Before Pearl Harbor: China, FDR and the Plot to Bomb Japan

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Could the attack on Pearl Harbor have been prevented? Could war with Japan have been avoided?

In Before Pearl Harbor: China, FDR and the Plot to Bomb Japan, military historian Michael Lemish uncovers a top secret plan hatched between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Chinese government to send U.S. heavy bombers to Tokyo, long before the attack on Pearl Harbor, in a desperate attempt to avert a war that seemed more and more inevitable.

Painstakingly researched and meticulously documented, this story of presidential power and covert diplomacy was hidden from the American people for decades following the war. The cast of characters reads like a who's who of 1930s and 1940s history — aviator Charles Lindbergh, General Jimmy Doolittle years before his famous 1942 raid, Ernest Hemingway, Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, and FDR himself.

As US-China tensions dominate today's headlines, Before Pearl Harbor reveals the deep historical roots of that rivalry and asks the question historians still debate: what did Roosevelt really know, and how different might the world have been if someone had paid attention?