Elusive Victories_ The American Presidency at War-Oxford University Press (2012)

(Axel Boer) #1

390 notes to pages 139‒143



  1. Th is point is suggested by Eric Larrabee, Commander in Chief: Franklin
    Delano Roosevelt, His Lieutenants, and Th eir War (1987; reprint ed.,
    Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2004), 49–50.

  2. In the mid-1930s, the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Investigation
    of the Munitions Industry, better known after its chairman as the Nye
    Committee, held a well-publicized series of hearings that suggested a
    tie between American arms manufacturers and other industries and the
    decision to enter the war. See David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear:
    Th e American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford
    University Press, 2005), 387–88.

  3. Watt, How War Came , 612.

  4. Watt, How War Came , 261.

  5. Watt, How War Came , 268. See similarly, Ambrose, “‘Just Dumb Luck,’” 59.

  6. Jonathan G. Utley, Going to War with Japan, 1937–1941 (1985; reprint ed.
    New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 14.

  7. Watt, How War Came , 134–36.

  8. Watt, How War Came , 264–66.

  9. Gullan, “Expectations of Infamy,” 516–17.

  10. Larrabee, Commander in Chief , 46–47.

  11. Utley, Going to War with Japan , xiv–xv.

  12. Utley, Going to War with Japan , 9–10, 19–21.

  13. Utley, Going to War with Japan , 98–100.

  14. Lowenthal, “Roosevelt and the Coming of the War,” 418–19, 424–25.

  15. Utley, Going to War with Japan , 112ff. For several decades, the United
    States had maintained a grandiosely titled Asiatic Fleet, based in the Phil-
    ippines. Although headed by a full admiral, it lacked capital ships (aircraft
    carriers or battleships) and could off er scant resistance to a major Japanese
    move south of French Indochina toward Singapore, the Dutch East Indies
    (now Indonesia), or the Philippines. Th e Asiatic fl eet was fought to virtual
    destruction in the four months following the start of war in the Pacifi c in
    December 1941. See W. G. Winslow, Th e Fleet the Gods Forgot: Th e U.S.
    Asiatic Fleet in World War II (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1982, 1994).

  16. Watt, How War Came , 266.

  17. Ambrose, “‘Just Dumb Luck,’” 59.

  18. Lowenthal, “Roosevelt and the Coming of the War,” 421–22; Larrabee,
    Commander in Chief , 46–47.

  19. Th e incremental path toward an alliance with Great Britain began in
    summer 1940 when the president agreed to transfer a number of
    American World War I destroyers to the Royal Navy in exchange for
    bases that the U.S. Navy could use. Lowenthal, “Roosevelt and the
    Coming of the War,” 422–23. Th e Roosevelt–Churchill relationship
    has been treated at length by several historians. See Warren F. Kimball,
    Forged in War: Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Second World War (New
    York: William Morrow, 1997).

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