On May 18, 1935, ten thousand marched up Fifth Avenue in New York with posters and signs opposing the build-up to war with Japan. Similar scenes were repeated numerous times in this period. People made the case for peace, while the government armed for war, built bases for war, rehearsed for war in the Pacific, and practiced blackouts and sheltering from air raids to prepare people for war. The U.S. Navy developed its plans for a war on Japan. The March 8, 1939, version of these plans described "an offensive war of long duration" that would destroy the military and disrupt the economic life of Japan.

The U.S. military even planned for a Japanese attack on Hawaii, which it thought might begin with conquering the island of Ni'ihau, from which flights would take off to assault the other islands. U.S. Army Air Corp. Lt. Col. Gerald Brant approached the Robinson family, which owned Ni'ihau and still does. He asked them to plow furrows across the island in a grid, to render it useless for airplanes. Between 1933 and 1937, three Ni'ihau men cut the furrows with plows pulled by mules or draft horses. As it turned out, the Japanese had no plans to use Ni'ihau, but when a Japanese plane that had just been part of the attack on Pearl Harbor had to make an emergency landing, it landed on Ni'ihau despite all the efforts of the mules and horses.

On July 21, 1936, all the newspapers in Tokyo had the same headline: the U.S. government was loaning China 100 million yuan with which to buy U.S. weapons.[x] On August 5, 1937, the Japanese government announced that it was disturbed that 182 U.S. airmen, each accompanied by two mechanics, would be flying airplanes in China.

1940

In November 1940, Roosevelt loaned China one hundred million dollars for war with Japan, and after consulting with the British, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau made plans to send the Chinese bombers with U.S. crews to use in bombing Tokyo and other Japanese cities. On December 21, 1940, China's Minister of Finance T.V. Soong and Colonel Claire Chennault, a retired U.S. Army flier who was working for the Chinese and had been urging them to use American pilots to bomb Tokyo since at least 1937, met in Morgenthau's dining room to plan the firebombing of Japan. Morgenthau said he could get men released from duty in the U.S. Army Air Corps if the Chinese could pay them $1,000 per month. Soong agreed.

In 1939-1940, the U.S. Navy built new Pacific bases in Midway, Johnston, Palmyra, Wake, Guam, Samoa, and Hawaii.

In September, 1940, Japan, Germany, and Italy signed an agreement to assist each other in war. This meant that were the United States at war with one of them, it would likely be at war with all three.

On October 7, 1940, the director of the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence Far East Asia Section Arthur McCollum wrote a memo. He worried about possible future Axis threats to the British fleet, to the British Empire, and to the Allies' ability to blockade Europe. He speculated about a theoretical future Axis attack on the United States. He believed decisive action could lead to the "early collapse of Japan." He recommended war with Japan:

"While . . . there is little that the United States can do to immediately retrieve the situation in Europe, the United States is able to effectively nullify Japanese aggressive action, and do it without lessening U.S. material assistance to Great Britain.

". . . In the Pacific the United States possesses a very strong defensive position and a navy and naval air force at present in that ocean capable of long distance offensive operation. There are certain other factors which at the present time are strongly in our favor, viz:

Philippine Islands still held by the United States.
Friendly and possibly allied government in control of the Dutch East Indies.
British still hold Hong Kong and Singapore and are favorable to us.
Important Chinese armies are still in the field in China against Japan.
A small U.S. Naval Force capable of seriously threatening Japan's southern supply routes already in the theatre of operations.
A considerable Dutch naval force is in the Orient that would be of value if allied to U.S.

"A consideration of the foregoing leads to the conclusion that prompt aggressive naval action against Japan by the United States would render Japan incapable of affording any help to Germany and Italy in their attack on England and that Japan itself would be faced with a situation in which her navy could be forced to fight on most unfavorable terms or accept fairly early collapse of the country through the force of blockade. A prompt and early declaration of war after entering into suitable arrangements with England and Holland, would be most effective in bringing about the early collapse of Japan and thus eliminating our enemy in the pacific before Germany and Italy could strike at us effectively. Furthermore, elimination of Japan must surely strengthen Britain's position against Germany and Italy and, in addition, such action would increase the confidence and support of all nations who tend to be friendly towards us.

"It is not believed that in the present state of political opinion the United States government is capable of declaring war against Japan without more ado; and it is barely possible that vigorous action on our part might lead the Japanese to modify their attitude. Therefore, the following course of action is suggested:

Make an arrangement with Britain for the use of British bases in the Pacific, particularly Singapore.
Make an arrangement with Holland for the use of base facilities and acquisition of supplies in the Dutch East Indies.
Give all possible aid to the Chinese government of Chiang-Kai-Shek.
Send a division of long range heavy cruisers to the Orient, Philippines, or Singapore. Send two divisions of submarines to the Orient.
Keep the main strength of the U.S. fleet now in the Pacific in the vicinity of the Hawaiian Islands.
Insist that the Dutch refuse to grant Japanese demands for undue economic concessions, particularly oil.
Completely embargo all U.S. trade with Japan, in collaboration with a similar embargo imposed by the British Empire.

"If by these means Japan could be led to commit an overt act of war, so much the better. At all events we must be fully prepared to accept the threat of war."

The dispute between interpretations of this memo and similar documents is a subtle one. Nobody believes the memo quoted above was aimed at negotiating peace or disarmament or establishing the rule of law over violence. Some think the intention was to get a war started but be able to blame it on Japan. Others think the intention was to get ready for a war to start, and take steps that might very well provoke Japan to start one, but might instead - it was just barely possible - frighten Japan out of its militaristic ways. This range of debate turns an Overton window into a keyhole. It's a debate that has also been sidetracked into a focus on whether one of the eight recommendations above - the one about keeping the fleet in Hawaii - was part of a nefarious plot to get more ships destroyed in a dramatic attack (not a particularly successful plot, as only two ships were permanently destroyed).

Not just that one point - which is significant with or without such a plot - but all eight recommendations made in the memo or at least steps similar to them were pursued. These steps were aimed at intentionally or accidentally (the distinction is a fine one) starting a war, and they seem to have worked. Work on the recommendations, coincidentally or not, began on October 8, 1940, the very next day after the memo was written. On that date, the U.S. State Department told Americans to evacuate Eastern Asia. Also on that date, President Roosevelt ordered the fleet kept in Hawaii. Admiral James O. Richardson wrote later that he had strongly objected to the proposal and to its purpose. "Sooner or later," he quoted Roosevelt as having said, "the Japanese would commit an overt act against the United States and the nation would be willing to enter the war."

EARLY 1941

Richardson was relieved of his duties on February 1, 1941, so perhaps he lied about Roosevelt as a disgruntled former employee. Or perhaps getting out of such duties in the Pacific in those days was a popular move by those who could see what was coming. Admiral Chester Nimitz declined to command the Pacific Fleet. His son, Chester Nimitz Jr. later told the History Channel that his father's thinking had been as follows: "It is my guess that the Japanese are going to attack us in a surprise attack. There will be a revulsion in the country against all those in command at sea, and they will be replaced by people in positions of prominence ashore, and I want to be ashore, and not at sea, when that happens."

In early 1941, U.S. and British military officers met to plan their strategy for defeating Germany and then Japan, once the United States was in the war. In April, President Roosevelt started having U.S. ships inform the British military of the locations of German U-boats and planes. Then he started allowing the shipment of supplies to British soldiers in North Africa. Germany accused Roosevelt of "endeavoring with all the means at his disposal to provoke incidents for the purpose of baiting the American people into the war."

In January 1941, the Japan Advertiser expressed its outrage over the U.S. military build-up at Pearl Harbor in an editorial, and the U.S. ambassador to Japan wrote in his diary: "There is a lot of talk around town to the effect that the Japanese, in case of a break with the United States, are planning to go all out in a surprise mass attack on Pearl Harbor. Of course I informed my government." On February 5, 1941, Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner wrote to Secretary of War Henry Stimson to warn of the possibility of a surprise attack at Pearl Harbor.

On April 28, 1941, Churchill wrote a secret directive to his war cabinet: "It may be taken as almost certain that the entry of Japan into the war would be followed by the immediate entry of the United States on our side." On May 24, 1941, the New York Times reported on U.S. training of the Chinese air force, and the provision of "numerous fighting and bombing planes" to China by the United States and Britain. "Bombing of Japanese Cities is Expected" read the subheadline. On May 31, 1941, at the Keep America Out of War Congress, William Henry Chamberlin gave a dire warning: "A total economic boycott of Japan, the stoppage of oil shipments for instance, would push Japan into the arms of the Axis. Economic war would be a prelude to naval and military war."

By July, 1941, the Joint Army-Navy Board had approved a plan called JB 355 to firebomb Japan. A front corporation would buy American planes to be flown by American volunteers. Roosevelt approved, and his China expert Lauchlin Currie, in the words of Nicholson Baker, "wired Madame Chiang Kai-Shek and Claire Chennault a letter that fairly begged for interception by Japanese spies." The 1st American Volunteer Group (AVG) of the Chinese Air Force, also known as the Flying Tigers, moved ahead with recruitment and training immediately, were provided to China prior to Pearl Harbor, and first saw combat on December 20, 1941.

On July 24, 1941, President Roosevelt remarked, "If we cut the oil off , [the Japanese] probably would have gone down to the Dutch East Indies a year ago, and you would have had a war. It was very essential from our own selfish point of view of defense to prevent a war from starting in the South Pacific. So our foreign policy was trying to stop a war from breaking out there." Reporters noticed that Roosevelt said "was" rather than "is." The next day, Roosevelt issued an executive order freezing Japanese assets. The United States and Britain cut off oil and scrap metal to Japan. Radhabinod Pal, an Indian jurist who served on the war crimes tribunal after the war, found the embargoes a predictably provocative threat to Japan.

On August 7, 1941, the Japan Times Advertiser wrote: "First there was the creation of a superbase at Singapore, heavily reinforced by British and Empire troops. From this hub a great wheel was built up and linked with American bases to form a great ring sweeping in a great area southwards and westwards from the Philippines through Malaya and Burma, with the link broken only in the Thailand peninsula. Now it is proposed to include the narrows in the encirclement, which proceeds to Rangoon."

On August 12, 1941, Roosevelt met secretly with Churchill in Newfoundland and drew up the Atlantic Charter, which set out the war aims for a war that the United States was not yet officially in. Churchill asked Roosevelt to join the war immediately, but he declined. Following this secret meeting, on August 18th, Churchill met with his cabinet back at 10 Downing Street in London. Churchill told his cabinet, according to the minutes: "The [U.S.] President had said he would wage war but not declare it, and that he would become more and more provocative. If the Germans did not like it, they could attack American forces. Everything was to be done to force an 'incident' that could lead to war."

British propagandists had also argued since at least 1938 for using Japan to bring the United States into the war. At the Atlantic Conference on August 12, 1941, Roosevelt assured Churchill that the United States would bring economic pressure to bear on Japan. Within a week, in fact, the Economic Defense Board began economic sanctions. On September 3, 1941, the U.S. State Department sent Japan a demand that it accept the principle of "nondisturbance of the status quo in the Pacific," meaning cease turning European colonies into Japanese colonies. By September 1941 the Japanese press was outraged that the United States had begun shipping oil right past Japan to reach Russia. Japan, its newspapers said, was dying a slow death from "economic war." In September, 1941, Roosevelt announced a "shoot on sight" policy toward any German or Italian ships in U.S. waters.

A WAR SALES PITCH

On October 27, 1941, Roosevelt made a speech:

"Five months ago tonight I proclaimed to the American people the existence of a state of unlimited emergency. Since then much has happened. Our Army and Navy are temporarily in Iceland in the defense of the Western Hemisphere. Hitler has attacked shipping in areas close to the Americas in the North and South Atlantic. Many American-owned merchant ships have been sunk on the high seas. One American destroyer was attacked on September fourth. Another destroyer was attacked and hit on October seventeenth. Eleven brave and loyal men of our Navy were killed by the Nazis. We have wished to avoid shooting. But the shooting has started. And history has recorded who fired the first shot. In the long run, however, all that will matter is who fired the last shot. America has been attacked. The U.S.S. Kearny is not just a navy ship. She belongs to every man, woman and child in this nation. Illinois, Alabama, California, North Carolina, Ohio, Louisiana, Texas, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arkansas, New York, Virginia - those are the home states of the honored dead and wounded of the Kearny. Hitler's torpedo was directed at every American whether he lives on our sea coasts or in the innermost part of the nation, far from the seas and far from the guns and tanks of the marching hordes of would-be conquerors of the world. The purpose of Hitler's attack was to frighten the American people off the high seas - to force us to make a trembling retreat. This is not the first time he has misjudged the American spirit. That spirit is now aroused."

The ship sunk on October 17th, the Kearny, was a replay of the Greer. It may have mystically belonged to the spirit of every American and so forth, but it was not innocent. It was taking part in a war that the United States had not officially entered, that the U.S. public was adamantly opposed to entering, but that the U.S. president was eager to get on with. That president continued:

"If our national policy were to be dominated by the fear of shooting, then all of our ships and those of our sister Republics would have to be tied up in home harbors. Our Navy would have to remain respectfully-abjectly-behind any line which Hitler might decree on any ocean as his own dictated version of his own war zone. Naturally we reject that absurd and insulting suggestion. We reject it because of our own self-interest, because of our own self-respect, because, most of all, of our own good faith. Freedom of the seas is now, as it has always been, a fundamental policy of your government and mine."

When he had become Prime Minister in 1940, Churchill had set up an agency called British Security Coordination (BSC) with the mission to use any necessary dirty tricks to get the United States into the war. The BSC was run out of three floors of Rockefeller Center in New York by a Canadian named William Stephenson - the model for James Bond, according to Ian Fleming. It ran its own radio station, WRUL, and press agency, the Overseas News Agency (ONA). The hundreds or thousands of BSC staffers, later including Roald Dahl, kept busy sending forgeries to the U.S. media, creating astrologers to predict Hitler's demise, and generating false rumors of powerful new British weapons. Roosevelt was well aware of the BSC's work, as was the FBI.

According to William Boyd, a novelist who has investigated the agency, the "BSC evolved a prankish game called 'Vik' - a 'fascinating new pastime for lovers of democracy'. Teams of Vik players across the USA scored points depending on the level of embarrassment and irritation they caused Nazi sympathisers. Players were urged to indulge in a series of petty persecutions - persistent 'wrong number' calls in the night; dead rats dropped in water tanks; ordering cumbersome gifts to be delivered, cash on delivery, to target addresses; deflating the tyres of cars; hiring street musicians to play 'God Save the King' outside Nazi sympathisers' houses, and so on."

Ivar Bryce, who was Walter Lippman's brother-in-law and Ian Fleming's buddy, worked for the BSC, and in 1975 published a memoir claiming to have produced there the first draft of Roosevelt's phony Nazi map, which had then been approved by Stephenson and arranged to be obtained by the U.S. government with a false story as to its origins. Whether the FBI and/or Roosevelt was in on the trick is not clear. Of all the pranks pulled by "intelligence" agents over the years, this was one of the more successful, and yet least trumpeted, as the British are supposed to be a U.S. ally. U.S. book readers and moviegoers would later dump fortunes into admiring James Bond, even if his real-life model had tried to deceive them into the worst war the world had ever seen.

Of course, Germany was struggling in a drawn-out war with the Soviet Union, and had not dared to invade England. Taking over South America was not going to happen. No record of the phony map has ever turned up in Germany, and speculation that somehow there might have been some shadow of truth to it seems especially strained in the context of the next section of Roosevelt's speech, in which he claimed to possess another document that he also never showed anyone and which may never have existed, and the content of which wasn't even plausible:

"Your government has in its possession another document made in Germany by Hitler's government. It is a detailed plan, which, for obvious reasons, the Nazis did not wish and do not wish to publicize just yet, but which they are ready to impose - a little later - on a dominated world - if Hitler wins. It is a plan to abolish all existing religions - Protestant, Catholic, Mohammedan, Hindu, Buddhist, and Jewish alike. The property of all churches will be seized by the Reich and its puppets. The cross and all other symbols of religion are to be forbidden. The clergy are to be forever silenced under penalty of the concentration camps, where even now so many fearless men are being tortured because they have placed God above Hitler. In the place of the churches of our civilization, there is to be set up an International Nazi Church - a church which will be served by orators sent out by the Nazi Government. In the place of the Bible, the words of Mein Kampf will be imposed and enforced as Holy Writ. And in place of the cross of Christ will be put two symbols - the swastika and the naked sword. A God of Blood and Iron will take the place of the God of Love and Mercy. Let us well ponder that statement which I have made tonight."

LATE 1941

In late October, 1941, U.S. spy Edgar Mowrer spoke with a man in Manila named Ernest Johnson, a member of the Maritime Commission, who said he expected "The Japs will take Manila before I can get out." When Mowrer expressed surprise, Johnson replied "Didn't you know the Jap fleet has moved eastward, presumably to attack our fleet at Pearl Harbor?"

On November 3, 1941, the U.S. ambassador to Japan, Joseph Grew, tried - not for the first time - to communicate something to his government, a government that was either too incompetent to understand, or too cynically engaged in plotting war, or both, but which certainly was not even considering working for peace. Grew sent a lengthy telegram to the State Department warning that the economic sanctions imposed by the United States might force Japan to commit "national hara-kiri." He wrote: "An armed conflict with the United States may come with dangerous and dramatic suddenness."

On November 6, 1941, Japan proposed an agreement with the United States that included partial Japanese withdrawal from China. The United States rejected the proposal on November 14th.

On November 15, 1941, U.S. Army Chief of Staff George Marshall briefed the media on something we do not remember as "the Marshall Plan." In fact we don't remember it at all. "We are preparing an offensive war against Japan," Marshall said, asking the journalists to keep it a secret, which as far as I know they dutifully did. Marshall told Congress in 1945 that the United States had initiated Anglo-Dutch-American agreements for unified action against Japan and put them into effect before December 7th.

On November 20, 1941, Japan proposed a new agreement with the United States for peace and cooperation between the two nations.

On November 25, 1941, Secretary of War Henry Stimson wrote in his diary that he'd met in the Oval Office with Marshall, President Roosevelt, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, Admiral Harold Stark, and Secretary of State Cordell Hull. Roosevelt had told them the Japanese were likely to attack soon, possibly the next Monday, December 1, 1941. "The question," Stimson wrote, "was how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves. It was a difficult proposition."

On November 26, 1941, the United States made a counter-proposal to Japan's proposal of six days earlier. In this proposal, sometimes called the Hull Note, sometimes the Hull Ultimatum, the United States required complete Japanese withdrawal from China, but no U.S. withdrawal from the Philippines or anywhere else in the Pacific. The Japanese rejected the proposal. Neither nation, it seems, invested remotely the resources into these negotiations that they did into preparing for war. Henry Luce referred in Life magazine on July 20, 1942, to "the Chinese for whom the U.S. had delivered the ultimatum that brought on Pearl Harbor."

"In late November," according to Gallup polling, 52% of Americans told Gallup pollsters that "the United States would be at war with Japan "sometime in the near future." The war was not going to be a surprise to over half the country, or to the U.S. government.

On November 27, 1941, Rear Admiral Royal Ingersoll sent a warning of war with Japan to four naval commands. On November 28, Admiral Harold Rainsford Stark re-sent it with the added instruction: "IF HOSTILITIES CANNOT REPEAT CANNOT BE AVOIDED THE UNITED STATES DESIRES THAT JAPAN COMMIT THE FIRST OVERT ACT." On November 28, 1941, Vice Admiral William F. Halsey, Jr., gave instructions to "shoot down anything we saw in the sky and to bomb anything we saw on the sea." On November 30, 1941, the Honolulu Advertiser carried the headline "Japanese May Strike Over Weekend."[xlvi] On December 2, 1941, the New York Times reported that Japan had been "cut off from about 75 percent of her normal trade by the Allied blockade." In a 20-page memo on December 4, 1941, the Office of Naval Intelligence warned, "In anticipation of open conflict with this country, Japan is vigorously utilizing every available agency to secure military, naval and commercial information, paying particular attention to the West Coast, the Panama Canal, and the Territory of Hawaii."

As of December 6, 1941, no poll had found majority U.S. public support for entering the war. But Roosevelt had already instituted the draft, activated the National Guard, created a huge Navy in two oceans, traded old destroyers to England in exchange for the lease of its bases in the Caribbean and Bermuda, supplied planes and trainers and pilots to China, imposed harsh sanctions on Japan, advised the U.S. military that a war with Japan was beginning, and - just 11 days before the Japanese attack - secretly ordered the creation of a list of every Japanese and Japanese-American person in the United States. (Hurray for IBM technology!)

On December 7, 1941, following the Japanese attack, President Roosevelt drew up a declaration of war against both Japan and Germany, but decided it wouldn't work and went with Japan alone. On December 8th, Congress voted for war against Japan, with Jeanette Rankin casting the only no vote.

CONTROVERSY AND LACK THEREOF

Robert Stinnett's Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor is controversial among historians, including in its claims about U.S. knowledge of Japanese codes and coded Japanese communications. I don't think, however, that either of the following points should be controversial:

The information I've already presented above is already more than sufficient to recognize that the United States was neither an innocent bystander attacked out of the blue nor an engaged party making an all-out effort for peace and stability.

Stinnett is right to have put in the efforts he has to declassify and make public government documents, and right that there can be no good excuse for the National Security Agency continuing to keep huge numbers of Japanese naval intercepts secret in the 1941 U.S. Navy files.

THE PHILIPPINES

As the book review above mentions, the same question about the details of foreknowledge and the same lack of any question about the general outlines of it apply to the Philippines as to Pearl Harbor.

In fact, the case for an intentional act of treason would be easier for historians to speculate about in regard to the Philippines than in regard to Hawaii, if they were so inclined. "Pearl Harbor" is a strange shorthand. Hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor - on the same day but technically December 8th due to the International Date Line, and delayed six hours by the weather - the Japanese attacked the U.S. military in the U.S. colony of the Philippines, fully expecting to have a harder go of it, given that surprise would not be a factor. In fact, Douglas MacArthur received a phone call at 3:40 a.m. Philippines time alerting him to the attack on Pearl Harbor and the need to be prepared. In the nine hours that elapsed between that phone call and the attack on the Philippines, MacArthur did nothing. He left U.S. airplanes lined up and waiting, like the ships had been in Pearl Harbor. The result of the attack on the Philippines was, according to the U.S. military, as devastating as that on Hawaii. The United States lost 18 of 35 B-17s plus 90 other airplanes, and many more damaged. In contrast, in Pearl Harbor, despite the myth that eight battleships were sunk, the reality is that none could be sunk in such a shallow harbor, two were rendered inoperable, and six were repaired and went on to fight in WWII.

On the same day of December 7th / 8th - depending on the position of the International Date Line - Japan attacked the U.S. colonies of the Philippines and Guam, plus the U.S. territories of Hawaii, Midway, and Wake, as well as the British colonies of Malaya, Singapore, Honk Kong, and the independent nation of Thailand. While the attack on Hawaii was a one-off attack and retreat, in other locations, Japan attacked repeatedly, and in some cases invaded and conquered. Falling under Japanese control in the coming weeks would be the Philippines, Guam, Wake, Malaya, Singapore, Hong Kong, and the western tip of Alaska. In the Philippines, 16 million U.S. citizens fell under a brutal Japanese occupation. Before they did, the U.S. occupation interned people of Japanese origin, just as was done in the United States.

Immediately after the attacks, the U.S. media didn't know it was supposed to refer to them all with the shorthand of "Pearl Harbor," and instead used a variety of names and descriptions. In a draft of his "day of infamy" speech, Roosevelt referred to both Hawaii and the Philippines. In his 2019 How to Hide an Empire, Daniel Immerwahr argues that Roosevelt made every effort to depict the attacks as attacks on the United States. While the people of the Philippines and Guam actually were citizens of the U.S. empire, they were the wrong sort of people. The Philippines was generally viewed as insufficiently white for statehood and on a track to possible independence. Hawaii was whiter, and also closer, and a possible candidate for future statehood. Roosevelt ultimately chose to omit the Philippines from that part of his speech, relegating it to one item in a later list that included the British colonies, and to describe the attacks as having happened on "The American Island of Oahu" - an island whose Americanness is, of course, disputed to this day by many native Hawaiians. The focus has been kept on Pearl Harbor ever since, even by those intrigued by the blundering or plotting behind the attacks.

FURTHER INTO THE PAST

It's not hard to think of things that could have been done differently in the years and months leading up to U.S. entry into WWII, or even leading up to the first sparks of war in Asia or Europe. It's even easier to describe things that could have been done differently if one goes back a little further into the past. Things could have been done differently by every government and military involved, and each is responsible for its atrocities. But I want to mention some things that the U.S. government could have done differently, because I'm trying to counter the idea that the U.S. government was forced reluctantly into a war that was exclusively of others' choosing.

The United States could have elected William Jennings Bryan president over William McKinley who was succeeded by his vice president, Teddy Roosevelt. Bryan campaigned against empire, McKinley in favor of it. To many, other issues seemed more important at the time; it's not clear that they should have.

Teddy Roosevelt didn't do anything halfway. That went for war, imperialism, and his previously noted belief in theories about the Aryan "race." TR supported the abuse and even killing of Native Americans, Chinese immigrants, Cubans, Filipinos, and Asians and Central Americans of nearly every variety. He believed only whites capable of self-rule (which was bad news for the Cubans when their U.S. liberators discovered some of them to be black). He created a display of Filipinos for the St. Louis World's Fair depicting them as savages who could be tamed by white men. He worked to keep Chinese immigrants out of the United States.

James Bradley's 2009 book, The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War, tells the following story. I'm leaving out portions of the book that have had doubts raised about them.

In 1614 Japan had cut itself off from the West, resulting in centuries of peace and prosperity and the blossoming of Japanese art and culture. In 1853 the U.S. Navy had forced Japan open to U.S. merchants, missionaries, and militarism. U.S. histories call Commodore Matthew Perry's trips to Japan "diplomatic" although they used armed war ships to compel Japan to agree to relations it adamantly opposed. In the years that followed, the Japanese studied the Americans' racism and adopted a strategy to deal with it. They sought to westernize themselves and present themselves as a separate race superior to the rest of the Asians. They became honorary Aryans. Lacking a single god or a god of conquest, they invented a divine emperor, borrowing heavily from Christian tradition. They dressed and dined like Americans and sent their students to study in the United States. The Japanese were often referred to in the United States as the "Yankees of the Far East." In 1872 the U.S. military began training the Japanese in how to conquer other nations, with an eye on Taiwan.

Charles LeGendre, an American general training the Japanese in the ways of war, proposed that they adopt a Monroe Doctrine for Asia, that is a policy of dominating Asia in the way that the United States dominated its hemisphere. Japan established a Bureau of Savage Affairs and invented new words like koronii (colony). Talk in Japan began to focus on the responsibility of the Japanese to civilize the savages. In 1873, Japan invaded Taiwan with U.S. military advisors. Korea was next. Korea and Japan had known peace for centuries. When the Japanese arrived with U.S. ships, wearing U.S. clothing, talking about their divine emperor, and proposing a treaty of "friendship," the Koreans thought the Japanese had lost their minds, and told them to get lost, knowing that China was there at Korea's back. But the Japanese talked China into allowing Korea to sign the treaty, without explaining to either the Chinese or Koreans what the treaty meant in its English translation.

In 1894 Japan declared war on China, a war in which U.S. weapons, on the Japanese side, carried the day. China gave up Taiwan and the Liaodong Peninsula, paid a large indemnity, declared Korea independent, and gave Japan the same commercial rights in China that the U.S. and European nations had. Japan was triumphant, until China persuaded Russia, France, and Germany to oppose Japanese ownership of Liaodong. Japan gave it up and Russia grabbed it. Japan felt betrayed by white Christians, and not for the last time.

In 1904, Teddy Roosevelt was very pleased with a Japanese surprise attack on Russian ships. As the Japanese again waged war on Asia as honorary Aryans, Roosevelt secretly and unconstitutionally cut deals with them, approving of a Monroe Doctrine for Japan in Asia. In the 1930s, Japan offered to open up trade to the United States in its imperial sphere if the United States would do the same for Japan in Latin America. The U.S. government said no.

CHINA

Britain was not the only foreign government with a propaganda office in New York City leading up to WWII. China was there too.

How did the U.S. government shift from its alliance and identification with Japan to one with China and against Japan (and then back again the other way after WWII)? The first part of the answer has to do with Chinese propaganda and its use of religion rather than race, and with putting a different Roosevelt into the White House. James Bradley's 2016 book, The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in China tells this story.

For years leading up to World War II, the China Lobby in the United States persuaded the U.S. public, and many top U.S. officials, that the Chinese people wanted to become Christian, that Chiang Kai-shek was their beloved democratic leader rather than a faltering fascist, that Mao Zedong was an insignificant nobody headed nowhere, and that the United States could fund Chiang Kai-shek and he would use it all to fight the Japanese, as opposed to using it to fight Mao.

The image of the noble and Christian Chinese peasant was driven by people like the Trinity (later Duke) and Vanderbilt educated Charlie Soong, his daughters Ailing, Chingling, and Mayling, and son Tse-ven (T.V.), as well as Mayling's husband Chiang Kai-shek, Henry Luce who started Time magazine after being born in a missionary colony in China, and Pearl Buck who wrote The Good Earth after the same type of childhood. TV Soong hired retired U.S. Army Air Corps colonel Jack Jouett and by 1932 had access to all the expertise of the U.S. Army Air Corps and had nine instructors, a flight surgeon, four mechanics, and a secretary, all U.S. Air Corps trained but now working for Soong in China. It was just the start of U.S. military assistance to China that made less news in the United States than it did in Japan.

In 1938, with Japan attacking Chinese cities, and Chiang barely fighting back, Chiang instructed his chief propagandist Hollington Tong, a former Columbia University journalism student, to send agents to the United States to recruit U.S. missionaries and give them evidence of Japanese atrocities, to hire Frank Price (Mayling's favorite missionary), and to recruit U.S. reporters and authors to write favorable articles and books. Frank Price and his brother Harry Price had been born in China, without ever encountering the China of the Chinese. The Price brothers set up shop in New York City, where few had any idea they were working for the Soong-Chiang gang. Mayling and Tong assigned them to persuade Americans that the key to peace in China was an embargo on Japan. They created the American Committee for Non-Participation in Japanese Aggression. "The public never knew," writes Bradley, "that the Manhattan missionaries diligently working on East Fortieth Street to save the Noble Peasants were paid China Lobby agents engaged in what were possibly illegal and treasonous acts."

I take Bradley's point to be not that Chinese peasants are not necessarily noble, and not that Japan wasn't guilty of aggression, but that the propaganda campaign convinced most Americans that Japan would not attack the United States if the United States cut off oil and metal to Japan - which was false in the view of informed observers and would be proved false in the course of events.

Former Secretary of State and future Secretary of War Henry Stimson became chair of the American Committee for Non-Participation in Japanese Aggression, which quickly added former heads of Harvard, Union Theological Seminary, the Church Peace Union, the World Alliance for International Friendship, the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, the Associate Boards of Christian Colleges in China, etc. Stimson and gang were paid by China to claim Japan would never attack the United States if embargoed, would in fact transform into a democracy in response - a claim dismissed by those in the know in the State Department and White House. By February 1940, Bradley writes, 75% of Americans supported embargoing Japan. And most Americans, of course, did not want war. They had bought the China Lobby's propaganda.

Franklin Roosevelt's maternal grandfather had gotten rich selling opium in China, and Franklin's mother had lived in China as a child. She became honorary chairwoman of both the China Aid Council and the American Committee for Chinese War Orphans. Franklin's wife Eleanor was honorary chairwoman of Pearl Buck's China Emergency Relief Committee. Two thousand U.S. labor unions backed an embargo on Japan. The first economic advisor to a U.S. president, Lauchlin Currie, worked for both the U.S. government and the Bank of China simultaneously. Syndicated columnist and Roosevelt relative Joe Alsop cashed checks from TV Soong as an "advisor" even while performing his service as a journalist. "No British, Russian, French, or Japanese diplomat," writes Bradley, "would have believed that Chiang could become a New Deal liberal." But Franklin Roosevelt may have believed it. He communicated with Chiang and Mayling secretly, going around his own State Department.

Yet Franklin Roosevelt believed that if embargoed, Japan would attack the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) with the possible result of a wider world war. Morgenthau, in Bradley's telling, repeatedly tried to slip through a total embargo on petroleum to Japan, while Roosevelt resisted for a time. Roosevelt did impose a partial embargo on aviation-fuel and scrap. He did loan money to Chiang. He did supply airplanes, trainers, and pilots. When Roosevelt asked his advisor Tommy Corcoran to check out the leader of this new air force, former U.S. Air Corps captain Claire Chennault, he may have been unaware that he was asking someone in the pay of TV Soong to advise him on someone else in the pay of TV Soong.

Whether the British or Chinese propagandists working in New York moved the U.S. government anywhere it didn't already want to go is an open question.

(c) 2020 David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is director of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson's books include War Is A Lie. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. He is a 2015 and 2016 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee. Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook.