One conventional wisdom that I find irksome is the notion that the United States was unprepared for World War II. While the US was certainly not prepared enough for the conflict that emerged, the US actually had taken a number of significant steps to improve its readiness. Starting in 1934, Congress began increasing the size of the U.S. Navy. Their efforts were led by the chairman of the House Naval affairs committee Carl Vinson (the one we named an aircraft carrier after) and this led to a series of acts that marginally increase the Navy. For instance, the Naval act of 1938 , also known as the second Vinson act, mandated a 20% increase in the Navy largely in response to the Japanese invasion of China in the German annexation of Austria. In July 1940, Congress passed the two Ocean Navy act, which mandated a 70% increase in the size of the Navy, with the goal of allowing the Navy to operate in both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans (hence the name). While the US found itself lacking in aircraft carriers at the start of the war, it had 2 new battleships (the North Carolina and Washington) on hand and 8 other battleships building. 4 of these joined the fleet by August 1942 thereby making up most of the losses at Pearl Harbor. [Note: The new battleships were fast and bristling with anti-aircraft guns. Rather than being vulnerable to air attack, they were formidable area air defense systems and were primarily used to protect the carriers from air attacks.]
As far as the Army goes, the United States launched its first peacetime conscription in 1940 with the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940. The US also mobilized 18 National Guard divisions and 29 aerial squadrons for per year of training and reorganization. A US Army history of the mobilization gives the sense of an Army under great pressure to expand when it makes the following claim:
“Although full-scale mobilization remained politically impossible, the government started the financial transition from parsimony to abundance. Appropriations came faster than the Army could absorb them, over $8 billion in 1940 and $26 billion in 1941, dwarfing the half billion dollars that had been allotted for expansion early in 1939. By the time of Pearl Harbor, Congress had spent more for Army procurement than it had for the Army and the Navy during all of World War I.”Unfortunately, these numbers appear to be a bit inflated (perhaps the author was using inflation adjusted dollars). If we look at historical figures on defense spending from 1939 to 1945, we see a smaller, but still dramatic, up tick in US defense spending in fiscal year 1941 (Oct 1, 1940 to Sep 30, 1941):
FY1939 $1.9 billion
FY1940 $2.2 billion (15% increase over previous year)
FY1941 $7.2 billion (227% increase over previous year)
FY1942 $27.1 billion (165% increase over previous year)
FY1943 $70.4 billion (159% increase over previous year)
FY1944 $86.5 billion (22% increase over previous year)
FY1945 $93.7 billion (8% increase over previous year)
The $7.2 billion in FY1941 doesn't sound like a lot of money to us today, but in 1941, the entire GDP of the United States was only $129.4 billion. This means that the United States spent 5.5% of its GDP on defense in 1941 (rather from Oct 1940 through Sep 1941). Also, it is interesting to note that the biggest percentage increase in defense spending occurred in fiscal year 1941 prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. . When you add the specter of drafting people into the peacetime military for the first time ever, one certainly doesn't get the impression of a nation sitting idly by while the world burns around it.
A corollary to the unpreparedness wisdom is the conventional wisdom that the United States was pursuing an isolationist policy. To be sure, there was a strong strain of isolationism in US policy, which led to the passing of a number of neutrality acts in the 1930s. However, from 1940 on, the US was in fact beginning to take fairly aggressive steps on the international stage.
In December 1940, Pres. Roosevelt declared the United States, the Arsenal of Democracy in a radio address promising to help Great Britain fight Nazi Germany. The US at that point was selling arms to belligerents, albeit on a cash and carry basis, and continued to do so until it became clear that the UK could no longer afford to buy weapons. In March 1941, Congress passed “An Act to Further Promote the Defense of the United States”, better known as Lend-Lease. Under this policy, the United States provided more material to Great Britain, China, and the Soviet Union free of charge (albeit subject to a vague promise to return the material when the war was over).
The US efforts did not stop here. In September 1939, at the very beginning of the war, the United States established a neutrality zone in the north Atlantic. The U.S. Navy began the first of what we called Neutrality Patrols that would observe and report the movement of warships west of latitude 65° and protect merchant shipping within this zone. Despite the name, neutrality patrols greatly favored the British as it relieved them of the responsibility for protecting shipping i about half the North Atlantic. Furthermore, in June 1941, the United States occupied Iceland, which the British had invaded in 1940 to prevent it from falling into German hands.
Meanwhile, in the Pacific, United States was taking an even more aggressive stance towards Japan. In September 1940, the Japanese occupied French Indochina in the United States responded by cutting off exports of scrap metal to Japan (74% of Japan scrap iron and 93% of its copper came from the US) and closing the Panama Canal to Japanese shipping. In early 1941, the US Pacific Fleet was moved from San Diego with the intention of restraining Japanese behavior. Negotiations ensued but continued Japanese aggression in China led the US to freeze Japanese assets in July 1941 and to embargo all oil and gasoline exports in August. Since 80% of Japan’s oil came from the US, this was a particularly dramatic step as it left the Japanese with about a 2 year supply of oil on hand and an urgent need to secure new supplies.
Essentially, the United States put Japan in the position of choosing between withdrawing from China or securing access from someplace else to the resources it needed to continue its conquest of China. The closest oil to Japan was in the Dutch East Indies, today’s Indonesia, and the Dutch had already refused to sell them enough oil to continue their war in China. This led the Japanese to plan for an invasion of what they called the Southern Resource Area. However, the British naval base at Singapore and the US naval bases in the Philippines lay on either side of the sea route to this area and, therefore, had to be secured as part of Japan’s massive Southern Operation. This set the stage for a war with the US and the UK (not to mention the Dutch and Australians).
It is interesting to note that a Gallup poll taken shortly before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor asked Americans. “Do you think the United States will go to war against Japan some time in the near future?” 52% of respondents said they expected war with Japan, while only 27% did not, and 21% had no opinion. So, while the attack on Pearl Harbor was shocking surprise, the war itself was hardly unexpected.
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