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	Gods Graves Glyphs	Never wondered how the Japanese didn't find any of the carriers at Pearl? Weird coincidence. Roosevelt was right, AFAIC. wwii keyword To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list. GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother, and Ernest_at_the_Beach
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Ever wondered how the Japanese didn't find any of the carriers at Pearl? Weird coincidence.

First off, thanks Dave for your previous post.

Comms security and radio silence was a boon and and a detriment to the attacking fleet. They were as blind as we were. The intercepted stuff was along diplomatic channels; its import was just a guess when analyzed for early warning and tactical value. Luck had it that the carriers were at sea, nothing less.

If the attack had come a couple weeks later, the Japanese task force wouldn't have had the benefit of sailing under the cover of Pacific storm and been detected but the carriers would have been back in port for the Christmas holidays.

That's all speculation or in Naval terms ...BS.

I just don't buy the conspiracy theories. Japan had been waging a war of aggression and conquest in Manchuria and China for years. The US embargo was a fairly weak response IMHO.

The Japanese decided they needed the oil, rubber and other resources of Indochina, Malaya and the Dutch West Indies in addition to China. The main problem, of course, was the American presence in the Philippines and the Asiatic Fleet sitting athwart the lines of communication south. Yamamoto understood that taking out the Philippines would mean war with America and he understood just how vast our population and economic power was. Thus, the logic lead to the gamble that taking out the fleet at Pearl in addition to the Philippines would buy Japan enough time to consolidate it's conquests and achieve superiority in the Pacific. A number of people in Washington believed an attack was imminent, thus the several warnings sent to Pearl. Most, however, thought the blow would fall in the Philippines and not so far east as Pearl. The bigger scandal IMHO was MacArthur's lack of preparedness. He probably couldn't have defeated the invasion, but he took needless losses in the first blows.

Some Americans wanted to believe the Communist bloc hostility to America and the West was our fault. Some Americans believe Islamofascist hostility to America is our fault. Similarly, some Americans insist we, not the fascists, were somehow responsible for WWII. I don't buy it. Japan, Germany and Italy were all engaged in wars of aggression before we finally came into the war.

Tora Tora Tora fairly closely follows the At Dawn We Slept narrative, which to me is persuasive that our lack of preparedness was due to mistakes, not conspiracies.

Never wondered how the Japanese didn't find any of the carriers at Pearl? Weird coincidence.

I've always considered it evidence that Murphy's Law doesn't just sabotage us, it can also do in others.

It's a "what if" I don't want to play. What if they had been at Pearl? No Battle of the Coral Sea? New Guinea occupied? No Midway? Australia invaded? I just don't even want to think about it. Yamamoto may have been more right than he's been given credit for.