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Comment by wayoutthere | Hacker News Reader

There’s a school of thought that Pearl Harbor was intentionally left vulnerable in order to provide public justification for entering a war that it was pretty obvious we were getting drawn into anyway. The Nazis were vehemently anti-communist which means they had a significant amount of support within the US government, and overcoming that required an egregiously offensive violation of our national sovereignty (which Pearl Harbor provided).

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The problem with this school of thought is that it essentially says "let's lose the bulk of our Pacific fleet and have to spend a couple years rebuilding, to get a sufficiently strong cause for war."

This is absurd on its face, especially when you consider that successfully repelling a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor would achieve the same thing without the massive loss in men and material, and allow the U.S. to go on the offensive immediately, before Japan consolidated its Pacific holdings.

Besides, at the time of the attack, public sentiment was 2:1 in favour of risking war with Japan to curtail its expansion; German submarines were already sinking U.S. ships in the Atlantic. The U.S. public had already swung towards war with both powers. The PR boost of the attack wasn't needed.

Yes the complete oil embargo by the British, Dutch and US made war practically assured. A brilliant diplomatic move by FDR.

The problem (well, many problems) with that particular conspiracy theory (which is what it is) is that going to war with Japan doesn't mean that the US will enter the war against Germany.

It de-facto did; the US had been providing material aid to the British for years and the axis powers had a mutual defense treaty. As soon as the US declared war on Japan, Germany and Italy declared war on the US (meaning they would now be attacking every US ship they saw, civilian or military). This was entirely expected by military leaders at the time and blatantly obvious to even the news media.

The point is that Germany was under no obligation to declare war on the United States. What was Japan going to do if they didn't?

Not only was there no obligation to declare war, but it was Hitler's first formal declaration of war in the conflict! So there was no precedent for expecting him too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declarations_of_war_during_Wor...

There had been a low-grade conflict for a few years with German U-boats attacking American ships carrying goods to England. Given that’s how we got drawn into WWI, it was certainly the most likely outcome at the time given our “special relationship” with England.

Japan's attack prompted the U.S. to declare war on Japan. That declaration prompted the other Axis powers to declare war on the U.S.

It's plausible in terms of cause and effect. The "if-this-then-that"s follow pretty well.

However, counting on something like Pearl Harbor is pants on head moronic. Japan shipped the majority of its fleet across the Pacific to hit a single target. If the U.S. was counting on an attack, they probably weren't counting on an attack of that scale. Which is poor planning.

And what happens if the Japanese never attack?

Over time, the U.S. would have entered the war, just like it did with World War I. Eventually, trade would have been hindered or too many U.S. ships would have been incidental casualties. The U.S. consistently thought that being across an ocean on either side protected it from being affected by European/Asian affairs and was consistently proven wrong.

> That declaration prompted the other Axis powers to declare war on the U.S.

That was Hitler's single biggest error.

That's extremely debatable and a very US-centric point of view. The general consensus is that Hitler's single biggest error was the invasion of the Soviet Union.

I'd place that as his second biggest error.

And yet... Stalin was going to attack Hitler eventually, maybe 1942 or 1943. So the pre-emptive attack has it's virtues. Could he have conquered England in time to get be ready for war with Russia when it came?

And, could Russia have done as well as they did without US materiel? (I freely acknowledge that Russia did most of the bleeding in World War II. I don't want to minimize that at all. But US materiel was also essential to them.)

I agree with what you are saying. But US materiel could have come with or without an actual war declaration. Actually, war was declared by Germany on December 11, 1941, and the USSR was declared eligible for lend-lease aid on November 7, 1941. Declaring war on the US or not, Hitler would have still dealt with (partially) US funded Soviets just because it attacked the USSR in June 22, 1941 so that is not an argument. Of course, it's hard to judge, as aid can (and was) accelerated.

As a primary war aim, I'm not sure you could call the invasion of the Soviet Union a strategic error. The whole war was an error, therefore Hitler's biggest error was the invasion of Poland.

In WW2 the US was the first country that Germany formally declared war on, and was not required by its treaty with Japan, so thats an odd theory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declarations_of_war_during_Wor...

People forget the democratic/political constraints on Roosevelt though, including Hitler who thought of it as normalizing relations but Roosevelt wouldn't have had the political capital for declaring war on Germany.

>which means they had a significant amount of support within the US government

That totally explains why the USA never attacked Stalin, and in fact provided lots of logistical material from oil, rubber, and ammo, to tanks and airplanes.

An alternate explanation: “the enemy (Russia) of my enemy (Germany) is my friend”.

It's been years since I read Eisenhower's biography, but my recollection is that within the military a lot of the aid to Russia was seen as a terrible idea and many felt that the British tricked the US into giving that aid in a secret three-way meeting in North Africa.

Did I remember that correctly?

Nope, incorrect. Lend Lease was criticized that it wasn't really lending gear, since there was a high expectation that it wasn't coming back.

I don't know of any large scale thoughts that Britain tricked the US into entering initial aid attempts. The US was heavily into anti Axis attempts early in the war.

You are remembering incorrectly.

Communism wasn't a threat to the USA in the 1930s. Have you heard of the lend-lease program? Billions of dollars in military hardware sent to the USSR to fight the Nazis.

US anti-communism was a Cold War thing. You're getting your timelines messed up here.

It most certainly was not just a Cold War thing [1]; anti-communism was a coherent and vocal point of view even in the late 1920s. The big industrialists (e.g. Henry Ford, a known nazi sympathizer) at the time saw it was an existential threat and were determined to stop it at all costs.

[1] https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/1730

Yes there was a non-zero number of anti-communists in the United States at any given time. That wasn't what I was saying.

What I'm saying is that anti-communism to the point of orchestrating quasi-false flags to get drawn into another World War was not a focus of FDR's administration. As I pointed out, FDR's admin fully and materially supported foreign communist governments.

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