Description
By Charles Callan Tansill.
Using a vast array of official documents secured at the highest levels of the US Government, official US Senate historian and history professor Charles Tansill delves deep into the origins of American involvement in the Second World War, and comes to a startling conclusion: that, despite public pronouncements to the contrary, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Administration actively sought to participate in that conflict.
To that end, Professor Tansill shows, US diplomacy in the 1930s was focussed exclusively on forcing first the Japanese Empire into “firing the first shot,” and in Europe, helping Britain to generate a “war fever” through solemn undertakings of support (such as those made to Poland) which, the author shows, the US Administration was well aware had no hope whatsoever of being fulfilled.
Thus, the author shows, that the Roosevelt Administration sought to provoke Japan into an attack on American territory, knowing that such an even would inevitably involve Japan’s Axis allies, and in this way, America would enter the war through the “back door”.
Charles Callan Tansill (1890-1964) was professor of history at American University, Fordham University, and Georgetown University and an accomplished historian in his own right who authored 14 major historical works. In addition, he worked as the official historian for the United States Senate and in that capacity, was the final editor the classic “Documents Illustrative of the Formation of the Union of the American States,” published by the Library of Congress. By the 1930s, he had been promoted to the office of advisor to the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. His access to documents from the very highest levels of government afforded him a unique insight into the generation of American foreign policy in the period leading up to World War II, and he made active use of this material in preparing “Back Door to War.” Tansill died of a heart attack in 1964 at the age of 73, and is buried at Oak Hill Cemetery in Washington, D.C.
740 pages
Softcover ISBN
9781915645166
Hardcover ISBN
9781915645302
