Churchill could have warned us about Pearl Harbour and didn’t.
No he couldn’t, and he didn’t know about the Pearl Harbor operation.
In the fall of 1941 all eyes in the Pacific were focused on Japan’s build up towards what they called the Southern Resource Area (Malaya and the Dutch East Indies) and the Philippines.
The British were reinforcing Singapore and Malaya, the US was reinforcing the Philippines. FDR called the Philippine Army into Federal Service back in the Summer of 1941. The US was evacuating China. The 4th Marines had been evacuated to the Philippines as had the Yangtze River Patrol gunboats. (Yes, the USN sailed riverboats access the South China Sea in December weather.) The remaining Marines in China were due to be evacuated on December 10th.
The Pearl Harbor strike was an addition, designed to keep the Pacific Fleet out of the Southwest Pacific, not the main Japanese attack. That’s why it was a surprise, and an effective one, but ultimately counter productive.
Actually, there is reason to believe that Churchill warned the US and that FDR thought a sufficient war warning was passed on to the commanders at Pearl Harbor. As it was, FDR’s plan seems to have been for the Japanese to attack and be decisively repulsed with little damage to the Pacific fleet. There was little understanding in Washington about the potency of the Imperial Japanese Navy or the inadequacy of US defenses.
Why? It was FDR who set up the attack on Pearl Harbor in the first place. FDR already knew.
The U.S. was so mentally ill prepared to fight a modern war that the Japanese successfully launched a devastating air raid against the Philippines after Pearl Harbor. The hubris in the U.S. military was thick.
“Churchill could have warned us about Pearl Harbour and didn’t.”
Sorry, England did try to warn us but it didn’t work out.
After the English destroyed the Italian fleet at Taranto the Japanese went over every point of the attack with the Germans. Taranto was the same type of harbor as Pearl and the Japanese were already plotting to destroy the US fleet.
The English knew that because they had a man inside the German intelligence service who was pretending to spy on the English but actually working FOR the English.
The English sent that man, Dusko Popov, to the US with all the relevant information. “Officially” Popov was here under orders of the Abwehr in order to set up a spy ring in the US. The English had notified the US department of state that Popov was here with critical information. State sent him to the FBI and J Edgar Hoover. Hoover instantly disliked Popov, refused to give much credence to his information and even threatened to arrest him under the Mann Act.
What Hoover did with the information is unknown.
Can’t say England didn’t try.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Du%C5%A1ko_Popov
Proof?