Over 75 years after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that launched America's entry into the Second World War, one persistent question remains unanswered: "Did President Franklin D. Roosevelt have foreknowledge of the attack---and did he (and his senior military leadership) then withhold that knowledge from his overseas commanders in Hawaii?" Douglas P. Horne, a former Naval Officer who recently completed 40 years of combined military-and-civilian service to the Federal Government, deals directly with this most difficult of all questions about World War II, in the first major "Revisionist" work about Pearl Harbor written in the last decade. Contrary to recent assertions by mainstream historians that the Revisionist hypothesis is now dead, Horne finds it to be more robust than ever. In the first known work that studies FDR's foreign policy "on the road to Pearl Harbor" as a timeline, or chronology (which assesses numerous factors---including codebreaking, diplomacy, military strategy, the unfolding events in Europe, and the personality and words of FDR himself), the author compellingly presents his own unique findings regarding the longstanding allegation by Revisionists that FDR used the impending Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as a "back door to war." Horne concludes there is, indeed, persuasive evidence that once FDR's undeclared naval war against Hitler in the north Atlantic failed to provide the desired casus belli (which would have allowed him to request a declaration of war against Nazi Germany), then consequently, permitting the Imperial Japanese Navy to attack Pearl Harbor---without providing any specific advance warning to the Hawaiian field commanders (i.e., allowing the Japanese to "fire the first shot" and commit "an overt act of war")---became the last, best chance for FDR to get a united America into the Second World War. FDR's overriding goal throughout 1940-41 was the imperative to get America involved, as a belligerent, in the war against Hitler's Germany, and the Japanese attack accomplished that goal, as Roosevelt knew it would. Both the timing of when FDR apparently received his foreknowledge of the impending attack, and the mechanism by which it was likely delivered, are thoroughly considered in this work. Author Douglas Horne also provides a critical assessment of the most recent Revisionist works, and using a new approach to the "big question" about Pearl Harbor, provides a bold new interpretation of events that will surprise most readers.
About the Author: Douglas P. Horne, a 1974 Cum Laude graduate of The Ohio State University who majored in history, and author of the five-volume work "Inside the Assassination Records Review Board" (about the U.S. Government's medical cover-up of the JFK assassination), has put his 40 years of combined military-and-civilian service to the Federal Government to good use in studying the 1945-46 Congressional Investigation into the Pearl Harbor attack; a little-known 1946 U.S. Government report containing key evidence about the attack; and the most recent Revisionist works about Pearl Harbor, to produce a grand "new synthesis" which answers the persistent question: "Did FDR know about the Pearl Harbor attack before it took place?" A former U.S. Naval Officer who spent 14 years working in four different Navy jobs at Pearl Harbor, and a Japanophile who has always been fascinated by the Imperial Japanese Navy, Horne has applied his own Navy job experience, and his understanding of how the government operates, to a plethora of data about the Pearl Harbor attack, to produce a work of high tension and drama that attempts to deal honestly with the most significant foreign policy event in America's 20th century history.