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http://www.rockfordinstitute.org/NewsST120700.htm
December 7, 2000
PEARL HARBOR CONSPIRACY?
FDR and the making of a war
by Srdja Trifkovic
Some of our readers may be shocked by the mere intimation that the government of the United States in general, and its chief executive in particular, could be capable of criminal conspiracy resulting in thousands of lost American lives. In deference to their sensibility we shall refrain from making any such suggestion. On this, 59th anniversary of Pearl Harbor we shall limit ourselves to a brief summary of what some less idealistic souls have dubbed the "mother of all conspiracies."
Their claims can be summarized as follows: President Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted to enter the war in Europe, especially after the fall of France (June 1940). In this desire he was supported by the old elite of Anglophile Wasps and by the increasingly influential Jewish lobby. In June 1941 they were joined by the assorted leftists who cared about the Soviet Union more than about America. After meeting FDR at the Atlantic Conference (August 14, 1941) Churchill noted the "astonishing depth of Roosevelt's intense desire for war." But there was a problem: the President could not overcome the resistance to "Europe's war" felt by most Americans and their elected representatives.
The mood of the country was a problem, and Roosevelt therefore resorted to subterfuge. He systematically and deliberately provoked the Japanese into attacking the United States. His real target was Hitler: Roosevelt expected the German dictator to abide by the Tripartite Pact and declare war on America, and hoped that Hitler's decision would be facilitated by a display of America's apparent vulnerability. Accordingly, even though Roosevelt was well aware of the impending attack on Pearl Harbor, he let it happen and was relieved, even pleased, when it did. The evidence is circumstantial, of course, and chronologically its more important elements proceed as follows:
1. In the summer of 1940 Roosevelt ordered the Pacific to relocate from the West Coast to Hawaii. When its commander, Admiral Richardson, protested that Pearl Harbor offered inadequate protection from air and torpedo attack he was replaced.
2. On October 7 1940 Navy IQ analyst McCollum wrote an eight-point memo for Roosevelt on how to force Japan into war with U.S., including an American oil embargo against Japan. All of them were eventually accomplished.
3. On 23 June 1941 - one day after Hitler's attack on Russia - Secretary of the Interior and FDR's Advisor Harold Ickes wrote a memo for the President in which he pointed out that "there might develop from the embargoing of oil to Japan such a situation as would make it not only possible but easy to get into this war in an effective way. And if we should thus indirectly be brought in, we would avoid the criticism that we had gone in as an ally of communistic Russia."
4. On 18 October Ickes noted in his diary: "For a long time I have believed that our best entrance into the war would be by way of Japan."
5. The U.S. had cracked key Japanese codes before the attack. FDR received "raw" translations of all key messages. On 24 September 1941 Washington deciphered a message from the Naval Intelligence HQ in Tokyo to Japan's consul-general in Honolulu, requesting grid of exact locations of U.S. Navy ships in the harbor. Commanders in Hawaii were not warned.
6. Sixty years later the U.S. Government still refuses to identify or declassify many pre-attack decrypts on the grounds of "national security"!
7. On November 25 Secretary of War Stimson wrote in his diary that FDR said an attack was likely within days, and asked "how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without too much danger to ourselves. In spite of the risk involved, however, in letting the Japanese fire the first shot, we realized that in order to have the full support of the American people it was desirable to make sure that the Japanese be the ones to do this so that there should remain no doubt in anyone's mind as to who were the aggressors."
8. On November 25 FDR received a "positive war warning" from Churchill that the Japanese would strike against America at the end of the first week in December. This warning caused the President to do an abrupt about-face on plans for a time-buying modus vivendi with Japan and it resulted in Secretary of State Hull's deliberately provocative ultimatum of 26 November 1941 that guaranteed war.
9. On November 26 Washington ordered both US aircraft carriers, the Enterprise and the Lexington, out of Pearl Harbor "as soon as possible". This order included stripping Pearl of 50 planes or 40 percent of its already inadequate fighter protection. On the same day Cordell Hull issued his ultimatum demanding full Japanese withdrawal from Indochina and all China. U.S. Ambassador to Japan called this "The document that touched the button that started the war."
10. On November 29 Hull told United Press reporter Joe Leib that Pearl Harbor would be attacked on December 7. The New York Times reported on December 8 ("Attack Was Expected," p. 13) that the U.S. knew of the attack a week earlier.
11. On December 1 Office of Naval Intelligence, ONI, 12th Naval District in San Francisco found the missing Japanese fleet by correlating reports from the four wireless news services and several shipping companies that they were getting signals west of Hawaii.
12. On 5 December FDR wrote to the Australian Prime Minister, "There is always the Japanese to consider. Perhaps the next four or five days will decide the matters."
Particularly indicative is Roosevelt's behavior on the day of the attack itself. Harry Hopkins, who was alone with FDR when he received the news, wrote that the President was unsurprised and expressed "great relief." Later in the afternoon Harry Hopkins wrote that the war cabinet conference "met in not too tense an atmosphere because I think that all of us believed that in the last analysis the enemy was Hitler... and that Japan had given us an opportunity." That same evening FDR said to his cabinet, "We have reason to believe that the Germans have told the Japanese that if Japan declares war, they will too. In other words, a declaration of war by Japan automatically brings..." - at which point he was interrupted, but his expectations were perfectly clear. CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow met Roosevelt at midnight and was surprised at FDR's calm reaction. The following morning Roosevelt stressed to his speechwriter Rosenman that "Hitler was still the first target, but he feared that a great many Americans would insist that we make the war in the Pacific at least equally important with the war against Hitler."
Jonathan Daniels, administrative assistant and press secretary to FDR, later said "the blow was heavier than he had hoped it would necessarily be... But the risks paid off; even the loss was worth the price." Roosevelt confirmed this to Stalin at Tehran on November 30, 1943, by saying that "if the Japanese had not attacked the US he doubted very much if it would have been possible to send any American forces to Europe."
Hitherto eminently establishmentarian historian Jonathan Toland has made it possible for Pearl Harbor "conspiracy theorists" to become more respectable "revisionists" with his Infamy: Pearl Harbor and its Aftermath [1981]: "Was it possible to imagine a President who remarked, 'This means war,' after reading the [thirteen-part 6 December] message, not instantly summoning to the White House his Army and Navy commanders as well as his Secretaries of War and Navy? ... Stimson, Marshall, Stark and Harry Hopkins had spent most of the night of December 6 at the White House with the President. All were waiting for what they knew was coming: an attack on Pearl Harbor. The comedy of errors on the sixth and seventh appears incredible. It only makes sense if it was a charade, and Roosevelt and the inner circle had known about the attack."
Churchill later wrote that FDR and his top advisors "knew the full and immediate purpose of their enemy": "A Japanese attack upon the U.S. was a vast simplification of their problems and their duty. How can we wonder that they regarded the actual form of the attack, or even its scale, as incomparably less important than the fact that the whole American nation would be united?"
The real target, Adolf Hitler, duly walked into the trap on December 10, 1941, thus committing the greatest blunder of his career and ensuring Germany's defeat. The rest, as they say, is history. The ensuing fury gave birth first to a superpower, then to an empire. It swept away doubters and isolationists, it legitimized a total war for unconditional surrender. It created nuclear weapons, the Cold War, the military-industrial complex, the "intelligence community," and today's benevolent global hegemony. The people who run the American Empire today will as strenuously deny the existence of a Pearl Harbor conspiracy as their predecessors denied it half a century ago. But in their hearts they'll admit that, even if there had not been one, it should have been invented.
Ah yes, The orignial First RAT, father of the current day brand of demoncRATs, FDR.
Any rational thinking person already knows FDR did this.
Revisionist history.
This is straight out of "Day of Deceit" by Robert Stinnett.
He raises good points. BUT . . .
every single time the author can actually PROVE something, he doesn't. Rather, he goes to waffling phrases such as "must have known," "probably would have" etc.
Such things as moving the fleet FORWARD is standard operational procedure: when you have a threat internationally, you DEPLOY FORWARD. So this is goofy. As I say, his work on the radio intercepts is brilliant, but he does not close the case. That leads me to conclude that he can't.
And your evidence is?
6. Sixty years later the U.S. Government still refuses to identify or declassify many pre-attack decrypts on the grounds of "national security"!
Pls suggest how to declassify this.
What always "tore it" for me was 1 little, often ignored fact--
All the carriers were gone, out ot sea, and all the (obsolete) battlewagons were moored- tied up in port.
My Mom joined the WAC's right after Pearl, and there were always rumors- scuttlebutt- that Kimmel & Short were scapegoats for what was actually masterminded by FDR to get America hopping mad.
See George Morgenstern's (Pearl Harbor: The Story of the Secret War, Devin-Adair Company) book - published in 1947.
Just the last chapter (Chapter Twenty) and the notes and appendicies have some "pearls of wisdom."
Something to think about - entry into WWII helped Stalin.
(a) Complete contents of RG 38 Box 792.
(b) "True" copy of JD #7001.
(c) Churchill Papers on Atlantic Charter talks/agreement with FDR (so called "parallel action" understanding).
To quote from Morgenstern, Chapter 20 (1947):
"If admitted, it might have diminished the willingness of the people to forget the provocative course by which the President had by-passed Congree in inviting hostilities. There might have been an atitude of serious questioning toward the acts and the wisdom of Mr. Roosevelt and the men around him. That was the last thing the "commander-in-chief" wanted or could afford."
On 23 June 1941 - one day after Hitler's attack on Russia - Secretary of the Interior and FDR's Advisor Harold Ickes wrote a memo for the President
Is this a relation to the despicable person in the Clinton Administration of the same name?
Yes, same family.
(a) Complete contents of RG 38 Box 792. (b) "True" copy of JD #7001. (c) Churchill Papers on Atlantic Charter talks/agreement with FDR (so called "parallel action" understanding).
are these the titles of pertinent classified docs.?
Here's another log on the fire ... something that works so well, has many imitators.
There have been many American "geo-political" conspriracies since, and there are many organizations stirring those pots and what have stirred them. What a great idea the Pearl deception was to those secret circles.
But FDR's Pearl deception did not work so well. The lend-lease act and the heroism of the British people had already saved England. Hitler was wasting his forces against Mother Russia. Japan was overreached in the huge center nation, China, and throughout Indo-China.
Had FDR done all the war-provoking acts up though November 1941 that would have been ok, and good statescraft, by some decent measures. But when he let the known attack at Pearl go on without a defense ... that was wrong. Too much American ire was roused, misplaced, deceived. Too many innocents killed, when they could have been saved.
Had we fought back, battled at Pearl, we still would have gone to war with Japan, and also with Germany. Our entry into the European Theater may, or may not have been delayed. If delayed Stalin and his Soviet would have been wasted, along with Germany's pride and resources in Russia.
But rather than the general "complete" citizen mobilization, we would have had a more gradual one. Less socialism of the military (the GI bill, the VA), less of the fascism of the military industrial complex, less popular support post-war for "big government programs".
Rather than rise out of the Great Depression by means of total war and the all-out unAmerican amixture of socialism and fascism needed to win it, we would have risen by means of a moral reawakening.
Instead we sent all the countries men and fathers away from home for enough years to birth the US mommy state.
I don't blame FDR so much. I blame the virulent anti-Jewish factors that spoke to a deep flaw in American moral culture, one that said the current generation then of Americans did NOT deserve to be uplifted, but rather to be brought low.
Now we are brought low.
Except that Navy doctrine, AS OF DECEMBER 7TH, 1941, held that the carriers were PART OF THE SCOUTING AUXILIARY TO THE BATTLE LINE. The battle line was the main combat element of the fleet.
And those "obsolete" battleships were the best that we had available.
In order for the conspiracy theory to work, FDR would have to know that the US Navy could whip up, in literally a few weeks, an entirely new tactical, operational, and strategic doctrine, AND THEN SUCCESSFULLY FIGHT TO THAT DOCTRINE WITHOUT ANY TRAINING. Puh-leez!
We were incredibly lucky in 1942--there were many opportunities for a decisive defeat that would have kicked us out of the Western Pacific until 1950 at the earliest.
Below is a response to this article that I received from a friend of mine who lived through the FDR Administration:
"This Rockford Institute article was absolutely brilliant. It is an articulate summation of all the "crank" hypotheses and suspicions I have heard over the years about FDR and the war to "preserve democracy", the "war to end all wars", etc. The "crank" analyses of world socio-historical-politics have much better descriptive and predictive validity than 99% of establishment blather.
WWII was a frightening and deadly war. It is true that Europe, the world economy, German Jewry, and the friction between capitalism and communism were all at a high-tension crossroads. Some may argue that war was necessary, but it is reasonable to assume that some pacifism and conflict resolution may have radically reduced the body count and solved the underlying conflicts more satisfactorily than the all-out war which ensued.
The wise Danes took a deep breath, dived beneath the tidal wave, and surfaced after it passed. They escaped much more intact than if they huffed and puffed and violently resisted Hitler.
It is possible that even the Jews of Germany might've been allowed to be deported if Hitler were humored and cut some slack. The non-negotiable strategy of confrontation doesn't work too well with autocratic dictators. They will react with force when attacked militarily.
Saddam Hussein is really quite predictable in his actions. When he is violently confronted or issued ultimatums, he will always react in a hard-line way. If he is humored or ignored, he has nothing to huff and puff about. He is denied an opportunity to posture. I blame America and the Gulf War Coalition much more than Saddam Hussein for all the devastation that has occurred in the region since 1991.
FDR was quite a war-mongering scoundrel and a narcissistic wheeler-dealer of a fellow. He was a tyrannical and arrogant SOB in most of his private dealings. Like Bill Clinton, he had a lot of "surface charm" and used-car-salesman charisma, but a wise, perceptive person could see right through it.
In the end, Poland and Eastern Germany and Europe were enslaved and tormented by thuggish commissars for over 40 years, tens of millions of people lost their lives or were hideously wounded, cities were leveled, enormous pain and suffering was inflicted. The war-mongering elite and hawkish instigators hardly felt any pain at all. That is/was a grave injustice.
War stinks. Let the troops and people frolic, force the leaders to do the fighting themselves.
"This Rockford Institute article was absolutely brilliant. It is an articulate summation of all the "crank" hypotheses and suspicions I have heard over the years about FDR and the war to "preserve democracy", the "war to end all wars", etc. The "crank" analyses of world socio-historical-politics have much better descriptive and predictive validity than 99% of establishment blather.
Correction: it is a summary of crank theories that blow in your ear a lot, but never deliver the full-on-kiss...
WWII was a frightening and deadly war.
No f-ing DUH!
Congratulations on a grasp of the blindingly obvious.
It is true that Europe, the world economy, German Jewry, and the friction between capitalism and communism were all at a high-tension crossroads.
The war had little to do with the Jews in Germany; they were merely a target of opportunity for a particularly opportunistic piece of filth. Had there been a similarly large group of "outsiders" in place of the Jews, they would have been the lightning rod in their stead.
Some may argue that war was necessary, but it is reasonable to assume that some pacifism and conflict resolution may have radically reduced the body count and solved the underlying conflicts more satisfactorily than the all-out war which ensued.
Uh-huh. Tell that to the Einsatzgruppen who went from place to place in the Ukraine, liquidating undesirables--the same undesirables who had greeted the Germans days earlier as liberators. Better yet, tell that to their pacifist victims.
The wise Danes took a deep breath, dived beneath the tidal wave, and surfaced after it passed. They escaped much more intact than if they huffed and puffed and violently resisted Hitler.
Of course, all those nasty people who didn't do what Hitler wanted, World War II is THEIR fault.
It is possible that even the Jews of Germany might've been allowed to be deported if Hitler were humored and cut some slack.
It is much more likely that this guy is a total dumbf**k.
The non-negotiable strategy of confrontation doesn't work too well with autocratic dictators. They will react with force when attacked militarily.
Ah, the pseudo-Clausewitzian logic arises! The defender is always responsible for a war in this case, because he COULD simply submit to the conquerer's whim. World War II was the fault of those nasty Poles for not rolling over and playing dead.
Saddam Hussein is really quite predictable in his actions. When he is violently confronted or issued ultimatums, he will always react in a hard-line way. If he is humored or ignored, he has nothing to huff and puff about. He is denied an opportunity to posture. I blame America and the Gulf War Coalition much more than Saddam Hussein for all the devastation that has occurred in the region since 1991.
Saddam Hussein had a decision to make, and he made it. He was humored, as this s**thead suggests, and he decided to handle his country's debt situation by invading one country and preparing to invade another.
Only the queasiness of the GCC kept the Coalition out of Baghdad--and that queasiness has led to our present warped policy. Imagine if England and France had said, "No, no, none of this unconditional surrender stuff...just get Hitler out of France and to stop bombing London and that's all." No Marshall Plan, no rebuilt Western Europe--and a nasty cold war that could have gone on a LOT longer than ours did.
The next time around, I think someone will make it screamingly clear to the GCC--better to put a rabid dog down NOW than to wait another decade or more. Post-Saddam, Iraq will be rebuilt. But it's impossible now.
FDR was quite a war-mongering scoundrel and a narcissistic wheeler-dealer of a fellow. He was a tyrannical and arrogant SOB in most of his private dealings. Like Bill Clinton, he had a lot of "surface charm" and used-car-salesman charisma, but a wise, perceptive person could see right through it.
True, but irrelevant. The US foreign policy has been clear since day one: we should NOT want to see a Europe unified under one government, because all of those irredentist territorial claims of Spain, France, and England regarding the New World--the land we happen to be sitting on--come to the fore. Hitler was interested in seeing America destroyed as any sort of independent nation and instead becoming a vassal state of the Reich. But then, this idiot probably thinks that being a vassal of the Aryan supermen is a good thing.
In the end, Poland and Eastern Germany and Europe were enslaved and tormented by thuggish commissars for over 40 years, tens of millions of people lost their lives or were hideously wounded, cities were leveled, enormous pain and suffering was inflicted. The war-mongering elite and hawkish instigators hardly felt any pain at all. That is/was a grave injustice.
Life sucks, get a helmet. Europe has proven singularly incapable of self-governance--they f-ing well DESERVE what history hs handed them.
War stinks.
Wow, you are SO-O-O insightful!
Let the troops and people frolic, force the leaders to do the fighting themselves.
And who put those leaders into power, dumbs**t?
If this guy's registered to vote, it's in Palm Beach County...
#14
Ditto!
There's a bear in the woods. Some people can't see the bear. Some people say the bear doesn't exist (they're posting to this thread). The bear will disembowel them as surely as it will disembowel us. At least you and I know who the bear is, and may even fight the bear. These twits will help the bear while waving the flag. A pity.
A myraid of classified documents exist:
(a) Check "Day of Deceit" references and bibliography for RG (Record Group) contents,
(b) For JD#7001 ("winds" message) - follow the history of Cmdr. Safford (with on again/off again support from Cmdr. Kramer (and others)) especially before the so-called Joint Congressional and Navy investigations,
(c) Some Churchill papers will not released for another thirty-plus tears (75 years after his death).
Recommended starting place for Pearl Harbor - Morgenstern (published in 1947).
"Here lie the bones of Lt. Jones,
He lost his life in his very first fight,
Using the school's solution."
Fort Sill
As you recall in the war the very first casuality - ...
THE PLANS ... SIOP or not!!!
Ah, still not a Grand Poohbab.
Found JD#7001 yet - viz., still believe in full release of all documents?
Also, any other "bomb plots" ever found other than for Pearl Harbor? Tell you anything? I know still thinking.
Next ...?
If it walks like a duck, ...
My Dad was already in the Marines when Pearl was attacked. He believed FDR knew about it in advance at the time, and he still believes it.
By the way, every good friend he had in WWII and Korea was killed.
FDR was an agent for global socialism. He won the presidency on the solemn promise to keep us out of the wars. He was a liar of the worst sort.
There is a HUGE difference between a platoon-sized firefight and a theater-level conflict. You can be very flexible at the platoon level, but at the fleet level, your forces on hand determine your strategy, and your strategy determines your operations plans. You can turn a platoon on the proverbial dime, NOT an entire theater.
Also, the "East Wind Rain" message would merely indicate that relations were at a crisis state, NOT that any specific military operation would be executed.
Also, re: the bomb plot message: this is an example of how centralizing intelligence gathering and analysis can be a really bad idea. The "bomb plots" were sent in a low-grade code; the Navy's cryptographic community didn't care much about the low-grade material--even when it was broken, it had a low priority for translation. Also, it was broken out in Washington, where a fleet perspective was sorely lacking. Their efforts were riveted on the "five-kana" or JN-25 system, the flag officer's system (never broken due to the relative paucity of traffic encrypted in that system), and PURPLE. Station Hypo was directed to concentrate on the flag officer's system and to ignore the lower-grade material from the consulate. I am convinced that had CAPT Layton seen the "bomb plot" message, he would have alerted Kimmel and Short immediately.
"FDR was a liar of the worst sort" No doubt, but when he said "Your boys will not be sent to fight in foreign wars" he wasn't lying. They were sent to fight in an American war on foreign soil. Clinton wasn't the first to make deceptive use of language. Of course it isn't all that likely that Roosevelt's usage here was intentional, he clearly wasn't all that bright.
But the point that my friend makes that you don't seem to acknowledge is the undemocratic way that US foreign policy is carried out. Yes, the people elect the leaders, but that does not mean we elect them to get us into wars. When push comes to shove, the leaders make decisions on where to intervene militarily based on their consultations with military leaders and "think tanks", and there is little say that the American people have in the decision. The empire that these faceless interventionist rulers seek is in the interest of some (though not all) rich corporations, but definitely not in the interests of the American people.
The ones to make these decisions are not the ones to do the fighting and the killing and the dying themselves. They have no idea of the horrors they causing to others, including innocent civilians.
When push comes to shove, the leaders make decisions on where to intervene militarily based on their consultations with military leaders and "think tanks", and there is little say that the American people have in the decision.
Because the vast majority of the American people CHOOSE to sit around with their thumbs firmly jammed up their Clymers, toots. Not saying anything is actually saying something.
Is this a relation to the despicable person in the Clinton Administration of the same name?
Yes.
My Dad was a student at Penn State, studying with his engineering buddies, when news of the bombing of Pearl Harbor came over the radio. He told the story that "right then, we all knew we were going to war." He joined the ROTC and some time later, began active duty. Never made it overseas, though.
"We were incredibly lucky in 1942--there were many opportunities for a decisive defeat that would have kicked us out of the Western Pacific until 1950 at the earliest"
Maybe so, but it didn't matter to the White House what happened to the USA as long as mother Russia was in peril and needed saving.Also, much needed war material was diverted from McArthur to the Soviets.We see the same attitude today in White House. Damn the national security of the US, give the Chicom's what they need to be a world military power.No matter how bad WW2 got, they had the UN planned as the "solution" to such horrors.
More info on FDR's Pearl Harbor swindle is at http://www.geocities.com/Pentagon/6315/pearl.html
My Dad was a student at Penn State, studying with his engineering buddies, when news of the bombing of Pearl Harbor came over the radio. He told the story that "right then, we all knew we were going to war."
Well, DUH!
Of course, it's all the amorphous yet monolithic THEM that are responsible for all Bad Things. Get a grip; the Japanese Navy reached the pinnacle of their operational art at Pearl Harbor and only went downhill from there. The Pearl Harbor OPLAN lacked the usual IJN tendency to replace strategic analysis and operational art with wishful thinking; the US Navy's high command had a nice internecine brawl going on with War Plans trying to do Naval Intelligence's job (and doing it badly--the guy in question then proceeded to lose four cruisers at Savo Island before becoming an amphibious warfare genius); and the command at Pearl had gotten so many war alerts that one more wouldv'e been ignored outright.
Except that Navy doctrine, AS OF DECEMBER 7TH, 1941, held that the carriers were PART OF THE SCOUTING AUXILIARY TO THE BATTLE LINE. The battle line was the main combat element of the fleet.And those "obsolete" battleships were the best that we had available.
In order for the conspiracy theory to work, FDR would have to know that the US Navy could whip up, in literally a few weeks, an entirely new tactical, operational, and strategic doctrine, AND THEN SUCCESSFULLY FIGHT TO THAT DOCTRINE WITHOUT ANY TRAINING. Puh-leez!
We were incredibly lucky in 1942--there were many opportunities for a decisive defeat that would have kicked us out of the Western Pacific until 1950 at the earliest.
Wow, I've seen some pretty glaring examples of ignorance of history, and particularly ignorance of military history, but this one takes the cake.
Point one: the carrier as merely a scouting element for the battleship line was the original justification for the building of aircraft carriers, but only immediately after WWI. It was a necessary justification at a time when the battleship admirals controlled the navy. This scouting doctrine did not last very long as a matter of practical navy war doctrine, at least for the US and Japanese navies. The Royal Navy held on to the outdated scouting doctrine longer (primarily because its aircraft were under the control of the RAF, thus retarding the development of tactical doctrines and procedures).
In the 1920's, the two large US aircraft carriers (Lexington and Saratoga, uncompleted battlecruisers converted to aircraft carriers under the terms of the Washington Naval Treaty) were used in war games as independent striking units in war games which took place attacking and/or defending vital targets in the Pacific - the Panama Canal, Hawaii, the Phillipines. On several occasions, aircraft launched from US aircraft carriers carried out successful surprise air strikes against ships in Pearl Harbor during war games. In other words, the USN had already "whipped up" the correct tactical, operational, and strategic doctrines, and the training for same, ten to fifteen years before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
The notion of US Navy doctrine strictly limiting the carriers to scouting for the battle line might have been a cherished canard still defended by the older battleship admirals, but in reality the US Navy had fully developed the tactical doctrines and military procedures for using their aircraft carriers as independent striking units. The notion of the USN carriers as mere scouting units for the battleships was anachronistic by 1941.
Indeed, the Royal Navy had already shown in its 1940 attack on the Italian fleet at Taranto that carrier aircraft (in this case obsolete biplane torpedo bombers) were capable of suprising and sinking a battleship fleet in harbor. The Japanese navy used the Taranto attack as a model for its own attack on Pearl Harbor; it would be ridiculous to assert that the USN did not take similar note of Taranto. Indeed, the Japanese Navy was much more a victim of victim of hide-bound battleship admirals than was the USN, and that did not stop the Japanese from developing the correct aircraft carrier doctrine prior to 1941.
The notion that carriers were suddenly vindicated and battleships demoted on December 7, 1941, is false, except as a myth in the public mind. The actual naval strategists (in Japan and the USA at least) had already grasped the nature of the shift of naval power from battleships to aircraft long before this, and had changed their plans accordingly. Whether there was or was not some naval ordinance on the books somewhere asserting that carriers were merely for scouting for the battle line is irrelevant. The reality was that the people actually planning the future of naval power had already developed the tactics, doctrine, and training, necessary to take full use of the aircraft carrier.
BTW, most of the battleships sunk at Pearl Harbor were raised, repaired, and back in the war within a year or two. The last battleship vs. battleship action in WWII was in the Phillipines at the Battle of Surigao Strait, where the old Pearl Harbor survivors wiped out a Japanese task force. In reality, the damage inflicted on our battleship fleet strength was only temporary, and only bought the Japanese at most a year of battleship superiority. By 1943, repaired survivors of Pearl Harbor combined with newly built USN battleships were already outnumbering the Japanese battleship fleet.
The notion that the Japanese could have kept us out of the Western Pacific until 1950 is not taken seriously by any military historian who has taken the time to compare Japanese industrial power with that of the USA. Even if the Japanese had destroyed all our carriers in 1941; even if they had permanently sunk all of our battleships and captured Hawaii (which the Japanese never planned or prepared for), it would only have delayed our advance in the Pacific by at most a year.
The Japanese simply did not have the resources to hold the central Pacific; they rejected the idea of landing on Australia as it was simply too huge for them to occupy. Even without carriers we could have held the Japanese advance at some point until new carriers and other ships were built. By 1945, the USN had more ships than the rest of the world's navies combined. By 1945 the aircraft of the USN alone outnumbered by several orders of magnitude the aircraft the Japanese had available for defense. To this we must add US Marine aircraft, USAAF aircraft, and also the British and other allied forces. The idea of the Japanese holding us off until 1950 is simply laughable; it is a complete fantasy.
Thanks for that-- I was going to reply in detail but just didn't feel like dragging out a pile of old books, getting quotes, references & sources, and re-typing them here, to try to convert one more "buyer of the FDR-wasn't-such-a-bad-guy" theory.
Wow, I've seen some pretty glaring examples of ignorance of history, and particularly ignorance of military history, but this one takes the cake.
But your goes me one better--it presumes that what followed was deterministically inevitable, and it really wasn't. We got lucky in having a pair of somewhat foolish opponents.
Point one: the carrier as merely a scouting element for the battleship line was the original justification for the building of aircraft carriers, but only immediately after WWI. It was a necessary justification at a time when the battleship admirals controlled the navy. This scouting doctrine did not last very long as a matter of practical navy war doctrine, at least for the US and Japanese navies.
SNIP
In the 1920's, the two large US aircraft carriers (Lexington and Saratoga, uncompleted battlecruisers converted to aircraft carriers under the terms of the Washington Naval Treaty) were used in war games as independent striking units in war games which took place attacking and/or defending vital targets in the Pacific - the Panama Canal, Hawaii, the Phillipines. On several occasions, aircraft launched from US aircraft carriers carried out successful surprise air strikes against ships in Pearl Harbor during war games.
And those carriers subsequently got the crap kicked out of them by surviving surface elements--Lexington got killed three times in just one exercise. The carrier was, at best, viewed as an eggshell armed with a varying degree of hammer. And the early days of World War II were no reason for optimism--the loss of HMS Courageous to one U-boat, and HMS Glorious getting bagged by the Scharnhorst and Gneisemau were very firmly in most war planner's minds.
In other words, the USN had already "whipped up" the correct tactical, operational, and strategic doctrines, and the training for same, ten to fifteen years before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Except that the fleet did NOT routinely train to that doctrine, and the War Plans folks at CNO and CINCPACFLT did not develop their war plans to that doctrine. Mere details, I am sure. But you train the way you're going to fight--or at least THINK you're going to fight.
The notion of US Navy doctrine strictly limiting the carriers to scouting for the battle line might have been a cherished canard still defended by the older battleship admirals, but in reality the US Navy had fully developed the tactical doctrines and military procedures for using their aircraft carriers as independent striking units.
And the wargames indicated that the carriers would pay a ghastly price in the independent strike role--as they almost did on several occasions.
The notion of the USN carriers as mere scouting units for the battleships was anachronistic by 1941.
Again, there is the pesky detail of the war plans still reading like they were.
Indeed, the Royal Navy had already shown in its 1940 attack on the Italian fleet at Taranto that carrier aircraft (in this case obsolete biplane torpedo bombers) were capable of suprising and sinking a battleship fleet in harbor. The Japanese navy used the Taranto attack as a model for its own attack on Pearl Harbor; it would be ridiculous to assert that the USN did not take similar note of Taranto.
Notice was taken: and Pearl Harbor was believed to be too shallow for air-dropped torpedoes. Some clever technical work by the Japanese overcame that little problem.
Indeed, the Japanese Navy was much more a victim of victim of hide-bound battleship admirals than was the USN, and that did not stop the Japanese from developing the correct aircraft carrier doctrine prior to 1941.
True. But the Japanese were the only ones who actually planned to use that doctrine, and trained to it.
The notion that carriers were suddenly vindicated and battleships demoted on December 7, 1941, is false, except as a myth in the public mind. The actual naval strategists (in Japan and the USA at least) had already grasped the nature of the shift of naval power from battleships to aircraft long before this, and had changed their plans accordingly.
Except that when you review the various Orange war plans, they weren't changed a whit as you describe. If the battleship was now the secondary source of combat power, then why did the USN spend an awful lot of scarce design resources on the Montana class? Those ships just about made it to the building slips before getting cancelled--and that was after the war got started. Absent a truly decisive demonstration of carrier airpower, we would have built those ships.
Whether there was or was not some naval ordinance on the books somewhere asserting that carriers were merely for scouting for the battle line is irrelevant.
No silly regulation--it was just how the Naval War College performed their tactical gaming, how the CNO War Plans folks lined up their resource requirements, and how the General Board planned for a war with Japan.
Sometimes it takes a HUGE slap in the face from reality to get a large institution's attention.
BTW, most of the battleships sunk at Pearl Harbor were raised, repaired, and back in the war within a year or two. The last battleship vs. battleship action in WWII was in the Phillipines at the Battle of Surigao Strait, where the old Pearl Harbor survivors wiped out a Japanese task force. In reality, the damage inflicted on our battleship fleet strength was only temporary, and only bought the Japanese at most a year of battleship superiority.
Yes, I know that--but it wasn't known at the time. We got luckier than we deserved to be at Pearl Harbor. Had Nagumo hung around for another strike, he would have demolished most of Hawaii's shipyard capacity--just at the time when repair capacity was needed most. And had we gotten REALLY unlucky and gotten an accurate DF reading instead of a reciprocal, we probably would have lost the Enterprise and Halsey, as well--and for all his flaws, Halsey was irreplaceable in many ways. Without Halsey's recommendation, for example, Spruance would have stayed in command of the cruiser force--and Fletcher would have been in charge of Midway, a situation that would have far exceeded his modest tactical skills.
The notion that the Japanese could have kept us out of the Western Pacific until 1950 is not taken seriously by any military historian who has taken the time to compare Japanese industrial power with that of the USA. Even if the Japanese had destroyed all our carriers in 1941; even if they had permanently sunk all of our battleships and captured Hawaii (which the Japanese never planned or prepared for), it would only have delayed our advance in the Pacific by at most a year...[e]ven without carriers we could have held the Japanese advance at some point until new carriers and other ships were built.
The question is WHERE the line would have been held, and how long it would have been a holding action. Some bad luck on our part in terms of German and Japanese decision-making--and the outcome of our more boneheaded decisions--could have radically changed our priorities. The situation in the Indian Ocean during early 1942 after a visit from Nagumo's boys was extremely bad--the Japanese could have thrown an SNLF onto Ceylon, and then Churchill's fat would have been well and truly in the fire. Followed by losing the Enterprise and Hornet in Empire home waters during the Doolittle Raid (dang, now THERE's a perfectly named raid, for it risked much and indeed did little), and the complexion of the war would have been drastically different. Roosevelt would have stood a good chance of getting impeached--at the very least, he would not have had the freedom of action that he had historically.
Again, for their flaws, Roosevelt and Churchill were probably more competent than any prospective successors or committee thereof.
Another issue is losing large amounts of carriers in 1942--the surviving heroes of the great carrier battles went home to instruct young butterbars in the finer points of putting the zap on the "sons of heaven." Flip our situation around with the Japanese--we might have suffered our own "Marianas Turkey Shoot" in 1944.
By 1945, the USN had more ships than the rest of the world...[t]he idea of the Japanese holding us off until 1950 is simply laughable; it is a complete fantasy.
In a straight-up analysis of industrial power, assuming equal levels of competence in decision-making on both sides, true. But sufficiently huge disasters in 1942 might have unhinged US and British decision-making, much as the same sorts of disaster unhinged German and Japanese decision-making later on. Superior industrial might, coupled with deranged decision-making, usually equals a huge mess.
But your goes me one better--it presumes that what followed was deterministically inevitable, and it really wasn't. We got lucky in having a pair of somewhat foolish opponents.
Nothing is deterministically inevitable in full, but once certain parameters are met, certain outcomes become impossible and certain other outcomes become highly probable. The only thing that cannot be determined is the details of how things will fall out. We could not predict the details of how WWII would progress or exactly how it would end, but once, by the end of 1941, both the USSR and USA were in the war, there was simply no way that Japan and Germany could have won (which really means: there was no way they could have ended the war in a favorable truce, which is all they could hope for by 1942; the notion of German or Japanese "world conquest" is nothing more than war propaganda, sheer fantasy). The ledger of raw materials and industrial capacity is so unbalanced (comparing the allies to Germany/Japan) that no matter how brilliant their defense, they could only delay, not prevent, their eventual defeat. Their only hope would have been to get one of the allied powers to drop out of the war and sign a seperate peace treaty, and that simply was not going to happen.
And those carriers subsequently got the crap kicked out of them by surviving surface elements--Lexington got killed three times in just one exercise. The carrier was, at best, viewed as an eggshell armed with a varying degree of hammer. And the early days of World War II were no reason for optimism--the loss of HMS Courageous to one U-boat, and HMS Glorious getting bagged by the Scharnhorst and Gneisemau were very firmly in most war planner's minds.
Precisely why the USN developed the doctrines which emphasized the strengths of the carrier and minimized the weaknesses; one way of doing this is to ensure the carriers are truly operating independantly of the battleline, so they won't be caught by surface units. This is something the RN did not do; the HMS Courageous was ferrying aircraft from Norway, and did not have any kind of air combat patrol or scouts out looking for enemy surface ships. The RN is a perfect example of what the Japanese Navy and the USN were not: old fashioned battleship fleets which relegated their carriers to the supporting role.
Except that the fleet did NOT routinely train to that doctrine, and the War Plans folks at CNO and CINCPACFLT did not develop their war plans to that doctrine. Mere details, I am sure. But you train the way you're going to fight--or at least THINK you're going to fight.
You are looking at plan Orange and the various Rainbow plans; these were drawn up at the higgest levels by people in Washington drawing on what they knew about naval warfare from past wars. You are conflating this kind of planning with the actual, day-to-day training of the fleet as a practical matter. The plain fact is that the USN did not suddenly discover how to use aircraft carriers in 1942; they had been training to use the carriers as independent striking units for years. The notion that the carriers were for scouting ignores several points: one, the battleships had their own floatplanes. These could carry out the scouting roles quite well, as they in fact did in WWII. Two, the carriers were considerably faster then the battleships we had prior to WWII. It made no sense to tie down these fast units, just to tag along with the slow battleship units, where, if they were caught by the enemy battleships in a surface action, they would be annihilated. The USN recognized this immediately, and trained their aircraft carriers to function as independent units long before the war. Hell, even the British immediately used their carriers as independent units as soon as war was declared with Germany in 1939 (with disasterous results, since, unlike the Japanese or the Americans, they had not developed the tactics, training, or doctrine to do this properly, nor did they have the right aircraft for the job).
Having aircraft carriers tag along with and support the battle line makes no tactical sense at all, and actual naval operations (as opposed to Ivory Tower war college planning) recognized this; they did not need to wait until Pearl Harbor to find this out. Yes, official USN war doctrine still assumed the primacy of the battle line, but the point is that the USN carriers themselves had already prepared for, and been trained for, the role of acting as an independent strike force, regardless of whether official USN war planners grasped this fact or not. The reality is that once war broke out, the USN already had the proper tools (fast carrier groups armed with fighers, dive bombers and torpedo/level bombers), the men properly trained to use these tools, and years of practical experience in launching and recovering aircraft and using these aircraft to find and strike the enemy fleet without having to wait for the slow battle line to trundle to the rescue. If it were not so, we would have had no chance at the Coral Sea or Midway. The Japanese would have wiped the Pacific clean of all USN carrier groups within 6 months, if the USN had been so inept that it had not spent the interwar years training its carriers in the proper tactics for carrier warfare. If the first 6 months of 1942 look shaky, that is evidence of the need for battle hardening and the modification of tactics in light of real battle experience, not a complete lack of the proper tactical doctrine and training.
For your theory to have merit, the USN would have had to have emulated the British. The RN did indeed stick to the "scouting" doctrine for their carriers for much longer, due in part to lack of control over their own aircraft, which they did not regain from the RAF until shortly before the war. British carriers were well armoured and thus more survivable operating with surface units, but carried few aircraft in comparison to Japanese or USN carriers. Fleet Air Arm carrier aircraft also are a dead give away to the lingering influence of the "scouting" doctrine: two seat fighters like the Fulmar where the second crewman serves no purpose except as an observer; in-line aircraft engines that are harder to maintain at sea; an alarming reliance on converted RAF landplanes; even a design for a super-slow, super-long endurance scout aircraft whose only role was to "shadow" enemy ships. The RN was alarmingly limited in terms of aircraft capable of seeking out and destroying enemy fleets (unlike the Japanese and Americans who were well provided with lethal ship killers). The Bismarck was sunk by RN battleships after a lucky torpedo hit from a FAA "Stringbag" (biplane torpedo bomber) managed to jam the Bismarck's rudder. Significantly the FAA did not have the weapons to sink the Bismarck outright, but had to rely on the RN battleships to finish the job. The FAA would have to wait until later in the war to have useful carrier aircraft (most of them American lend-lease). If the USN really was still thinking of the carrier as just an air auxillary for the battle line, then yes, your theory would have been true. But if it had been true, we would have lost the battles of the Coral Sea and Midway.
Notice was taken: and Pearl Harbor was believed to be too shallow for air-dropped torpedoes. Some clever technical work by the Japanese overcame that little problem.
Taranto harbor was also shallow. The Italian battleships sunk were not completely sunk, but bottomed out, sitting in shallow water. Armor piercing bombs were equally dangerous as torpedos. Even more dangerous, in fact, to old battleships with thin deck armor. The USN battleships that were unrecoverable after Pearl Harbor were unrecoverable not due to torpedo hits but due to armor piercing bombs which exploded ammunition magazines, gutted machinery and engine rooms, etc. Any naval planner who thought Pearl Harbor was safe due to the shallow water should have been reassigned to a more suitable job. Ditto for those who knew the Japanese were planning a strike, but allowed the battle fleet to be concentrated in one spot (Pearl Harbor) rather than scattered to various naval bases around the Pacific.
True. But the Japanese were the only ones who actually planned to use that doctrine, and trained to it.
Bzzzt. Sorry. Wrong. The USN also planned and trained to use their carriers in a striking role. One need look no further then comparing the actual Japanese and American carriers, and the kinds of airplanes they carried: virtually identical in every respect (except Japanese naval fighters were nimble but unarmored, whereas American naval fighters went the other way: well protected but not as maneuverable). Both Japanese and Americans had large, fast carriers with unarmored decks and large hangers, intended to carry as many aircraft as possible (something unnecessary for a mere scouting role). Both had long ranged fighters, dive bombers, and torpedo bombers (again, unnecessary for mere scouting). Both trained to use these weapons properly. End of story.
And the wargames indicated that the carriers would pay a ghastly price in the independent strike role--as they almost did on several occasions.
Conservative military brass routinely rig war game rules to favor their branch or "school" in the service. In a values system which emphasises battleships, even several lost carriers would not have been considered a small price to pay for wiping out the enemy's battleships. The point to consider is not what the old school battleship admirals thought the Japanese would do, but what FDR and his inner circle thought the Japanese would do. I'd wager they were much more up on the realities of industrial power and the new technology than were the old battleship admirals who still called the shots in the USN.
Again, there is the pesky detail of the war plans still reading like they were.
Again, there are the pesky little details of actual USN carrier training, the actual design of USN carriers, and the actual design of USN carrier aircraft and the training designed to extract the maximum usefulness from these designs, which were, please note, designs intended to make full use of the carrier as an offensive striking unit, utilizing the long range power of carrier aircraft, and only as an afterthought (or vestigal remnant) as a long range scouting role for the battleline. That last scouting bit made the old battleship admirals happy, but the USN was full of ambitious younger officers (or more flexiable older battleship admirals) who knew better. FDR and his circle were not military fossils; they knew what the USN's strengths and weaknesses were and what the real potential of aircraft and aircraft carriers were. They could not have been sure about how exactly naval warfare would evolve, but they would have been aware of the potential.
Except that when you review the various Orange war plans, they weren't changed a whit as you describe.
Irrelevent: the actual fleet level training recognized the strengths and weaknesses of the carriers and was adjusted accordingly. It doesn't matter what the desk jockeys back in Washington planned for. The USN was trained and ready to use carriers properly, and FDR was aware of this.
If the battleship was now the secondary source of combat power, then why did the USN spend an awful lot of scarce design resources on the Montana class?
Internal USN politics, and federal electoral politics. Battleships were still a prestige item; hence politicians loved them. And the USN brass was dominated by battleship admirals.
And please note, I did NOT say that the battleship was the secondary source of combat power prior to Pearl Harbor; I NEVER said this, and you are putting words in may mouth, or setting up a straw man of your own to avoid confronting what I am actually saying. I will say it again, plainer: conventional thinking still assumed the battleship was the prime instrument of naval warfare, but the USN had also grasped the potential of the carrier, and had trained and planned accordingly. Hence, our carriers were up to the challenge when the full responsibility for carrying on the war against Japan was given to them after the loss of the battleships at Pearl Harbor. Anyone who did not have a vested interest in USN internal politics (naval war planners and war gamers being the guilty party here) could have discerned the importance of carriers in the Pacific theater, where the distances were huge, the islands capable of supporting airfields few and far between, and the vast distances involved could only be effectively covered by aircraft carriers. FDR had the imagination to realize this, as did others.
Those ships just about made it to the building slips before getting cancelled--and that was after the war got started. Absent a truly decisive demonstration of carrier airpower, we would have built those ships.
They still would have been completed had the war lasted. Battleships were hard to sink, and you could put a massive battery of AAA on them. Fast battleships which the USN completed building in time to see service in WWII acted as AAA ships protecting the carriers. Older, slow battleships were used for shore bombardment and as convoy escorts. The USA had such massive resources that we could build more carriers then we needed (primarily by mass producing the Essex class design) and still have plenty of open slip ways and excess steel to produce battleships. If we truly did not understand the importance of aircract carriers as you say, we would not have planned for such a massive increase in carrier production in our naval building programs of 1940-41. So, again you are wrong: the important people (the people who mattered) understood the importance of aircraft carriers prior to 1941, and planned accordingly. Our pre-1941 building program (battleships, yes, but also lots of aircraft carriers) proves this.
In a straight-up analysis of industrial power, assuming equal levels of competence in decision-making on both sides, true. But sufficiently huge disasters in 1942 might have unhinged US and British decision-making, much as the same sorts of disaster unhinged German and Japanese decision-making later on. Superior industrial might, coupled with deranged decision-making, usually equals a huge mess.
A sufficiently huge disaster would have required a far more resourceful and well-armed Japan than in fact existed, and would have required an American leadership and populace capable of being "unhinged". Even an "unhinged" USA could have completely crushed Japan within five years. I don't agree that German or Japanese decision making was ever "unhinged", btw; the plain fact of the matter was that, by 1942, they had ZERO chance of winning the war (which for them was not the ridiculous "world conquest" propaganda lie, but rather the carving out of large but well defined regional empires). Japanese warplans were strictly defensive: attempting to inflict sufficient war losses against the Americans to allow a peace treaty which would let the Japanese keep at least some of their empire intact. Germany hoped to divide the western allies from the USSR so they could concentrate on the Eastern front alone. No analysis I have ever read takes seriously the notion that Germany or Japan could have won, once both the USSR and USA were in the war. Survival was the only thing Germany and Japan could hope for.
Let's get back to one of the objections to the FDR theory:
"FDR could not have known that Germany would have declared war". Response: FDR was happy to have any war, as it cemented his power and silenced his critics, and diverted attention from the failures of the New Deal. Also, although he could not guarantee a German declaration of war, it was highly probable that war would be declared by one side or the other once "isolationism" and the America First movement was discredited and the public was in a war mood. Assume Hitler did not declare war on the USA and did his best to avoid any naval incidents which would have been used by FDR to get the Congress to declare war on Germany. Germany would have had to call off its entire U-boat campaign; otherwise, inevitably, more USN ships, and US merchant ships, would have been sunk by U-boats and Americans killed. Germany would not only have had to tolerate "lend-lease" war materials in massive quantities being shipped to Britain, but to the USSR as well. There is no way Germany could have tolerated this while carrying on a war against Britain and the USSR. Therefore at some point more American destroyers would have been sunk, and FDR would have had his war. Even if somehow this did not happen, the massive amounts of aid that FDR could provide to Britain and the USSR would have prevented Hitler from forcing an end to the war with Britain or defeating the USSR.
If FDR spent a lot of time and energy to get his war with Germany, and risked impeachment conspiring with a foreign power to do so (see the Tyler Kent case), and then, eventually, he got what he wanted by round-about means which he may not have entirely anticipated, are we irrational to connect the dots? As the archives have opened over the years and researchers connect more and more of these dots, it becomes increasingly hard to believe that FDR did not deliberately provoke war with Japan and (at least by ommission) allow them to strike first so as to achieve the kind of national disaster which would unite all Americans instantly and give him the kind of complete control over the country that FDR wanted. Hitler's declaration of war on the USA might not have been anticipated, but it was "icing on the cake"; a nice bonus for FDR.
If the battleship was now the secondary source of combat power, then why did the USN spend an awful lot of scarce design resources on the Montana class?
You would be just as justified asking why the Japanese wasted resources building the massive Yamato class battleships, rather than building more aircraft carriers, if, as you claim, the Japanese and grasped the importance of aircraft carriers prior to 1941, and we had not. You don't ask yourself the question, because you damn well know the answer.
Thanks for that-- I was going to reply in detail but just didn't feel like dragging out a pile of old books, getting quotes, references & sources, and re-typing them here, to try to convert one more "buyer of the FDR-wasn't-such-a-bad-guy" theory.
I appreciate that, but I think my work here is done. I'm not going to waste any more time exchanging historical minutae with blinkered defenders of historical orthodoxy: every canard I knock down will simply be replaced by two or three more canards. The FDRphiles never tire of grasping at straws. We will have to rely on the passing of time and the steady accumulation of evidence to win this argument.
Mind you, everything that conservatives claim to hate about Clinton (or liberals claim to hate about Reagan and Bush) was first established by FDR: secret wars, gun running, illegal negotiations with foreign powers, Presidential violation of US neutrality laws, using the Presidency to help jail American critics of the President in a foreign country (the Tyler Kent case), using the Presidency to help set up foreign spies and agents of a foreign power, so they could spy on and discredit the President's critics and enemies (FDR allowed the British to spy on and play dirty tricks on American "isolationists" right here on American soil!), rounding up the President's enemies and trying them on trumped up "treason" charges, using the FBI and IRS to spy on, harrass, and play dirty tricks on the President's political enemies, etc., etc., etc.
As Lawrence Dennis noted at the time, we went to war against fascism abroad, while establishing fascism at home.
The FDRphiles never tire of grasping at straws. We will have to rely on the passing of time and the steady accumulation of evidence to win this argument.
I know what you mean-- it's like argueing with the 'Toon-worshipers who currently plague America... but I thank you for your efforts.
The FDRphiles never tire of grasping at straws. We will have to rely on the passing of time and the steady accumulation of evidence to win this argument.
I know what you mean-- it's like argueing with the 'Toon-worshipers who currently plague America... but I thank you for your efforts.
Everyone who talks about an FDR conspiracy to hold back knowledge ignores several things:
BRAVO
How easy it is to get off point Poohbear - one message does not a story make.
Did Kimmel/Short even get a message concerning the "bomb plot" information prior to the attack? Was Short not led to believe that sabotage was the real threat? Was Pearl even adequately equipped to defend herself (HINT: See Lend-Lease materiel shipments to England and USSR)? ... Even better, why was Adm. Richardson replaced?
Often forgotten, until the brazen klintune-approach to demonize, are text by Morgenstern, Beard, Tansill, Martin, Barnes, Flynn, Bartlett, ... etc.
P.S., Which is the IOWA Class Battleships is longest? Why? Which one planned was never built? What did the MONTANA Class contribute?
"helped Stalin"
Shortly after the Germans attacked the Soviet Union during the summer of '41, Roosevelt sent his close friend and advisor, Harry Hopkins, to visit Stalin and find out what the United States could do to help Stalin. Stalin told Hopkins that the United States must keep Japan from "stabbing" the Soviet Union "in the back" - by attacking Siberia. Hopkins returned home, and soon the United States implemented sanctions against Japan designed to divert Japanese attention to the United States. An American general soon advised Roosevelt that the sanctions would cause Japan to attack the United States in less than six months. He was right.
"Kicked us out of the Pacific until 1950"
Ha! The U.S. subs were starving Japan to death by 1945. Ten percent of the American war effort was aimed at the Japanese. We fought them with one arm tied behind our back, and one leg tied to our head. Japan could have possibly delayed the inevitable for a year or two, but I doubt it. Even if victorious, their aircraft carriers would have become row boats by '46 because of the effective use of our submarines.
The Japanese were second-rate and doomed from day one, and many of their leaders, including Yamamoto, knew it.
6. Sixty years later the U.S. Government still refuses to identify or declassify many pre-attack decrypts on the grounds of "national security"!
Pls suggest how to declassify this.
Seems like GWB would just have to order it. I think it would be a good political move too. FDR is the soul of the Democratic party, if proof of his knowlege is released, it would have to take the wind out of the Democrats sails.
How easy it is to get off point Poohbear - one message does not a story make.
Please look at my screen name again--it is Poohbah, not Poohbear. If someone else hadn't replied, I would've missed your missive.
Did Kimmel/Short even get a message concerning the "bomb plot" information prior to the attack?
No, neither didn't. One of the supreme ironies of Pearl Harbor is that the "bomb plot" message was transmitted in a rather low-grade system, and was thus deemed unimportant and not broken promptly (there WAS a shortage of qualified crypto and interpreters). Had it been transmitted in Purple, and nothing sent forward, the revisionist case becomes a lot more believable.
Was Short not led to believe that sabotage was the real threat?
No, he wasn't--the dipstick read one clause in the message that said not to alarm the civilian populace and somehow interpreted that as being focused on sabotage. For the life of me, I cannot figure out how Short got from A to B--they do not logically connect at all.
Was Pearl even adequately equipped to defend herself (HINT: See Lend-Lease materiel shipments to England and USSR)?
No, and neither were the Phillippines, and neither was Guam, and neither was Wake Island. We can debate the wisdom of Lend-Lease until the cows come home, but you cannot consider it part of a massive conspiracy, unless it was a conspiracy to get the US thrown out of WESTPAC.
Here is the big question: how would giving tactical warning to Oahu have prevented the US from going to war with Japan? Please explain, in detail, how a six-carrier alpha strike by the IJN would have been overlooked had the fleet been on alert and interceptors airborne. I'd LOVE to hear your theory...
... Even better, why was Adm. Richardson replaced?
Because he told FDR that he could not support FDR's decision, made under his authority as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States, to retain the Pacific Fleet in a forward deployment at Hawaii.
Unless you subscribe to the theory that officers of the US armed forces should be allowed to engage in borderline-to-flagrant insubordination, and that the President is NOT the CINC, then you cannot argue with the decision made by FDR regarding Admiral Richardson.
Often forgotten, until the brazen klintune-approach to demonize, are text by Morgenstern, Beard, Tansill, Martin, Barnes, Flynn, Bartlett, ... etc.
And often forgotten by everyone else is that Pearl Harbor was a secondary operation as far as the IJN was concerned. BTW, please give me a quick rundown on the specific data in these books, as the revisionist bibliography ranges from Fuzzy Theobald's "FDR screwed up bigtime" (no particular argument from me on that point) to several works that state that the Royal Navy actually carried out the raid with some aircraft borrowed from the IJN (yeah, right). Where do these gentleman fit into the spectrum?
P.S., Which is the IOWA Class Battleships is longest?
My guess would be the USS Wisconsin.
Why?
Because she got the bow of the USS Kentucky after colliding with the destroyer Eaton.
Which one planned was never built?
There were TWO laid down and not completed:
Illinois (cancelled 12 August 1945 when 22% complete), broken up from September 1958 onward; she was originally planned for a 1941/42 laydown but was delayed by other construction that was more urgent; and
Kentucky, launched in January 1950 at 73% complete; bow removed to repair USS Wisconsin, and her turbines were used in the fast replenishment ships Sacramento and Camden. She was described as being "not so much a ship as an empty hull" when she was stricken in 1958.
What did the MONTANA Class contribute?
Had they been built, the Montana class would have mounted 12 16-inch/50 caliber guns, and probably would have reverted to the speed figures for the North Carolina and South Dakota classes. IIRC, New Hampshire and Louisiana were planned as fleet flagships and would have had extra accomodations for the Admiral and his flying monkeys.
Correction to my last post: I was guessing that the Wisconsin was the longest one of the class; I have since found the dusty tome with the actual figures and it is actually the New Jersey. Unfortunately, I do not know why the New Jersey is four inches longer than the other three ships.
Judge, given equal levels of operational art on both sides, you are right. However, if Japanese operational art had been a little more competent in early 1942, and we had gotten a good deal less lucky than we did from 12/7/41 to 6/4/42, I think that Allied decision-making COULD have been pretty thoroughly deranged, probably to the point that Churchill and FDR would have been replaced, in whole or in part, with committees. And we both know that a committee is the only form of life with six or more legs and no brain...
"re: declassifications and Bush"
Under Bush's father, the USG was steadfast in its refusal to declassify 45+ year-old documents on thousands of American servicemen held in the Soviet Union post WWII. The men had been taken from German POW camps by the Red Army. The reason Bush's Administration refused to release such documents during the early '90's - "National Security." Who do you thing President Bush was hiding the documents from - Hitler? Stalin? What makes you think his son will be any better?
I'd be lots more willing to at least read this kind of guff if it came from a source that had a less Communist-sounding name with more vowels.
Why don't you try posting a conspiracy theory written by an American, for a change?
"The reason Bush's Administration refused to release such documents during the early '90's - "National Security." Who do you thing President Bush was hiding the documents from - Hitler? Stalin? What makes you think his son will be any better?"
Judge, you hit it out of the park. But those who do not remember history will find the country manipulated again by foreign interests who want war for their own interests. 'Saddam is a Hitler', 'Milosovic is a Hitler'. (Guess Stalin must be considered a good guy - comparisons with Stalin must be regarded as praise.)
Just ask any Leftist. There are only right wing conspiracies.
Left wing actions are just "good vs evil".
Whatever it takes.
Actually, Christopher Columbus was the first democrat. When he left Spain, he didn't know where he was going. When he landed, he didn't know where he was. And when he got home, he didn't know where he had been.
And he did it all on borrowed money.
Trifkovic is another, maybe, should have, could have, must have known author.
I'd be lots more willing to at least read this kind of guff if it came from a source that had a less Communist-sounding name with more vowels. Why don't you try posting a conspiracy theory written by an American, for a change?
Because I feel that sometimes a non-American, like a Serbian like Srdja Trifkovic, can see the lies being fed to the Americans by their government better than a lot of Americans can.
Well, ok. There are at least fifty Serbs posting on FR about atrocities committed by President Clinton's military directives against Milosevic, yet this one lone Serb chooses to blow smoke up our butts about Pearl Harbor, 1941.
It's literally incredible.
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