I'm on Roosevelt's side, Toadfrog. He was a smart fellow, and did pretty much what had to be done under the circumstances. Like you, I do not believe he had any idea Pearl Harbour would be hit, but he knew perfectly well that war was coming...it was just a question of when and where.

When he stated that the attack was "unprovoked" he was doing what politicians always do...speaking for the benefit of his own constituency. It was only unprovoked in a strictly military sense.

My father saved many newspaper clippings from the early war years in England. It's fascinating to look at them now, and see the distortions, misleading statements, and outright lies that were fed to the British public in their media about how the war was going. All this was in an attempt to build up morale on the homefront, of course, as well as to possibly spread disinformation which might confuse the Germans if they got hold of it.

For example, they go on and on about the imagined deficiencies of the Messerschmitt BF-109 German fighter, while praising its stablemate, the twin-engine Bf-110 in another article as a virtual masterpiece. The fact was, the 109 was a deadly little machine, as good as anything in the sky at the time....while the 110 was dead meat when confronted with British fighters...because it just wasn't manueuverable enough. The article fails to mention this.

Did they actually hope to get the Germans to read that nonsense and fly more 110's to their doom over England? I have no idea, but it's certainly strange to read it now with the benfit of hindsight.

War is full of disinformation, and Roosevelt certainly was not going to reveal to his own public that he had used a trade embargo to drive Japan into war.

To point these things out is not to take sides with the Axis, whose war aims were unjustifiable from the start. Roosevelt was absolutely right to take them on.

It's simply telling both sides of the story, that's all.

I'm just as glad as you are that the Axis lost the war.

- LH