whitehall
Diamond Member
FDR was in his 3rd term when the US Navy was crippled in Hawaii. Everyone in the freaking world knew that war with Japan was imminent. The US even provoked the volatile Bushido Japanese with an oil embargo. What did the FDR administration think would happen? The grossly over hyped Military Chief of Staff, George Marshall, who never commanded anything larger than a bunch of CCC civilians actually had the decoded Japanese message in his hand hours before the attack and he never called Pearl Harbor until (conveniently?) the message center went down and he sent a Western Union telegram which arrived the same time as the Japanese Zeroes. The US Army in the Philippines had orders to fall back from Bataan to Corrigador when the do-do hit the propeller but the US had no way to evacuate them or even resupply the Philippine Army and they were forced to surrender by April 1942.