Road to Pearl Harbor: The Coming of the War Between the United States and Japan

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, continues to be of great interest to historians and conspiracy theorists, even more so since the terror attack of 9/11. How could America have been taken by surprise? Why were we so unprepared? Whose fault was it? Politics, including demagoguery and scapegoating of the worst kind, heavily influenced the investigations of the events leading up to Pearl Harbor. To this day, no one knows with certainty exactly what FDR's knowledge and intentions were. There is no question in anyone's mind that he knew America was headed for war eventually. If a war had to be fought FDR wanted that war to be fought on the best terms possible for America. He clearly felt American interests lay in preventing the defeat of Britain, and he went far beyond the accepted limits of Presidential power to further that end. Did he go so far as to deliberately put the Pacific Fleet in harm's way, hoping the Japanese would attack it on US territory and thus mobilize public opinion in favor of war? No one knows, and no one may ever know. It is certainly conceivable in my mind that he did so, but it is yet unproven. What is clear in all I have read about Pearl Harbor, Feis included, is that the high levels of US government were not in the least surprised by the timing of the Japanese attack, just by its location. The Philippines and Guam were expected to bear the brunt of any Japanese attack, with Pearl Harbor being a theoretical but less likely target. Japanese intentions were very clear to FDR and his cabinet - only the American people were in the dark. A larger question raised by Pearl Harbor is that of whether war with Japan could have been avoided entirely if relations between Japan and the US had been better managed. Herbert Feis' book is one of the early and authoritative attempts to address this question. Feis was a retired diplomat and historian. He won the 1960 Pulitzer Prize for his book "Between War and Peace" on the origins of the Cold War. The American Historical Association has named an award after Feis that goes to independent scholars, not associated with academic institutions. (David Walley has written an interesting on-line biography of Feis.) There is no question that Feis was very knowledgeable about diplomatic affairs and had mastered the voluminous reports of the Pearl Harbor investigations and the diplomatic memorandums and cables of the period. Much information has become available since Feis published this book in 1950, especially on the Japanese side, but nothing has emerged since then to contradict the basic outline of the story. It's a complicated story, to say the least. Relations had deteriorated considerably between the US and Japan long before Feis picks up the thread in 1937, when what he calls "the last good chance" for a peaceful settlement was lost by Japan's increasingly ruthless actions in China. Japanese disregard for American commercial interests in China