The Pearl Harbor Secret: Why Roosevelt Undermined the U.S. Navy

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This book provides a penetrating look into Franklin D. Roosevelt's strategy to bait Adolf Hitler into declaring war on America in order to defeat Germany militarily, thus preventing the Nazis from developing the atomic bomb. In late 1939, President Roosevelt learned that Hitler was attempting to develop an atomic bomb to use against the United States. The president responded by directing his own scientific community to develop an atomic bomb and began making plans to go to war with Germany. However, he was hampered by public opinion, with 80 percent of the American people against U.S. involvement in another ground war in Europe. Roosevelt seized an opportunity in 1940, when Japan and Nazi Germany formed a military alliance. To bait Germany into war, FDR shut down Japan's war-making economy, prompting Tokyo to attack Pearl Harbor. A few days later, Hitler declared war on America. Using declassified documents, this book shows how Pearl Harbor was not about Japan; it was about the United States going to war with Germany. It reveals how the U.S. Navy's intelligence gathering system could break virtually any Japanese naval code, but Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, the commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, was kept in the dark about the impending Pearl Harbor attack by his own government.

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Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. * Choice *

Author Bio

Sewall Menzel is a political-military analyst and scholar with a degree in history from The Citadel and a doctorate in international relations from the University of Miami.