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The claim that Franklin D. Roosevelt deliberately held back and allowed the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor even though he knew it was coming is without foundation. Gordon Prange and his coauthors did the best job of unearthing what truly happened in AT DAWN WE SLEPT. The scholarly consensus is that FDR knew that the Japanese would be staging some sort of big attack in the Pacific, but neither he nor any other American believed that the Japanese would ever attack American territory.
Moreover, the claim is based also on the old exploded claim that it was a sneak attack. What actually happened, according to David Kahn's great history THE CODEBREAKERS, was that the Japanese diplomats in Washington had difficulty decoding the despatch instructing them to break off relations with the United States. They should have had that word and broken off relations as much as twelve hours before the attack happened -- instead, they showed up to break off relations as the attack was happening.
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