| | Marotta, you've clearly been drinking some very strange kool-aid if you believe "...it is not clear at all that an attack on the Hawaiian Islands or the Philippines would be perceived as an attack on the United States by many or most people in the USA itself."
Let me disturb your strange fantasies with some facts. Here is the front page of The New York Times of December 8th, 1941 Does that look like they had no clue?
You mention that Charles Lindbergh said that Germany could not be defeated, well, you should have mentioned that he was a fascist and admired Hitler, but that after Pearl Harbor, the Fascist minority in the United States became very silent.
Your belief that the pictures of the men lined up to volunteer being some sort of "Broken Window" fallacy is just not supported by the facts.
From Wikipedia: By the summer of 1940, as Germany conquered France, Americans supported the return of conscription. One national survey found that 67% of respondents believed that a German-Italian victory would endanger the United States, and that 71% supported "the immediate adoption of compulsory military training for all young men".[20] Similarly, a November 1942 survey of American high-school students found that 69% favored compulsory postwar military training.[21] ... The act [Selective Service Act] set a cap of 900,000 men to be in training at any given time and limited military service to 12 months. An amendment took this up to 18 million by 1942.
The numbers show that as many as about 10 million of the 16 million in service at the peak of WWII were from the draft. So, when you saw pictures of long lines at the recruiting offices, your uncles may not have been in them, but nearly 4 out of every 10 who ended up in the service were. My father was one of those who volunteered after we were attacked.
And those numbers don't tell you how many men would have volunteered if there had been no draft... many of them, because they knew they would be drafted, simply waited for the notice to arrive.
The draft was started in 1940 out of a fear that war was inevitable and that our military at that time, about 2.2 million, was totally inadequate. With Pearl Harbor they decided they needed at least 9 million in uniform, then by 1942 they raised that number to 18 million.
In 1940 the entire population of the country was a little over 132 million. If we reduce that number to able males at the right age to join the military we can see that going from a standing army of 2.2 million, to the 16 million, in a period of less than five years, would mean that somewhere between a third and a half of all eligible males ended up going into the service. Do you think that Americans of that period were:
A) So sheep-like that they tolerated this massive change to their nation, and to their lives without massive riots and demonstrations and throwing the FDR and his administration out of office? Or, were they convinced that this was necessary and proper?
B) Tolerating such a massive change to the nation and the lives of those that joined or were drafted while they were kept in the dark, and ignorant as to the extent of the damages and the dangers as you claim?
The picture you paint of a nation whose people were mostly ignorant of what was happening, and mostly still isolationist AFTER Pearl Harbor is so far from the facts as to be laughable.
The government went into full propaganda mode to support the war effort and the many, many programs (rationing, war movies, liberty ships, recycling, women in the factories, the Home Front, Salvage drives, war bonds, mobilizing manufacturers, civilian defense, etc., etc.) People were frightened, they were angry, and they listened to the news on the radio, and read the newspapers, and they knew what was going on.
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