ABSTRACT
American policy would be deeply affected, indeed made, by the studied opinions of the military, the executive, and by that body of public opinion which, in a democracy, must support them. Japan's war in China had started several years before December 1941. Foreign military experts in Shanghai had been quoted then as saying that one hundred good American bombers and fifty American pursuit planes were capable of annihilating the Japanese Air Force in the Shanghai and Nanking areas within a week. American Army officers writing in The Army and Navy Journal in 1937 concluded that the Japanese had "a marked inaptitude" for aviation, added to which they were poor marksmen. Senators Carl A. Hatch of New Mexico and Joseph C. O'Mahoney of Wyoming, both Democrats, blamed the administration's economic policies for unnecessarily destroying the American system of free enterprise and rapidly building a totalitarian state.
