A Navy memo floats a plan: push Japan into firing the first shot
Fourteen months into the war in Europe, with Germany controlling territory from Poland to the French coast, the United States remained officially neutral. On October 7, 1940, Lieutenant Commander Arthur H. McCollum, head of the Far East desk at the Office of Naval Intelligence, sent Navy Captains Dudley Knox and Walter Stratton Anderson an eight-part memo on pressuring Japan, from aiding China to embargoing oil. McCollum wrote that if Japan could be led to "commit an overt act of war, so much the better." Knox worried the memo would pull resources away from the Atlantic, where Britain's survival was at stake.
The memo's own recommendations, especially the oil embargo, became actual U.S. policy within a year, and historians like Stinnett and Crane still disagree over whether that policy was meant to deter Japan or provoke it. That argument is why Pearl Harbor still raises an uncomfortable question: did Washington see it coming, and did it want to?
