Posted on 12/08/2018 2:26:02 PM PST by rktman
Commentators and critics often gloss over
the nearly simultaneous Japanese attack
on Clark Field and Iba Field in the Philippines.
I believe I remember reading that in a book sometime back. So basically they stole the plans for the attack.
Germany was defeated by Russia, America had very little to do with their defeat. The great myth of WW II history was the POV of Americans being indispensable. Without the absolute bravery of the Russian people, America would have lost the war badly.
> In reality all Roosevelt needed to do was say to Stalin, “This is the way it will be or you, your army and nation will cease to exist. ... <
That would have worked...if Roosevelt had been an absolute dictator, and had the military been his puppet.
But that wasn’t the case. The Soviet Union was our ally at the time. Would the Congress have gone along with a mass slaughter of our “allies”? Would the generals (Patton excepted) have gone along with even more killing?
And most importantly, would the home front have gone along with even more killing? Mom and Pop didn’t see the danger in Stalin. American propaganda had painted him as our ally, Uncle Joe. Mom and Pop didn’t want more people killed just to push Uncle Joe out of Europe. The war was over. They just wanted their sons to come home alive.
General George S. Patton warned the higher-ups in 1937. The admirals warned against moving the Pacific fleet to Hawaii.
Day of Deceit by Robert Stinnett argues that FDR knew an attack was imminent. Critics argue that Stinnett’s claim that the Navy had cracked the Japanese code was incorrect; it wasn’t broken until May 1942. However, the Battle of Midway took place June 4-7 1942. Hardly enough time to crack the code, decode messages, send a trap message, receive and decode the Japanese response and plan the attack.
Considering FDR’s other questionable actions, one has to concede that it is more likely that he knew than not.
“...Roosevelt gave it all away to the Soviets...”
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“He was already dead by then.”
He was very much alive at Yalta and Teheran where he and Stalin determined the fate of post war Europe.
As mentioned Roosevelt can only be described as a fool at best. I think he was not a fool.
Roosevelt somehow felt he could deal with Stalin and Charm him to his way of thinking. Only thing was Stalin ended up using FDR and conned him. Churchill tried to war FDR but he would not listen and ended up having private meetings with Stalin that Churchill was not privy to. It was all a huge mess and in the end Churchill was correct about Stalin.
Even into 1942 the Soviets kept 1.4M troops in Asia facing the Japanese.
Thus story about we knew you could attack Pearl Harbor because we did proved in the 30s has been around for decades. We did not attack Pearl Harbor to prove it could be done. We attacked Hawaii because it was a major fleet exercise out of San Diego, and it needed an objective far away and Hawaii fit the bill.
The Germans sank the Reuben James on October 31, 1941, yet even that couldn't get us to declare war on Germany.
I felt his “Arsenal of Democracy” speech on December 29, 1940, pretty much was a declaration of War against the Axis.
Wasn’t Teddy Roosevelt’s granddaughter put in charge of Red Cross and stationed in Los Angeles the day before - Dec.6th? I’m pretty sure that is on the record and she let’s slip she found it all too coincidental and believed there was foreknowledge.
Thanks for that.
General George S. Patton warned the higher-ups in 1937. The admirals warned against moving the Pacific fleet to Hawaii.
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As did Gen. Billy Mitchell a few years before that.
“Atom Bombs and effective delivery systems were few.”
You are in total error in your statement!
Our original war plans had 12 more atomic bombs in the pipeline of production to be used on Japan. It only took two to make them surrender. We were ramping up our production of fissile fuel as fast we could. Stalin had no idea how many we had ready or in production. It was increasing day by day.
We had B29s with a range of of 3250 miles. Round trip from England was only 2900 miles from our bases in Eastern England. If we used a launch point in Norway or Denmark which we had control it would have been even less as would have been France that we controlled and the west of Germany that we controlled.
With our P51 Mustangs and drop tanks these bombers would have had total air superiority and safe escort to target. I assure you if a B29 was carrying an atomic bomb to Moscow the biggest danger would be accidentally running into a P51 that would have been around that bomber like a swarm of flies. Unfortunately the P51 would have not had the range to get home to friendly territory. Our brave P51 pilots in that war would have stood up for the mission. The bomber crews in B17s and B24s stood up for far worse before they had the fighter escorts of the P51 on their raids on Germany.
We could have bombed Stalin with ease. It was 4 years later until the Soviet Union had the atomic bomb. It would have been longer least Soviet Spies in our atomic bomb program.
Stalin did have a huge army that could have caused a lot of harm until our atomics took out the Russian will to resist. Our option would have been a holding of territory and not attack against conventional forces. It is a lot easier to defend than attack when one considers loss of life.
As I said before, Roosevelt was a fool at best, I think he was far worse.
An odd point of history is the Jewish contribution to our Manhattan Atomic Bomb Program of WWII. Many were physicists of incredible intellect that fled Germany and Eastern Europe due to Hitler. It was mostly Jewish physicists that built the bomb for the allies. Oddly some were Marxist and betrayed us to the Soviet Union after the war. Oddly they did it in good faith of their ideology. They were sadly mistaken.
I have never understood how the Jews can be so damn smart and make such incredible errors that harm themselves.
That’s interesting, considering that the facility was still under construction.
Of interest:
http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2007/Jun/13/ln/FP706130406.html
https://web.mst.edu/~rogersda/umrcourses/ge342/Red%20Hill%20Storage%20Tanks-revised.pdf
“I think FDR knew we were going to be attacked, but never believed the Japanese could hit us so hard and do so much damage. Before Pearl Harbor, and even for a short while later, Churchill and FDR very much underestimated the Japanese.”
I hold a different opinion:
I believe that all of FDR’s actions demonstrate that he was prepared to make sacrifices to Japanese aggression, which he was openly goading. All the signs were there: Warnings to shipping, American bases and intel...oh the intel.
However, I also believe that our people probably advised, but no single action other than telling Kimmel to maintain a defensive posture demonstrates any conspiracy. I don’t think anyone knew, but everyone suspected and I’d bet my left gonad FDR quietly prayed for some attack on a US base in the Pacific. Even the carriers were staggered on their deployments away from Pearl, not a single sortie. Enterprise was due back on 12/7 but delayed by a storm.
Even though I believe the attack was unknown, it was not unanticipated and certainly was expected in some manner due to Lexington’s mission to deliver Marine Scouting Bombing Squadron Two Thirty One (VMSB-231) to Midway. One could only hope that our military would have anticipated as much but, likewise - as outlined in the OP’s linked article - FDR fired Richardson (who was crowing about an attack) and installed lackey Kimmel. How effing convenient.
After all that I’ve learned about our government’s adoption of Bernay’s principles, Operation Mockingbird (among others) and what we know of media bias and deep state manipulation today, IMHO a person must suspend disbelief to conclude that anyone in FDR’s administration didn’t discuss the need for a catalyst - a “Lusitania” - to goad the public into war to both rescue the American economy from his policy failures and to deal with Germany.
Clearly the attack stunned everyone, but it gave them exactly what was needed and, of course, obviously there could be only one story.
I submit that among the trillions expended upon the war that was easily-accomplished and we suffer the effects of the Four Minute Men to this day.
https://www.gla.ac.uk/media/media_247022_en.pdf
One enduring conspiracy theory is that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, George Marshall and Cordell Hull had foreknowledge of a potentially devastating Pearl Harbor attack and used the event to precipitate U.S. participation in WW II. In general revisionists start with the determination that the Japanese had to fire the first shot in order for the Administration to get the backing of the American people. Next looking backwards, they piece together specific data points to prove these men must have known the attack was coming.
However, they have had to ignore the fact that these men were living into history. The information the U.S. received from traffic analysis, informants, investigations, and code braking swam in a sea of 10,000’s of data points each month. Remember a few years ago you could buy pictures that seemed a mass of random color pixels, but a single picture emerged if you stared at it in the right way? In this case a host of pictures emerged each week with each put forward by professionals who asserted this could be their true intention. To direct our limited resources for the coming war these possibilities had to be reduced to the most probable alternatives.
The Pearl Harbor attack was one of the least likely options for a host of reasons among the few now noted. First U.S. War Plan Orange and the corresponding Japanese plan, which was generally known to us, both envisioned the supreme naval battle would be fought in the Western Pacific. Both navies were disciples of Alfred Thayer Mahan who wrote the outcome of war at sea would always be decided by the “decisive naval battle”. Past history had borne that out at Trafalgar, Tsushima, and Jutland. For Jutland Churchill said, “Jellicoe was the one man who could have lost the war in an afternoon”. For the Japanese enticing the U.S. Navy into a sea battle in the Western Pacific was the best option. Their ships of short operational range would not be at a disadvantage. Japan could use land-based reconnaissance and attack aircraft in battles as we attempted to counter their attacks against Guam, the Philippines, etc. Ships lost at sea could not be recovered as they could if they were hit in harbor.
A counter argument was developed through the large-scale U.S. Navy exercises between 1923 and 1940. These proved the feasibility of an increasing role for aircraft carriers in attacking bases like the Philippines, Panama Canal, and Hawaii. For example in 1932 Admiral Harry Ervin Yarnell commanded the carriers Lexington and Saratoga in an effort to demonstrate that Hawaii was vulnerable to naval air power. Yarnell’s planes attacked the harbor from the northeast, just as the Japanese would ten years later. The Navy’s war-game umpires declared the attack a total success, prompting Yarnell to strenuously warn of the Japanese threat.
However, the umpire's final report did not even mention his success. Instead they wrote, "It is doubtful if air attacks can be launched against Oahu in the face of strong defensive aviation without subjecting the attacking carriers to the danger of material damage and consequent great losses in the attack air force." The battleship admirals again launched a successful campaigned against reassessment of naval tactics being able to point to other exercises in which the vulnerability of aircraft carriers was demonstrated. Therefore, in this country War Plan Orange continued to determine the most probable interpretation to place on intelligence. Hence, there were many opportunities for self-deception, but not conspiracy.
When Yamamoto proposed a radical departure from Japanese strategic principles his firm commitment to resign at a meeting in October 1941 forced the Naval General Staff to accept his departure from existing plans. Yamamoto’s plan was improbable and radical because never before had any country planned and/or coordinated an attack of such a size on a naval or land target. No inkling existed in any allied naval operational and intelligence community of a proven capability beyond the 21 Fairey Swordfish bi-plane torpedo bombers a single British carrier sent to attack the Italian Navy at Taranto. Even Admiral Yarnell used only two carriers and left no fighters for task force defense to launch 152 planes for the raid. Yet, for Pearl Harbor the Japanese forged a strategic weapon of six carriers with escorts and tankers for a coordinated mass attack by 360 planes with 55 retained to defend the task forces.
The attack deserved a low probability for consideration because it was not only unprecedented, but also unexpected. Preparations were conducted without recourse to the diplomatic Purple Code that U.S. codebreakers were reading in substantial portions. The U.S. had no agents in Japan and the Imperial Japanese Navy excluded their diplomats from all knowledge of the Pearl Harbor plan. To solve problems regarding bombing, torpedoes, and underway refueling the attack plan relied on oral doctrines and technical innovations developed during the last ninety days prior to deployment.
U.S. naval traffic analysis in Hawaii detected the same message flurry followed by radio silence as they had observed for tactical operations in February and July when major units had remained in port. Even though the Japanese had changed their fleet unit call signs December 1, Lieutenant Commander Layton says Commander Rochefort was still able to identify a large movement of fleet units south. However, they had no idea of the whereabouts of four carriers and could only assume they were still in home waters.
In briefing Admiral Kimmel, Layton could say the ships were probably in home waters but confirmed Kimmel’s assertion they could possibly be steaming around Diamond Head without prior knowledge. Layton points to what he calls moral stupidity in the way the Washington intelligence community handled limited decrypts of the naval code (JN25) and the “bomb plot” message from a Purple Code decrypt. Once again, the picture of a probable Pearl Harbor attack could have emerged one alternative for a few intelligence people only to be overcome by what many people expected to see.
This limited discussion of Pearl Harbor conspiracy theorists covered only the likelihood the attack would be considered probable and/or of such a scale. Gordon W. Prange in writing At Dawn We Slept presented arguably the most scholarly, well researched volume on the attack from both the Japanese and American perspectives. The book ends with an eleven-page summary refuting a host of revisionist imaginings including internal political collusion, secret treaties and international intrigues. The Broken Seal by Ladislas Farago also focuses on refuting the claim that FDR knew.
War Plan Orange http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Plan_Orange
Naval History: Pearl Harbor’s Overlooked Answer http://www.usni.org/magazines/navalhistory/2011-12/pearl-harbors-overlooked-answer
And I Was There by Rear Admiral Edwin T. Layton
At Dawn We Slept by Gordon W. Prange
The Broken Seal by Ladislas Farago
Admiral Harry Ervin Yarnell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_E._Yarnell
Lexington-class aircraft carrier (78 aircraft) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexington_class_aircraft_carrier
USS Saratoga (CV-3) (78 aircraft) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Saratoga_(CV-3)
Yarnell used 152 airplanes for his simulated attack leaving nothing to defend the task forces. However, nobody asked two telling questions that should have been answered, “Admiral, provide an explanation of how you traveled undetected to position north of the Hawaiian Islands to launch the attack beginning from the Japanese Home Islands or Mandates to the south and east. Also, why would you launch an attack from a position where it was impossible to retreat under the protection of land-based aircraft?”
"Reflections on Pearl Harbor " by Admiral Chester Nimitz http://seekingalpha.com/instablog/388783-christopher-menkin/242946-reflections-on-pearl-harbor-by-admiral-chester-Nimitz
Fleet problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleet_problem
Japanese aircraft carrier Akagi (66 +25 reserve) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_aircraft_carrier_Akagi
Japanese aircraft carrier Hiryū (64 +reserve) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_aircraft_carrier_Hiry%C5%AB
Japanese aircraft carrier Kaga (72 +18 reserve) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_aircraft_carrier_Kaga
Japanese aircraft carrier Shōkaku (72 +12 reserve) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_aircraft_carrier_Sh%C5%8Dkaku
Japanese aircraft carrier Sōryū (63 +9 reserve) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_aircraft_carrier_S%C5%8Dry%C5%AB
Japanese aircraft carrier Zuikaku (72 + 12 reserve) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_aircraft_carrier_Zuikaku
The total task force had 409 aircraft available at Pearl Harbor with reserves of 85. Attack made by 350-354 aircraft leaving 55 aircraft available for defense of task forces. The others were inoperative or spares in kit form.
“I felt his “Arsenal of Democracy” speech on December 29, 1940, pretty much was a declaration of War against the Axis.”
You are most correct in that statement. However the United States at that time was very isolationist. The horrors of WWI were still fresh in our minds.
Roosevelt was a great leader in war. He was a disaster in post war (actually he died before the ended and Truman was the end of the war) but Roosevelt sowed the seeds of many years of conflict between the USA and the Soviet Union.
Oddly not one shot was fired between the Soviet Union and the USA. With the exception of a few aircraft that invaded each others airspace, both theirs and ours. Brave airmen of the USA and the Soviet Union died in these rare but untold encounters.
Many Americans died in Korea and Vietnam via proxy wars that would have never happened least the ignorance of Roosevelt and 90 million Chinese died post Roosevelt due to his perfidy. Truman should also share a lot of blame for China.
This was not Roosevelt’s doing but simply his policy post death.
Post WWII the United States with absolute military and nuclear superiority withdrew from the world stage with the exception of East West possible confrontation with the Soviet Union in Europe. This was a grave error.
Although WWII ended 74 years ago, the errors of Roosevelt continue today. Much blood has been shed due to him. He was a great leader in war. He is not a man to be admired.
Roosevelt was not a good man.
I remember the late Ed Koch (former Mayor of NYC) on the radio in New York saying (and I'm paraphrasing) FDR is burning in Hell for turning that ship away, because FDR knew what fate awaited them.
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