"Day of Deceit" provides compelling evidence that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt deliberately provoked Japan to attack the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor so that America could enter the war on the allied side. Stinnett, a distinguished World War II navy veteran who researched his subject for over sixteen years, provides the following evidence:
1. A naval intelligence officer named Arthur McCollum developed an eight-point plan to provoke Japanese hostilities. This plan reached Roosevelt who implemented all eight points.
2. Contrary to popular belief, the Japanese navy broke radio silence on multiple occasions prior to December 7, 1941.
3. More than 94% of all secret Japanese naval messages (including some with direct reference to the impending attack on Pearl Harbor) were successfully decoded by American intelligence units prior to December 7, 1941
4. Roosevelt implemented a change of naval command that placed proponents of the eight-point-provocation plan in key positions of power. However, the newly promoted commander of Pearl Harbor, Admiral Husband Kimmel was consistently denied access to vital decoded translations of Japanese naval communications.
5. Naval Intelligence and the FBI successfully monitored the communication of Japanese intelligence agents in Hawaii for months. These communications, which included a bombing grid map of Pearl Harbor, revealed Japan's intent.
6. Much of the information successfully collected and analyzed by American Intelligence organizations prior to December 7, 1941 was reinforced by information from British and Dutch intelligence.
7. A sophisticated radio tracking system spanning from Alaska to Indonesia enabled America to track Japanese commercial and military shipping patterns. These patterns, including the movement of carrier groups and recall of worldwide merchant ships pointed to an obvious prelude to hostilities several months before December 7th.
8. Most of the critical U.S. Pacific Fleet components such as heavy cruisers and aircraft carriers were not in Pearl Harbor during the bombing. In fact the only ships that were sunk were WW I relics.
9. Much of the documented information was censored or withheld from the public for decades and continues to be to this day.
10. In early 1941 Roosevelt divided the U.S. Navy into an Atlantic and Pacific command and ordered fleet construction, which included one hundred aircraft carriers to be completed by 1943. This indicates that the losses at Pearl Harbor would not interfere with America's larger war aims and with war production that supported those aims.
These facts are well documented and reinforced with repeated examples. Perhaps the most compelling part of the book is that photocopies of evidence including the eight-point plan are provided in a massive appendix. Simply put, you can see the evidence for yourself.
Interestingly enough, Stinnett never condemns Roosevelt or his cohorts and even agrees to some extent with their rationale that sacrificing a few men and ships at Pearl Harbor was ultimately worth preventing a complete Axis victory in World War II.
This is perhaps the only part of the book that I have an issue with. Stinnett agrees with McCollum's (and Roosevelt's) assessment that if Germany defeated England, then it would gain control or influence English colonies and nations such as Canada. McCollum believed that Germany's next move would be to occupy parts of South American and to start anti-American uprisings there--and Stinnett agrees with him. What McCollum and Roosevelt could not know at the time, but which a competent historian like Stinnett should know is that ultimately Hitler's war aims consistently followed the goals he had outlined in Mein Kampf. In other words, the defeat of England would likely have been followed by an invasion of Russia instead of an occupation of South America. And in this case, it is quite likely that Japan, having already lost two major border skirmishes with the Soviet Union, might have joined the Nazis in invading the Russian landmass from the East.
This judgment aside, Stinnett's work is compelling to the point of being nearly irrefutable. As to whether or not Roosevelt did the right thing in sacrificing men and material at Pearl Harbor for larger political reasons, that is something each of us must decide on our own.
