Posted on 11/03/2001 2:38:50 PM PST by dobbyman
Just heard Jim Marrs telling that in the latest (in late 90s) release of German Nazi Gestappo War documents, they show a transcript of the Gestappo intercepting a communications between Winston Churchill and President Roosvelt where Churchill warns FDR of the upcoming attack of the Japanese against Pearl Harbor.
Sounds to me that the years of rumors that the USA knew of the attack and possibly even might have encouraged the attack is at least partially true.
That kind of stuff makes you wonder about what is going on now with the war on terrorism.
Also another interesting tidbit from same source and if there are any Russians reading this I would be interested in its correctness - is that about 7 months ago Russia has created a new Coin currency - a real Gold Coin. Up to that point Russian citizens valued and held the US Dollar. Now the Russian Govt and Russian News Media are urging the Russian Citizens to trade in their US Dollars for the Gold Coin.
In June, there was also an article in the Russian Newspaper Pravda predicting the collapse of the US Dollar by the end of the summer.
Hmmmm?
Dobbyman
The British anticipated an attack by Japan, somewhere in the far east, well in advance of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Canadian troops were dispatched from Vancouver, by ship, in early November of 1941 to reinforce the British garrison on the island of Hong Kong. They arrived in late November, about 10 days before Pearl Harbor. On December 8 (the same day as Pearl Harbor ... but a day later, per the Int'l Date Line) the Japanese launched an attack from mainland China on the British garrison protecting Hong Kong. The British and Canadian troops, without any back up or re-provisioning whatsoever, held out 'till December 25 Xmas morning, before surrendering.
There is no doubt that Churchill knew the Japanese were poised to attack somewhere in the western Pacific ... there is nothing to indicate the British had intelligence indicating the Japs were going to attack Pearl Harbor first. Anything to the contrary is pure bunk pushed forward by Monday AM historical revisionists & journalists.
Supporting the mujahideen in Afghanistan against the imperialistic aggressions of the Soviet Empire is not "creating Osama bin Laden". If you want to know who created Osama Bin Laden, talk to the rich Arabs in Saudi and the U.A.E. who pay his bills, and talk to the Taliban who protected him, and talk to their mentors in the Pakistani army.
Making use of Saddam's war against a common enemy, Iran, is not "creating" Saddam Hussein.
You are a purveyor of anti-American paranoid fantasies.
For example, Costello:
Finds Marshall et. al., at the White House the evening of Dec. 6th.,
Identified Churchill documents (by Serial Number) that are still classified and surmised sent to FDR,
Quotes Commander Mortimer (FECB) as stating JN-25B was broken by the British, that Churchill got the COMINT, and knew about Pearl Harbor,
Discusses Sec. Knox visit to Pearl Harbor after the attack and asks ... "didn't you get our message that was sent the night of Dec. 6th????," and finally,
The 1995 Kimmel/Short Hearing transcript can be found at http://users/erols/com/nbeach/kimmel/htm. Kimmel and Short were exornated of all charges.
WWII ended in 1945 ... 56 years ago. Any, so called, secret files from that era have been disclosed. British Intelligence, in late 1941, had only began to break the German Enigma code. They were no further along on the Japanese code than the Americans. The Japanese did not reveal their war plans to the Germans ... at least not specific battle plans. The Germans were as unaware of the pending attack on Pearl Harbor as the Brits and Americans. My succinct analysis (underlined and in bold above) remains as stated.
Moreover, the Gestapo did NOT have any means of breaking the British/U.S. codes and Churchill and FDR did not talk on "open channel," nor by radio or telephone at all. It is pure bunk.
He DID deliberately try to confuse the "Purple" code, which we knew about, with the Japanese code "N" that we had NOT broken; he lied about radio transmission at sea---post-war JAPANESE sources conform that they had not even left harbor at the time Stinnett supposedly finds radio transmissions from the Kido Butai task force.
If you want to see the lies in Stinnett's book exposed, look at Cryptologica, the journal of cryptology, for an article by Commander Phil Jacobsen, a trained cryptologist. Stinnett apparently deliberately fudged evidence (and in at least one occasion, "invented" evidence because the documents he refers to DON'T EXIST).
But here is the book review I wrote for CONTINUITY (Belive me, mine is tame compared to what the professional cryptologists say about this book!)
Robert B. Stinnett, Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor. New York. Free Press, 2000. 388 pp, xiv. ISBN 0-684-85339-6. $26.00 hardcover.
Reviewed by Larry Schweikart, University of Dayton
This is a difficult review to write for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that I detest what Franklin D. Roosevelt did to the United States by introducing the welfare state mentality. Only in the 1990s---60 years after the New Deal---did the nation start to undo some of the damage inflicted on the economic and social institutions by FDR's ultra-liberal policies. Nevertheless, while FDR is guilty of many sins, "setting up" the 7th U.S. Fleet at Pearl Harbor in 1941 to as to slip the United States into war through the "back door" is not one of them.
Robert Stinnett could have had an important book, a respected book, and an influential book. To do that, he would have had to stuck to the facts as he had them, and possibly even re- title the book something like, How Intelligence Operations Might Have Averted Disaster at Pearl. Nevertheless, Stinnett, who is not a trained historian, did an admirable job of collecting and analyzing---to a point---new data, and organizing it to tell a story. Unfortunately, it appears he had the story he wanted to tell mapped out in advance, and whittled, pushed, and squeezed every piece of information into its pre-determined hole so as to complete his mosaic.
The story? Obviously, from the title, that Franklin Roosevelt, acting on the memo of a Navy captain, diabolically plotted an intricate plan to maneuver the Empire of Japan into war in 1941. The Japanese dutifully obliged, coincidentally responding to every Roosevelt initiative like puppets on a string. Further, Stinnett argues, Roosevelt, having goaded Japan to fire the first shot, sat on critical intelligence that normally would have gone to the commanders in Hawaii, Gen. Walter Short and Adm. Husband E. Kimmel, thereby deliberately and devilishly hanging U.S. soldiers and sailors out as fodder to pump up the emotional turbines of the American electorate for a war the people really did not want.
If this sounds familiar, it should. It was the basis for the Millis/Tansill "Back Door to War" theories several decades ago, which were revived by "pop" historian John Toland in the 1980s with his book Infamy. After an initial burst of publicity, Infamy was subsequently torpedoed (pardon the pun) by the work of the late Gordon Prange and his students, Donald Goldstein and Katherine Dillon. Toland's chief witness for the prosecution, it seems, "Seaman Z," was tracked down by Goldstein and Dillon and repudiated most of what Toland ascribed to him.
But just as the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has provided a literal gold mine for John Kennedy assassination researchers, so too has it opened the door for further Pearl Harbor revisionism. It is to the author of FOIA, appropriately, that Stinnett dedicates his book.
There is no question that Stinnett has unearthed a boxcar load of documents previously unseen by most Americans. His familiarity with the markings of radio transmissions and his analysis of who could have known what is impressive and may have been valuable in another context. Lacking a historian's perspective, however, Stinnett fails to perform one of the most basic elements of historical research, namely to follow the footnotes. It leads him to a disastrous trap, which I will develop in detail.
Stinnett's lack of historical training also produces a tunnel vision that sees one potential path of actions (among many thousands) as the only possible route that could have unfolded. The result is that at every critical point where Stinnett prepares the reader for a "gotcha" of FDR, he aborts his mission, employing a host of "mush" terms that reveal that in fact has does not have the incriminating evidence that his title purports to contain. I have counted at least 23 such term uses, but I am sure there are many more that I missed. Among them:
*(introduction, xiv) "The commanders in Hawaii . . . were deprived of intelligence that might have made them more alert to risks entailed in Roosevelt's policy . . . ." Would it made them more "alert" or not? How so?
*(5) Journalist Edward Murrow, commenting on what "he and Murrow were told by FDR" "hinted" at a "tantalizing" conclusion: "The President's surprise [at the attack] was not as great as that of other men around him. Nor was the attack unwelcome." Then Stinnett admits, "Any conclusion about the Murrow meeting must remain speculative." Oh? So why report it?
*(9) "The paper trail of the McCollum memo ends with the Knox endorsement. Although the proposal was addressed to Anderson, no specific record has been found by the author indicating whether he or Roosevelt actually saw it." Yet Stinnett builds much of his early case on the McCollum memo, which we will have more to say about later. Why bother, when there is no proof FDR "actually saw it?"
*(9) "Throughout 1941, it seems, providing Japan into an overt act of war was the principal policy that guided FDR's actions toward Japan." Was this the policy, or not? Can you prove it?
*(9) "Roosevelt's ‘fingerprints' can be found on each of McCollum's proposals." Yet Stinnett has no proof FDR "actually saw it." So Roosevelt must have handled it without seeing it.
*(10) "Action D [of the McCollum memo] was very risky and could have resulted in a loss of American lives approaching that of Pearl Harbor. In the end, however, no shots were fired . . . ." So there are alternatives to a single-path of history after all!
*(12) "There is no evidence that Admiral Kimmel knew of the action plans advanced by McCollum, because Admiral Richardson never told him of them." This raises an incredible possibility that Stinnett appears not to have considered: if Kimmel had known of the "action plans" (if, indeed, such things did exist, and which FDR saw---which Stinnett says he cannot prove), would Kimmel have enthusiastically gone along with them? In retrospect, Kimmel supporters portray him as "set up." In reality, did he feel "left out?"
*(14) "A link to some of McCollum's provocations surfaced earlier in 1940 but did not produce a written directive." Or, in plainspeak, either no one saw McCollum's memo, or the people who did see it did not act on it.
*(17) Referring to FDR's statement to members of his staff that "If somebody attacks us, then it isn't a foreign war, is it?" Stinnett writes, "McCollum's eight-action memo would soon make the President's words a reality." This is where the revisionists fail to realize what they are really saying: The "eight-action memo did not make the President's words a reality," the Japanese Imperial Fleet did! The most astounding side-effect of the revisionists' arguments is to completely excuse the Japanese for any role in Pearl Harbor. (Toland ends his book by blaming FDR for the presence of nuclear weapons and for the Cold War that resulted from, as he saw it, the use of the atomic bombs on Japan . . . by Truman.)
*(35) Director Walter S. Anderson, the head of the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) "obviously believed in the McCollum strategy and went to Hawaii knowing of the risks inherent in increasing American pressure on a militant Japan." First, Stinnett does not know what Anderson "believed," and second, his comments virtually apologize for "increasing pressure" on "poow wittle Japan," whom he admits was "militant." But the kicker comes in the next sentence. Again, on p. 35, Stinnett writes, "Yet in an oral-history interview conducted by Columbia University in March 1962, he [Anderson] claimed to know nothing of the Richardson-Roosevelt discussion concerning keeping the fleet in Hawaiian waters." It appears as an interpreter of thoughts, Stinnett knows what Anderson "obviously believed," despite what the man himself "claimed."
*(37) "Had he been briefed, Kimmel could have requested that Purple decryptions be sent to him from either Washington or Corregidor." Or, he could not have. The man who did not put up long range reconnaissance, who did not coordinate well with General Short, who did not have the fleet on full alert despite numerous and abundantly clear warnings, who did not have torpedo nets up---that admiral would "have requested" decryptions if only he had been briefed.
*(44) Dutch naval attache Johan Ranneft, monitoring Japanese fleet movements for the Dutch, reported in a diary that he had plotted carrier groups, but had one unnamed port location. "Ranneft's unnamed port could only be Hitokappu Bay . . . ." Stinnett goes on to say "There was no way Ranneft could mistake the southern Japanese carrier movement for an eastern foray."
*(48) "Dropping ‘Hitokappu Bay' from the typewritten summary may have been done deliberately to conceal American success in decoding Japanese naval communications." Or, it may not have been done deliberately. I will say more on this key message later.
*(96) "It is quite possible that Director [J. Edgar] Hoover learned he was excluded from the Tsu intercepts and, in a state of pique, planted the espionage questions directed at FDR with favored White House reporters." It is also possible, if one believes Anthony Summers, that Hoover was involved in trying on new dresses. Either is as equally likely . . . or unlikely.
*(96) "The prickly FBI director was offended when he was refused access to secret naval communications documents. FBI censorship still veils the full details, but apparently Navy codebreakers refused to share Japanese intercepts, including the Tsu reports, with Hoover." We don't know, do we, because "FBI censorship still veils the full details" . . . or not.
*(97) "Though there is no proof that he saw the Tsu reports, [Hoover] continued to forward evidence of the Japanese espionage at Honolulu to "Berle." There is "no proof" that Hoover saw the Tsu reports, and there is no proof that FDR saw the McCollum memo. What else can the author share that he has no proof of? I have no proof that UFOs exist, or that unicorns live in Dayton, Ohio. Is that grounds for a book---"The Unicorn Deception?"
*(134) "How much was disclosed to Admiral Kimmel and the White House [by the codebreakers] is obscured by continued US censorship." This tack gets old. The author is plenty eager to pat himself on the back for using FOIA to obtain some documents, but retreats to the "censorship" canard when the documents he does get don't make his case.
*(136) "Admiral Kimmel's war plans staff should have been alarmed by the arrival of a Japanese invasion force south of Wake Island." Certainly, the staffers would have been less alarmed than the Wake Islanders. But I could just as easily argue that the staff "should have been relieved" that the fleet wasn't south of Oahu.
*(136) Commander Vincent R. Murphy was "the man who was responsible for evaluating Japanese intentions" as the assistant war plans officer for Kimmel. "Murphy attended major meetings with America's top naval brass [who? how ‘top'?] while in Washington in late 1940, which suggests that he learned of FDR's policy of ‘let Japan commit the first act of war.'" While working with the U.S. Air Force, I hung out with some of the "top brass" (generals, colonels, and Senior Executive Service-types) related to aerospace transport programs. How much do you think I learned from them about strategic bomber programs? Or about policies related to "no-fly" zones in Iraq?
*(136) Stinnett follows these two "shoulda/wouldas" with a third on the same page: "It is unreasonable to believe [Adm.] Richardson [Kimmel's superior] did not convey Roosevelt's policy to his top aide---Murphy." Now Stinnett has two degrees of separation from reality: he has no proof that Murphy knew and he has not proof that Richardson told him, and he cites both as evidence to the contrary!
*(145) "Neither Kimmel nor his family ever mentioned the mysterious sortie and the sudden recall from the North Pacific waters." But Stinnett thinks this sortie important enough to dwell on at length.
*(168) After stating that "the Kimmel-Bloch-Rochefort alert of November 25 is the only intelligence report generated by Station HYPO that can be linked to President Roosevelt," on the following page he backtracks, saying "Tracing the Navy's copy of the HYPO message to the White House during this time frame is difficult." He then spends the remainder of the paragraph explaining that he cannot prove that this alert "can be linked to President Roosevelt."
*(207) Edwin Layton, responding to a comment by Kimmel, "may not have beencompletely frank. . . . He then expanded the falsification." So is it a lack of frankness, or an outright falsification? The answer comes soon enough when we learn that Joseph Rochefort is in on the plot: "Rochefort . . . backed up Layton . . . ."
There are other similar "mush phrases" I could cite, but the reader, no doubt, gets the point. Other, arguably more serious, problems abound. Stinnett has more than a few substantial contradictions in his Stinnett thesis. He admits that "American agencies from whom the oil is bought [by Japan] go ahead and make suitable arrangements with government authorities in Washington," (19), and calls the oil-licensing system a "sham." The embargo, he points out, did not work between July 1940 and April 1941, but, of course, "McCollum's proposals had not yet been adopted." (19) So that explains it! The proposals by a mid-level navy officer, that Stinnett has no proof were ever seen by FDR, had "not yet been adopted." Yet a few pages later, Stinnett tells us that "Japan's initial planning for the attack began in the fall of 1940, about a month after McCollum's action recommendations were sent to the White House." (30) So the oil embargo had nothing to do with Japan's decision to prepare the Pearl Harbor attack, and the McCollum memo had nothing to do with it, since it had only been a month and nothing in the McCollum memo---[which Stinnett cannot prove FDR even saw----possibly could have been approved, let alone acted on, by the President!
This alone is a fatal blow to Stinnett's argument (but, believe it or not, hardly the worst error). The onus for war was clearly on Japan. Planning already started no matter what FDR did, or whose advice he took. But this is, in essence, working backward. Stinnett's thesis falls apart right from the start, when he rolls the dice, as it were, on a memo by Lt. Commander Arthur H. McCollum, the head of the Far East desk of ONI.
McCollum's five-page memo of October 1940 (which Stinnett calls the "eight-action memo") was a blueprint for starting a war with Japan, and, more important, inciting Japan to "fire the first shot." Stinnett places incredible stock in the notion that a mid-level commander in an intelligence agency---and only one of several---somehow had the ear of the President of the United States. Intel groups generate these memos by the hundreds and few, if any, ever directly end up in the hands of the President. Indeed, in the 20th century, one would be hard pressed to name any large-scale public initiative---let alone manipulating a foreign power into a war---that was the work of a mid-level military officer. Possibly the closest anyone could come would be the Iran-Contra Affair, which is a pretty far cry from provoking an enemy into bombing American soil. It has already been established that Stinnett cannot prove Roosevelt, or Kimmel, or even Murphy, ever saw the memo, and we know that although Anderson denied hearing anything about the "eight-action" plan in a January 1941 meeting between Richardson and Roosevelt, which, to Stinnett, is proof that he in fact did know about it! (35)
One of the most egregious errors, though, is that Stinnett fails to mention that it was prohibited by the Navy's regulations for an officer to sent any memo forward without sending it first to his superiors, including copies to his superiors, including Adm. Kimmel. One of the central lynchpins of Stinnett's argument---that FDR was engaged in manipulation behind Kimmel's back- --thus collapses.
Where Stinnett could have made a valuable contribution---in the unearthing of various intercepts of radio broadcasts on November 25, and, at the latest, on November 26, while the Japanese fleet was still in Japan---he fritters away through a failure to appreciate the big picture within which not only the intelligence groups, but all the Pacific armed forces, were operating. The crux of the issue was this: while many of the intercepts show movement, and although the Japanese carriers were known to be at sea, Stinnett's own evidence time and again suggests that they were thought to be heading south. When viewed in the understanding of Japanese naval capabilities of the day, it is easy to see why no one took seriously an attack on Pearl Harbor at that time: Japan did the impossible, conducting three major simultaneous amphibious or attack operations in Singapore, the Philippines, and Pearl Harbor. Most military authorities would admit that the United States, today, with all its vast capabilities could not pull off such a feat. When combined with the chronic underestimation of Japanese prowess, there is little doubt that any messages of ships at sea were taken as feints and decoys for the "main attack" at Singapore.
Rochefort's dispatch of November 26 makes this clear: while the Japanese fleet was on the move, intelligence "INDICAT[s] STRONG FORCE COMPONENT MAY BE PREPARING TO OPERATE IN SOUTH EASTERN ASIA WHILE PARTS MAY OPERATE FROM . . . MARSHALLS" (166). This is anything but confirmation that the fleet was headed to Pearl! Captain Duane Whitlock, as Stinnett confirms, denies that any message spelling out Hitokappu Bay was ever sent. But even if it was, this was only the staging area, and as such did not lock the Japanese into moving in any predetermined direction.
It gets worse for Stinnett's argument. On pp. 45-47, Stinnett supposedly uncovers four radio dispatches---two by Nagano and two by Yamamoto---that were "intercepted" and decoded, and thus warned FDR (but not Kimmel) that the Japanese fleet was on the move. Virtually all of Stinnett's thesis hangs on these four intercepts indicating that the Japanese did not keep radio silence. It is the lynchpin of his "new" information, and the core of his book. No originals exist, but rather, Stinnett's source for this "new" information is "two US naval histories: Pearl Harborby Vice Admiral Homer N. Wallin and The Campaigns of the Pacific War prepared by the . . . Strategic Bombing Survey." Wallin's source was the 1979 Pearl Harbor hearings, which referenced the Navy's History Section. Both of these came from a November 29, 1945 document produced by the History Section, based on October 1945 interviews with principal Japanese actors!
Let's reconstruct this: Stinnett cites Wallin, who cites the Hearings, which cite the History Section's "reconstructions" with Japanese four years after the incident. Even then, the Strategic Bombing survey, cited in the classic book by Gordon Prange, et. al., At Dawn We Slept, quotes the Strategic Bombing survey as saying that none of the four were transmitted by radio and that all four messages were hand-delivered. This is confirmed by virtually all of the Japanese participants, including Genda, in repeated interviews. Stinnett's key evidence then---which is hardly new, and has been in the open for years---is that there is no "new" evidence, and that the Hitokappu Bay message was hand delivered. Had Stinnett traced the citations back, to use his waffle terms, it's hard to believe that he would have relied on this as evidence of anything.
What about the decrpytions of 120+ other "radio transmissions" that Stinnett claims to have found from various fuel tankers and other ships? These messages may well have been intercepted, but most were not translated until after the war (and certainly not in December 1941). Keeping in mind that the intelligence sources were looking for a task force heading toward Singapore, any information not fitting into that template was delayed in translation, then analysis. Here, I again will defer to Stinnett's waffle language, and say, it is not clear if any of the radio decryptions were actually translated, and if they were, if they were then sent to Washington or to Kimmel. Of course, Stinnett cannot prove that they were---only that they were intercepted. Historians of Pearl Harbor are well familiar with the evidence that surfaced in the mid-1980s about the information Duskow Popov gave the FBI on a microdot, which the FBI then for the most part ignored. This is the same scenario.
Moreover, the notion that Kimmel, if only properly warned, would have taken action is, to use Stinnett's phraseology, difficult to believe. Rochefort told Kimmel on October 22 that Japan was in the midst of a large-scale "screening maneuver," and while Hitokappu Bay references were deleted from the messages passed to Kimmel to conceal American decoding successes, Stinnett again takes this as denying the Admiral critical information. But Stinnett misses the key phrases---it wasn't the starting point that was important, it was the "screening" mission that convinced Kimmel and everyone else that this fleet was not a threat to Pearl. Stinnett misses the significance of the December 2 decrypt. While making the case we had in fact cracked the code, he ignores the fleet moves "thus implying a move from Japan proper to the south." On my Rand- McNally, Hawaii is due east of Japan. Singapore is south.
There is other evidence that even had Kimmel had more information, he wouldn't have known what to do with it. RCA messages were delivered to Kimmel by David Sarnoff: "Though made personally aware of the RCA messages by Sarnoff's visit, neither Kimmel nor Short ever took an interest in them" (108). Stinnett notes that Gen. Short waited two days for a photo plane to have machine guns installed before sending it out on patrol. But what about all the PBYs and other long-range aircraft that could have made visual reconnaissance? Characterizing Kimmel and Short as "watch[ing] helplessly" while the [Japanese] ships steamed into position," neither dispatched any subs, long-range ground-based air, or even a destroyer or two to patrol the region they (according to Stinnett) were so concerned about.
This takes us to the last significant point, namely the recall of the U.S. carriers that Kimmel had sent to the "intended Japanese launch site" (145) Washington "issued directives that caused Kimmel to quickly order the Pacific Fleet out of the North Pacific and back to its anchorages in Pearl Harbor." (145) Although Stinnett includes a monstrous endnote section, little is said about exactly what was in these "directives." But let's use his tactic and imagine we know. Likely it was something along the lines of: "Get those carriers, which have no battleship or submarine support, and which are our only naval air assets in the Pacific, back where they can be protected from submarine attacks." On page 148, Stinnett explains that the U.S. was outnumbered four to one in carriers alone. If viewed in this light, Stinnett's amazement that "neither Admiral Kimmel nor his family ever mentioned the mysterious sortie and the sudden recall . . . ." I should hope not! It indicates that Kimmel realized he may have exposed the carrier fleet to an ambush at sea.
On November 28, Adm. Betty Stark told Kimmel in no uncertain terms to take all due precautions: "THIS POLICY SHOULD NOT REPEAT NOT BE CONSTRUED AS RESTRICTING YOU TO A COURSE OF ACTION THAT MIGHT JEOPARDIZE YOUR DEFENSE . . . YOU ARE INSTRUCTED TO UNDERTAKE SUCH RECONNAISSANCE AND OTHER MEASURES YOU DEEM NECESSARY . . . ." (172) Stark's only caveat was not to "alarm" the civilian population. Based on these instructions, Stinnett concluded Kimmel was "handcuffed." (173).
Other contradictions and flat-out errors abound. A central point in the Stinnett thesis is that Adm. Anderson was promoted shortly before December 1941 to act as FDR's "enforcement" mechanism. But Anderson's own oral history, and national biographical sources confirm, that he was promoted in July 1936, and he attributed his position as a demotion based on a falling out with Frank Knox. If Anderson was friendly with FDR, it doesn't come through in his oral history.
There are still more inconsistencies and errors. On page 146, Stinnett calls it a "bizarre series of coincidences" that Yamamoto and Kimmel both selected the identical launch area as the most desirable from which to attack Pearl Harbor, then on 147 he tells us that "naval war planning had always contemplated a Japanese carrier raid aimed at Hawaii from the North Pacific." After 100+ pages explaining how Kimmel was denied information, Stinnett reproduces a message from Admiral Royal Ingersoll indicating an attack was possible "in any direction" INCLUDING ATTACK ON PHILIPPINES OR GUAM. . . ." Again, Rochefort's November 26 intercept warned of a Japanese fleet "PREPARING TO OPERATE IN SOUTH EASTERN ASIA." To repeat: in the context of what intelligence sources knew about Japanese capabilities, any attack on the Philippines or South Eastern Asia would exclude a strike anywhere else. He describes the vessels at Pearl as "27-year-old relics of World War I," yet every one of the ships sunk (except the Arizona) returned to action in World War II.
Stinnett's single most important contribution is the revelation that the Japanese transmitted in the open late on November 25 or early on November 26. If this is "breaking radio silence," it is pretty flimsy stuff. The overarching issue remains clear, though. Data must be analyzed in a variety of contexts. Intelligence efforts at codebreaking were superb prior to Pearl Harbor, but the context in which they were placed was obsolete---a Japanese Empire capable of only one large-scale operation. Perhaps if other areas of intelligence about Japan's capabilities, and intentions, were better, a surprise attack would have been averted.
But the key fact remains: Japan intended to attack Pearl Harbor, surprise or not, and as John Toland showed, fully expected to find the ships under way, all guns blazing. Japanese documents reveal that planners there anticipated losing 30% of the entire Pearl Harbor task force! This makes clear that nothing Kimmel, or FDR, could have done would have forestalled the December 7 strike. Even if Kimmel and Short had been better prepared and fully informed, it only would have changed the finally tally, not the outcome.
No, no.......he was the guy who made that puppet, Pinoccio.
Except that (1) Roosevelt was the defacto secretary of the Navy in WWI and as an "old navy hand, less impressed by the brass than another man might have been, and inclined to reach down to junior officers. The fictional hero "Pug" Henry of Winds of War is a conflation of actual men that Roosevelt did use. (2) Whether Roosevelt read the memo or not, he certainly acted as through he had and deciced to use it as a guide for policy. The nazi information suggests that Stinnet's conclusion about FDR's foreknowledge may be correct even if he has made a poor or even dishonest argument.
Suggest you read the book At Dawn We Slept. It covers this myth quite comprehensively, and explodes it throroughly.
You can make a case for past civilization on Mars with enough spin and speculation. I refuse to believe an American president allowed Pearl Harbor to happen. I will never believe it.
The operations in Afghanistan are not new and in all liklihood have also been war gamed. The military must always prepare for action against anticipated enemies.
The on-going arguments surrounding the decryption of the famous "East Winds Rain" transmission will continue for many generations. Did FDR "allow" Pearl Harbor to happen by ignoring the strategic warnings? Maybe. But given the America First movement and the "peace above all" atmosphere is the US after more two years of war in Europe suggests that maybe FDR knew that we needed to come in on the side of "Truth, Justice and the American way" by whatever means possible.
What would the world be like today had we allowed Germany the time to consolidate its holdings, complete the "Final Solution" and develop the jet fighters, bombers, and missiles to defend the Fatherland. Might the mushroom clouds have occurred over Washington D.C., NYC and Boston????
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