Posted on 12/07/2021 9:16:17 AM PST by Retain Mike
Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace
https://archive.org/details/PerpetualWarForPerpetualPeace1953/page/n321/mode/2up
From what I have read FDR etal did not have the actionable intelligence—but it is likely Winston Churchill did—and refused to share since he needed the US in the war.
The British had impressive code-breaking capability (far better than the US)—but it is hard to prove they broke the relevant Japanese codes at that time.
This is not a part of their history the Brits want us to know about...
There is nothing new on the conspiracy front and they existed then just as they do today.
I am a bit of a history buff and WWII is a fascinating topic beginning many years prior to actual combat. It is clear that our leaders in the West knew that Japan was going to expand and that had already begun. Britain knew this even better than we did and when the war in Europe broke out it was clear that the British could not capably defend their far East holdings.
It is easy to see in hindsight that war was going to break out in the region. What was NOT easy to see based on what I have read was that Japan would launch a sneak attack on the US Navy at Pearl Harbor. How could we have known? Sure, there were War College studies of “what if?” but nobody knew that Warplan Orange would happen or if it did it would involve a sneak Japanese attack on our main naval base.
Japan, like Germany, went whole hog in one decisive action while most of our intel types believed they would focus on one or two objectives at once. In hindsight, Japan was convinced we would declare war on them so they went for broke. In reality, they likely could have taken many of their goals piecemeal and lessened the chance of provoking us into war.
Pearl Harbor was a military victory but a strategic blunder of massive consequence. It guaranteed that we would enter the conflict on a massive scale.
I feel like Japan could have actually invaded and captured hawaii and that would have been big. They thought big but not big enough
That alone is enough to point out how much FDR was trying to avoid going to war.
Still, it seems incredible that both the army and navy commands at Pearl hadn’t taken more serious actions to prepare the bases for war. It was absolutely clear that the Japanese were going to continue aggressive action in the Pacific and we would be in their way.
Pearl Harbor was a recent move closer to Japan and with most of our naval eggs in one basket, it would be an attractive target.
Nobody thought about putting the bases on 50% readiness, leaves canceled, steam up, ready ammunition boxes filled and firing crews on watch, increased air patrols?
Without the base at Pearl it would have been far harder for us to persecute the war. However, given that our strategic plan was to end the war in Europe and then turn to the Pacific the end result would have been the same although it would have taken longer. Hawaii gave Japan nothing strategically other than it deprived us of our most important base in the Pacific. It was beyond most of the Japanese conquests.
By the end of the war we were producing a dozen or more carriers for every one that Japan could make and they were equipped with better planes and pilots than the Japanese. Japan simply did not have the resources to defeat us and given the juggernaut of the Red Army they would have certainly lost all of China and beyond.
What Japan did made no sense to our Admirals or political leaders. It was unthinkable in many ways.
Complacency is the mother of disaster, but our intel into what Japan was doing was extraordinarily weak in 1941. In hindsight there were many things we could have done to minimize the damage on December 7th and put up a better fight, but in the end it was really irrelevant. We replaced and repaired the bases and the losses in ships and planes were replaced within the years. Japan missed the most vital targets of all since the carriers were out to sea and that was their big failure.
However, too many forget that most of our navy and leaders still believed the battleship was supreme on Dec 7th.
The attack was viewed as a cowardly act by a brutal enemy and it steeled the resolve of a nation and power that few could predict.
Imagine if there had been a climate change conspiracy and we had cut back on the use of those nasty fossil fuels to feed our B-17’s in Europe and carriers in the Pacific and our heavy industry that ultimately defeated Japan and Germany. We would still be fighting for our survival. The reason we were victorious was not because of our courage but because of our plentiful supplies of our natural resources among which were those beautiful fossil fuels.
Anyone think we DO NOT need fossil fuels in the future to fight China and keep NATO and the UN alive? Dream on.
So, in other words, losing over 2,000 of our young men worked out great for us? Glad you were never in command of anything.
The Japanese didn't have the heavy lift to move the required number of troops needed to take Oahu, the amphibious know-how needed to attack a defended beach, or the cargo capacity necessary to supply their invasion force plus the civilian population they took. And the Japanese knew that. They never seriously considered invading Hawaii.
They could have conquered the islands if they had more nasty fossil fuels. In fact, Japan struck Pearl Harbor so that they could strike the Dutch East Indies with impunity in order to obtain those precious fossil fuels without which they could not have waged war in the first place.
>>By the end of the war we were producing a dozen or more carriers for every one that Japan could make.....<<
Our windmills were whirring 24/7 and our solar panels were eating up photons by the mouthful in order to produce the energy required for supporting our heavy industry. And everyone wore a face mask because of the disastrous air pollution. Poor, helpless America.
Whether conspiracy or not we were caught flat footed on December 7, 1941.
It doesn't surprise me at all about the superiority of British intelligence. These are the people after all who invented radar. Seeing the enemy before he even knows you're there. The Brits have had to be resourceful as an island nation. The British have a long history of organizing guerrilla bands and skillfully attacking their enemies. So naturally any information gained has to be weighed as to who should know, even an ally. Churchill wanted the US in the war to save the empire and he knew we were the cash box and the industrial power house. That was his driving reason.
The Brits also had the Poles who were crack code breakers.
I was born December 7, 1951. Made it to the 60th and 70th but not this year.
Never bought into the “somebody knew” theories. As for being on alert and flying searches, they did not have the planes to do that for every report.
I maintain if the Japanese had NOT attacked Pearl Harbor and the Phillipines, we would not have gotten involved defending “colonial empires”.
The US Army establishment on Oahu would have been a tough nut for the Japanese. It would have required moving an entire Japanese Field Army (about a corps-size unit in US terms) and keeping it supplied for weeks of heavy fighting. The fighting on Oahu probably would have rivaled that on Bataan-Corregidor and being as it was much more distant the outcome would likely have been different from that battle.
No, it sucked. But in a “world war” where casualties were weighed in millions the attack on Pearl Harbor was pretty meaningless. It gave Japan time and space to conquer their objectives but in the end they could not win the war and all it did was mobilize a nation that had little idea about how powerful it could or would be.
It was a “battle won” that ultimately proved rather meaningless 4 years later outside of the clear resolve it gave America to persecute the war to unconditional surrender. Japan did what we could not do ourselves.... we ended the depression and committed to total war against fascism and Japanese imperialism.
My taking a strategic view of an event does not mean I do not lament the lives lost. As a veteran I know the cost of war better than most. Pearl Harbor was a temporary win and a long-term loss for Japan. Period.
We killed about 100,000 Japanese in the firebombings of Tokyo alone. Women and children mostly. It was a total war (a lost concept in America) that Japan started and we finished in the Pacific.
America was incredibly fortunate in WWII that our civilian population was largely left alone. The rest of the world was not blessed with our geography.
Which in modern times no longer affords any real security.
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