940 and thus must have been aware of the plans to attack Pearl Harbor. If FDR had warned the garrison, however, the Japanese would have intercepted the radio message and might have turned back. Since their entire air strike was predicated on achieving complete surprise, it is highly unlikely that Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo would have risked Japan's precious aircraft carriers on a mission whose secret had been revealed.

From Roosevelt's point of view, if there was no attack, then there would be no American declaration of war against either Japan or Germany---and this was his primary objective.

Precautions were taken. the American carriers, which were the likeliest Japanese targets, were moved out of Pearl Harbor, leaving mostly obsolete battleships left from World War I. but even if FDR granted his enemy the element of surprise, he had reason to hope that Pearl Harbor would be an American victory, as neither Japanese air power nor the Japanese fighting man had yet earned much respect in Washington.

Over the first weekend of December 1941, none of FDR's top wartime leaders could be located---and for a very simple reason: they were all at the White House awaiting the attack which finally came on Sunday morning, Dec. 7.

Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, the Navy's top man at Pearl Harbor, and Army General Walter Short were blamed for their lack of preparedness.

Monday the President signed a bill stating that a state of war existed with Japan and by the end of the week Hitler had declared war on the United States. For the second time in the 20th century a global war raged.

While the attack on Pearl Harbor united the nation and prompted it to take decisive action, the President had miscalculated the cost.

Was he justified? Only history can make that judgment.

AnswerI'm sorry, but I smell a whole lot of "woulda, coulda, shoulda" coming off the various answers above. The question asks specifically about HARD evidence of FDR's foreknowledge of an actual attack on Pearl Harbor.

Historical analysis and documentation from that time in history shows that the interception of Japanese coded diplomatic and military messages was hardly the complete thing we assume today - indeed, there were frequent gaps in US ability to decode messages, and many of the most critical ones were never sent via radio in the first place: the truly critical decision was discussed inside the Japanese government at the highest levels, and the US had neither radio intercepts or human spies privileged to that information. Indeed, the Japanese Ambassador in Washington D.C. was not informed of the impending attack until a few hours before it was to happen, and neither the US Military Intelligence or even Japanese Embassy staff would decode that message until AFTER the attack began. No witness has ever stepped forward to say, nor has any document ever been found that the US had solid intelligence predicting (let alone discovery of an actual plan for) a Japanese aerial attack on Pearl Harbor in early December 1941.

What the US did have was a whole bunch of observational and peripheral intelligence. In hindsight, a good collection of that shows a very specific interest in Pearl Harbor. However, there is also a very significant interest in many other key US military installations. Indeed, US Military Intelligence at the time indicated that Pearl Harbor was on a very short list of probable targets for attack should the Japanese choose to initiate war. There was also the recognition that such an attack could come with little or no warning (as the US was well aware of the history of the Japanese to initiate war by surprise attack).

The end result of this is that FDR, while pursuing an undeniably confrontational foreign policy with the Japanese, had absolutely no indication that an attack on Pearl Harbor would happen on Dec 7th. What he did have was knowledge that continued antagonism of the Japanese would almost certainly cause war, and that such a war would likely start with a surprise attack, and that there were about 6 or so places where such an attack would logically be directed against. Knowing that a fight is very likely sometime in the future, and that it would probably be directed at one (OR MORE) of a short list of predicable places is ABSOLUTELY not the same as having foreknowledge of the specifics of a plan.

There's absolutely no indication that ANYONE in the world knew the details of Nagumo's attack force (even Nagumo himself was not told until after the fleet sailed), and the course it sailed was designed to specifically avoid detection. And, once again, the military's own judgement was that an attack against Oahu was a low-success-probability. That is, the Navy's assessment to FDR was that while they didn't discount the possibility of an attack on Pearl Harbor by IJN forces, they were confident that such an attack would be both defensible and not seriously damaging. Indeed, they were more concerned with sabotage from the native Japanese population on Oahu.

Kimmel and Short were definitely scapegoats for the attack, however, as there is absolutely no evidence that either of them failed to take reasonable precautions or acted in any way inappropriately, given the situation and the information being passed down from the Navy high command.

In short: FDR (or ANYONE in the US military or political heirarchy) had absolutely no hard evidence of a plan by the IJN to attack Pearl Harbor at ANY specific time.

Answer 2

FDR did not know about the specific attack on Pearl Harbor. Nobody did. Japan sailed across the pacific under total radio silence to avoid alerting anybody of the attack before it happened. However, he could have suspected an attack somewhere, because he intentionally provoked the Japanese by cutting their oil supply so that we would have a reason to be involved in Europe. A Japanese attack on home turf would be perfect for rallying support for a war with Germany.

To make a very loose comparison, you can compare it to Bush (with no prior knowledge of it) using 9/11 to declare a War on Terror, which basically gives the President the authority to deploy troops anywhere as long as there is terrorist activity (Iraq). (this does not suggest a conspiracy, those theories are retarded)

Answer 3

No.

MLM

Answer YES

FDR had prior knowledge that there was going to be an attack on Pearl Harbor, and he knew that the Japanese naval fleet was in the Pacific Ocean going to Pearl Harbor>

See the following lonks:

http://www.apfn.org/apfn/pearl_harbor.htm

http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=408

http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/pearl/www.geocities.com/Pentagon/6315/pearl.html

http://home.flash.net/~manniac/pharbor.htm

JRF

AnswerNo. The above links are not sourced by any documentation, but provide a (rather imaginative) narrative that weaves a possible scenario. However, there are ABSOLUTELY no records anywhere that indicate that Roosevelt or any other American military or civilian adviser knew of a specific plan to attack Peal Harbor, let alone a timetable for such an attack.

Pearl Harbor was, of course, a logical point of attack for the Japanese, so there were quite a few high-level discussions around the possibility of such an attack - much of the conspiracy theorists draw on these discussions as "proof" that the U.S. knew ahead of time. Of course, there were plenty of other scenarios also discussed (attacks on the Philippines, San Diego and the Panama Canal being at the top of the list besides Pearl). Much of the substance of the conspiracy draws on the very real possibility that an attack on Pearl would happen - virtually the entire military establishment was keenly aware that such an attack would be both logical and possible, but very, very few believed it probable. Roosevelt can possibly be criticized for not strengthening Pearl's defenses (and, it may very well be that this was an intentional gambit to entice aggressiveness on the part of the Japanese). But, on the other side, he did nothing to weaken Pearl's defenses, and indeed, did not "keep the Pearl commanders in the dark". And, the carriers should have been in port - the U.S.S. Enterprise was scheduled to be in port Dec 6th, and was only delayed due to particularly severe weather on the return trip from Midway (at the time of the attack, she was only 200 miles out), and the U.S.S. Lexington was due back from Wake Island around the 10th or so.

American counterintelligence had thoroughly broken the Japanese diplomatic codes, but was still having problems with many (actually, most) of the Japanese military codes, in particular the naval codes. Inter-department rivalries and the Japanese's frequent changes of the code books meant that very few naval messages were broken before 1942 (after Pearl, the codebreaking became much more methodical and successful, but this simply wasn't the case prior to Pearl Harbor).

In short, there's not a shred of documented proof showing that anyone from FDR down had foreknowledge of an actual attack plan, and plenty of evidence showing bad intelligence failures, and uncoordinated and insular military bureaucracy, and a foreign policy almost explicitly designed to antagonized the Japanese.

Answer 4

This question is up for debate just like the question of whether George W. Bush knew about 9/11 before it happened. Conspiracy theorists would answer yes, but there is no real evidence to support it. A good history professor I once had said that Roosevelt could not possibly know the attack plan, but knew the Japanese would retaliate somehow because of the trade embargo. Knowing exactly how was a suprise, the president couldn't possibly know ahead of time.

Answer 5

There is a belief among some (which to my knowledge has never been proven) that Roosevelt wanted and needed a reason to bring the US into World War II. In the early days of the war it was hoped that the US could remain neutral. By "allowing" the attack on Pearl Harbor (if indeed he allowed such a thing) he was creating a scenario where our involvement in the war was imperative.

Answer 6

Some say he did and some say he didn't. But seriously, if he is a president for the united states then he must of wanted to warn them if he knew, maybe there was a deal made? Nobody knows for sure.

there are primary sources that you can read. most of them say that he didn't know for sure. Another fact is that he cut off the oil for the Japanese so they couldn't put oil into bombs to blow off the ships. If he did know why didn't he inform the united states that there was going to be an attack. Read books. try to get a primary source (a book that tells the exact event and is written by someone who was there at the certain time period.)