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Did FDR Provoke Pearl Harbor?
Townhall.com ^ | December 6, 2011 | Pat Buchanan

Posted on 12/06/2011 3:32:36 PM PST by Kaslin

On Dec. 8, 1941, Franklin Roosevelt took the rostrum before a joint session of Congress to ask for a declaration of war on Japan.

A day earlier, at dawn, carrier-based Japanese aircraft had launched a sneak attack devastating the U.S. battle fleet at Pearl Harbor.

Said ex-President Herbert Hoover, Republican statesman of the day, “We have only one job to do now, and that is to defeat Japan.”

But to friends, “the Chief” sent another message: “You and I know that this continuous putting pins in rattlesnakes finally got this country bit.”

Today, 70 years after Pearl Harbor, a remarkable secret history, written from 1943 to 1963, has come to light. It is Hoover’s explanation of what happened before, during and after the world war that may prove yet the death knell of the West.

Edited by historian George Nash, “Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath” is a searing indictment of FDR and the men around him as politicians who lied prodigiously about their desire to keep America out of war, even as they took one deliberate step after another to take us into war.

Yet the book is no polemic. The 50-page run-up to the war in the Pacific uses memoirs and documents from all sides to prove Hoover’s indictment. And perhaps the best way to show the power of this book is the way Hoover does it -- chronologically, painstakingly, week by week.

Consider Japan’s situation in the summer of 1941. Bogged down in a four year war in China she could neither win nor end, having moved into French Indochina, Japan saw herself as near the end of her tether.

Inside the government was a powerful faction led by Prime Minister Prince Fumimaro Konoye that desperately did not want a war with the United States.

The “pro-Anglo-Saxon” camp included the navy, whose officers had fought alongside the U.S. and Royal navies in World War I, while the war party was centered on the army, Gen. Hideki Tojo and Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka, a bitter anti-American.

On July 18, 1941, Konoye ousted Matsuoka, replacing him with the “pro-Anglo-Saxon” Adm. Teijiro Toyoda.

The U.S. response: On July 25, we froze all Japanese assets in the United States, ending all exports and imports, and denying Japan the oil upon which the nation and empire depended.

Stunned, Konoye still pursued his peace policy by winning secret support from the navy and army to meet FDR on the U.S. side of the Pacific to hear and respond to U.S. demands.

U.S. Ambassador Joseph Grew implored Washington not to ignore Konoye’s offer, that the prince had convinced him an agreement could be reached on Japanese withdrawal from Indochina and South and Central China. Out of fear of Mao’s armies and Stalin’s Russia, Tokyo wanted to hold a buffer in North China.

On Aug. 28, Japan’s ambassador in Washington presented FDR a personal letter from Konoye imploring him to meet.

Tokyo begged us to keep Konoye’s offer secret, as the revelation of a Japanese prime minister’s offering to cross the Pacific to talk to an American president could imperil his government.

On Sept. 3, the Konoye letter was leaked to the Herald-Tribune.

On Sept. 6, Konoye met again at a three-hour dinner with Grew to tell him Japan now agreed with the four principles the Americans were demanding as the basis for peace. No response.

On Sept. 29, Grew sent what Hoover describes as a “prayer” to the president not to let this chance for peace pass by.

On Sept. 30, Grew wrote Washington, “Konoye’s warship is ready waiting to take him to Honolulu, Alaska or anyplace designated by the president.”

No response. On Oct. 16, Konoye’s cabinet fell.

In November, the U.S. intercepted two new offers from Tokyo: a Plan A for an end to the China war and occupation of Indochina and, if that were rejected, a Plan B, a modus vivendi where neither side would make any new move. When presented, these, too, were rejected out of hand.

At a Nov. 25 meeting of FDR’s war council, Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s notes speak of the prevailing consensus: “The question was how we should maneuver them (the Japanese) into ... firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.”

“We can wipe the Japanese off the map in three months,” wrote Navy Secretary Frank Knox.

As Grew had predicted, Japan, a “hara-kiri nation,” proved more likely to fling herself into national suicide for honor than to allow herself to be humiliated.

Out of the war that arose from the refusal to meet Prince Konoye came scores of thousands of U.S. dead, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the fall of China to Mao Zedong, U.S. wars in Korea and Vietnam, and the rise of a new arrogant China that shows little respect for the great superpower of yesterday.

If you would know the history that made our world, spend a week with Mr. Hoover’s book.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial; Foreign Affairs
KEYWORDS: americalast; blameamericafirst; buchanan; godsgravesglyphs; history; patbuchanan; pearlharbor; pitchforkpat; skinheads
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To: Kaslin

Billy Mitchell predicted Japan would attack back the 20s


41 posted on 12/06/2011 4:46:32 PM PST by uncbob
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To: Kaslin

As usual, PB expresses some truths mixed with incomprehensible morality.

The US pursued a policy of non-conciliation with the Empire of Japan. In my opinion, this policy was moral and correct.

There is a legitimate argument that it was not wise, at least in the short run. There is no question that a more conciliatory policy could have prevented war, but it also would have been arguably immoral.


42 posted on 12/06/2011 4:47:11 PM PST by Jim Noble (To live peacefully with credit-based consumption and fiat money, men would have to be angels.)
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To: Lou Budvis
No matter what TR could have done there was going to be a war. The Japanese knew that without access to oil their war in Asia would have ground to a halt in 4 weeks. They attacked us- so they could attack the East Indies where all the Asian oil was located.
43 posted on 12/06/2011 4:48:51 PM PST by Recon Dad ("The most important rule in a gunfight is: Always win and cheat if necessary.")
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To: Kaslin

gee I thought it was in response to japans aggression and ethnic cleansing in china that caused us to slap japan with a boycott that led to pearl harbor


44 posted on 12/06/2011 4:48:51 PM PST by Charlespg
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To: Tallguy
Interesting. But I wonder how much of this was deliberate on FDR’s part. There was no doubt that FDR was fixated by the threat from Hitler’s Germany. Also, there was a strong “China Lobby” within the US State Department. Perhaps it was a case of US policy toward Japan “being on autopilot”.

FDR was seriously hampered by the isolationists, by treaties we tried to abide by, and by the situation in England.

We were going to have it out with Japan. There was just no way we weren't going to butt heads with them. I had an uncle who was a China Marine, thank God he was out of China by late 1941, and they knew that war with Japan was brewing. He was pretty sharp, as are all of the Marines I've been fortunate enough to be related to, and I'm not just saying that because my son is a Marine, heh, and he said a lot of the Americans in China knew, and the Japanese they talked to knew, that war was coming. Yes, the Marines in China talked to Japanese troops - there was an odd period of time before the war where both US Marines and Japanese troops were in very close proximity to one another.

People also forget that the US was trying to stick to its treaties, which left us in a bad naval situation. Read up on the USS Wasp to get a better grasp of what sticking to treaties got us.

USS Wasp CV-7

Wasp was a product of the Washington Naval Treaty. With the construction of Yorktown and Enterprise, the U.S. still had 15,000 long tons (15,000 t) available to flesh out its carrier fleet.

The Navy sought to squeeze a large air group onto a ship with nearly 25% less displacement than the Yorktown-class. In order to save weight and space, Wasp was constructed with low-power machinery (compare Wasp's 75,000 shp (56,000 kW) machinery with Yorktown's 120,000 shp (89,000 kW), Essex's 150,000 shp (110,000 kW), and the Independence-class' 100,000 shp (75,000 kW)). Additionally, Wasp was launched with almost no armor, although this may have been upgraded after completion. More significantly, Wasp had an almost complete lack of protection from torpedoes. The end result was a ship with major inherent design flaws. These flaws, combined with a relative lack of damage control experience in the early days of the war, were to prove fatal.



45 posted on 12/06/2011 4:49:08 PM PST by af_vet_rr
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To: Kaslin

We didn’t start the war —I’m happy we won.

But did FDR *want* to war on Japan with no moral responsibility for STARTING it? Why, yes —that’s absolutely true.

And Churchill very badly wanted FDR in the war, and the two had been working for quite some time on how to manage it, when presto, finally the Japanese threw the solution right into their laps.

Did Japan deserve to get whipped? Oh sure..!

They didn’t attack just the USA —they attacked Hong Kong, Singapore, Malasia, Vietnam, Australia, the British, and others, and ALL AT ONCE.

In fact, in Singapore when they took over the hospitals, they went from bed to bed, simply bayonetting doctors and patients. They even shot nurses and doctors performing surgery.

It also turned out that the IJA had made absolutely NO PLANS AT ALL for provisioning for POWs and conquered peoples —nothing at all.


46 posted on 12/06/2011 4:53:24 PM PST by gaijin
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To: gaijin
Part of the reason for Japan's early success with their plan was very simple ~ they had their main capital ships in certain places and their carriers in others ~ and their oil tankers available in yet other places.

Some genius (and I say genius since these things usually happen with just a single planner) realized that he had to use the existing resources to acquire oil in just about 30 days, so some things were possible and others weren't.

There was little margin for error so the planner simply chopped off all the "nice to have" stuff ~ leaving himself with an air attack on Pearl Harbor, main battle groups to Singapore, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and as soon as that was clear the tankers were sent to the oil fields ~

Later on, in the exuberance of victory somebody else sent units to the Aleutians, Sakhalin and beyond, and to screw around in the South Pacific.

They ended up with a great deal of their ground combat units bogged down on islands we never attacked nor needed to attack. The Japanese were forced to supply those troops on those islands with ships that were probably needed to support activity in China. The Chinese venture continued, and then got worse when the US used safe areas in China as landing pads for bombings of the Japanese Home islands.

One thing led to the next and the US ended up with the whole enchilada!

If the Japanese could have counted on a 6 month supply of oil back in 1941, they'd spent more time planning the attack because that was going to happen anyway whether we cut off their oil or kept sending.

All the theories that place the blame on FDR necessarily assume the Japanese didn't know how to plan major war movements ~ and that's just crazy talk!

47 posted on 12/06/2011 4:55:42 PM PST by muawiyah
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To: LS
The "FDR-Knew-In-Advance" is one of of the lies in my book "48 Liberal Lies About American History" and, yes, it was started by a liberal (a Marxist, actually) Charles Beard.

Ah, good old Charles Beard, whose book An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (New York; Macmillan, 1913) portrayed the Constitution as the product of a rich men's plot. Robert E. Brown demolished this view in his book Charles Beard and the Constitutuin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton, 1956).

Beard's pupil William Appleman Williams, who also taught at Wisconsin, blamed the Cold War on the US in his book The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: Marzani & Munsell, 1959), which inspired a generation of "revisionist" historians who blamed the US for all of the world's problems.

48 posted on 12/06/2011 4:59:14 PM PST by Fiji Hill
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To: Jim Noble
In 1908 Teddy Roosevelt handed over Korea to the Japanese. They had no reason to expect any higher level of morality out of American governments, particularly those ruled by the Roosevelt clan (putting it all into the Japanese worldview).

All they needed to do was make it expensive for the US to move into or return to the Western Pacific basin and we were out of the war permanently (their thinking, not mine).

49 posted on 12/06/2011 4:59:34 PM PST by muawiyah
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To: uncbob
Billy Mitchell predicted Japan would attack back the 20s

Don't forget that not only did he predict Japan would attack the United States in 1925 with mention of Pearl Harbor, but it was part of a 325 page report. It wasn't some off-hand remark - Mitchell made a clear and detailed case that Japan was going to attack and that carriers were going to play a major role.

There were missteps on both sides - Japan believed that attacking British colonies would bring the US into the war, and they believed they HAD to attack the US first because of that. Had they know that the US would allow some British colonies to be lost, it might have changed things. FDR believed that reinforcing the Philippines would make Japan think twice about further invasions.

In addition to Billy Mitchell predicting war in the 1920s, there was a group within the US military preparing for war with Japan. The "Orange" war plan started to be formulated in either 1918 or 1919, and the people involved with designing it were discussing war with Japan in 1905 and how to get ships to the Pacific from the Atlantic quickly. An Admiral Rogers laid out plans in 1911 that ended up being used in the 1940s.

People on both sides knew war was going to happen.
50 posted on 12/06/2011 5:02:15 PM PST by af_vet_rr
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To: Lou Budvis
Nobody cared about war crimes in China. After all, successions of Chinese governments had been committing war crimes against Chinese people for thousands of years.

The issue for the US was control of the Philippines and Hawaii (and at the time the Japanese owned outright hundreds of Pacific islands. They'd been collecting them for centuries. We had to be vigilant lest they decided they needed more Pacific islands).

51 posted on 12/06/2011 5:04:18 PM PST by muawiyah
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To: Kaslin

Only to a liberal does not giving into a tyrant (a liberal) constitute provocation. Typical liberal tactics.


52 posted on 12/06/2011 5:05:22 PM PST by CodeToad (Islam needs to be banned in the US and treated as a criminal enterprise.)
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To: muawiyah

Exactly so —the Pacific War was very much about oil.

In fact as a Navy guy very much aware that oil was the lifeblood of a modern Navy, Yamamoto had done a big paper at Harvard regarding the US oil industry —he even had a convertible and spent a good deal of time driving around the USA checking out refineries and so on.

And that is why he paid a maximum of attention to speedily gaining control and re-establishing productive oil-rich places like the Dutch East Indies, etc.

Oil, oil, oil, oil, oil —the economy and Navy need it.

And...I don’t have a problem with it —in fact I think very little has changed.

As we will soon see in the Spraties, etc.


53 posted on 12/06/2011 5:07:01 PM PST by gaijin
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To: gaijin

Your #46. Dead on.


54 posted on 12/06/2011 5:08:17 PM PST by CodeToad (Islam needs to be banned in the US and treated as a criminal enterprise.)
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To: GeronL; Homer_J_Simpson

I’ve been reading Homer’s threads for eons, and just recently checked the FR homepage.....”Homer” is a HEN, not a HE! Heh....


55 posted on 12/06/2011 5:09:24 PM PST by ErnBatavia (Obama Voters: Jose Baez wants YOU for his next jury pool.......)
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To: muawiyah
Later on, in the exuberance of victory somebody else sent units to the Aleutians, Sakhalin and beyond, and to screw around in the South Pacific.

They ended up with a great deal of their ground combat units bogged down on islands we never attacked nor needed to attack. The Japanese were forced to supply those troops on those islands with ships that were probably needed to support activity in China. The Chinese venture continued, and then got worse when the US used safe areas in China as landing pads for bombings of the Japanese Home islands.


This is a what-if scenario worthy of a book or two. What if Japan had stayed away from islands and areas that nobody cared about.
56 posted on 12/06/2011 5:09:32 PM PST by af_vet_rr
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To: Kaslin

One must consider just how totally commited FDR was to saving the the Soviet Union and the british empire and just how equally opposed Americans were to be f#@k%d by the russians and brits again after just twenty years.


57 posted on 12/06/2011 5:09:54 PM PST by nkycincinnatikid
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To: gaijin

Spraties = Spratly Islands, South China Sea, etc.

Basically now we’re 1938, or so, all over again, but this time Japan is China, Japan is (sort of) China, and we are somewhat poorer.


58 posted on 12/06/2011 5:13:01 PM PST by gaijin
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To: SkyDancer; Gamecock; F15Eagle

No, I think it was the Gordon Lightfoot, that was rammed by the Cat Stevens.


59 posted on 12/06/2011 5:13:40 PM PST by Larry Lucido
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To: ErnBatavia

??

really?

hhmmm


60 posted on 12/06/2011 5:14:03 PM PST by GeronL (The Right to Life came before the Right to Pursue Happiness)
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