Although the Japanese began their 1904–5 war with Russia by sinking the Russian Asian Fleet in harbour, the principal US naval base in the Pacific at Pearl Harbor was completely unprepared for the Japanese attack of 7 December 1941. As the attack was so politically advantageous to Roosevelt, suspicions about his complicity have never abated and as late as May 1999 the US Senate voted to annul the 1942 censure of the Hawaiian Fleet and Army Commanders because they were denied vital intelligence available in Washington. The truth is that the threat was incorrectly evaluated because of racialist underestimation of the Japanese (itself a crucial factor in creating the climate for war in Japan), and because of a generalised assumption that if the Japanese did attack, it would be southwards to seize the oilfields of the Dutch Fast Indies. This made it all the more inexcusable that the principal American deterrent, the heavy bombers based in the Philippines, were destroyed on the ground ten hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
