He didn’t know.
Everyone suspected they would attack but they thought Wake Island, Philippines etc.
That would have been enough to get us into the war. FDR would never have known the extent of an attack on Pearl Harbor and the result of such an attack could have rendered PH useless.
If the Japanese had bombed destroyed the oil depots, the submarine pens and repair yards PH is a waste land. We’d be trying to fight in the Pacific using San Francisco as our forward base.
Agree that FDR did not know. He was a fanboy of the black-shoe navy from a very early age and it’s not conceivable that he would have let the BB’s sit there to be destroyed. Not only that but he was trying to find a way to get us into the war against Hitler first.
Yeah, but no excuse for MacArthur sitting in Malacañang Palace AFTER hearing about Pearl and keeping the B-17s at Clark Field all day. We lost them all when we should have been bombing Formosa.