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never thought, and I doubt if many others had thought, of the immediate hazard of trouble in the East. It had never been said, but I had supposed that if we became involved in the European war at some time by war on Germany, that undoubtedly the Japanese would take that occasion to sneak up on the back door and make trouble for us in the Pacific, as the best thing they could do to help their allies, the Germans. They could keep half of the United States' strength pinned down in the East so that we could not be fully effective in Europe. But that had been just one of the things that had been presumed to come later on.

I had always thought that if the European war didn't end within the next year, we would be drawn in undoubtedly, but into the European war. But we would more or less choose the time and the place. We would decide when to start it. We would make the advance, which, of course, was not what happened.

So it was a very shattering day. But there was still no sense of anything immediate. One would have supposed that within the next two weeks they would find out where the Japanese fleet was. As a matter of fact, Knox more or less ended on that note - “We've got our sources of communication in pretty good shape, Mr. President, and we expect within the next week to get some indication of which way they are going. We have outposts of observation and within the next week we're likely to know which way it's going. The British also have good sources of information.”