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.
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…
