As the ship sunk rapidly into the harbor, it became a burning coffin to the 1,100 crew members trapped inside. There were no survivors. In addition to the thousands of innocent victims, America lost billions of dollars worth of military equipment. Eighteen ships and over 320 Army and Navy planes were either lost or damaged. Nine hours later, that very same day, the Japanese fleet caught MacArthur's entire air force at the Philippines by surprise and destroyed it. This was the destruction of the largest concentration of US air power outside the continental US.
In 1944, journalist John T. Flynn published a pamphlet entitled "The Truth About Pearl Harbor." His thesis was that the blame for the attack rested with "the maneuverings and miscalculations of the American government."(Mappen 189) The pamphlet was the opening for a critical interpretation of Pearl Harbor that has been come to be known as the "revisionist" school. Over time, various revisionists have made some very startling discoveries. Records from the late 1930's to mid 1940's hold evidence of the unthinkable - Franklin D. Roosevelt, the president, a title that comes with exceptional power, was conspiring against it. It isn't the attack itself, but the year prior to it, that justify people's beliefs that the Pearl Harbor attack was a clever scheme, carefully orchestrated by Roosevelt.
On January 27, 1940, a Peruvian envoy in Tokyo told a secretary in the US embassy that his intelligence sources said there was a war plan involving a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. This information was relayed to Roosevelt. On August 10, 1941, a top British agent told the FBI that a planned attack on pearl Harbor would occur soon. The FBI told him his information was ".too precise, to complete to be believed." They disregarded it as a trap. In early fall, an agent for the Sino-Korean People's League told an employee at CBS that the Korean underground had proof that the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor sometime before Christmas.