Posted on 10/02/2011 5:45:54 AM PDT by Homer_J_Simpson
Thanks for putting a human face on the slaughter.
National Socialist Germany made the deliberate murder of children a matter of state policy. Not a side effect of a bad policy or operation, a failure to protect, or incompetence, but instead deliberate planned murder.
The reason Naziism is more evil than communism is that while the Reds killed a hundred million plus as a side effect of creating “utopia”, the Nazi’s had to kill millions as a direct condition to create their utopia.
Communists are athiests, but the Nazis were satanic...
I don’t know details of the Dies map but I do know from speaking with Pearl Harbor survivors as recently as this past summer that they all believed there would be war with Japan and that they were a possible target. In the months leading up to Dec 7, they had been placed on high alert multiple times. In their minds, the attack was a surprise only in that recent diplomatic efforts between the U.S. and Japan had them believing the attack wouldn’t take place until after Christmas.
I can't remember the gentleman's name at the moment, but he was a marine stationed at Pearl on the day of attack and I think he said it best when he said, (paraphase)Why would you sink the fleet? You could fight them off and still go to war. You could fight them off and say 'look at these dastards what they tried to do to us, now lets go to war'.
In fact, I summarized your views precisely, and succinctly.
;-)
The opinion piece was by Texas Congressman Martin Dies, not a JBS editorial, so the issue is Dies' credibility.
Did he suddenly make this story up in 1964, or was there some "ground truth" to it?
First, so far as I know, everything CougarGA7 said on the matter is true, so the Dies story starts off on pretty shaky ground.
And second, we might note the timing here -- April 1964 was presidential primary season during the first election where the "Solid South" began to switch from Solid Democrat to Solid Republican by voting for Senator Barry Goldwater.
Since Dies was a classically conservative Southern Democrat, his article in the John Birch Society magazine could have been an effort to express his own disappointment with the party of FDR and now LBJ.
Texas went for Goldwater in the 1964 primaries, but native-son LBJ carried the general in November.
Some counties in and near Dies' district did vote for Goldwater, and the entire state of Louisiana next door voted Goldwater.
So 1964 was a critical year for Conservative Republicans in the South, and the Dies article may have helped break the ties that bound Southerners to the old Democrat party.
But, all that acknowledged and understood, does that make Dies' alleged map showing Pearl Harbor as Japan's target just pure fiction?
GLC: " A Pearl Harbor attack was not needed to get the US in the war.
It was clear in fall of 1941 that war was coming and it would include an attack on the Phillipines."
In fact, there is reliable historical evidence showing that President Roosevelt was worried that evening of December 7, 1941, whether even the attack on Pearl Harbor would be enough to convince Congress to declare war.
It was a huge question in the minds of top US leaders just what it would take to bring the US into war.
GLC: "Had FDR any sort of reliable intelligence about a Pearl Harbor attack, then he could have easily arranged an ambush. "
There is reliable historical evidence showing that FDR specifically rejected sending out the US fleet to find the Japanese in favor of his written orders to all US commanders that Japan must be allowed to commit the first overt act of war.
GLC: "Had any hard intelligence about Pearl Harbor being a even a probable target been known, the alert level could have been raised."
War warnings were sent to all US commanders in the Pacific, but they were vague and did not mention possible air attack on Hawaii.
What they warned of instead was possible sabotage, and that explains Short's and Kimmel's actions in response.
The question is whether Washington knew enough to have more clearly warned Hawaii of the coming attack.
The alleged Dies map suggests they did, so how true was the story?
GLC: "FDR gets no personal or political benefit from knowing about the attack but letting it proceed unhindered.
The traditional “FDR sacrificed some old battleships” argument doesn’t wash because in 1941 those old battleships were all we had."
We also had aircraft carriers, and more modern cruisers which were sent safely out of harm's way, just in time.
There is no evidence -- none -- suggesting that FDR expected anything like the levels of damage inflicted on December 7.
But in reality, all but one of those old battle-wagons were soon patched up and back in the war, so it is hard to imagine how the damage could have appeared to be worse, and yet actually been relatively small.
And it was precisely the appearance which mattered most to Roosevelt politically -- that's exactly what it took to convince Congress and the American people we had to get into the war all-out.
Still, the bottom line on the Dies alleged map is that, as CougarGA7 says, we have no other evidence to confirm it, and the timing of April 1964 suggests Dies' article had an important political motivation.
But does all that make the map story a lie?
No sir, you did not. I did not dismiss it out of hand and I’m not even the slightest interested in the motivations for his 1964 statement and most scholars would feel the same. It’s OK. We are all pretty used to you getting this wrong.
For me the question is not so much whether or not Dies saw such a map, it is more, Where did the map come from? Was it a Japanese planning document, straight from Tokyo? Was it an intelligence estimate from a Japanese agent in Hawaii? Or was is from an American intelligence source plotting the results of decoded Japanese military messages? Heck, I'll bet you could find plenty of maps showing Pearl Harbor as a target of a naval/air attack in the archives of our own Naval War College. Without a fuller description "I saw a map" isn't enough to draw any conclusions from.
I'd be interested in your point, as long as you can also name all the German civilians who died of starvation/disease because of the year long Allied blockade of Germany after the WW I 1918 armistice.
What it doesn't make it is true. You have a tendency to accept the wild accusation and extreme speculation as fact.
If I was to say that in 1940 someone showed me a letter from FDR stating his plans to stage an attack on Pearl Harbor using the carriers (which were out at sea) and planes painted with Japanese markings in order to get the U.S. in the war, no one would believe it unless they truly wanted to. Especially since no one will have substantiated it.
This is pretty much what you are doing here. You have a singular mention of a map that would have been nearly impossible to keep secret reported by a single individual with nothing ever to back it up whatsoever. The chances of this being true are probably as likely as the claim I just made being true.
Maybe they just learned how to target children from the Allies after the WW I 1918 armistice. Those bastions of fairness/freedom keep up the Naval blockade of Germany thru out 1919. Preventing needed food/medicine from entering Germany for a full year.
Could somebody post a copy of the Dies map?
No, on it’s worst day the stupid Allied blockade of Germany never even approached the evil of Nazi Germany or any Communist dictatorship.
There is no comparison, period.
In 1914 the German government started the First World War, and refused to admit defeat until November of 1918.
During that time about 10 million military and 7 million civilians died = 17 million total, of whom about 2 million military and 425,000 civilians were Germans.
So German military account for 20% of all military deaths, and German civilians about 6% of all civilian deaths -- in a war the German government started.
According to this source, total German civilian deaths were about 750,000 due to the British blockade.
That blockade began in 1914 and ended when Germany signed the Versailles Treaty in June 1919 = seven months after the November 1918 armistice.
But there is an important incident to keep in mind: in 1918 a barge loaded with grain intended for Germany was seized by Austrians on the Danube River.
This infuriated German General Ludendorf so much he wanted to declare war on Austria and seize whatever grain they had.
So my point here is that the British blockade was only part of the problem Germany had feeding its people.
But the real problem was that Germany's government started the war, and German civilians suffered relatively little compared to countries like Russia, Italy, France, Romania, Greece, Serbia, Austria and Turkey, to name a few.
Obviously, anyone who dies from war-caused starvation and disease is a tragedy, but before we get too, too excited about the deaths of half a million German civilians, maybe we should chronicle the deaths of 5.5 million civilians from other countries who died in the war which the German government started.
US battleship losses at Pearl Harbor:
USS Nevada BB-36 - Beached while trying to escape - Out of action for repairs and modernization until Spring of 1943.
USS Oklahoma BB-37 - Total loss - raised to be scrapped, sank en route to scrapping in 1947.
USS Pennsylvania BB-38 - damaged out of action until March 1942.
USS Arizona BB-39 - Total loss, left in place as memorial.
USS Tennessee BB-43 - slight damage
USS California BB-44 - sunk, raised an repaired, but out of action until January 1944. USS Maryland BB-46 - damaged, out of action until February 1942.
USS West Virginia BB-48 - sunk, raised and repaired, out of action until July 1944.
Of the eight battleships at Pearl Harbor:
1 was able to fight on December 8th.
2 more were back in action after several months.
3 were out of action for a year or more.
2 were totally lost.
Pearl Harbor could have been worse, but it was bad. Those five battleships could have made a difference in the early months of the war, particularly in the Solomons campaign. Or simply as a fleet-in-being, forcing the Japanese to hold back forces from other campaigns, weakening the assaults on Malaya and the Dutch East Indies.
I'm sure we will be debating this more as we get closer to December 7th. But to my mind, there is no case that FDR knew about Pearl Harbor. Rather the damning evidence is that everyone knew the US and Japan were on a collision course, but continued to dawdle, operating on a peacetime basis and moving too slow. That was the cause of the disasters of 1941 and early 1942.
In fact, you've dismissed every aspect of this story "out of hand", and since it, in your mind, cannot possibly be true, that leaves only: a politically motivated lie, as the most likely explanation for it.
Your claim that a 64-year-old's memory is necessarily inaccurate on such an important matter as this, is without foundation, I'd say.
Of course, I agree with you that there is no evidence to support Dies' claim, and plenty of reasons to suggest otherwise.
But there is one other important point to remember: the timing of this -- early 1941 -- was just the point when US Ambassador to Japan, Joseph Grew, also reported the Japanese were planning to attack Hawaii.
If the Dies map story is true, then it would mean FDR's administration ignored at least two clear early-warnings of Japanese intentions.
And there are suggestions of later warnings as well -- of course all of those disputed as vigorously, by folks like CougarGA7, as is the alleged Dies' map.
Bottom line: from lawyer henkster's perspective, Dies' case is not proved, but I have to wonder if no one ever took the time between 1964 and 1972, to question Dies more carefully about the whole thing?
Thanks, I had forgotten about that one.
Stinnett (page 9) quotes FDR in early 1941 commenting on Commander McCollum's proposal (Action D) for US Navy "pop-up" cruises near Japan:
"I just want them to keep popping up here and there and keep the Japs guessing.This quote of FDR comes from Admiral Stark, reported by Mitchell Simpson in his 1989 book Admiral Harold R. Stark, according to Stinnett.
I don't mind losing one or two cruisers, but do not take a chance on losing five or six."
So, in the end, "one or two" capital ships is just what the US permanently lost at Pearl Harbor.
If you follow these discussions carefully, you'll soon note that is not the choice being offered.
There is no evidence -- zero, zip, nada -- that President Roosevelt expected the US fleet to be "mauled" at Pearl Harbor.
But there is clear evidence "war warnings" to Hawaii were vague, misleading and emphasized that Japan must be allowed to commit the first overt act of war.
So in a certain sense, Kimmel and Short accomplished the mission they were given -- let Japan strike first -- brilliantly.
And they did it in such a way as to minimize the permanent loss of US battleships.
So, the debate is whether FDR's inner circle received enough clear warnings of a coming Japanese air-attack on Hawaii that Washington's war-warnings to commanders should have been clearer.
Authors like Stinnett, Victor and Toland say "yes".
Many others say "no".
If nobody can produce a copy of the map, then as far as I’m concerned it’s a UFO sighting.
Nonsense. I considered what you said. I did research on it. I even tried to find the actual article in which the statement is (finding the first installment of the article but not part II where said quote is supposed to reside). "out of hand" means "without further thought". You really should learn the definition of your idioms before you use them.
Now I can probably say I will dismiss it out of hand, since after looking into it and trying to find more detail on it, it appears to be just another red herring used by the conspiracy nuts and has no basis in reality.
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