 Many people are misled by formalities. They assume, for example, that the United States went to war against Germany and Japan only after its declarations of war against these nations in December 1941. In truth, the United States had been at war for a long time before making these declarations. Its warmaking took a variety of forms. For example, the U.S. Navy conducted so-called shoot-on-sight convoys. Convoys that might include British ships in the North Atlantic along the greater part of the shipping route from the United States to Great Britain. Even though German U-boats had orders to refrain and did refrain from initiating attacks on U.S. shipping, the United States and Great Britain entered into arrangements to pool intelligence, combine weapons development, test military equipment jointly, and undertake other forms of war-related cooperation. The U.S. military actively cooperated with the British military in combat operations against the Germans. For example, by alerting the British Navy of aerial or marine sightings of German submarines, which the British then attacked. The U.S. government undertook in countless ways to provide military and other supplies and assistance to the British, the French, the Soviets who were fighting the Germans. The U.S. government also provided military and other supplies and assistance, including war planes and pilots to the Chinese who were at war with Japan. The U.S. military actively engaged in planning with the British, the British Commonwealth countries, and the Dutch East Indies for future combined combat operations against Japan. Most important, the U.S. government engaged in a series of increasingly stringent economic warfare measures that pushed the Japanese into a predicament that the U.S. authorities well understood would probably provoke them to attack U.S. territories and forces in the Pacific region in a quest to secure essential raw materials that the Americans, British, and Dutch government in exile had embargoed. Consider these summary statements by George Victor. And by the way, George Victor is by no means a Roosevelt basher and it's the other way around. He greatly admires Roosevelt and entirely approves of the actions Roosevelt took to bring the United States into the war. So that's why I think he makes a good source for my purposes. You know, he didn't set out to provide grist for my meal. He has a very nice book, however, called the Pearl Harbor Myth, which I believe is completely honest and well done in its documentation. I'm going to read a long excerpt from that book by George Victor. Roosevelt had already led the United States into war with Germany in the spring of 1941 into a shooting war on a small scale. From then on, he gradually increased U.S. military participation. Japan's attack on December 7 enabled him to increase it further and to obtain a war declaration. Pearl Harbor is more fully accounted for as the end of a long chain of events, with the U.S. contribution reflecting a strategy formulated after France fell in the spring of 1941. In the eyes of Roosevelt and his advisors, the measures taken early in 1941 justified a German declaration of war on the United States, a declaration that did not come to their disappointment. Roosevelt told his ambassador to France, William Bullitt, that U.S. entry into war against Germany was certain but must wait for an incident, which he was confident the Germans would give us, establishing a record in which the enemy fired the first shot was a theme that ran through Roosevelt's tactics. He seems eventually to have concluded, correctly as it turned out, that Japan would be easier to provoke into a major attack on the United States than Germany would be. Still reading from George Victor, the claim that Japan attacked the United States without provocation was typical rhetoric. It worked because the public did not know that the administration had expected Japan to respond with war to anti-Japanese measures it had taken in July 1941. Expecting to lose a war with the United States and lose it disastrously, Japan's leaders had tried with growing desperation to negotiate. On this point, most historians have long agreed. Meanwhile, evidence has come out that Roosevelt and Hull, persistently refused to negotiate. Japan offered compromises and concessions which the United States countered with increasing demands. It was after learning of Japan's decision to go to war with the United States if the talks, quote, break down that Roosevelt decided to break them off. According to Attorney General Francis Biddle, Roosevelt said he hoped for an incident in the Pacific to bring the United States into the European war. It's the end of my quote from George Victor. These facts and numerous others that point in the same direction are for the most part anything but new. Many of them have been available to the public since the 1940s. As early as 1953, anyone might have read a collection of heavily documented essays on various aspects of U.S. foreign policy in the late 1930s and early 1940s edited by Harry Elmer Barnes that showed the numerous ways in which the U.S. government bore responsibility for the country's eventual engagement in World War II, showed in short that the Roosevelt Administration wanted to get the country into the war and worked craftily along various avenues to ensure that sooner or later it would get in, preferably in a way that would unite public opinion behind the war by making the United States appear to have been the victim of an aggressor's unprovoked attack. As Secretary of War Henry Stemson testified after the war, quote, we needed the Japanese to commit the first overt act, close quote. At present, however, 70 years after these events, probably not one American in a thousand, maybe not one in 10,000, has an inkling of any of this history. So effective has been the pro-Rosevelt, pro-American, pro-World War II faction that in this country it has utterly dominated teaching and popular writing about U.S. engagement in the so-called good war. Now I want to retrace my steps here, providing a little more context for what I've just said and some additional details. In the late 19th century, Japan's economy began to grow and to industrialize rapidly. Because Japan has few natural resources, many of its burgeoning industries had to rely on imported raw materials such as coal, iron ore or steel scrap, tin, copper, bauxite, rubber, and petroleum. Without access to such imports, many of which came from the United States or from European colonies in Southeast Asia, Japan's industrial economy would have ground to a halt. By engaging in international trade, however, the Japanese had built a moderately advanced industrial economy by 1941. At the same time, they built a military industrial complex to support an increasingly powerful Army and Navy. These armed forces allowed Japan to project its power into various places in the Pacific and East Asia, including Korea and northern China. Much as the United States had used its growing industrial might to equip armed forces that projected U.S. power into the Caribbean, Latin America, and even as far away as the Philippine Islands. When Franklin D. Roosevelt became president in 1933, the U.S. government fell under the control of a man who disliked the Japanese and harbored a romantic affection for the Chinese because some writers have speculated Roosevelt's ancestors had made money in the China trade. Roosevelt also disliked the Germans in general and Adolf Hitler in particular, and he tended to favor the British in his personal positions and in world affairs. He did not pay much attention to foreign policy, however, until his new deal began to peter out in 1937. Thereafter, he relied heavily on foreign policy to fulfill his political ambitions, including his desire for re-election to an unprecedented third term. When Germany began to rearm and to seek Laban's realm aggressively in the late 1930s, the Roosevelt administration cooperated closely with the British and the French in measures to oppose German expansion. After World War II commenced in 1939, this U.S. assistance grew ever greater and included such measures as the so-called destroyer deal and the deceptively named Lend-Lease program. In anticipation of U.S. entry into the war, the British and U.S. military staffs secretly formulated plans for joint operations. U.S. forces sought to create a war-justifying incident by cooperating with the British Navy in attacks on German U-boats in the North Atlantic. But Hitler refused to take the bait. Thus denying Roosevelt the pretext he craved for making the United States a full-fledged declared belligerent, a belligerent that the great majority of Americans opposed. In June 1940, Henry Stimpson, who had been Secretary of War under Taft and Secretary of State under Hoover, became Secretary of War again. Stimpson was a lion of the anglophile northeastern upper crust and no friend of the Japanese. In support of the so-called open-door policy for China, Stimpson favored the use of economic sanctions to obstruct Japan's advance in Asia. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau and Interior Secretary Harold Ickes vigorously endorsed this policy. Roosevelt hoped that such sanctions would goad the Japanese into making a rash mistake by launching war against the United States, which would bring in Germany because Japan and Germany were allied. The Roosevelt administration, while curtly dismissing Japanese diplomatic overtures to harmonize relations, accordingly imposed a series of increasingly stringent economic sanctions on Japan. In 1939, the United States unilaterally terminated the 1911 commercial treaty with Japan. On July 2nd, 1940, Roosevelt signed the Export Control Act, authorizing the president to license or prohibit the export of essential defense materials. Under this authority, on July 31st, exports of aviation motor fuels and lubricants and number one heavy melting iron and steel scrap were restricted. Next, in a move aimed at Japan, Roosevelt slapped an embargo effective October 16th on all exports of scrap iron and steel to destinations other than Britain and the nations of the Western Hemisphere. Finally, on July 26, 1941, Roosevelt froze Japanese assets in the United States, thus bringing commercial relations between the nations to an effective end. One week later, Roosevelt embargoed the export of such grades of oil as they were still in commercial flow to Japan. The British and the Dutch followed suit, embargoing exports to Japan from their colonies in Southeast Asia. Roosevelt and his subordinates knew they were putting Japan in an untenable position and that the Japanese government might well try to escape the strangleholds by going to war. Having broken the Japanese diplomatic code, the American leaders knew, among many other things, what Foreign Minister Toyota had communicated to Ambassador Nomura in July 31st. I read from that message, commercial and economic relations between Japan and third countries, led by England and the United States, are gradually becoming so horribly strained that we cannot endure it much longer. Consequently, our empire, to save its very life, must take measures to secure the raw materials of the South Seas. This was a message US leaders read as of the end of July 1941. They knew the position Japan was in, perfectly well. Because American cryptographers had also broken the Japanese naval code, the leaders in Washington also knew that Japan's measures would include an attack on Pearl Harbor. Yet they withheld this critical information from the commanders in Hawaii who might have headed off the attack better to defend against it. That Roosevelt and his chieftains did not ring the toxin, makes perfect sense. After all, the impending attack constituted precisely what they had been seeking for a long time. As Stimson confided to his diary after a meeting of the war cabinet on November 25th, 1941, quote, the question was how we should maneuver them into firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves, close quote. After the attack occurred, Stimson confessed that quote, my first feeling was of relief, that a crisis had come in a way which would unite all our people. Thank you very much.