Pearl Harbor attack highlights lack of intelligence

Bonestar says:

11:09am | 10/12/11

Star crew represent!

acotrel says:

09:35am | 10/12/11

@John
‘The result is a manipulated mass’s want to fight a lie of a war. The reality is the majority of people in west have not fought for any war for moral principles just stock shares of armament, to secure the political power of the international bankers, to secure the profits of oil barons, to secure power for a small elite who rule the world. ‘

Your naibety is impressive ! Both WW1 and WW2 were wars for democracy.  Lies might have been used to get people to fight, but never underestimate or understate the effects of what might have happened if Hitler and the Japanese had won.  Many of us wouldn’t be alive today. And you certainly wouldn’t be putting your opinions on this forum.

Bonestar says:

11:06am | 10/12/11

John, you have some wacky ideas in your melon. The crap you write about 9\11 is a joke right? Why would they let the Japs blow the crap out of their Pacific fleet? you say so they can enter the war but wouldn’t you want as much of your fleets intact to wage war? WWII US soldiers were duped you say i say you are a dope. If you don’t know why we were fighting the Ottoman empire then you are a poor Australian and you know little about history.

Andy Mack says:

11:21am | 10/12/11

Hi John

You’re absolutely right.  The film, “Pearl Harbor”, was released on 25th May, 2001:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_Harbor_(film)

It was over three hours in length and grossed almost $450 million in revenue.  It was a conditioning exercise to prepare its viewers for the 9/11 attacks just three and a half months later.

I hope that you keep persevering with the truth that you are presenting on this website.  I, for one, really appreciate and enjoy your comments.

God bless you!

iansand says:

03:57pm | 10/12/11

If Pearl Harbour (the movie) was a conditioning exercise why was it so crap?

Greg says:

12:32am | 11/12/11

Bonestar, what has the Ottoman Empire got to to with Pearl Harbour? Please explain. What is going on inside your melon?

As for the ships destroyed at Pearl Harbour, most were WW1 vintage that were superseded. The most modern and also the most indispensible ships were the aircraft carriers, which just happened to be out of port and well out of danger.

Maybe the scale of the Japanese attack was unexpected, but the writing was clearly on the wall that an attack was imminent, given that FDR had forced the Japanese into it.

Daniel says:

04:47am | 11/12/11

@John - You are a Nut… Keep up the good work and don’t forget to take your Med’s

Bonestar says:

09:31am | 11/12/11

@Greg, that was stupid of you i was replying to the silly question put forward by John, he asked why were we fighting the Ottoman empire? Did you not read the post you were replying to? What’s going on in your melon? Don’t forget about all the aircraft the yanks lost at Pearl Harbor also or were they superseded and ready for the scrapheap aswell.

Andy Mack says:

09:38am | 11/12/11

iansand, because that’s what evil people produce.

Greg says:

01:55pm | 11/12/11

@ Bonehead, John was referring to the last 100 years of history when he mentioned the Ottoman Empire, you were only referring to WW2.

I was replying to your post, which is why I addressed my response to you. I can’t help it if you intended to say something different from what you actually wrote. Try to be more atriculate next time.

And I did not say that FDR knew exactly when, where or how the Japanese would attack. It made sense given his taunting of Japan to make sure that his aircraft carriers were not in port more than absolutely necessary. The aircraft could not stay in the air for months at a time.

If FDR had any honour and integrity at all, he would have resigned for his duplicity. He had the position of Commander in Chief of the US military, and he deliberately provoked an attack while leaving his own people vulnerable. He had innocent people killed in order to overcome popular anti-interventionist opinion and bring the US into the war.

The US has been a warmonger ever since, despite its leaders never bothering to get congressional approval as required from their constitution. After FDR set such a low threshold of integrity, no subsequent US president has even bothered to go through the motions.

St. Michael says:

11:10pm | 11/12/11

“The US has been a warmonger ever since, despite its leaders never bothering to get congressional approval as required from their constitution.”

Er, if you’re talking about WW2, that was actually the last time that the US Congress declared war.  That is, FDR did follow the Constitution on that one.

Bonestar says:

10:08am | 12/12/11

Stupid again Greg! i also spoke about 9/11 as did Johnlearn to read fool.

Greg says:

05:44pm | 12/12/11

St Michael, that was my point: no SUBSEQUENT president has even bothered to go through the motions of getting congressional approval.

FDR had manipulated the situation to the point where congressional approval became a rubber stamp, and it lost its relevancy as an independent point of review and approval for declaring war.

FDR did not follow the constitution, he found a way around it, just like he did when he outlawed ownership of gold.

Greg says:

05:49pm | 12/12/11

Bonehead, maybe it’s you who needs to learn punctuation and grammer.

Your rant had switched topic to WW2, with only a single reference to 9/11 that had no connection to the rest of your diatribe.

Trying to re-write your intentions after the event just doesn’t hold water.

Greg says:

12:40am | 11/12/11

This explains why FDR left Pearl Harbour vulnerable for attack, while provoking the Japanese.

He knew that the WW1 vintage battleships were obsolete, and were not of stategic value in modern warfare, which is why he was willing to risk them in Pearl harbour. Unlike the aircraft carriers, which were essential for achieving air superiority in the Pacific, and which were well out of harms way.

marley says:

09:38am | 11/12/11

A minor cavil.  Billy Mitchell was Army, not Air Force.  There was no USAF in his day.  And he certainly wasn’t the first general in the Army, or even in the Aviation Section of the Army.  He undoubtedly was the most outspoken though.

But what of Army Intelligence?  Didn’t they have an inkling of what was going on?  After all, they lost a lot of planes in the attack too.

St. Michael says:

11:08pm | 11/12/11

“He knew that the WW1 vintage battleships were obsolete, and were not of stategic value in modern warfare, which is why he was willing to risk them in Pearl harbour.”

The Hunch once again has eaten my post.  Thanks a lot, guys.  I suspect it’s because I linked to a US Navy FAQ on which vessels were sunk at Pearl and which were repaired and sent back out.

In brief, this is not a rational view of the circumstances.

Of the 8 battleships (the BB class) deployed at Pearl, four were sunk.
- Of those 4, 3 were refloated and repaired: USS Arizona is the only one left where it sank.
- One of the battleships was floated but wasn’t repaired.
- The other 2 were repaired
- The remaining 4 damaged but still afloat after Pearl were also repaired.

All of them saw later action in the Pacific campaign.

6 out of 8 battleships, all restored to the line and sent back into battle.  Rather a big and pointless expense to put on your country if, as you presume, FDR was convinced they were all “obsolete” vessels which don’t have any further part to play in the war.

See, on one hand you are saying FDR was willing to sacrifice these vessels because they were obsolete, but the same FDR then presided over their reconstruction and missions back into action.  That sort of response, resorting to Occam’s Razor, does not fit with a chessmaster-y setup by FDR.

Rather, it fits with a US Navy bureaucracy that didn’t realise battleships were obsolete—or did know they were obsolete but pushed for them to be kept in play as part of the effort to justify their own existence as an arm of the military.  It also fits with a US Navy bureaucracy that was so hidebound it refused to even consider Billy Mitchell’s warnings about Pearl’s vulnerability, mostly because he’d made the Navy look bad and because he imperiled their reason for existence.

Look back to my quote on the reaction of admirals and the politicians funding their battleships when Mitchell sank one with a few bombs from a single aircraft.  That’s the sort of idiots who make fateful decisions in US governments and US militaries—not Corleone-style presidents plotting the deaths of servicemen.  And to their discredit, they have been enormously successful at it: battleships of all stripes have been obsolete since roughly 1960 or so, but the US Navy clung onto theirs until roughly 1990 or so (Iowa, New Jersey, Missouri and Wisconsin).  And even after decommissioning there are still US Navy idiots who want all four of them kept as museum ships.  (To some extent the aircraft carrier has now replaced the battleship as the prestige piece growing less and less relevant as planes and missile delivery systems gain longer range, more speed, and more accuracy.)

No, you need to check the identities of those who said “FDR knew”.  For the most part, the ones making the original allegations were all US Navy men, up to and including Vice Admirals.  The US Navy has always been a government bureaucracy determined to preserve itself despite its steadily growing obsolescence, without any real regard for the cost or expense it puts onto the US.

Each navy man who said “FDR knew” had very potent reasons to displace blame for Pearl Harbour onto a President who’s been dead since 1944 and thus not around to be cross-examined on it.  (Note that despite the clear and apparent scandal none of the Navy types came out with their revelations before FDR had died.)  Namely, their own incompetence and the fact Pearl again proved Mitchell right and that the “bluewater coast guard” of the US was no longer needed or terribly useful beyond protecting its carriers.

I agree with you that FDR was an appalling President, but because of his incompetence, not his Macchiavellian competence.

John says:

09:47am | 11/12/11

Also FDR was dropping depth charges on German subs without a declaration of war. He was also freezing all the assets of nations that went onto to Hitler side. He was trying to provoke Hitler to go to war with the US.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfWe8qVabsE&feature=related

Here is Adolf Hitler himself disusing the matter.

marley says:

12:03pm | 11/12/11

@Greg - yeah, the US clearly provoked Japan into invading Manchuria.  Give it a break.  Japan was an imperial country without an empire, and it decided to acquire one, first in China and then around the Pacific.  It had to discourage American intervention in its plans, hence the attach on Pearl.  It miscalculated, big time.  But to claim the Americans provoked the attack is akin to blaming WWII on the Poles.

Greg says:

09:20pm | 11/12/11

@marley, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria was more than a decade before the Pearl Harbor bombing. So how far back do you want to go? How about the US sending navy warships to Japan in 1853 and demanding that Japan opens trade negotiations with the US?

This enforced trading policy resulted in Japanese dependency on raw materials that did not exist within Japan, and subsequently to Japanese vulnerability to the pre-war trade embargos which were later imposed by FDR.

But the US did not declare war on Japan after the Manchurian invasion. Why should it? Manchuria was not critical to US interests. Furthermore, the Nazis were not in power in Germany yet, and had not signed an alliance with Japan, so there was no ability to use the situation to influence US foreign policy in Europe.

Japan had to find a source of raw materials to drive its economy, and when the US prevented Japan from obtaining raw resources via economic trading, then they forced them to use military force.

The winners of wars get to write the history books, and also get to continue broadcasting their propaganda after the war has ended, but the truth remains the truth, and it is difficult to bury all of it.

Try reading some of it to educate yourself:

http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1930

St. Michael says:

10:42pm | 11/12/11

Greg, you might want to understand this little policy called “appeasement”, which was practiced by both the UK and the US in the years before World War 2.  Britain didn’t go directly to war with Germany either in the decade prior to 1939: not when they invaded Czechoslovakia; not when they annexed the DMZ between Germany and France; not until they invaded Poland, with whom England had a direct alliance and after Hitler had lied again and again about his ambitions for Germany.

That is, the great powers were trying to avoid another destructive conflict on the scale of WW2 and were hoping (foolishly, as it turned out) that Germany, Japan, or both would back off.

This more than explains why the US chose not to go to war with Japan over Manchuria, not to mention the fact that the US was deeply against getting involved directly in Europe until Hitler declared war.

It was because the Japanese kept pushing, not because the US kept provoking them.

Japan had been steadily headed towards imperialist expansionary war for decades, chiefly because of the way their society rebuilt itself following the breakdown of the Shogunate in the years after Admiral Perry’s 1853 mission, something that you clearly do not understand in any depth.

Hitler declared war on the US, not the other way round.  In doing so he made his second and last big mistake, the previous one being to abandon Operation Sea Lion and turn to attack Russia.  Had he not done so the US most likely would have stayed out of Europe and dealt with Japan more or less on its own.  It is to the world’s great fortune that Hitler was that dumb.

marley says:

05:58pm | 12/12/11

@Greg- the US had a commercial treaty with Japan until 1938 and was a major supplier. Japan could get all the materials it needed via regular trade.  But that wasn’t enough to satisfy its imperial ambitions.

So, Manchuria.  Then China itself.  As Japan became more aggressive, the US put in more restrictions on what could be sold to the Japanese.  The US had no embargo at all on Japan when Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, and none when it attacked China in 1937.  It only applied an embargo on oil after Japan invaded Indochina in 1941.  So, you tell me, how did the Americans force the Japanese to use military power to invade Korea, Manchuria, China and finally Indochina, when the serious sanctions came into play after all four military actions had already been undertaken.

Greg says:

06:08pm | 12/12/11

St Michael, Hitler did not lie about his intentions for Germany. He wanted lebensraum and he wanted to re-incorporate ethnic Germans back into Germany, after they had been removed by redrawing national borders or by being occupied after WW1.

The DMZ, as you call it, was actually part of Germany. Czechoslovakia included Sudetenland and Poland included Prussia, all populated by ethnic Germans.

The links that I have already posted give ample evidence to prove that FDR did everything he could to repel Japanese appeals for peace and provoke a war. FDR also went out of his way to supply all of Germany’s enemies, while imposing trade sanctions on Germany and her allies.

Hitler declared war on the US because at that stage it was already effectively underway. US citizens were already flying in the RAF, providing military advice, and supplying materials. His mistake was that he expected Japan to declare war on Russia, but the allegedly warmongering Japanese declined.

As for British “appeasement” and their Polish alliance, didn’t you ever wonder why they declared war on Germany, but not Russia, when both countries invaded Poland?

marley says:

06:09am | 13/12/11

@Greg - the Sudetenland may have had an ethnic German population, but it was never part of Germany. It was historically part of the Kingdom of Bohemia, which was absorbed into the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the 16th century.  When the Empire fell at the end of the war Czechoslovakia emerged on the territory of what had been Bohemia. The Germans had absolutely no historical claim to the territory.

St. Michael says:

11:55am | 13/12/11

“Poland included Prussia, all populated by ethnic Germans.”

Prussia’s “inclusion” as part of Poland, I note you failed to add, followed centuries of variously Austria, Prussia, Germany, and Russia trying and failing to tear the country to pieces, which proved rather inconvenient since the Poles kept rebelling and getting their country back.  It was indeed for this reason that Hitler called the Poles “the race that would not die”.  It was for that reason that Stalin said that trying to impose communism on Poland “would be like trying to saddle a cow”.

Prussia was not included in the entirety of Poland.  Rather, Prussia had seized tracts of Poland whilst it was still the dominant part of Germany and had not given them back.  There was a long tradition of genocide by German and east European nations against Poland and Lithuania alike, none of which made Hitler’s claim to those sections of Poland any more valid.

Greg says:

05:44pm | 13/12/11

Marley, although Japan could get raw material via economic trading before the US embargoes were imposed, the fact was that their supply was always subject to the whim of the Americans. It was in their national interests to ensure a guaranteed supply of raw materials that could not be restricted by the whim of a foreign power.

As far as imperial ambitions were concerned, the USA had already set a precedent for Japan to follow, with invasions of Mexico, & Puerto Rico, as well as in the Pacific region with Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines and Somoa.

And since then, the US has also set up puppet leaders in Saudi Arabia, Iraq and the Shah of Iran to secure their oil supply.

Yet despite the American hypocrisy, and the Japanese willingness to make concessions to avoid war with the US, the US painted them into a corner so that they had no other choice.

As far as the Sudetenland is concerned, the majority of ethnic Germans who lived there wanted to become part of Germany. The situation was the same as Austria, which voted for the Anchluss.

Hitler wanted all German speaking regions in Europe to have the right to become part of Germany. His pre-war territorial expansions were limited to countries with significant numbers of ethnic Germans, who wanted to become part of Germany.

Germany had more claim to these German speaking regions than the British had to India, the US had to the Philppines, or the French had to Algiers.

marley says:

05:59pm | 13/12/11

@Greg - so far as I know, Japan made no concessions, it simply invaded other countries to get what it wanted.  There was no disruption in trade with the Americans until Japan invaded China proper (not Manchuria). If you think sanctions are an inappropriate response to an aggressive military regime invading other countries, what alternatives do you suggest? Should the Americans simply have conceded the Japanese takeover and ignored the rights of the Chinese?

As for Germany, it had no claim whatsoever to the Sudetenland.  The fact that Germans had migrated there and failed to integrate with the local population hardly means that Germany had a right to simply march in and take over.  Do you think Lebanon has a claim to Western Sydney?

Greg says:

05:59pm | 13/12/11

St. Michael, more than half of Prussia was given to Poland after WW1, and the remaining half was separated from the rest of Germany.

Despite the newly redrawn national borders, there were millions of German speaking people, mostly in Western Poland, who wanted to become part of Germany again.

Hitler wanted to reunite with these people, which is why Germany only incorporated the western part of Poland that included the majority of the German speaking people.

The Russians decided to invade Eastern Poland, despite having no Russian people living there, and despite the fact that the none of the Poles wanted to be part of Russia.

Yet the Allies declared war on Germany, and formed an alliance with Russia, supposedly to defend Poland. Then they abandoned Poland to the Communists after the war, and forced the Polish national boundaries to be redrawn again, taking more land off Germany and giving more land to the USSR. Then they agreed to the ethnic cleansing of Germans out of all of the newly declared Polish regions.

History is not as simple and one-sided as you seem to believe.

Greg says:

10:53pm | 13/12/11

marley, take a look at the links I posted, and you will know about the concessions that the Japanese offered to the USA to end the sanctions and avoid war. They included an end to the China war and the occupation of Indochina, which were the issues that the US said prompted their trade sanctions.

The US rejected them and made no counter proposal.

As for aggressive military regimes invading countries, that’s what they do. The strong attack the weak, they always have, in nature as well as throughout human history. The US has done it, and continues to do it to this day.

Maybe it wouldn’t happen as much if politicians did not interfere with economic trade, and use it as a weapon for political leverage.

The Americans should preach what they practice, and not selectivley and inconsistently decide to protect the rights of foreign nationals against the same actions that they have done themselves.

As for the Sudetenland, it was claimed by the Sudeten Germans, who had lived there for over 700 years, well before the formation of Czechoslovakia. There were no German migrants, and the entire region was populated with Sudeten Germans. The Sudeten Germans were the local population, and they were completely integrated with eachother, and the people immediately across the adjacent German border.

It wasn’t just an ethnic ghetto, formed by recent migrants, thousands of kilometers away from their original homeland, surrounded by another culture, like the Lebenese in Western Sydney.

There is no comparison at all. You are just clutching at straws. Why don’t you just accept that you have been taught a biased version of history?

St. Michael says:

12:42pm | 14/12/11

Resorting to the wall of text does not erase Hitler’s intended genocides, Greg.  I notice you’ve been avoiding that aspect of the discussion.  It wasn’t just Jews in the concentration camps, you know.  It was also Poles, homosexuals, gypsies, Catholic priests, and any other political prisoners in the way.  Like I said: Hitler was intent on his own ethnic cleansing.  He might have wanted to have all German speaking people under Germany, but that meant exterminating entire nations of people to get his way.  And the Poles were target #1.  Poland did not want to become part of Germany.  It had been given sections of Germany that were historically theirs to begin with, and which they’d always asserted control over.  You cannot wipe that out.

As for the Allies after the war: I’m well aware of the betrayal by the Allies of Poland at Yalta.  That was mainly because FDR was a fool, Churchill wanted to keep Russia in play against Germany, and Stalin was better prepared as a negotiator than they’d anticipated.

St. Michael says:

12:56pm | 14/12/11

P.S.: I decided to have a look at the link, from the independent that you put up.  Higgs says this in his article:

“At the same time, they also built a military-industrial complex to support an increasingly powerful army and navy. These armed forces allowed Japan to project its power into various places in the Pacific and east Asia, including Korea and northern China, much as the United States used its growing industrial might to equip armed forces that projected U.S. power into the Caribbean and Latin America, and even as far away as the Philippine Islands.”

By ‘project its power’, in the case of Japan, the term is “invade and conquer.”

In the case of America, initially it was ‘annex and then hold’ in the case of the Philippines.  On the other hand, Higgs rather conveniently misses out that America first promised the Philippines self-government in 1916, gave the Philippines a form of self-government in 1935, and then recognised their independence in 1946.  And bear in mind the US from the point of its invasion had always said it intended on independence for the Philippines, and they stayed true to their word.

Greg says:

05:43pm | 14/12/11

St. Michael, the “wall of text” is in reality some basic facts to support my argument. I can’t help it if you are feeling overwhelmed by the amount of evidence that I have provided.

I am not avoiding any aspects of the discussion either, even though the topic of discussion has already digressed from the start of the war in the Pacific to the start of war in Europe.

However, the fact is that until war was declared on Germany, Germany had only ever incorporated regions with large numbers of willing German-speaking people into the Reich. Countries without German people were only invaded after the war had started, and there were no exterminations of entire nations of people.

The Poles were not target #1 either. No Poles were put into concentration camps just because they were Poles. And after the war had started, the eastern Poles treated the Germans as liberators, freeing them from Communist rule, something that the Allies never did.

There were no regions that were “historically Polish” and that they had “always asserted control over”. European national borders have been drawn and redrawn dozens of times over the past two thousand years, before the existence of either Poland or Germany as nations.

The relevant issue was what the people in each region wanted, and which nation they identified with. It was the Allied nations which forced the “all or nothing” approach on the Germans.

By ‘project its power’, in the case of the USA, the term is also “invade and conquer”. “Annex and hold” means the same thing. It is just semantics.

The Japanese also installed the last Emperor of China as the leader of Manchuria, which was a similar form of self government. Maybe Japan would have given Manchuria full independence too, if they still controlled it 47 years later.

Greg says:

04:59pm | 14/12/11

marley, I never said that the Sudetenland was part of Germany or that it was taken from Germany after WW1. You are just making that up, or imagining it. Go read what I actually wrote. It’s still there.

And German speaking people had been living in the region since at least the 13th century, so you are wrong about that too.

You are also wrong about Hitler just invading the Sudetenland. He had an agreement with Neville Chamberlain and other European leaders. Remember the “appeasement” that you mentioned? Don’t you know what it actually covered? It sounds like it’s time for you to do some more googling.

And it was never just about the language either. The Sudeten Germans wanted to be part of Germany. Just like the Austrians did. The Canadians and French have not indicated any desire to become part of the USA. So that is another false analogy.

A better analogy would be Northern Ireland, which is still part of the UK, and whose people want to be part of the UK. Their ancestors came to live in Ireland long after Germans had settled in the Sudetenland too.

That’s why the British agreed to the “appeasement”. They would have been hypocritical not to agree. But being hypocrites has never bothered the Americans.

I specifically mentioned the concessions that the Japanese offered to the USA to avoid war in my post, and it was also covered in the link that I gave. Read them again, and don’t just ignore the parts that you don’t like.

And as I said above, the Japanese did not act any differently than the USA in being an “expansionist power”. Furthermore, the Germans acted the same way as the British in supporting the people on their borders who wanted to be part of their country.

WW2 started when the French and British declared war on Germany, after the Germans had justifiably liberated their own people from foreign control. So they were completely responsible for starting the war.

And the US were responsible for escalating the war, by provoking Japan to source raw material via military rather than economic means.

It’s not hard to understand. I have no Japanese or German ancestry, or contemporary relatives, on the contrary, my grandparents fought on the Allied side. But that doesn’t prevent me from recognising the truth.