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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ........................................................... introduction Sidney Pash John Chambers’ wide-ranging scholarship, which includes studies of the Progressive era, the peace movement, United States foreign relations, conscientious objectors, the Army Corps of Engineers, the draft—and, most recently, the Office of Strategic Services—has attracted a diverse set of students and admirers. This volume, focusing on the Second World War, brings together essays from many of those whom John has mentored and befriended over the years. To varying degrees, each contributor’s interests —and, therefore, the work that follows—have been shaped by our relationship with John Chambers and by our study of his eclectic, approachable, and penetrating scholarship. Just as John’s interests have shaped the content of this work, this anthology reflects, in another far more important way, his imprint on the authors. I hope that we have brought some of John’s passion for history to this collection. I hope that John’s interest in the mighty and the meek, in the warrior and the peacemaker, is also apparent in our work. I hope that our study sheds additional light on the story of World War II, while telling the equally important stories of how America became a part of the global struggle, how the country shaped its outcome, and in turn how the war reshaped the nation. Finally, I hope that we have done what John so often did and continues to do. I hope that we have, to paraphrase William Appleman Williams, written history that allows us to see our nation as it was and how we wish it could have been. The first two essays in this volume examine the origins of the Second World War, a topic that John has taught to a generation of Rutgers students . Although many know John primarily for his work in military history , both The Eagle and the Dove1 and Tyranny of Change2 offer detailed studies of United States foreign relations during the Progressive era. In ‘‘Roosevelt at the Rubicon: The Great Convoy Debate of 1941,’’ J. Garry Clifford and Robert H. Ferrell capture John’s long-standing interest in American foreign relations, taking readers back to the dark days of 1941 when the fates of England—and, by extension, of the United States—hung in the balance. Combining the personal insights on President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s diplomacy, found in works such as Warren Kimball’s The Juggler3 and in the compelling narrative on the approach of war best seen in Waldo Heinrichs’ Threshold of War,4 ‘‘Roosevelt at the Rubicon’’ focuses on the critical issue of the U.S. Navy’s convoying of merchant ships across the Atlantic during 1941. Clifford and Ferrell examine how lukewarm public opinion, Congressional opposition, incomplete rearmament, and the pressing needs of other theaters led Roosevelt to dissemble and delay rather than address the convoy question. Their study offers a particularly penetrating re-examination of Roosevelt’s legacy of bipartisanship, his mishandling of isolationists in 1941, and his lack of candor toward Congress and the public. Sidney Pash’s ‘‘Containment, Rollback, and the Onset of the Pacific War, 1933–1941’’ traces the evolution and eventual failure of the Roosevelt administration’s strategy for containing Japanese expansion. Begun in 1933 and accelerated soon after the start of the Second Sino–Japanese War in 1937, the United States, Pash contends, sought to contain Japan by sustaining Chinese resistance and weakening the Japanese economy. Pash demonstrates that American containment sustained Chinese resistance but in the process accelerated Japan’s embrace of the Axis Alliance and its advance into French Indochina. Containment was, Pash contends, a patient , cautious, and largely successful American program that changed radically only after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Convinced that Tokyo would not strike against Western targets prior to a Soviet collapse and certain that England was safe from invasion until the summer of 1942, the Roosevelt administration abandoned containment in an ill-fated effort to roll back Japanese expansion and break up the Axis. While Pash charts a middle course in his study, tacking well away from works such as Robert Stinnett’s Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor,5 the latest in a string of works dating to the 1940s that explain the Pearl Harbor tragedy as the result of a conspiracy, he nonetheless recognizes that senior American officials inadvertently, and in a genuine effort to avoid war, fatally undermined Japanese–American efforts to keep peace in the Paci...

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