I've read in academic histories many times that FDR or at the very least someone high up in the WH had advance notice of Pearl Harbor. Allowing Japan to attack without any defensive action may well have been a ploy to go to war in Europe and Asian. Congress would not approve a war nor fund it. Pearl Harbor changed that on a dime. Actual records exist that the info was picked up by the Pentagon in Arlington and forwarded to the WH for action. No one knows definitely whether FDR saw it. Someone did not act when acting in haste was so obvious. American intelligence was forewarned that an attack was imminent. It was not much of a surprise. So even if the cable traffic did not exist, what justification was there, knowing the current events that were readily public in newspaper articles, in not defending Pearl Harbor. I don't know how any official could walk past the ocean grave of the Arizona.
More lives were at stake in the long run. I don't believe in conspiracies but I believe this one. Also, radar went off quite a while before the Japanese struck. It was a new technology that no one trusted. It was the first time most people were exposed to radar so people thought there was a glitch in the system.
For decades, I would freak reading about Hiroshoma and Nagasaki. It was beyond me how any Americans could sanction such slaughter. Since WWII studies have become popular in recent years, I've read much more. The Germans were ahead of us in developing the A-bomb. Einstein and other peaceniks wrote to reluctant physicists and engineers to cooperate. They opposed the bomb as an idea but Hitler having a A-bomb let them put their consciences to one side. The Germans just happened to pursue a slightly deviated path to the bomb or we would have been bombed. The Japanese military did not want to surrender even after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The emperor made the decision. Japanese were willing to die for Japan. The slaughter of Allied troops fighting on Japanese homeland would have enormous. I did not know of the firebombings of Dresden and other German cities. Far more civilians died in the firebombs rained down on Germany than those who died in the American attack. The damage was much greater, except radiation was not present. I wish we did a trial with independent observers in the South Pacific. Reading commentaries, though, it would have not changed the result. The moral purity would be more obvious if we did a trial.
I also assume Japan knew we had a bomb. Maybe not the full extent of its development but a ball park idea of what Germany and the US were doing.
