Roosevelt did not need a “sitting duck” nor was that what he was looking for.
Everybody knew war was coming. Were were trying to throw everything we could into the Philippines before war broke out. But the minute the first Japanese bomb hit Manila, Clark Field, or Cavite, we were at war.
The goal of Japan’s war was to size the oil fields of the Dutch East Indies. The Pearl Harbor Raid was conceived by the Imperial Japanese Navy with the goal crippling the US Battle Fleet to buy time for the East Indies Campaign.
President Roosevelt was not involved with it in any way shape or form. Indeed he did not need it, because the moment Japan decided to attack the Dutch East Indies, Japan decided on war with the US and the British Empire. Because you have to hold Singapore and the Philippines to hold the DEI.
"Everybody knew war was coming..."
Not true. You need to follow Homer's posts every day, to see the "latest results" from the Gallop Pole of American opinions. ;-)
The fact is that Americans were nearly 100% sympathetic to the British and French allies -- only about 4% favored the Germans. But Americans also overwhelmingly did not want to get sucked into another "foreign war."
Furthermore, Franklin Roosevelt had specifically and loudly promised during his re-election campaign of 1940 that he would not send American boys to fight in any "foreign war."
Americans believed him, and so voted for him -- again.
What "everyone understood" was that if America was attacked, then it was no longer a "foreign war."
That's what Pearl Harbor was all about, imho.
Sorry to disagree about FDR, but when it comes to Pearl Harbor, I’m a ‘grassy knoll’ kind of guy.
First, you can’t treat the attack on Pearl Harbor, or the events immediately leadinbg up to it in a vacuum. FDR spent almost all of 1940 trying to get into a war with Hitler. He split the North Atlantic into two defense zonea, and covered British convoys in the Western Atlantic before handing them off to the Brits. He had the Navy shadow, and report to the Brits, positions of German U-boats. Toward the end of that year, and before the Germans responded, the U.S Navy was depth charging U-boats. He enacted lend lease. All of those would make the U.S a co-belligerent under international law. But Hitler didn’t bite.
So he turns his attention from Germany to Japan. From their point of view moving the Pacific fleet was a provocation. And coupled with FDR’s aggressive ‘diplomacy’, it wasn’t a move the Japanese could ignore. Using the Japaneswe two stage occupation of French Indochina as a justification, Rooevelt cut off Japanese accesion to U.S steel, iron, andoil. We supplied something like 90-95% of Japan’s oil. And his price for turning on the tap was not merely Japanese withdrawal from Indochina, but China, where the Japanese had been at war since 1937 [1931 if you include Manchuria].
That left the Japanese with two choices. Cave. Or find another source of oil. That source was Indonesia, which meant war with the Dutch, and their current allies, the Brits. It also meant war with the U.S.
When the Japanese sailed for Pearl, they had a 90 day oil reserve. Period. So I believe FDR forced a war.
Do I think he knew Pearl was the target? Probably. There was plenty of info out there. But the way that info was not passed to Kimmel and Short, or was passed in , shall we say, imprecise language, leads me to that conclusion. But I also think FDR believed his Hawaiian commanders would spot the Japanese in time to sortie out to battle [no one really knew how effective the Japanese doctrine of carrier warfare would be at the time], and not suffer the losses that occurred.