Why Did FDR Fail to Relieve MacArthur and 151,000 Troops Fighting the Japanese in the Philippines?

According to Soviet intelligence reports, we now know that one of FDR’s top officials, the Treasury Department’s Harry Dexter White, was a Soviet agent, who, among many other deceptions, subverted relations between the US and Japan by inserting “ultimatum” language into the cable flow that actually spurred the Japanese attack. This was language written in Moscow, passed to White by a Soviet handler in Washington, D.C., and dropped into a State Department communiqué sent to Japan.

This brilliantly executed influence operation doesn’t live in infamy – at least not yet.

“A continuous stream of fighter and pursuit planes is traversing the Pacific,” FDR cabled MacArthur is early 1942, one of the extravagant lies FDR told to the people and forces under Japanese siege. No planes were on their way. Nothing was coming. .. Truth, John Hersey later wrote, would come “in mean little doses.”

the US continued to sustain catastrophic losses while shipping Lend Lease supplies to Stalin through the Nazi U-boat-infested North Atlantic.

Could the decision to abandon US forces to death or the horrors of Japanese POW camps by giving uninterrupted priority to the Red Army have had anything to do with the influence of the scores of Soviet agents and assets within reach of the levers of power inside the US government? How about the man driving military supply policy, the man behind Lend Lease?

That man was Harry Hopkins and he was without question FDR’s top wartime advisor. As George Marshall would state in 1957 to his official biographer Forrest Pogue: “Hopkins’s job with the president was to represent the Russian interests. My job was to represent the American interests.”

This was probably unrealistic, but is everything had gone as well as possible they may have made it expensive for the IJN.

Had the been at sea around Luzon on 12/8, who knows what several of them might have been able to tag.

They failed badly, mainly due to poor training and the scandalous state of the torpedoes.

One has to add poor naval leadership.

The Asiatic fleet submarines sortied immediately and for the most part were in useful patrols to intercept Japanese shipping in December 1941. They even had a large number of contacts,many even in Lingayen, among the invasion fleet, or off Taiwan and elsewhere in the South China Sea.
The problem is that they were unable to turn most contacts into attacks, which they should have, which was a failure in training and leadership, and when they did attack their tactics or torpedoes mostly proved defective.

Quite fair I think.
Other parts of the US Navy were much better run than the submarine branch, and navies with much fewer resources, like the Dutch, managed to operate their submarines, boat for boat, far more effectively than the US did at least until 1943. The torpedo dept had been very badly run, mainly out of political and bureaucratic reasons, for a couple of decades. They NEVER properly tested their torpedoes until forced to by the submarine force in late 1942/early 1943.

This is from the Wiki on the Mark 14, but it matches everything I have read on the subject. There is a LOT of material on this out there, they were even printing articles in the Naval Institute “Proceedings” back when I was reading that religiously in the 1970’s-80’s.

“In 1923, Congress made NTS Newport the sole designer, developer, builder and tester of torpedoes in the United States. No independent or competing group was assigned to verify the results of Mark 14 tests. NTS produced only 1½ torpedoes a day in 1937, despite having three shifts of three thousand workers[17] working around the clock.[18] Production facilities were at capacity and there was no room for expansion.[17] Only two thousand submarine torpedoes were built by all three[19] Navy factories in 1942.[18] This exacerbated torpedo shortages; the Pacific Fleet Submarine Force had fired 1,442 torpedoes since war began.”

The simple answer to this - the failure to even produce defective torpedoes with such a huge establishment - is simple. Corruption and gross incompetence.

And the submarine branch likewise failed to test them - their principal weapon system - even after a year of reports of defective torpedoes from returning patrols, until the local squadron commander in Western Australia took it upon himself to run unauthorized tests.

Interestingly the Germans similarly found defects in their magnetic torpedoes in 1939, and heard of it from their U-boat commanders. They fixed their problems within weeks.

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