You deny two key points:
CougarGA7:"You have posted McCollum's 8 point memo three times, not two."
Then your ability to search through previous posts is better than mine.
I've looked back through my February posts, and except for that hard-to-read photocopy, can't find where the complete list of Eight Actions was ever posted before.
CougarGA7: "Aside from the fact that there has never been any proof that this memo was even seen by the President..."
Personally, knowing how bureaucracies & military hierarchies work, I doubt seriously if Navy Commander McCollum even originated those eight actions.
I'm near certain he was told what to write by his superiors, as a result of their many conversations.
So McCollum was simply recording what FDR's inner circle was saying amongst themselves.
That means: whether FDR himself saw the memo is irrelevant, since he was the one who effectively initiated it, and carried it out.
Further, according to Stinnett, all eight items were started, and nearly all accomplished before the Pearl Harbor attack.
And the result was just what McCollum predicted: Japan was lead to commit the first overt act of war, which created enough "ado" to bring the US into the war.
CougarGA7: "Three of the items on the list never happened, two were already policy, two were a logical extension of an existing policy and one happened late and clearly unrelated to any memo, but related to a shift in planning in the War Department."
In fact, according to Stinnett, all eight actions were started before Pearl Harbor.
I refer you to chapter 2, notes 7 through 11, on pages 321 to 322 of Stinnett's paperback.
CougarGA7: "So again, I don't see any proof here that FDR knew Pearl Harbor was going to get hit and allowed his fleet to get sunk."
McCollum's memo does not even suggest, much less prove, that Japan might attack Pearl Harbor.
What it does show is that top US officials were thinking of methods to provoke the Japanese into some kind overt act, which would create enough "ado" to justify a declaration of war.
I have never said that actions taken by FDR did not provoke an attack by Japan. What I have said (even in the last post) is that there is no evidence that FDR knew that Pearl Harbor was going to get hit by the Japanese and intentionally allowed his fleet to get surprised and sunk. I have also said that there were failures all the way up the chain of command.
I know how military bureaucracies work too, and there is still no evidence that FDR ever saw this memo and there is less proof that he or any of his inner circle contracted its authorship. To make such a suggestion is just making wild suppositions. It’s really the core problem with this memo, the suppositions are so far out there that they are not even believable.
Considering the numerous problems with Stinnett’s book, I’m not very surprised that he claims all 8 were done. And, like I said, 2 of them were just a restatement of policies that were already decided before the memo was even written (not very telling). 3 of them never happened.
Overall though, its just not that incredible. Of the 5 of 8 actions that did take place, none of them are outside the realm of what would make sense considering the situation.
The full embargo, which really was a primary motivator for Japan, was just an extension of the embargos that were levied after July of 1940 when Japan occupied northern Indochina. This is why I put the question out there when it happened, what would you (general you, not specific to you) have done. If you decide to go with the full embargo, of course you are going to ask your allies to do it as well and I bet it wouldn’t take much convincing either.
Keeping the fleet in Hawaii? That was a done deal long before this memo was written. So was the commitment to help China. T.V. Soong had already brokered loans disguised as trade agreements before this memo was written and with the long standing American commitment to the Open Door policy in China, their support is really a no brainer.
Stinnett makes a reference to a obscure statement in a letter to Richardson about sending submarines to Manila dated November 1940, but in reality two divisions of submarines were not sent to Manila at that time (at most there were three individual submarines, but the Seawolf and Searaven may have already been transferred the Asiatic Fleet by October). It was not until October of 1941 as plans were changing on how much effort was going to be put into defending the Philippines (championed by MacArthur of course) that two divisions were sent, almost doubling the number of submarines assigned to the Asiatic Fleet and more than doubling their effectiveness since 6 of the subs that were already there were old S-class subs that had been there since 1924. I don’t see how this memo could have anything to do with it.