[quote=Jacarandoso]In a pragmatic sense we were at war with Japan and they were at war with us prior to Pearl Harbor.
They were acting boldly against our interests.Embargoes were in place.
Any peace was extremely tenuous and the US was preparing war.We were aiding and abetting the enemies of her allies, in what was already a “world” conflagration.
The US had acted “imperially” in the the previous decades and had ramped up mobilization for war at least as early as 1939. We had not been sitting around eating apple pies and playing baseball. Everyone with the need to know anticipated a “sneak attack”…was certain of one, but expected it to be more of a proxy nature or at least not be as devastating as pearl harbor.[/quote]
Russ: Sorry, but none of this stands up to scrutiny. Japan was not acting against our interests, they were pushing an openly militaristic, hegemonic approach (exemplified by the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”) and had war plans in place regarding what they called the “ABCD powers” (America, Britain, China and the Dutch). Japan recognized that, in order to assert this hegemony, she’d need access to significant amounts of raw materiel, as well as additional industrial capacity and capability. To that end, she began a policy of bullying her immediate neighbors, such as China, as early as 1915. In point of fact, the Russo-Japanese War (1904 – 1905) can be successfully argued as a first attempt on the part of the Japanese to assert dominance over a (quasi) Western power, Russia. At no point did Japan consider using peaceful means to acquire this materiel and capacity and instead focused on taking it by force. As far as Pearl Harbor went, US Naval Intelligence was indeed aware that Japan had targeted the facility, but thought it more likely that Japan would seize the oil facilities in the Dutch East Indies first (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_Indies_campaign).
Further, the “mobilization” for war in 1939 was no such thing. Contingency planning was underway and a full-scale mobilization had been discussed in 1940 (including joint planning with Great Britain), but nothing significant had been implemented (and largely because FDR did NOT want to be seen as getting America involved in another European war) and the US, especially the US Army and US Army Air Corps, was not only woefully unprepared, but woefully undersized and ill-equipped (when compared to the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe, for instance) when America finally did enter the war.
