in 1942 of the Office of Strategic Services. It was the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In 1941 there was no coordination of the information coming in from the Army, Navy, and State department as well as from the British and Dutch allies. The system of notification was also flawed, and what the sender thought was an urgent message did not appear urgent to the recipient. After the attack, congressional investigators identified and linked together all sorts of small little signals pointing to an attack, while they discarded signals pointing in other directions. Even in hindsight there was so much confusion, noise, and poor coordination that Wohlstetter concludes no accurate predictions of the attack on Pearl Harbor was at all likely before December 7.Lt-Col Robert F. Piacine, "Pearl Harbor: Failure of Intelligence?" (Air War College, 1997) online World War II The same pattern which emerged with the first world war continued with the second: warring European powers, blockades, official U.S. neutrality but this time President Roosevelt tried to avoid all of Wilson's mistakes. American policy substantially favored Britain and its allies, and the U.S. getting caught up in the war. Unlike the loans in World War I, the United States made large-scale grants of military and economic aid to the Allies through Lend-Lease. Industries greatly expanded to produce war materials. The United States officially entered World War II against Germany, Japan, and Italy in December 1941, following the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. This time the U.S. was a full-fledged member of the Allies of World War II, not just an "associate" as in the first war. During the war, the U.S. conducted military operations on both the Atlantic and Pacific fronts. After the war and devastation of its European and Asian rivals, the United States found itself in a uniquely powerful position due to its enormous economic and military power . The major diplomatic decisions, especially relations with Britain, the Soviet Union, France and China, were handled in the White House by President Roosevelt and his top aide Harry Hopkins.Robert Dallek, Franklin D Roosevelt And American Foreign Policy 1932–1945 (1979) online Secretary of State Cordell Hull handled minor routine affairs. The one State Department official Roosevelt depended upon was strategist Sumner Welles, whom Hull drove out of office in 1943. Postwar peace After 1945, the isolationist pattern that characterized the inter-war period had ended for good.