dvisor, had repeatedly assured the President that Oahu fortress complex, which included Pearl Harbor, was the strongest in the world and that a seaborne attack was out of the question. The plan of attack on Pearl Harbor, which involved getting a gigantic carrier force unobserved over thousands of miles of ocean, was the most audacious and complex scheme of its kind in history. Nothing like it had ever been conceived before, in extent and complexity, and it is no wonder that Marshall discounted its magnitude and FDR brushed aside such warnings as he received.The Second World War was not started in secrecy and deceit. Roosevelt was not an ideologist, who saw salvation in forcing an isolationist country into international affairs. He was a President fraught with the problems of a panicked, economically debacled country. His entire focus was on the regrowth of the American infrastructure. The fickle attitude of Japan, a country that occilated between threats of war and neutrality, between military and civilian control, were not taken seriously in leu of more prevalent problems. This is not to say, either, that the U.S. itself was a populace of isolationists. America had grown wealthy through international trade and exports, but the devastating implications of a war on an already strained people was too much. America joined the war, initially, in retaliation to the threat of war. It was forced, inadvertently, into war, not by Presidential conspiracy to overturn isolationist feelings, but out of self-defense....
