Part III, President Roosevelt's Options

To make sense of today's posting, I urge you to scroll down to the daily 'Blog Archives' and click on the December 3rd posting.

As I noted in yesterday's posting,
President Roosevelt had several options
to try and force Germany to declare war
against this county.


Great Britain was placing very large orders of food, oil, raw materials and war productsfrom this country but German U boats were sinking large numbers of the ships hauling this material to the British Isles.


To help Great Britain counter this German effort to stop the flow of goods from the United States and Canada, President Roosevelt issued two orders. One was to turn over 50 WWI destroyers to Britain.


The other was to order our destroyers to escort the British convoys as far as
Greenland. He knew Germany would find these moves provocative but I have no doubt he welcomed that attitude. Germany might even feel provoked enough to declare war against the United States. During this period several of our destroyers were torpedoed and one and one was sunk, resulting in the loss of many American naval personnel. But Germany did not feel provoked enough to declare war
against this country.


Roosevelt's other option was to attempt to take advantage of the axis agreement in which, if one of the three members of the axis
agreement was attacked or if war was dedeclared against that country, the other two countries would declare war against the country which had
attacked or declared war against their
axis partner.


Since it was Germany President Roosevelt was trying to force into declaring against us, Japan seemed the logical country to try and
provoke into attacking this country. It wouldn't be enough to provoke a minor attack. It had to be a devastating attack which would turn the people in the United States toward revenge.


How to do this?
The first action President took was to order a stop to the shipment of all scrap metal and oil from this country to Japan. The second was to order an embargo of oil and raw materials from any source to Japan.
These actions were enough to be greatly
provocative. The Japanese were very dependent on these sources of of raw materials. They were sure to try and obtain their own
sourcesthrough conquests. But the president and his advisors felt these
measures might not be enough to provoke
Japn into attacking us.

To further provoke the Japanese further,
President Roosevelt ordered two small
civilian boats, one a sail boat and the other
an old yacht which the United States had
taken possession of, to be commissioned and outfitted for a mission. These two boats were to be manned by US Navy sailors. The crews were given orders to sail into the
waters close to Japanese ports in the
south Pacific to spy on the ports and
issue reports back to Hawaii by radio.
The hope was this act would provoke
the Japanese government enough to
cause them to declare war against the
United States. We would then
reciprocate by declaring war against
Japan. Germany would then declare
war agains us.


The president and his people were well
aware these orders would result in suicide missions for the crews of the two
boats. In fact, the naval people in Hawaii
and the members of the crew were also
aware they were being sent on a suicide
mission. Both boats set sail around the
first part of December but were recalled
very shortly after setting sail when the
top people in Washington realized the
missions would be unnecessary. By this
time they were aware the main Japanese
fleet had set sail from their home ports and were rendezvouing for their big mission.


The Roosevelt administration was getting
reports from a numerous sources Japan
was going to launch a surprise attack
against the United States . At first they
did not know where but this was to
change over the next several days because of
reports coming in from various places which
were to confirm what direction the Japanese
fleet was sailing.
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