In many of the accounts I have read, and after talking with my parents and their friends who were alive at the time, the fact that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and as a result the US was dragged into WWII came as a complete surprise. Really?
With what was happening in Europe and Asia in 1941 how could anyone be surprised that someone might want to pick a fight with us? We were actively aiding our allies in Europe and Asia at the time, although we weren’t willing to send in troops yet.
I realize that was a different time… memories of WWI still haunted, and that many people wanted nothing to do with what was happening outside of the US, but with both Germany and Japan on a roll it seems obvious, at least in hindsight, that the US just couldn’t idly stand by and hope things worked out well for our friends.
By 1941 there should have been important people standing up and saying that something had to be done to stop these two superpowers. At the time was the majority of the US really as isolationist as we have been led to believe, or was government just not listening very well?
Well according to what I recall my parents telling me is that people were more concentrated on what was happening in Europe, Asia/Japan was still thought of as an exotix far away place that had little affect on us. And two, Pearl Harbor was pretty far away from Japan, it was thought that they would invade something closer to home first, like the Philippines. Even today when looking back the Pearly Harbor attack was a bold move.
I think it was honestly that people convinced themselves Japan would not be so stupid as to attack a country which it could not possibly hope to beat. There were obviously some warning about it, but the Executive was constrained by the Neutrality Act in what it could do in reaction to Japanese activity. The Act had been partially revised in the face of the events in Europe, but it was not until Pearl Harbor that it was repealed.
As of 1940-41, polls showed a majority of Americans wanted to help England against the Nazis, even if that risked drawing America into the war. But when asked outright (in mid-1941) if America should enter the European war, it was a different story.
*Interviewing Date 5/8-13/41
Survey #236-K Question #7
If you were asked to vote today on the question of the United States entering the war against Germany and Italy, how would you vote — to go into the war or to stay out of the war?
Go in… 21 (%)
Stay out…79 (%)*
As of about a year earlier, a similar Gallup poll found 88% of Americans against the idea of entering the war.
This was at a time when isolationists like Charles Lindbergh were drawing huge crowds to rallies in favor of neutrality and staying out of the war at any cost.
I believe the prevailing wisdom was that US involvement was inevitable given Japan’s aims. If you go in with the assumption that the US will join the Pacific war at some point, it makes some sense to launch a preemptive attack with the hope of gaining a large enough advantage to win that war.
To the OP, I don’t believe war with Japan was a complete surprise. I think that a majority in the US expected it, at least per this Gallup poll, prior to Pearl Harbor.
They figured that they could weaken the U.S. Navy sufficiently with their attack that they could annex the Pacific territories they were actually interested in without interference, and then hold them long enough that the U.S. would eventually get tired of fighting and agree to an armistice recognizing the new status quo. The first part of this plan went great, the second part not so much.
As far as I know, there weren’t serious thoughts about “defeating” the U.S., as in invading or conquering the continental U.S., at least not then.
There were a lot of Americans who didn’t want to have anything to do with Europe. The feeling was that this was just another European war, like the 19th century. They could fight it themselves without US soldiers.
As for Japan, the general public didn’t pay much attention. It was a long way away and few people had relatives or ancestors there, so there was no connection.
Roosevelt and most leaders knew that war would probably happen, but your average American was too busy trying to earn a living (the Depression was just starting to end) to worry about foreign affairs.
Note that Imperial Japan did not always have the same set of political leadership, not like Hitlers Germany. It was not until 1940 or so that the War “party” had complete control and war was thought of as inevitable by them. They also thought if they hit the USA really hard we’d back off. :dubious::rolleyes:
A series of diplomatic miss-steps, caused by a lack of understanding of the other nation, made each year get closer to war. Even until the middle of 1941 there were some serious attempts at negotiation. One sticking point is that Imperial Japan thought the USA was demanding a complete withdrawal from all of China, including Manchukuo. Apparently however, the USA wasn’t asking for that.
In the course of researching a book project recently in the Public Records Office here I came across an assessment by, I think, the Ambassador in Washington (Lord Lothian) to the effect that while most people in America sympathised with Britain and France in their efforts they were equally determined that, come what may, the USA was going to stay out of this war.
The idea that the US was totally caught by surprise by WWII is false. All you have to do is look at the size of the military buildup in 1940-1941. In 1939, the US spent 500 million on expanding the armed forces. In 1940 they spent 8 billion, and in 1941 they spent 26 billion. Essentially by the point that Pearl Harbor happened, Congress had spent more defense money than during ALL of WWI.
Similarly, the military was composed of about 335,000 soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen in 1939. In 1940, it was 458,000, and in 1941 it was 1,801,101.
They knew something was up, and the military and politicians knew we were likely to be involved. They weren’t expecting an expeditionary type of warfare, and were still for the most part, preparing for fighting a defensive war in the Western hemisphere. That’s really where they were surprised for the most part. They knew there would be a fight, but didn’t know where, when and with who exactly. Pearl Harbor was a pretty audacious move, and the first of its kind (how many massive surprise air attacks on naval bases had there been prior to then?) , so it’s understandable that they were caught off guard.
Certainly there had been several warnings issued to the armed forces in the previous weeks that Japan was expected to commence hostilities within a few days. When nothing happened, it induced a certain scepticism.
One could say that the war in Asia had started in 1937 or even 1931, and the war in Europe had started officially in September of 1939, yet by the end of 1941 America was still very poorly prepared to fight.
And (probably correctly) it seemed to the Japanese that America’s attention was focused on the possibility of fighting a major war in Europe instead of Asia, with the best-case possibility (for America) of the US forces in the PI and the Pacific Fleet buying time until some later point when they could move against the Japanese Empire. So by removing or at least neutralizing the US Pacific forces, Japan would have a free hand in Asia and the western Pacific, and by the time that America recovered its strength and willingness to fight (if it ever did), Japan would be in an essentailly invulnerable strategic position. If Japan moved fast and struck hard, America could be taken out of the fight before they even really got into it, and would think twice and twice again before getting back into it.
Additionally, the example of what seemed to be developing at the time in the USSR seemed to suggest that this strategy would hold water. The Soviets were, like the Ameircans, massively industrialized (and compared to the USA, the USSR devoted WAY more resources to military production vice civilian), geographically huge, and capable of mustering a lot of manpower. Yet at the time it seemed that the best the Soviets could do with all those soldiers, tanks, guns, etc, was to let the Germans capture or destroy them in immense quantities. It seemed preordained that the conquest of the USSR was only a matter of how fast the Germans could drive forwards. And this served only to confirm to the Japanese that they too could pull off a similar trick if they were organized and bold enough.
The counter to the thought immediately above is that the Japanese themselves had had very recently had their butts kicked in a couple of short duration fights wth the Soviets. The lesson they took away seems to have been that next time they should do it bigger and do it bolder.
The lessons learned from their ongoing piecemeal conquest of China seemed also to confim the go big or go home idea, and also that it was very possible for Japan with a much smaller population and slimmer resources to overcome a much larger and more populated nation.
At least that seems (to me) to be what they were thinking. Seemed like a good idea at the time.
My Dad served with MacArthur and Dad had a interesting theory; The USA thought the “surprise attack” would hit the Philippines, and FDR ordered Mac to “act surprised”. This** could** explain why he was caught with his pants down so badly, he still was following secret orders from FDR.
Mind you my Dad despised Mac, which Mac did not know. Dad also said that the “true story of how Dug-out Doug escaped from the Philippines would never be known”.
Since 1931, the mandatory final essay question at the Imperial Japanese Naval Academy had been “How would you go about launching a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor?”
Found this at the Institute for Historical Review’s website:
John Toland’s Infamy takes a good look at some of the shenanigans that went on behind the scenes in Washington.
I don’t think you can compare Al Qaeda with the German or Japanese War Machines of 1941, rolling over country after country, but we certainly underestimated what they might do to strike us. Maybe we should have expected a 9/11-style attack from Al Qaeda before it happened, but where or how they might attack would still have been hard to predict.