Posted on 12/06/2014 4:51:05 PM PST by Jacquerie
Adm. James Richardson strongly disagreed about permanently docking navy ships in Pearl Harbor, believing that the Japanese would feel threatened by the proximity of America's Pacific fleet and organize a preemptory attack.
With their exposed and isolated location, the ships would be vulnerable to any such aggression. He also recognized that the navy did not have the manpower to fight a war in the Pacific in 1940. He relayed these concerns to all who would listen and protested the decision to politicians in Washington. In response, Pres. Franklin Delano Roosevelt relieved Richardson of his command.
This biography covers Richardson's life from moderate beginnings to the investigations by the army and navy into shortcomings at Pearl Harbor, detailing his influences on the military.
“Of course, if the Japanese did attack, it’s only sensible to imagine that they would try to strike a knockout blow in the first round to US Pacific military operations.”
The Japanese originally did not think so at all. Yamamoto had to put his reputation and credibility on the line and demand the adoption of his own Pearl Harbor strike plan contrary to decades of pre-war planning for a decisive battle with the U.S. Navy somewhere at sea and close to the Japanese naval bases.
“There weren’t many other realistic options for how the story would play out.”
On the contrary, there were numerous other Japanese naval war plans which did not have anything to do at all with attacking the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. Yamamoto’s strike plan for Pearl Harbor was an innovation Japan had been incapable of performing until special measures were taken to acquire the technical capabilities to make the raid possible. These included among many other special preparations Japan’s first underway refueling of a carrier task force, developed specifically to attack Pearl Harbor; and special aerial torpedoes capable of being dropped and operating in the shallow waters of Pearl Harbor.
“However, if top US leadership prepared adequately and the attack damage was minimized, i.e., the battle was relatively “even”, US public opinion would not have been so cranked up over retribution in the coming war. Having such a disaster happen provided the carte blanche the planners were looking for from the American people, paving the way for an all-out war effort.”
That is a myth, because the American public opinion would also have been sufficiently inflamed by the Japanese atrocities in the Philippines to have served the same purpose as the attack upon Pearl Harbor. So, the Japanese war of aggression against the territories of the United states would have left no alternative but the kind of war we experienced whether or not the U.S. Pacific Fleet was forward based in the Hawaiian Islands.
Also, the worst part of the Japanese attack upon Pearl Harbor were the casualties we suffered and the loss of the military and naval aircraft. The loss and damage suffered by the Pacific Fleet’s battleships and cruisers caused no serious damage to the strategic and tactical capabilities of the U.S. Navy in the war. The sunk and damaged battleships were obsolescent and could play no important roles in the first year or two of the war.
“Because my father took the flash traffic.”
What is the name of his ship?
What task force and/or task group was the ship assigned to on 7 December 1941?
Yes, FDR called Tojo and told him to bomb Pearl. Makes perfect sense.
So since that didn’t happen, the standard story must be true.
I mean, why would the press leave out key information from the standard story ?
And why would historians who work at elite universities endowed by wealthy elites leave out any part of the story in their writings ?
Everybody is telling the 100% truth.
When you read the news, you’re getting the whole story.
Roosevelt provoked the attack on Pearl Harbor to get us into the War. Read “day of Deceit” it will open your eyes
And then cleverly managed to make Germany declare war on us. Germany immediately became the priority after they declared war on the United States, why arrange things so that Japan attacks if your real goal is to fight Germany? Yes, Japan and Germany were allies, but Japan certainly didn't attack the Soviet Union when Germany did, so how could FDR have known Hitler would declare war on the U.S.?
I've never understood why, if FDR "arranged" things, it was necessary for us to have our pants around our ankles at Pearl Harbor. The political purposes could have been served just as well if the alerted American forces destroyed the attackers. The Japanese would still have been proven to have started things.
1. Germany was treaty bound to Japan Also they were winning
2. Anti war sentiment in the US ran high against getting into another European war
3. Roosevelt and our military misjudged how capable the Japanese really were It wasn’t until the Battle of the Coral Sea that we began to even things up
4. It is a fact that Kimmel had the fleet out and in the exact place he needed to be to intercept about two weeks ahead of the attack. He was ordered back into Pearl by Adm Stark (CNO)
If you don’t want to trust the statement just say so. As tothe rest of your post I don’t know. It has been a while. He died in the eighties.
I have read At Dawn We Slept twice and will probably read it again some day. Quite possibly one of the best researched and unbiased works on an event ever written.
1. Roosevelt underestimated Japanese capability resulting in more damage at Pearl than thought
2. As to Kimmel and the fleet attacks on Pearl Harbor had been war gamed continuously and the most effective attack was to pass to the north and then attack from the east. Admiral King won a big victory in the Earle 1930’s that way. So educated guess would be my answer
“If you don’t want to trust the statement just say so.”
I was trying to see if there was some way of reconciling your statement to the historical fact there were no destroyers located in the 13th Naval District of Alaska, the Alaskan Sea Frontier, or the North Pacific on 7 December 1941. A search of the whereabouts of every destroyer in the U.S. Navy finds none of them were anywhere near to Alaska on 7 December 1941. The destroyers (DD) located closest to Alaska were on patrol off Puget Sound; undergoing overhaul at Mare Island (San Francisco Bay, California); San Diego, California; Pearl Harbor, Oahu, Hawaiian Terr.; or accompanying various task forces ferrying aircraft to Midway Island and Wake Island.
You wrote: “Three days before Pearl my father received flash traffic to immediately sortie and intercept the Jap fleet headed for Pearl. He was on a four stacker tin can in Alaska. He told me they went to sea with ammo on deck.”
PG-51 Charleston was conducting operations somewhere between Seattle and the Alaskan Sea Frontier, but it is a small patrol gunboat that can in no way be compared to a WWI era “four stacker tin can [destroyer].”
In the absence of any confirmable information to the contrary, any claims about the presence of “a four stacker tin can in Alaska” on 7 December 1941 is refuted by the official logs of each and every destroyer in the U.S. Navy. So, the evidence makes it only natural to find the statement cannot be trusted and must be rejected as contrary to the historical facts.
In terms of a knockout blow U.S. War Plan Orange and the corresponding Japanese plan, which was generally known to us, envisioned the supreme naval battle would be fought in the Western Pacific. Both navies were disciples of Alfred Thayer Mahan who wrote the outcome of war at sea would always be decided by the “decisive naval battle”. Past history bore that out at Trafalgar, Tsushima, and Jutland. For Jutland Churchill said, “Jellicoe was the one man who could have lost the war in an afternoon”.
When Yamamoto proposed this radical departure from Japanese strategic principles only his firm commitment to resign at a meeting in October 1941 forced the Naval General Staff to accept his radical departure from existing plans or find another fleet commander. In this country Plan Orange continued to determine the most probable interpretation to place on intelligence and events.
Submarine action, sabotage, and an air raid were considered possibilities, but a six carrier task force was not on anyone’s radar. (Sorry about the pun.)
Target Tokyo: The Story of the Sorge Spy Ring and Miracle at Midway are two other must have books by him. He is soooo good.
The wider case for conspiracy and cover-up by FDR and his associates is forcefully made in Day Of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor Paperback, by Robert Stinnett, and Pearl Harbor: The Seeds and Fruits of Infamy, by Percy L. Greaves Jr. With key files still secret in US and British archives, the case remains open.
Call it revisionism, but Day Of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor, by Robert Stinnett, and Pearl Harbor: The Seeds and Fruits of Infamy, by Percy L. Greaves Jr. make a worthy case that FDR and his associates knew of the impending attack on Pearl Harbor. Most likely, they expected the attack to be easily repulsed, unaware of the combat strength of Japanese naval aviation and of the lack of defensive readiness at Pearl.
Although the extent and reason for the tactical surprise that Japan achieved at Pearl Harbor remain disputed, Japan's strength and daring clearly were a strategic surprise for the US -- a development that FDR and his associates must take the blame for. They underestimated Japan's potential as an adversary and the US paid heavily for that error.
Notably, with pertinent intelligence files in US and British archives still secret, the case for a revisionist view of the Pearl Harbor attack cannot be definitively rejected. Let us hope that we both live long enough to be around when those files are finally released to public view and the issues addressed on a more informed basis.
I had no idea they were related. That would be one hell of a family feud!
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