Discovery of Japanese sub proves sailors of USS Ward hit target in 1941

Center Daily.com / Knight Ridder Newspapers ^ | 12/7/2002 | Bill Gardner

[lentulusgracchus]

You're just being a hard-head and a hardass. Everything you say about Kimmel and Short is hardassed, but it isn't necessarily true.

Basically, you're full of it -- and your (unfair, and unsupported) sneering about cocktail circuits doesn't stand up too well by comparison with the babe-o-rama on your own home page. Who are you to talk?

A third of a planet away or not, Roosevelt was in charge, and his appointment of Kimmel proves it. In the Philippines and at Pearl Harbor, it was his personal foreign and defense policy that went forward -- not Walter Short's, not Kimmel's or Hart's or MacArthur's.

Roosevelt provoked war with Japan, he led with his chin, he kept his subordinate commanders in the dark and he deprived them of the intelligence tools Kimmel and Short needed to meet the attack. They didn't know which way the Japanese were coming from, and FDR did -- and he didn't tell them. That is dirty in any book, and it is dog-dirty of you to try to make the guys who got screwed eat it all.

Your charge that it is their fault that their patrolling was inadequate is particularly disingenuous and vile. With limited reconnaissance resources, they had to have some help from intelligence -- which Roosevelt wilfully withheld, and ordered his senior officers to withhold.

Kimmel had his most likely approaches covered, on the "biggest rattlesnake" theory, and that was all he had the resources for. In addition, he had a war plan to carry out and offensive operations to plan and allocate resources for. To tax him on this point is tendentious vilification -- and it can have no other purpose than to draw attention away from where the real culpability was: and that was where the Naval Inquiry found it, at the CNO level. The ultimate responsibility for the failure to intercept and receive the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor was higher than their pay grade though, and higher than the cabinet secretaries. It was Roosevelt.

"Third of a world away" won't cut it. To quote you.