August 2, 2023

In 2021, U.S. Navy veteran Douglas P. Horne published a masterfully researched book, The McCollum Memorandum: a Story of Washington, D.C., in 1940-41, that takes a microscope to the available historical facts in the lead-up to Pearl Harbor and concludes that FDR not only knew about the Pearl Harbor attack in advance but had wanted it to happen. Now, Horne has a fascinating podcast discussing the McCollum Memorandum, a foreign policy action memorandum authored on October 7, 1940, by Lieutenant Commander Arthur H. McCollum, the director of the Office of Naval Intelligence’s Far Eastern Section.

‘); googletag.cmd.push(function () { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1609268089992-0’); }); document.write(”); googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.pubads().addEventListener(‘slotRenderEnded’, function(event) { if (event.slot.getSlotElementId() == “div-hre-Americanthinker—New-3028”) { googletag.display(“div-hre-Americanthinker—New-3028”); } }); }); }

The Nazi Blitz attack on London began on September 7, 1940, when German planes appeared over London, and lasted until May 11, 1941. In the Battle of the Atlantic that began in 1939, German U-boats were sinking trans-Atlantic merchant ships in a tonnage war that threatened to sink the Allied supplies Churchill needed to survive.

On August 9, 1941, Churchill arrived aboard the HMS Prince of Wales at Placenta Bay off the coast of Newfoundland for a secret meeting with FDR. What emerged from the meeting was a joint policy statement known as the “Atlantic Charter,” a declaration that stopped short of pledging that the U.S. would enter the war to defeat Hitler. In the wake of World War I, U.S. public sentiment had no appetite for involvement in another European war. Roosevelt’s greatest fear was that the United States would be forced to enter the war prematurely while still deeply divided ideologically.

Image: Aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941.

On June 22, 1941, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, invading the Soviet Union. FDR needed to keep Japan from attacking the Soviet Union so Stalin could stay in the fight against Hitler. Stalin’s chances of defeating two Axis powers—Hitler in the west and Imperial Japan in the east—were not good, given Stalin’s purge of the Red Army Officer Corps in the 1930s.

‘); googletag.cmd.push(function () { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1609270365559-0’); }); document.write(”); googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.pubads().addEventListener(‘slotRenderEnded’, function(event) { if (event.slot.getSlotElementId() == “div-hre-Americanthinker—New-3035”) { googletag.display(“div-hre-Americanthinker—New-3035”); } }); }); }

Horne’s new podcast explains how important the October 7 McCollum Memorandum—written just two months before the attack on Pearl Harbor—is to understand FDR’s actions in the lead-up to that pivotal event.

McCollum stated his key conclusion as follows: “It is not believed that in the present state of public opinion the United States government is capable of declaring war against Japan without more ado.” What McCollum recommended was that the U.S. government should take a series of steps to bait the Japanese to attack us. McCollum knew that the Japanese navy depended on U.S. oil exports, and Japan would consider an oil embargo an act of war. Horne makes a convincing case that FDR implemented McCollum’s plan.

Horne discovered a vitally important document buried in the British National Archives. The document involved a Japanese diplomatic “MAGIC” cable transmitted on August 15, 1941, that was sent from the Japanese ambassador in Berlin to the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo. The British and Americans intercepted the coded diplomatic telegram independently.

On August 15, 1941, after meeting with S.S. General Sepp Dietrich, the Japanese Ambassador to Nazi Germany, Baron Hiroshi Oshima, transmitted the cable from the Japanese Embassy in Berlin using the Japanese Foreign Service Type B encryption machine. One of Hitler’s elite S.S. bodyguards in the 1920s, Dietrich was now a combat general with the Waffen S.S. Horne noted that “to say Dietrich was an insider, and ‘trusted’ by Hitler was an understatement.”

According to Oshima, Dietrich told him that “in the event of a collision between Japan and the United States, Germany would at once open hostilities with America.” For FDR, this intercepted cable addressed a key concern with the McCollum Memorandum’s plan. Baiting Japan to attack the U.S. would only serve FDR’s desire to enter the war to save Great Britain if Germany joined Japan in declaring war on us.

Horne makes a credible case that U.S. naval intelligence tracked the progress of the Japanese fleet sent to attack Pearl Harbor as the armada crossed the Pacific Ocean—information FDR intentionally hid from Admiral Husband Kimmel, the commander-in-chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet (CINCPACFLT), stationed at Pearl Harbor.