No, Kimmel and Short were NOT set up, although their respective families have paid large sums of money to spread that very rumor.
Kimmel and Short were sent to Pearl in February of 1941 to specificly defend Pearl from the Japanese. Rather than use their existing B-17 bombers as long range patrol aircraft, they instead wrote letters to FDR "demanding" specialized long range patrol aircraft, and they waited by sitting on their hands until they got such aircraft. In other words, they didn't patrol their own airspace due to their petty budget fight with FDR and Congress.
Moreover, they didn't station men at all available anti-aircraft batteries on weekends. Nor did they fly fighter aircover on Sundays.
You can blame FDR for quite a lot of things, but FDR wasn't in charge of watching that base. It was Kimmel and Short who failed to man the anti-aircraft batteries and fly fighter aircover.
Kimmel and Short had only been at Pearl since February of that year, yet they were clearly complacent and more interested in the Honolulu nightlife than in fulfilling their military duties.
And if you are ever in command of a base, expect me to bash you the very same way if you don't cover the basics, either.
Dear Franklin Roosevelt Jr:
You are incorrect. Hawaii had no B-17's the first flight was on their way to Pearl during the attack and got caught.
Kimmel's predecessor was retired early because he insisted that the main body of the fleet be kept on the west coast of California where there were better defenses and dockyards to maintain the Pacific Fleet, and where it had traditionally been.
Kimmel had the fleet on standby pretty much constantly but did not have the fuel or the spare parts for extended patrols. In fact he pretty much used up his flying patrol boats doing that.
As something for you to consider, Kimmel had the fleet out and in position to the north and east of Hawaii (that's where the Japanese fleet came in) just before December 7th, but was ordered by Stark (Roosevelt's CNO) to put back in to Pearl Harbor.
Naval Intelligence (located at Pearl) had all kinds of intercepts including inter-ship traffic from the Japanese fleet that they never shared with Kimmel.
Dig a little more into this and you might be surprised at what you learn.
Regards,
Sounds like you've been reading Gordon Prange. Prange was on MacArthur's staff, and has always busted the Hawaiian commanders' chops without explaining why MacArthur, with several more hours' warning than Kimmel and Short had, still lost almost his entire air corps.
As to Prange's being a MacArthur staffer, that is in itself a qualifying statement: as General Marshall once said to MacArthur in a famous retort, "Doug, you don't have a staff. You have a court."
And as for Justice Roberts and his investigation you rely on so heavily:
Justice Owen Roberts was Roosevelt's whore on the Supreme Court. He was the swing vote, the guy who turned the Court from the path of constitutionalism and began the careers of the "great" Liberal justices Brandeis, Cardozo, and Stone by opening the floodgates to their novel distortions of the Commerce Clause and other Liberal fictions about the Constitution. What's more amazing is that Roberts wasn't even a Roosevelt appointee. That's red flag number one.
And, tellingly, when Roberts's name was put up to the President, by Assistant Sec'y of the Army John McCloy, as the civilian on the Pearl Harbor inquiry that Secretary Stimson in particular had already determined must lay the responsibility at the feet of the Hawaiian commanders (red flag number two), in order to justify their immediate removal and scapegoating, Roosevelt commented over dinner to Mrs. Charles Hamlin, who was visiting the White House, that Justice Roberts "seemed very friendly lately" -- red flag number three.
Herewith a precis of Justice Roberts's role in the Supreme Court in the years when it swung from conservative and constitutionalist to swinging and liberal:
The Court-packing plan was defeated despite the President's landslide victory at the polls only a few months earlier and despite the overwhelming popular support for New Deal legislation. The President's disingenuous explanation made the plan vulnerable to factual criticism. Justice Louis D. Brandeis, widely known as a progressive dissenter from his colleagues' conservative philosophy, joined Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, demonstrating that the Court was fully abreast of its docket and would be less efficient if converted into a body of fifteen Justices. Although much of the opposition was partisan, the resistance to the Court-packing plan ran much deeper. At its source lay the American people's well-nigh religious attachment to constitutionalism and the Supreme Court, including their intuitive realization that packing the Court in order to reverse the course of its decisions would not only destroy its independence but erode the essence of constitutionalism in the United States.
Roosevelt had counted on conservative opposition and had probably anticipated some of the liberal defections, but he failed to reckon with the power of the Court itself. On March 29, in a 5-4 decision in which Roberts joined the majority, the Court upheld a Washington mimimum-wage law similar to the New York statute it had erased in the Morehead Case. Two weeks later, Roberts joined once more in a series of 5-4 rulings which found the Wagner Act constitutional. These decisions marked a turning point in the history of the Supreme Court. They upset the historic verdict in the Adkins Case and appeared quite contrary to the Court's rulings in the Carter and the Schecter cases.
On May 18, prodded by Senator Borah, Justice Van Devanter announced his retirement from the bench. Since Robert's "conversion" had given Roosevelt a 5-4 court willing to approve New Deal legislation, Van Devanter's departure made possible a 6-3 division. The need for drastic reform no longer seemed pressing. However, it would not be until July 22 that Roosevelt finally conceded defeat and the bill died.
Source: http://fc.mosesbrown.org/~dmacleod/ND_and_Supreme_Court.html
Their sources:
Archibald Cox, The Court and the Constitution ; Houghton Mifflin Co., 1987, pp 148-150
Leuchtenburg, William: Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal ; Harper Torchbooks, 1963, pp 143-145, 170-171, 232-237
Furthermore, in addition to all the foregoing, you also had the fact that the man appointed to the Roberts Commission to represent the Army Air Corps was, in fact, one of General Marshall's favorites and his right-hand man. Red flag number four. Which paled next to the fact that the senior Army uniform on the commission, Major General Frank McCoy, had been Stimson's trusted friend for over 30 years and had previously been Stimson's catspaw in his politicking to get President Hoover to accept Stimson's anti-Japanese position, and later in Stimson's successful campaign to force the Japanese either out of Manchuria, or out of the League of Nations. Red flag, huge red flag, number five.
And lastly, we have the comments of one of the two former CINCPAC's on the Commission, Admiral Wm. Standley, who was boxed in between the hanging squad from Marshall's and Stimson's offices and Justice Roberts, on the one hand, and Admiral Jos. Reeves on the other, with whom Standley had had a contretemps years before when Standley, as CNO, had passed over Reeves for a second tour as CINCPAC. Concerning the Roberts-led hanging party, Standley was so put out by their open display of prejudice toward Kimmel, who was grilled and reamed for lack of organization and not allowed assistance or counsel, notwithstanding that most of his staff was at sea already, that Standley warned Navy Secretary Frank Knox that if Kimmel were ever court-martialed, Standley would take Kimmel's case and guaranteed his acquittal. But Knox worked on Standley and manipulated him into not submitting a minority report, "lest it divide the country and harm the war effort" (thus Toland, Infamy) -- where have we heard that argument before?!
In the end, Standley signed the Roberts Commission report reluctantly, but wrote about it later, "it did not present the whole, true picture. The findings as to sins of commission presented true enough statements, but the many sins of omission in the picture were omitted from our findings, because the President in his executive order setting up the Commission had specifically limited its jurisdiction." [Emphasis added.] Funny how that happened. Red flag number six, size enormous.
Of Roberts's performance in particular, Standley later said that it had been "as crooked as a snake", a comment which promptly got Standley appointed Ambassador to Moscow. And at this point, who's counting red flags any more? If this were DIRTXPOTUS we were talking about, would there be any doubt in this forum that there was a fresh corpse buried somewhere close by and stinking everything up?
And as for the armada of B-17s you refer to.....they were all fed through to the Philippines, where Franklin Roosevelt wanted them. They were given to MacArthur, to menace the Home Islands of Japan in a "forward strategy" that Roosevelt himself had pushed (hence the retirement of Kimmel's immediate predecessor over the movement of the Fleet from San Diego to Pearl) on both the Army and the Navy.
That's why the B-17s you refer to were not in Hawaii, and why the B-17s en route from California were not to be based in Hawaii. They were all in transit.