sinking a Japanese submarine just outside of Pearl Harbor.
The Japanese retaliated by attacking Pearl Harbor a couple of hours later.
Posted on 12/07/2012 11:18:50 AM PST by Errant
Guest: Author John Koster discusses his book, "Operation Snow - Who instigated the attack on Pearl Harbor?"
Interview begins at 11 mins into the broadcast.
Link to download MP3 audio file
(Excerpt) Read more at trunews.com ...
Sorry the USS Ward had every right to do so..
Years ago I posted a similar thought that was countered by a very knowledgeable and reasonable argument.
First, I believe that American progressives of the era opposed going to war against Hitler after his August 1939 nonaggression pact with their Uncle Joe. Progressives demanded war against Hitler in June, 1941 when Hitler attacked their beloved workers' paradise.
I find it very creditable that Uncle Joe Stalin worried about Japan especially after June. He needed help. Something had to be done.
I first heard from some Europeans that the FDR administration provoked Japan.
It's NOT tinfoil hat stuff to say that some people very close to FDR were communists or sympathetic to Uncle Joe's workers' paradise.
In a biography of Armand Hammer I read that it was he who sold the idea of a generous lend lease program for the Soviet Union to a willing FDR Administration. In the 1930s the Export-Import Bank was created to help the Soviets. I've known FDR Democrats (in 1940s - 50s) who could tear up talking about their Uncle Joe.
IMO, the FDR Administration wanted some kind of act of war from Japan as an excuse. No one likely thought that it would be that big.
Pearl Harbor made the isolationists give full support to FDR. But by 1944 when it was obvious that we'd win Republicans did debate post war plans with the Democrats.
Republicans wanted a tough stand against communism, the Democrats became the isolationists.
Another FReeper responded to my comment that: Stalin worried about Japan.
"Stalin wasn't worried about the Japanese. The Red Army had thoroughly bloodied the Japanese Army's nose in the border clashes of the late '30s. The Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact signed in April 1941 was pushed for by the Japanese, who by then had already decided their thrust was going to be to the south. The Japanese had every reason not to provoke the Soviets and the Soviets understood this, otherwise they would not have depleted their forces in the Far East by sending them to Europe as they did."
Ah. I believe that was a midget submarine, part of the Pearl Harbor attack. To think the Japanese could organize a large calculated attack in retaliation is simply ridiculous.
I can highly recommend the book.
...The Americans did not seem to believe that they would be the victims of a Japanese attack...
~snip
It was a massive misjudgement. Far from seeking to disengage with the Japanese after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Americans were driven on by a sense of righteous indignation to pursue vengeance against Japan. 'Remember Pearl Harbor!' became the rallying cry of American forces in the war that followed...
FDR immediately declared a war on "sneak attackers" and cautioned Americans that it was not a war against the peaceful Imperial Japanese government . . . .
Damn that Charlie Chaplin!
Dang! I knew it.
Thank God for The “Un”.
Looking closer, that doesn’t look like the real Chaplin. Looks like someone dressed up as him. Gotta be those Latvians. They were somehow in cahoots with Denmark. Or something like that.
I just watched “From Here to Eternity” and it was clearly US Navy Douglas Dauntless Dive Bombers and Grumman Avenger Torpedo Bombers that made the runs against the ships at Pearl Harbor, while USAAF T-6 Texan advanced trainers painted to look like Japanese Zeros strafed Schofield Barracks. Thus it was an entirely US Navy and USAAF inside job that was then blamed on the Japanese.
Christina Shelton, in her recent biography of Alger Hiss, wrote that Hiss and or Harry Dexter White, kept State Department position papers from either the Sec State or FDR that made the case against the oil embargo against Japan. The position paper(s?) stated that a denial of oil supplies would very likely lead to a decision by the Japanese to attack the Dutch Indies (Indonesia) and British colony of Borneo to seize their oil wells. And probably to attack the Philippine Islands as the US Navy there was in a position to cut the Japense supply line back to Japan from the Dutch Indies.
Just posted a article from that author here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2966761/posts
On Showtime, the anti-American director Oliver Stone’s busy repainting FDR’s Communist Henry Wallace into a patriot despite revelations from the USSR wiretap, the Venona Project which exposes Wallace as a Soviet spymaster.
Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White? Well.. even without Stalin asking, his people were trying to help him settle the score with Imperial Japan -- others including O. John Rogge were helping Stalin; to wit, FDR pressured DOJ to prosecute his (FDR's) critics. The critics were mostly anti-Stalin, anti-communists who had opposed the war prior to Pearl Harbor. DoJ assigned O. John Rogge to be the prosecutor.
Rogge had been a good friend of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, was involved in numerous communist front groups, and had visited Russia, where he spoke in the Kremlin and laid a wreath at the grave of American Communist Party co-founder John Reed in Red Square. His wreath was inscribed: “In loving memory from grateful Americans.” . . . Rogge was an American delegate to a world communist “peace conference” in Paris and was a lawyer for many communists in trouble with the law. He was the attorney for David Greenglass, the atomic spy who saved his own life by turning state’s evidence against his sister and brother-in-law, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg [who] went to the electric chair for turning over U.S. atomic secrets to the Soviets. [Rogge] was thus eventually exposed for what he was. No wonder he was so fanatical in his hatred against the Sedition Trial defendants, all of whom were anti-communists.
I like to mention A Mockery of Justice The Great Sedition Trial of 1944 often.. because I see Great "Sedition" Trials of 201x - 201x" a coming.
Having readI was strongly inclined toward that view. Because the US Navy became more aggressive in protecting shipping from America to Britain “though out the summer of 1941” - which, when you consider that summer started on June 22 and so did Hitler’s invasion of the USSR. This, after diplomatic recognition of the USSR had been FDR’s first foreign policy act.
- The New Dealers' War:
- FDR and the War Within World War II
by Thomas Fleming
But having recently readI realize that that apparently is not the case. Because that book make a very credible case that FDR was frantically working to keep Britain in the war from Dunkirk on. The British Army was essentially unarmed after Dunkirk, and FDR sold all the Army’s WWI surplus (because the US Army was adopting the Garand) rifles. And allowed Britain (and France, before its fall) to shop for arms in America with little or no restriction. Churchill occasionally sent FDR a telegram warning of Britain’sprecarious position - at one point warning that if Britain fell, Churchill obviously could not speak to what his successors might feel obliged to allow Hitler to do with the Royal Navy. FDR did not want the Royal Navy to appear off the coast of New Jersey.
- Freedom's Forge:
- How American Business Produced Victory in World War II
Arthur HermanYou probably know, as I already had, that the British had sent the blueprints for the Rolls Royce Merlin fighter engine and plans for radar and the Wittle jet engine, and other advanced devices to America. But it had not sunk in to me that that was over a year before Pearl Harbor. The British also paid cash on the barrelhead, as long as they were able, for American supplies - and FDR made sure that that money helped the US build up its military-industrial complex.
As under Secretary of the Navy, FDR had seen first hand that during WWI America’s factories had never delivered any military materiel to Europe, still less the front, before the shooting ended. And he knew that a repeat of that performance would be disastrous in WWII. So he called Bertrand Russell, the only industrialist who had impressed him during WWI. Russell demurred, saying he was too old for the job, but recommended Bill Knudsen. Knudsen had immigrated in 1900, had gone to work for Ford, risen to Henry’s right hand man, and had quit in a policy dispute in 1920. He then signed on with a struggling auto company known as General Motors, and brought the Chevrolet division up to parity with Ford. So basically from the time of Dunkirk to the time of Pearl Harbor, Knudsen - operating as a dollar-a-year man - organized the American ability to mass produce war materiel. Knudsen gave FDR an estimate of 18 months to finish preparation for mass production - first get enough machine tools, then enough factory space, and so on - and was ready to seriously ramp up production when the smoke cleared away from Pearl Harbor.
That 18 month period from Dunkirk to Pearl Harbor meant that America was even more of a “sleeping giant” than Yamamoto knew in 1941. America had few warplanes in 1941 - but it was in a position to undertake to make 50,000 planes (many multiengine) in 1942.
I am reminded of something I heard on the John Batchelor show about the GNP and the role it played during W.W.II. This is from Batchelor's website:
1005P Jim Lacey . . . tells how a few obscure American economists guided the miracle of production that crushed the Axis. In 1940-1943 all-outer military chiefs and Roosevelt himself badly misjudged American capacities of labor, materials and finance. Their jumbled arms programs were out of touch with reality. Lacey persuasively describes how the economists, applying then-new statistical measure like gross national product, convinced them to recalibrate output to credible goals that assured a timely victory.
A little serendipity here. Mr. Edward S. Miller, author of Bankrupting the Enemy: The U.S. Financial Siege of Japan Before Pearl Harbor, was mentioned associated with the above. The new book is described:
"Award-winning author Edward S. Miller contends in this new work that the United States forced Japan into international bankruptcy to deter its aggression. While researching newly declassified records of the Treasury and Federal Reserve, Miller, a retired chief financial executive of a Fortune 500 resources corporation, uncovered just how much money mattered . . . ."
As with these kind of events, it's much more to it than the average person will ever know.
Thanks for posting,
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