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 ...
an” example of the folly of military unpreparedness for any great nation”
We seemed doomed to repeat the mistakes of the 1930’s today lead by the the Liberal Dims and the Liberaltarian GOP...
So do I.
The war in Europe had not yet started. Our military was cut to nothing after WWI. Our troops had little to train with and little to no equipment.
The fighters in the Philippines were biplanes.
Could be because the heart of our Pacific fleet was sitting on the bottom of Pearl Harbor.
My uncle, who I was named after, died on the Bataan death march. I have been to the Philippines many times, and I am about to retire there soon. Not Bataan, but New Bataan.
If there was no expectation of victory then they should have evacuated as many as possible to Australia. They let these men fight to the death for no reason.
I suppose you would think if we were going to force an economic embargo on Japan, and that we were well aware that they would eventually attack SE Asia, that we would have made some preparations in our only territory in the area to defend it?
Like what was FDR thinking that Japan would do? Give up?
Looking back, it appears that Hitler made a monumental mistake in declaring war on the United States, but you have to remember that up until WWII, no country had ever fought a two-front war and won. The Germans were keenly aware of this and I believe Hitler thought that declaring war on the United States was a low risk move because the United States would focus exclusively on fighting Japan. Moreover, Hitler thought that by declaring war on the United States, he was encouraging the Japanese to go all out against the United States and thereby keeping the United States tied down in the Pacific, which was his goal
After Pearl Harbor, what no one expected was for FDR to focus America on defeating Germany rather than devoting all of America's resource to fighting Japan. No one, except Americans, could understand how economically powerful the United States was. And when you look from a pre-WWII perspective, it really was beyond belief that the United States was able to fight a global war on 2 fronts and win on both fronts. Simply put, that was thought to be an impossible feat.
I still think Roosevelt set us up at Pearl Harbor.
But then I also believe that Obama sent 20 some Seals to their death to quiet Al Qaeda. I slo believe he is holding out on giving the victims of Ft. Hood their deserved purple hearts , because he doesn’t want to admit his Muslim friends are in our military.
The US lacked the capability to get significant aid through to MacArthur after the Japanese attack. And only 10 convoys sailed for arctic Russia between the initial Japanese attack and the fall of Corregidor. (Some non-military aid went via the Pacific. The route through Iran wouldn’t have been a factor at this point).
As far as moving transport from the Atlantic to the Pacific (ignoring the fact that anything that got to Philippines would have been chopped up by the IJN), let’s look at the Yorktown - certainly slow cargo ships couldn’t have been moved any more quickly - it took almost two full months to get it from Norfolk to Samoa. So you’d need to allow at least to sometime in February to have gotten significant reinforcements to the western Pacific. The joint force was still holding on Bataan at that point, but the battle was not winnable.
Recommended Reading on this subject:
http://www.amazon.com/American-Betrayal-Assault-Nations-Character/dp/0312630786/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_nC?ie=UTF8&colid=3QEHOQMYACE8C&coliid=I16RNBDPZLJRND AND:
http://www.amazon.com/Operation-Snow-Soviet-Triggered-Harbor/dp/B00D9TE32A/ref=pd_sim_b_9
I agree with you also. Admiral Pie recalled the Wake Island relief force and also was over cautious during the battle of Midway. About your point regarding the U.S. Navy not being ready or able to cut through to the Philippines I agree with you on that point too. Look also at the U.S. Navy losses in the Solomon Islands in 1942. There were several American Naval blunders that almost ended that campaign in the Japanese favor. One of the biggest blunders resulted in five us cruisers being sunk in one battle. The biggest blunder though belonged to Japanese Admiral Mikawa who could have ended the campaign but withdrew for out of fear of other US forces that weren’t even in the area.
Most of WWII was a Euro-Centric war-— and you can see this in the various TV histories that for the most part ignore the Pacific theater.
FDR and his euro-socialist pals focused on Europe— because of the Brits. The Ribbentrop Molotov pact was broken by Hitler in June 1941. Pearl Harbor attack in Dec. 41. Stalin— who was a psychopath and could not see another one in hitler— was stranded— then to be our “ally” of sorts.
There is excellent info on the Jap ambassador to Berlin—and his close relations with Hitler on the subject of why no demand japs declare against the Sovs. The matters in the Ukraine, white russians came into the mix.
The whole thing makes sense when one realizes the level of penetration (the cambridge 5 et al in Brit govt. who all worked for the soviets). Agents in place steered the war effort to help soviets. Japs were already in Manchuria (Manchukuo) and on the soviet border. The Brits made sure the US entered the war-— many threads on this one now declassified story of the jap codes and purposeful deception of the Brits (who were, remember compromised by stalin).
To counteract this— the rewritten soviet “meme” is that FDR callously let the soviets slug it out vs. the Germans on the Eastern Front to save US lives. FDR being the genius and all, more likely... a patriot got between Dexter White and Hopkins et al. so they couldn’t push the Southern front invasion sites instead of Normandy. Patriots like the FBI maybe who knew White and Hopkins were bent.
I don’t think he set it up. I think All of the Allies were headed by blithering political idiots at first.
Even the Axis nations could not believe how stupid France/UK was when it came to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Norway, the Ardennes and the Maginot Line not running all the way to the sea. Or even how Stalin destroyed his own army through purges and thought Hitler was trustworthy.
Let’s no even get started on The British and Singapore.
May I suggest you grab a copy of John Koster’s recent “Operation Snow” which documents the post Soviet records showing how White forced the Japanese attack and war entry at Soviet direction.
This had been covered in asian reporting but not here and his heavily documented book was ignored in the press.
The Soviet spies and moles in the FDR team caused the Japanese to feel that they had no choice but make war.
see my post #36
The fighters were P-35s and early P-40s with a few of the newer E models,not Biplanes. The Philippine airforce was flying Boeing P-26s at the time of the attack.
3854 air miles Boston - Murmansk
6661 air miles Seattle to Manila
Sea miles would be higher for each, but it isn't even close.
You all need to get new globes.
Heck with the Philippines, they didn’t have s significant force in California after Pearl Harbor. Patton wrote that the few obsolescent tanks he had would have met a Japanese invasion at the beaches. Only after the scare passed did he learn that they had no main gun ammunition.
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