Pearl Harbor and the Revisionists

Abstract

It was perhaps inevitable that after the Second World War, as after the war of 1914–18, there should appear in the United States a school of historians questioning the purposes of the war and the motives of the wartime statesmen. The cost of both world wars, in human lives and in physical resources, was very high; and it was only natural that some individuals should question such expenditure. Yet the new school of ‘revisionism’ appearing after the Second World War has undertaken a line of investigation which, if successful, will force the rewriting of an entire era in American history. The revisionists hope to prove that in 1941 President Franklin D. Roosevelt purposely exposed the Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, and goaded the Japanese into attacking it, thus bringing the United States into the war on the side of the Allies. As Professor Harry Elmer Barnes has put the case, in rather plain English, ‘The net result of revisionist scholarship applied to Pearl Harbor boils down essentially to this: In order to promote Roosevelt’s political ambitions and his mendacious foreign policy some three thousand American boys were quite needlessly butchered….’1