Roberta Wohlstetter Pearl Harbor Analysis

When I first saw the title of the argument, I suddenly remembered the show I watched whether President Roosevelt knew the information that Japan was planning an attack on Pearl Harbor or not. Because the show was only focusing on the myth that the President knew the upcoming attack, it was interesting to read two different arguments. The argument first starts with explaining what caused Japan to attack on Pearl Harbor. Then two authors named Robert A. Theobald and Roberta Wohlsteetter claim each yes and no argument. According to the paper, Theobald is a “retired rear admiral,” who wrote The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor, which contends President Roosevelt knew the information that Japan was coming to attack on Pearl Harbor. On the other hand, Wohlstetter is a historian who wrote Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, and she has an opposed argument against Theobald. She believes that it was hard

intelligence information” (261), although they were able to translate the Japanese code. Furthermore, she adds that there were too much of information coming from various sources which it made hard to find the right information among those sources. Also, she claims that Japan had sent false signals to make people to believe that Japanese fleet was still near its country. She believes that President Roosevelt did not expect that Japan would attack the U.S. but thought they would attack other country instead. And the reason why the American leaders who were staying in the Philippines could not attack Japan after an eight-hour warning was because their planes were damaged by Japanese planes. I think Wohlstetter’s argument also seems very persuasive since all her points are reasonable on how the U.S. could be attacked by Japan although the naval intelligence was able to figure out the Japanese