Then on December 7, 1941, the air force of imperial Japan launched a sudden and devastating attack upon the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
On May 16, 1942, just prior to a visit to the United States by Vyacheslav Molotov, Foreign Minister of the USSR, President Roosevelt decided to remove one minor impediment to the closest possible wartime relations between the two powers by commuting Earl Browder's sentence to time served [REF].