A lot of things are clear in hind sight. We had help in starting the WWII conflict with Japan. Russia had always feared the Japanese at their back door. What they needed was a large scale effort to nullify the Japanese threat. Who better than the blooming military might of the USA. The Japanese military, and economic influence in the region since the 1880s with the Japan's humiliating defeat of Russia in 1905 , gave Russia motive to have the Japanese wings clipped and provide opportunity for the spread of communism.
Ref: "The Needless US Pacific War with Japan-- Courtesy of Japan and Roosevelt" by Michael E. Krecca-www.LewRockwell.com
"The US and British ambassadors to Japan, Joseph C. Grew (a Herbert Hoover appointee) and Sir Robert Craigie, respectively both urged FDR to confer with Konoye and to agree to his terms. Grew especially was trying to avoid war with Japan and did everything he could to do so. Grew wrote:
"It seems to me highly unlikely that this chance will come again or that any Japanese statesman other than Prince Konoye could succeed in controlling the military extremists in carrying through a policy which they, in their ignorance of international affairs and economic laws, resent and oppose. The alternative to reaching a settlement now would be the greatly increased probability of war and while we would undoubtedly win in the end, I question whether it is in our own interest to see an impoverished Japan reduced to the position of a third-rate power."
Craigie agreed with Grew, stating tersely in a dispatch to London, "Time suitable for real peace with Japan. Hope this time American cynicism will not be allowed to interfere with realistic statesmanship." Churchill (whose own Foreign Office was riddled with Soviet spies, among them the notorious "Kim" Philby, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess) was incensed with Craigie's conciliatory stance toward Tokyo. He told Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden:
'He (Craigie) should surely be told forthwith that the entry of the United States into war either with Germany and Italy or with Japan is fully conformable with British interests. Nothing in the munitions sphere can compare with the importance of the British Empire and the United States being co-belligerent.'
Moreover, there were four close Roosevelt advisers who, according to the US Army's 1940–48 communications surveillance of the Soviet Embassy in Washington (a operation commonly known as "Venona"), were Soviet spies or sympathizers. These four spearheaded the ultimately successful attempt to frustrate Grew's and Craigie's negotiating efforts. They were top White House aide and Canadian-born economist Lauchlin Currie, Assistant Treasury Secretary Harry Dexter White (who essentially was Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr.'s puppetmaster), New Deal tax-and-spend fanatic Harry Hopkins and the notorious State Department official Alger Hiss. Hiss had tapped Johns Hopkins University Asia specialist and "adviser" to Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang-Kai-shek, Owen Lattimore, as FDR's "China expert" – one whom Mao Tse-tung's sidekick Chou En-lai warmly regarded as "quite sympathetic to the Chinese Communists.
All of these men, White and Currie especially, actively pressured FDR into waging a war with Japan. They eloquently masked their staunch Soviet sympathies behind facile appeals to the territorial integrity of China under Chiang (a weak, greedy and corrupt leader who was uneasily allied with Mao and would later be overwhelmed by him) and in the interests of a "united front against fascism." FDR thus flatly disregarded the advice of Grew and Craigie and refused any meeting with Konoye." FDR, in love with the liberals of his day, would not have been a hard sell.
On Nov. 18, 1941, Secretary Morgenthau sent to Secretary of State Cordell Hull a long memorandum drafted by Assistant Secretary White describing US terms for peace with Japan. These terms were so severe that White and Currie knew Japan would never accept them. Japanese Foreign Minister Togo Shigenori, one of the most moderate members of the Japanese government, recalled after receiving the Morgenthau-White-Hull memo, "I was utterly disheartened, and felt like one groping in darkness. The uncompromising tone was no more than I had looked for; but I was greatly astonished at the extreme nature of the contents."
An aide to Navy Secretary Frank Knox, Vice Admiral Francis Beatty, revealed in 1954:
"Prior to December 7th, it was evident even to me... that we were pushing Japan into a corner. I believed that it was the desire of both President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill that we get into the war, as they thought the Allies could not win without us and our efforts to cause the Germans to declare war on us failed. The conditions we imposed upon Japan – to get out of China, for example – were so severe that we knew that that nation could not accept them. We were forcing her so severely that we could have known that she would react toward the United States. All her preparations in a military way – and we knew their overall import – pointed that way."
Exactly a week after this memo was issued, FDR's Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, wrote in his diary some two weeks before Pearl Harbor, recalling a cabinet meeting discussing the problems with Japan. He wrote:
'There the President...brought up entirely the relations with the Japanese. He brought up the event that we were likely to be attacked, perhaps [as soon as] next Monday, for the Japanese are notorious for making an attack without warning and the question was what should we do. The question was how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.'
On Nov. 18, 1941, Secretary Morgenthau sent to Secretary of State Cordell Hull a long memorandum drafted by Assistant Secretary White describing US terms for peace with Japan. These terms were so severe that White and Currie knew Japan would never accept them. Japanese Foreign Minister Togo Shigenori, one of the most moderate members of the Japanese government, recalled after receiving the Morgenthau-White-Hull memo, "I was utterly disheartened, and felt like one groping in darkness. The uncompromising tone was no more than I had looked for; but I was greatly astonished at the extreme nature of the contents."
An aide to Navy Secretary Frank Knox, Vice Admiral Francis Beatty, revealed in 1954:
"Prior to December 7th, it was evident even to me... that we were pushing Japan into a corner. I believed that it was the desire of both President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill that we get into the war, as they thought the Allies could not win without us and our efforts to cause the Germans to declare war on us failed. The conditions we imposed upon Japan – to get out of China, for example – were so severe that we knew that that nation could not accept them. We were forcing her so severely that we could have known that she would react toward the United States. All her preparations in a military way – and we knew their overall import – pointed that way."
Exactly a week after this memo was issued, FDR's Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, wrote in his diary some two weeks before Pearl Harbor, recalling a cabinet meeting discussing the problems with Japan. He wrote:
'There the President...brought up entirely the relations with the Japanese. He brought up the event that we were likely to be attacked, perhaps [as soon as] next Monday, for the Japanese are notorious for making an attack without warning and the question was what should we do. The question was how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.'
Sir Oliver Lylleton, Churchill's war production minister, knew all of Churchill's and FDR's plans and decisions to force the USA into the war. In a June 20, 1944 speech to members of the American Chamber of Commerce in London, he stated:
'America provoked Japan to such an extent that the Japanese were forced to attack Pearl Harbor. It is a travesty on history, even to say that America was forced into the war.'"
With Love and Kindness,
THE HATMAN
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