Posted on 08/04/2013 10:54:44 AM PDT by cutty
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.”
Was Hopkins representing Russian interests at a time of American need?
Who was Harry Hopkins?
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
It’s hard to figure out what might have been. The original article is plausible, and that saddens me no end. I guess I’ll read the next four parts. A lot of good men died on the Bataan Death March. I would like to think that they didn’t die because our leaders were tricked.
When a person on Free Republic answers a post, that thread gets move (bumped) back to the top of the replies list.
Given the poor performance of TD's in the war, my grandfather's unit was converted into an armored cavalry battalion and given tanks and armored cars. They were in Washington state, loading their equipment onto LSTs for the invasion of the Japanese home islands, when the war ended.
wow.
The invasion of Japan would have been horrendous for both countries. The occupation of Japan wasn’t so much. :p
Interesting excerpt - found online - I forgot about this -
Whitman - Our Last Ditch -
Note - Major Zobel’s battalion of the 1st Regular Division was the “mestizo” (Filipino-Spanish) battalion, in which my granduncle served. I don’t know if he was in the fight described, but that’s the unit mentioned. There were few survivors of this unit after Capas.
On April 6, the Americans and Filipinos staged a last ditch counterattack...
Three hundred men from Col. Whetherby’s 41st Infantry (PA) pushed eastward early that morning to establish a line across Trail 29 to which the 45th Infantry (PS) could advance. Hoping to surprise the enemy, the 41st Infantry decided against using an artillery preparation; it would be a sneak attack. It is amazing that the Filipinos could still be called upon for an offensive operation and, more amazing still, it was a night attack, one of the most difficult and hazardous of military maneuvers.
...Whetherby was ordered to use only 300 of his 650 effectives - a provisional battalion of three 100-man companies commanded by Filipino Major Zobel. After Col. Fortier gave them orders about 1600 hours on April 5, American and Filipino officers organized their men for the effort and put them into motion. Leaving the west bank of the Pantingan river just after midnight, the 41st Infantry slithered down the 300-foot tall banks, crossed the boulder-strewn brush-cloaked river, and slowly scaled the steep wooded cliffs of the opposite side. After catching their breaths on the east bank, the Filipinos crept cautiously into their old kitchen area. Straining to see in the dark, they found a small number of Japanese asleep in the rear-area shelters and huts the 41st Infantry had recently evacuated. These Japanese were old enemies, their Abucay and Trail 2 opponents, men of Nara’s 65th Brigade.
About 2 hours after climbing into and out of the river, the Filipinos stole across the darkened terrain, bayoneted and knifed some sleeping enemy, and pushed ahead of their objective, Trail 29...
But Japanese who escaped from the kitchen area sounded the alarm, and before noon the Japanese counterattacked with forces equalling a reinforced battalion and pushed the Filipinos off Trail 29 into a defensive position on a small ridge paralleling the Pantingan river. Here the 41st Infantry held.
Drawing on their experiences in Abucay and Trail 2, the hardened survivors of 4 months of war dug in. In the next 36 hours, the Filipinos, backed against the Pantingan, and armed only with rifles and machine guns suffered 30 percent casualties, 100 men killed or wounded while defending their little ridge.
I see. Thanks.
“The war in Europe had not yet started’’.<< The Germans invaded Poland on Sept.1, 1939. They invaded Norway on April 10, 1940 and a month later they attacked Holland and then France. They attacked the Soviet on June 21,1941.
The earlier writer was trying to point out that the British beaches were no longer threatened by German invasion, that there were no invasions into Europe/Africa planned (or even possible BY the Allied forces), and the fighting in Russia was heading the other direction. Roosevelt had NO reason to focus on Germany - or even aid to Britain! - until the troops in the Philippines were supported.
Except the pressure from Russian communists in Britain and inside the US government to support Stalin’s murderers against Hitler’s murderers.
After May 1942, the situation was different. But our first invasion into Guadalcanal was even after that.
FDR was sending aid to Britain with the ‘’Lend-Lease’’ program that began in March of 1941.
Thanks to your family. Exemplary of the many reasons why the US should never turn its back on the Philipines, or let the chicoms subvert it from without and within, including territorial incursions/takeovers of Philipine islands.
The chicoms worked to subvert the relations between the US and the Philipines through their efforts at destabilizing the Philipine government and marxist guerrilla movements. Time we help them stop this chicom aggression.
What do I think, let's see... Mao did not become a factor until the end of WWII
I think the Nazis had a toehold in the US before the shooting war started with the German/American Bund and rallies in Madison Square Garden. Stalin was in power years before Hitler seized the German government, and Stalin used the NKVD (forerunner to KGB) to infiltrate agents into US government positions as well as corrupt US citizens already in government who were left leaning and sympathetic to socialist/communist ideas. Recruiting US citizens had several pathways, cash, sex, blackmail (married men were vulnerable to the "honeypot" and homosexuals were afraid of exposure). Soviet agents penetrated newspaper and radio (fifth column) to start undercutting any German leaning sympathies. Once the Nazis blitzed Poland the US political climate changed as we were maneuvered into becoming the war production facilities isolated from Europe by a 3000 mile moat. At first production of munitions centered on holding England afloat which later included lend(with no hope of return)/lease(with no cash) with major shipments going to the Soviet Union. (Finland being the only country in the world to fully repay US aid from WWII)
Pearl Harbor brought us into the war with both feet. Skipping all the gory details, civil war broke out in China at the end of allied hostilities in Europe and later the far east. The two sides were Mao's communists and Chiang Kai-Shek's Nationalists. After Hirohito surrendered to the allied Forces, one of America's top generals, George C. Marshal diverted all allied ordnance remaining in theater to Mao Tse-tung thus arming the Communists while denying aid to Chiang's Nationalists. Was Marshal a Communist Traitor, we'll never know but if I were betting... The Nationalists fought a losing battle until they were forced off the mainland to regroup in Taiwan. Taiwan is still independent but the future does not bode well for their continued Independence as Mainland China insists that there can only be one china and I truthfully don't think that Obama will tell them to bugger off. Meanwhile both the US and England's governments which were riddled with Soviet spies prior to and throughout WWII continue to stagger along with useful idiots, fellow travelers, progressive liberals, and card carrying communists punching in to work every day at the Department of State, serving as aides and advisers in the House and Senate, and working subtly to misdirect American policy at every level and cause enormous amounts of cash to be squandered on misguided programs.
Meanwhile Stalin's ghost sits like some malevolent Buddha with an enigmatic smile, his hands holding on to silken threads woven deeply into the fabric of our times. His long ago manipulations still reverberating in our lives.
Regards,
GtG
PS What do I really think? I think Stalin was in a position to influence our news reporting both before, during and after WWII. Constantly pointing to Hitler's brutality while hiding his and later Mao's Pogroms under Potyomkin villages filled with smiling faces.
PPS Never play chess with a Russian!
I think Taiwan needs to admit they are not the rulers of mainland China and just declare themselves an independent country and get their UN seat.
>>>The cable story makes no sense. The Soviets feared that if Japan became involved in the broader war, they would probably be forced to fight the Japanese. What is interesting is why did Hitler declare war on the US but did not demand Japan declare war on the Soviets? Hubris or just another monumental German blunder?<<<
In fact Germans wanted the Japanese to attack Soviets but there was a non-aggression treaty between USSR and Japan similar to Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Japanese wasn’t that fortunate in skirmishes with the Soviets through the late 1930s and decided to follow it.
Our involvement did not start until after 12/7/41. If Hitler had not declared war on the USA, he would only have a 1 front war and would have developed the A-bomb first.
In all likelihood, he would have won the war.
I agree 100% except I think that Mainland China will never give up on gobbling up the real estate. They would "lose face", something they will never permit.
I also think the Taiwanese also accept the status quo and are more than willing to give up any claim to sovereignty as long as the mainland Chinese reciprocate, the hard nut to crack is the mainlanders insistence that Taiwan (Formosa) is irrevocably a part of the whole of China.
Regards,
GtG
PS Maybe we should John Kerry to negotiate? Just kidding, he's probably give them Hawaii too. Just a thought, we could give them California, they could move some of the factories that produce the junk we buy from them back here, they'd save shipping expenses and California would have more jobs than they'd know to do with...A win-win, I should quit my day job!
G
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