USA/Japan

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, they attacked the territorial outpost of a colonial rival. (In 1941 Hawaii was not yet a State of the Union.) It gave the U.S. the long-sought pretext to enter World War II. But did the attack on Pearl Harbor come as a surprise, or did the Roosevelt administration have ample pre-warning, which it deliberately ignored in order to maximize the ensuing casualties and, thus, also the public’s outrage and support for entering the war? Revisionists claim precisely this: Admiral Husband Kimmel, commander of the Navy units in Hawaii, was deliberately kept in the dark about intelligence gathered by the Roosevelt administration which showed that the Japanese, driven into a corner by various boycotts and blockades, were about to strike…