Five Years On, Unanswered Questions About December Seventh Remain

HONOLULU (Routers) Five years after the sinking of the battleships in Pearl Harbor, many still question the official government story of what happened on that fateful day, and who was responsible. Some believe that the Roosevelt administration did it themselves, deliberately, making it look like Japanese religious fanatics were responsible, in order to drag the country into a war that they could get by no other means, to benefit arms merchants and the Jews.

The controversy has been renewed by a recently released film documentary, titled "Loose Ships." It makes a compelling case against the Shinto extremist theory, citing inconsistent eyewitness reports, mistaken radar readings, and structural analysis of the sunken battleships.

"It makes no sense to think that Japanese Shintoists could have done this," explains one of the film's producers. "Shinto is a deeply spiritual religion, derived from Buddhism, worshiping nature. A Shintoist would never have desecrated Pearl Harbor with all of that leaking and burning diesel fuel and oil. It is fundamentally a religion of peace."

He points out that many eyewitnesses saw American planes in the air that day, and that the radar images that many claim, preposterously in his view, were of the attacking Japanese aircraft, were actually a squadron of American B-17s on its way to Hickam Air Force Base, perhaps to take part in the plot. The Truman administration itself has admitted that there was a group of bombers in the area that morning, on its way from the mainland, though a War Department spokesman claimed that it was too far away and in the wrong direction to appear on radar at that point in time.

The documentarian went on to expand on his theory. "We don't think that Japanese aircraft would have the range to get here all the way from Japan, but if by some miracle they did, it was probably to protect Honolulu, in which many Japanese live, from the administration plot. That's probably what people were seeing."

Some have examined the wreckage of the Arizona, and claim that it wasn't brought down by aerial bombs, but by charges planted on the ship beforehand.

"Look at those two huge circular holes in the front and rear of the sunken ship," he said. "No bomb is big enough to make a hole that size, and do it so cleanly. It was obviously a shaped charge of some kind. It's just not possible to take down ships that big with the little bombs that are carried in those little Japanese airplanes."

"They killed thousands of sailors for their filthy war, and many of them died a long and horrible death in air pockets. And take a look at the roster of the people who died on the Arizona. How many Jewish names do you see there? I think they were warned ahead of time."

"It was all part of the Zionist neo-liberal conspiracy to drag America into a needless war of choice."

In response to suggestions that the Japanese used aircraft carriers, and that many of the Japanese planes were torpedo bombers, and that the large holes were the empty sockets for the gun turrets, that were removed afterward, he scoffed. "That's all just Franklin Delano Rosenfeld administration propaganda," he sneered knowingly.

Some enterprising and innovative people have carried the analysis further. In one sequence shown in the documentary, a man built a wooden model of the ship in his pond, and filmed himself dropping lit firecrackers on it from above, to demonstrate how preposterous was the notion that ships could be sunk by bombs. They seemed to have no effect other than a slight scorching of the deck, and the sturdy little toy remained afloat.

He was proud of his own small part in uncovering the cover up. "Other than the fact that the ship is wood, which is much weaker than steel, and I used firecrackers instead of iron bombs, and that there was no ammunition magazine aboard to explode, this is a perfect simulation of what the Roosevelt administration claims happened to the Arizona. But there the ship floats, to show to one and all the administration's lie. And how convenient of Roosevelt to die a year and a half ago, so he can avoid having to answer these questions."

Most of the conspiracy theories are based on purportedly decoded Japanese diplomatic messages. Some credence was also leant to shipping in the north Pacific picking up tactical radio communications from the attacking fleet.

It becomes nearly the same paradox as 9/11. We may have known some information but nobody put the pieces together correctly. In 1941 the far east particularly the Philippines was everybody's bet for the first point of attack. Even with the advanced intel, as a matter of fact, even after the Pearl Harbor attack started, the diplomatic community thought the attack was in the Phillipines and that Pearl harbor was a typo.

The average American on the street had no idea where Pearl Harbor was and received a geography lesson on Dec 7th.

My thoughts:

1. No conspiracy at all. The central issue, with regards to connecting the dots afterwards, was that there was no one charged with connecting them BEFORE THE FACT. Intelligence collection was a parochial business (each service collected it's own, and very often, did not share it with it's sister services or the federal agencies like the FBI). This was not truly rememdied until the creation of the OSS and later, CIA.

2. The military structure of the day was quite used to muddle, bureacratic inertia and nonsense, empire building, and fostered an enviornment where original thinkers and those who might otherwise buck the system, were buried. Anyone who had both brains and initiative was pretty much automaticaly suspect in the military of 1920-1941. Those officers who attained high rank during this period did so by kow-towing to their superiors and keeping orthodox thoughts.

3. As to the attack itself, Gen. Short was responsible for the defense of the islands, including the harbor. Admiral Kimmel is guilty of being the guy on watch when the bombs fell, but he did at least order an emergency sortie to the ships in harbor (despite the fact that 21 of them were either sunk or damaged).

4. Racism and a lack of appreciation for the enemy and his capabilities played a huge part in the debacle. Neither Short nor Kimmel took their "War Warnings" beyond a certain point, because it was universally believed that all Japanese were 5' 2", wore Coke-bottle glasses and had buck teeth, and were little better than semi-intelligent apes, certianly incapable of sailing across the Pacific undetected and attacking the American fleet at it's moorings. Short and Kimmel were derelict in thir duty in ordering a full alert upon receipt of EVERY "War Warning"; the fact that several had been issued previously and not resulted in anything makes no difference. You still practice fire drills even when there isn't a fire, correct?

5. The codebreaking was all very nice, but it was still regarded as something less than reliable by career military men (there were exceptions, such as Nimnitz and MacArthur), and the limited success that Britain was enjoying with Ultra (not widely know at the time for obvious reasons) did very little to change minds. Common practice at the time was to have at least one other credible source back up (concretely) whatever the code breakers had dug up. The process of collecting intelligence was way ahead of th eability to co-ordinate and make use of it effectively. After Pearl Harbor, and Britain's cracking of the Luftwaffe and Kreigsmarine Enigma codes, minds were changed.

6. Never mind the "Sneak attack" business. In the entire history of warfare you would be hard pressed to find more than perhaps 10 major wars that were preceeded by a formal declaration of war by either side. It is axiomatic in warfare that one must always try to take the enemy at unawares, and the only reason the Japanese attempted to abide by the formal legalities attendant to declaring war was because they expected a short war, ending in overwhelming Japanese victory, and the fact that the Japanese had "played by the rules" was supposed to be remembered by the American peace negotiators who would then be more amenable to a victorious Japan. Instead, what Yammamoto had feared came to pass: far from being resigned to having been beaten "fair and square", the late declaration gave the appearance of duplicity and only served to ensure that Japan would be burned to the ground.

There's more than enough blame to go around (as per Donald M. Goldstein), and we saw the same mistakes made with regards to intelligence gathering and acting upon it on September 11, 2001, as we did on December 7, 1941.

You can idiot-proof any system, and Mother nature just basically makes better idiots to screw the whole thing up.

"...looked at the Russian-Nippon War they would have seen a very capable enemy who had laid a a$$ whupp'n, on their opponents without notification."

Actually, studying the Russo-Japanese war would have been a very bad example for Western planners. While the Japanese Navy did lay an ass-whooping on the Ruskies, the Japanese Army was a different story. The Japanese suffered horrendous losses at the hands of the Russians and were about to collapse when the Russians finally gave up the ghost. Japan got far more at the negotiating table than the results in the field justified.

Likewise for th series of border wars fought between Japan and Russia in the late 30's (the battles of Nomonhon and the Amur River). Although the total forces committed by either side were relatively small, 'victory' in the first incident (Amur river) was the result of either nation being truly eager for a protracted conflict. In the series of battles around Nomonhon, General Georgi Zhukov overwhelmed the Japanese with numerical superiority and matched them man-for-man in the ruthlessness department. Japan was seriously smacked at this battle. Again, the fact that neither country was prepared nor seeking an extended conflict caused the whole thing to be quietly put to bed before it got out of hand.

Western experts recording the lessons of these two incidents also learned the wrong lessons. They held the Russinas in very low regard to begin with and when Japan was trounced by the same underrated Red Army not once, but twice, coupled with the Japanese xperience in China, and the assumption was that the Japanese Army was not all that effective a fighting force. Which was only sorta-kindqa true.

What made the Japanese Army such a fearsome weapon in the opening days of the Pacific War, were the Japanese navy and the Japanese Air forces; the Japanese, for all intents and purposes, practiced Blitzkreig without the tanks -- utilizing naval and air superiority to achieve the speed and shock of heavy armor. of course, their opponents in the early days of the war were caught by suprise, poorly equipped, and mostly very poorly led, which effectively multiplied Japanese combat power. This does not take away from the individual wualities of the Japanese fighting man, however. He was a fearsome opponent in his own right.

The asumptions that were made about the Japanese Army should never have been made about the Imperial Navy, but unfortunately were. The Japanese armed forces were largely viewed in the West as just "another Oriental rabble" would would turn tail the secodn they crossed swords with a "real" Western military. Again, this is a problem with the collection, analysis and dissemination of information in Western military and political circles. had anyone paid attention, they would have found a Japanese military which was, at the very least, professional and capable, and acted accordingly

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