I've heard this before and I don't believe it, but can somebody fill me in?
Hey there this has come up before!
Would point you towards 2 of my previous answers on the subject: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3yifa3/were_there_conspiracy_theorists_who_believed_that/cydw2s7
It boils down to a combination of things people looking back to say "conspiracy!".
The big one is that it is much easier to say it was all planned, then that 50 years of rising geopolitical and racial tensions set into motion giant nations and bureaucracies whose eventual inevitable conclusion would be conflict in some sort. Frankly it is a testament to diplomacy that the war was held off as long as it was, because professionals on both sides of the ocean knew it was coming, and both navies had trained for generations to fight it, and according to some interpretations geopolitcs of the region made it a foregone conclusion base don both nation's goals.
But one major point I would use to say it is ridiculous that FDR had such advance knowledge of the attack and was of a mind to let it happen is he was doing the most damage he could to the Pacific Fleet. It was sheer coincidence that bad weather delayed Enterprise in returning or you could have added a carrier and a gaggle of escorts to the toll.
But the Battle Line was the real kicker. FDR was a Navy man at heart, had been Assistant Secretary in WW1, LOVED the Navy with all his heart, and also knew how it was planned on fighting Japan, with the battleships then settling into the mud of Pearl Harbor.
Itd be like going looking for a fight and then intentionally letting the first punch break your arm, you just lost the tool you planned on using to hit back with!
To my knowledge no...but conspiracy theorists (I'm not one of them) base their reasoning off of the following.
A war, especially on the magnitude of fighting Japan (and Germany since they were in a truce), would bring countless into the workforce to help the war effort. Government lends out loans, companies begin pumping out uniforms, trucks, jeeps, weapons, ammo, bombs, planes, and people are needed to build all these pieces of equipment. Unemployment goes down and you now have a war-based economy. Of course it is unsustainable, seen in the recession in the late 1940s but the fact we took no damage from the war as opposed to Europe & Japan, we became a superpower with Russia and an economic powerhouse on an international level.