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.”
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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 ...
The book reads like a novel, but it is very accurate and is should be included in every military library as it gives a new understanding to the fog of war. It's a damned shame more folks don't know anything about the Aleutian campaign.
An affinity for taking the dominant role by limited wars in asia and being prodded with a sharp pointed stick to do so are vastly different instances.
As the treachery of Harry Dexter White was not more than a suspicion, archival records that prove it and outline it give us an entirely different concept of the outbreak of war or the inevitability of the war in the Pacific.
I was wrong...
It’s Homer J Simpson not Homer G Simpson. lol.
At the outset of the War, MacArthur was the supreme Commander in the Philippines, not the US Army. He was immediately recalled. But the point is the he was caught off guard as well.
There are very few innocent parties in this part of the war.
The Philippines are closer than Vladivostok?
Several ships taking supplies (mostly gasoline, as I recall having read) to Vladivostok were torpedoed off the west coast in 1942. Kind of hard to believe meaningful supplies could have been gotten through to the Philippines.
No accident the movie about torpedo boats in 1941-42 Philippines was called “They Were Expendable”.
bookmark
What does ‘’bump’’ mean?
Yes, sadly we are. It’s almost like 1939 all over again.
Japan may have been prodded by people with their own agenda, but their massive offensive from December 1941-May 1942 would not have occurred unless they really wanted to accomplish their strategic goals and long term ambitions. It is extremely difficult for Westerners to comprehend the humiliation that Asians felt by European and American control in their countries.
Patton hubris aside, the Japanese would have rolled over our defenses in the Philippines as the had to the Brits when they rolled down the Malaya Peninsula.
I posted this with the article also. FDR and Sec of War Stimson also muzzled Maj Ed Dyess and the handful of other POWs (and two Filipinos) who miraculously escaped from the POW camp at Davao, Mindanao in April, 1943. They were forbidden to talk about the atrocities the Japanese were committing upon our POWs lest the American people hear of it and demand more support for the Pacific theater. I recommend John D. Lukacs’ detailed and enlightening book for your perusal. I cannot say FDR had the same noble motives as Churchill had regarding the Coventry bombings.
In 1940 our army was ranked tenth in the world, behind Belgium. Our ramped up production of war material was nothing compared to what it would be when it peaked in 1944. If what you mean by ‘’capital ships’’ i.e battleships, they didn’t turn the tide- aircraft carriers did. If that is what you mean I agree with you. But as to a full time war footing production, it wasn’t booming in the late thirties.FDR only instituted the draft in 1940.
How many Japanese troops were used to defeat that Allied force of 151,000 Soldiers? Most military theory says the attackers need to be three times larger than the defenders. We were defending. Did the Japanese attack with 500,000 troops?
Concur only in part: MacArthur could have put his stars on the line and stood up to FDR. He could have refused to leave for Australia. Had that word reached the American people, FDR would have been forced to send support. Instead, MacArthur had MG Wainwright stay and suffer captivity.
bflr
oh oops
In this case it means I generally agree with you.
Yes.
1,305 nautical miles sailing distance from Nagasaki to Manila.
6,233 nautical miles sailing distance from San Francisco to Manila.
If the invasion fleet and the rescue fleet sailed at the same instant, the invasion fleet could send its transports back for another load, and have the second wave in the Philippines before the first American reinforcements arrived.
If the Americans found out about the invasion as it happened, and had to begin the process of hiring or commandeering transports and tankers, converting them to military use, and getting troops and supplies to the docks, the Japanese would have time to make many trips between Japan and the Philippines. Which is why the Navy was never optimistic about holding them, and why it knew there was zero chance of doing so with the surface fleet sitting on the bottom of Pearl Harbor.
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