Reply To: 80 Years Today of Pearl Harbor Invasion

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#2039101
charliehall
Participant

FDR desparately wanted the US to go to war with Hitler, and desparately wanted the US *not* to go to war with Japan. The trouble was, Japan was already endangering US interests and had been for over four years. Sanctions were ineffective and Japan realized that the US was the only thing in the way of its conquest of all of East and Southeast Asia. So it attacked.

The other trouble was that almost every prominent Republican (1940 Presidential nominee Wendell Willkie was a rare exception) and large numbers of prominent Democrats (FDR actually had to fire his Secratary of War because of that) were isolationists who actually tried to sabotage preparations for war. Lindbergh was probably an actual Nazi in terms of his ideology and Herbert Hoover at one point expressed hope for a Nazi victory.

Even so, FDR still didn’t have the public’s support for war against Hitler after Pearl Harbor — until Hitler himself declared war on the US four days after Pearl Harbor. Mussolini did the same thing the same day.