Stardate 20031104.2204

(On Screen): On December 7 1941, six Japanese aircraft carriers moving under strict radio silence reached a point northwest of Oahu and launched several hundred planes to make a strike against the American fleet anchored in Pearl Harbor. The strike leader radioed back "Tora Tora Tora", a predetermined message which meant that they had achieved surprise and the Americans were not ready. Two major strikes over the course of a couple of hours sank or badly damaged the majority of America's battleships in the Pacific, and caused much other damage. By sheer good luck, the three American big-deck carriers assigned to the Pacific fleet were away at the time. War had come to the United States, whether it liked it or not.

The US had stayed uninvolved during the first two years of the war. Roosevelt had tried to help as much as he could, and indeed he pretty seriously bent some rules and went beyond some constitutional limits. For instance, the US Navy had been involved in a shooting war in the Atlantic for several months before the Japanese attack, and the first Americans to die in combat in World War II were crewmen on an American destroyer which was sunk by a German sub while escorting a convoy, long before December 1941.

But the popular will in the US was to stay the hell out of it, and despite being the closest this nation has ever had to an imperial president, not even Roosevelt could ignore that. So he got funding to build up the US Navy, and he got funding to start increasing the size of the US Army, and to begin to build and acquire the equipment needed to fight a war. He even managed to make a deal to give fifty American destroyers to the British which could be used by them for convoy duty, and got Lend-Lease passed when the UK began to run out of dollars with which to buy vital supplies from the US. What he couldn't do was to actually join the war.

There was little secret that Roosevelt felt that the US should be involved in the war. He feared that the UK and USSR might be defeated, leaving Hitler dominant in Europe. In the summer of 1940 the UK had come within a whisker of defeat, and in the autumn of 1941 the German attack against the USSR had been devastatingly effective, and also came within a whisker of complete victory. It was by no means clear that the war would continue for much longer; one or both of them might be forced to make terms and cease resisting.

Roosevelt was also deeply worried about the ongoing Japanese wars of conquest in SE Asia, as Japan had conquered Korea and Manchuria and Formosa, and had invaded America's ally China. He arranged to provide "unofficial" military support to the Chinese in the form of the "Flying Tigers", a unit of American fighters which was nominally volunteers but which was in practice an American squadron.

But he feared that if the US didn't go to a war footing industrially, and start committing troops, that the Axis might well win. (And in fact, if the US had not gotten involved in the war, it's entirely possible that the Axis would have won.) Unfortunately, there seemed little he could do to convince the majority of American voters.

The attack on Pearl Harbor changed everything. Congress passed a declaration of war against Japan. And after Germany and Italy declared war on the US, Congress then declared war on Germany and Italy. The prevailing American attitude about the war changed from "Hell, no!" to "Remember Pearl Harbor!"

Obviously no one could truly want American sailors and soldiers to die the way they had at Pearl Harbor, let alone losing so many ships, but despite the horror and the terrible losses sustained by the US Pacific Fleet, it was a political God-send for Roosevelt. And many were suspicious: had he known it was coming and deliberately let it happen? There are some even today who still claim he did.

If the Japanese plans had been detected but Roosevelt had deliberately refused to act to prevent it, he would have committed high treason. But that depended entirely on a question made far more famous later, during an investigation of a different president: What did he know, and when did he know it?

There were basically three possibilities, or various shadings between them: US intelligence had learned of the attack and Roosevelt had let it happen; US intelligence had not learned of the attack because US intelligence was incompetent; or US intelligence had not learned of the attack because the Japanese had been scrupulous about operational security. In the third case, all you could really do was shake your head and acknowledge that the enemy had pulled a masterstroke. But in the other two cases, it could imply that the administration should be replaced.

Just what had American intelligence learned about Japanese plans during 1941? Was there enough information to have determined that an attack was coming, and if so, were the pieces put together in time to save the US fleet? That's what had to be determined in order to discover the truth.

Unfortunately, trying to ask those questions while the war went on would have been severely damaging to the ongoing war effort. If there had been such a wideranging and deep investigation of American intelligence, it would have been nearly impossible to avoid revealing a lot of the means they had been using to gather intelligence, and since a lot of those means were still being used as the war went on, it might have told the nation's enemies how to shut off that intelligence.