Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered that transcripts of tapped telephone conversations indicating the possibility Japan could go to war with Britain in early 1941 be sent to U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, government papers declassified Thursday show.
The telephone conversations and intercepted telegrams suggest the possibility that the Japanese Embassy in London was at one point in February 1941 preparing for Japan to join forces with Germany and declare war on Britain, the documents released by the National Archives in London reveal.
Churchill asked Alexander Cadogan, the senior bureaucrat in the Foreign Office, that a digest of the material be sent to Roosevelt.