Franklin Delano Roosevelt

"A date that will live in infamy," (Snyder 33) was what President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called December 7, 1941. It was a calm Sunday morning at Pearl Harbor on the island of Oahu. Then two U.S. soldiers saw an oscilloscope signal on their mobile radars. They immediately called this in to their commanding officer but he told them to ignore it because the base was expecting a squadron of friendly B-17's to be coming from the mainland. Thirty minutes later the first bomb fell and almost killed a courier boy who was trying to deliver a message to Pearl Harbor Naval Base that the Japanese Imperial Navy was going to attack them. The Japanese bombers caught the base by surprise due to the Americans' tradition of not working on Sunday's. As the bombs fell, so did all the chances of the United States not joining the Allies in the second world war that was raging in Europe and the western Pacific. Up to that point the U.S. had just been supporting the Allies but they weren't technically at All throughout the first two years of the war, President Roosevelt focused on making life difficult for the Japanese. One way he did this was by creating various policies that would deter the Axis powers from being able to maintain the needs necessary to wage war on the Allies. One of these policies was the American financial and economic embargo, which supported China in its fight against Japan. It also, somewhat, forced neutral countries to side with the U.S. because it threatened that if any country would aid one of the Axis countries then that country would no longer be given aid packages from the United States. A second policy imposed by Roosevelt was the "moral embargo" of July 1938. This banned neutral countries from exporting planes and equipment to countries who engaged in the bombing of civilians. This made the U.S. look like the good guys because they were prote...