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 Brits have long claimed that they knew Imperial Japan was going to try and take their colonies and territories but they have long denied that they had any intelligence about Pearl Harbor. Japanese commanders not involved in the attack were also kept in the dark from what I have read although they were given warning orders to prepare to take objectives.
Japan was a very closed nation to the rest of the world and its difficult for us to comprehend in today’s age and technology not to mention that while both Britain and the US cracked some of the Japanese codes they were radio silent after they sailed from Japan to attack Pearl Harbor.
The American Navy at the outset of WWII was a mere shadow of itself two years later. Japan gambled that we would curl up in a ball and stay home. They chose poorly. By the end of the war our Pacific Fleet was even more powerful than the Russian Army in terms of dominance of the battle space.
Our submarines literally ran out of shipping to sink to the point that they were mostly destroying junks and fishing boats with cannon fire. Our aviation assets had total dominance. The Imperial Fleet was destroyed and Japan could no longer contest the airspace and focused on suicide attacks.
I believe they had one capital ship left in harbor that was damaged. They lost well over 300 warships and over 300,000 men in their Navy and that does not count the total decimation of their merchant fleet and even larger loss of men. They were incapable of replacing much of anything by 1944 and the loss of their experienced pilots was just as devastating as the loss of material.
It was in whole one of the most dominant defeats in the history of man if you view the war as one event. Decimation does not even begin to describe it and it was going to be even far worse as new planes, carriers, and ships continued to be built up to the atomic bombings.
Absent the atomic bombs and the quick surrender the siege of Japan would have been one of the ugliest chapters in human history. A horrific ending to the most horrible event in human history that would have made the atomic bombings look like a blip of suffering.