Posted on 12/06/2014 4:51:05 PM PST by Jacquerie
Adm. James Richardson strongly disagreed about permanently docking navy ships in Pearl Harbor, believing that the Japanese would feel threatened by the proximity of America's Pacific fleet and organize a preemptory attack.
With their exposed and isolated location, the ships would be vulnerable to any such aggression. He also recognized that the navy did not have the manpower to fight a war in the Pacific in 1940. He relayed these concerns to all who would listen and protested the decision to politicians in Washington. In response, Pres. Franklin Delano Roosevelt relieved Richardson of his command.
This biography covers Richardson's life from moderate beginnings to the investigations by the army and navy into shortcomings at Pearl Harbor, detailing his influences on the military.
Togo is a small African nation.....Tojo was the Prime Minister of Japan during WWII
Thnx
Germany was not going to defeat Great Britain. That was established by October of 1940, well before Pearl Harbor.
That’s not the conclusion Abraham Lincoln came to...
And so did Patton’s cousin, Lt. Gen. Lewis Burwell “Chesty” Puller, in 1934.
A the dry docks
“Richardson’s most stunning claim was that his superiors specifically vetoed his plan to use newly arrived PBYs to mount aerial patrols to the northwest of Hawaii.”
The story about the PBY patrols is a half truth which misrepresents the circumstances. The Navy had a limited number of PBY aircraft, a limited amount of appropriations to fund the maintenance and operations of those aircraft, and a limited number of operational flight hours allotted to their operations. The task of providing full coverage of all possible approaches to Pearl Harbor some 7 days a week and 24 hours per day for weeks and months on end was well beyond the number of PBY flight hours available to the Navy’s budget for these PBY aircraft and units. Consequently, a decision was made to maintain PBY patrols in what they considered to be the most promising patrol sectors and schedules. Even after the attack on Pearl Harbor occurred, the commanders still were unable to direct the PBY patrols to the correct patrol sectors at the correct times.
Revisionists offer arguments that FDR, Cordell Hull, and George Marshall foreknew the Pearl Harbor attack. These authors review historical events for those few data points that indicate an overwhelming attack. However, living history forward means accumulating and discerning patterns from 10,000’s of data points coming from humint, radio traffic analysis, code breaking, etc.
The Pearl Harbor attack astonished the administration and military professionals. Never before had even two carriers for any country planned and/or coordinated an attack on a naval or land target. No inkling existed in any allied Naval operational and intelligence community of a capability beyond the 21 bi-plane torpedo bombers from a single British carrier that attacked the Italian Navy at Taranto.
Yet, for Pearl Harbor the Japanese had forged a strategic weapon of six carriers with escorts and auxiliaries for a coordinated attack by 360 planes. The attack was not only unprecedented, but unexpected, because all 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 the diplomatic corps from their plans.
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. Therefore, even reading the naval JN25 code vital for Midway would not have helped.
The attack was a truly unexpected and improbable use of the Japanese air fleet.
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
I.need help quick. My 90yo grandma just told me that my grandpa in corpus christi was told he was shipping out if the war wasnt won. I was telling her of the two uboats recently found in the GOM.
She a lifelong dem voter admitted she voted st
raight R wow.
Horrid fone posts. Seriously right before aug 6 1944 she learned that my grandfather would be redeployed immediately IF.
You need to look into the activities of financial elites and their operatives prior to the attack.
“Three days before Pearl my father received flash traffic to immediately sortie and intercept the Jap fleet headed for Pearl. He was on a four stacker tin can in Alaska. He told me they went to sea with ammo on deck.”
The entire U.S. Navy had been on war warning alert since November 1941, because we knew the Japanese Army and Navy were mobilized for military campaigns in British Malaya and other as yet unidentified Japanese targets. U.S. naval units in the Philippines, Alaska, Midway Island, wake island, and more were in fact dispatched to conduct war patrols to monitor the Japanese movements.
Why do you assume a destroyer in Alaska had anything to do with an opposed Japanese strike in the Hawaiian Islands, when we already know Alaskan naval units were patrolling against a Japanese invasion of the Aleutian Islands in November-December 1941?
I heard that it was the Panama Canal that the Germans bombed.
Because my father took the flash traffic.
Wake Island was Minnie Pearl.
“Because my father took the flash traffic.”
How do you know what the exact wording of the “flash traffic” looked like, i.e. did you view a photocopy of the “flash traffic” message?
They got bombed on Panamanian Rum..
This limited discussion of the 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.
Yes, volumes have been written.
They simply leave out a few key things, which I don’t have time to dig up links on.
Simple common sense, however, is enough to see:
The top elites of the US, and their man, FDR, and the top elites of the UK, and their man, Churchill, desperately wanted the US to enter the war.
A radical shift in US public opinion needed to be manufactured for this to happen.
And it was pretty obvious that war was inevitable and the US was preparing for war.
If there was no Japanese attack, US public opinion would not have supported war.
Of course, if the Japanese did attack, it’s only sensible to imagine that they would try to strike a knockout blow in the first round to US Pacific military operations.
There weren’t many other realistic options for how the story would play out.
However, if top US leadership prepared adequately and the attack damage was minimized, i.e., the battle was relatively “even”, US public opinion would not have been so cranked up over retribution in the coming war. Having such a disaster happen provided the carte blanche the planners were looking for from the American people, paving the way for an all-out war effort.
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