The real reason why Dec 7 is a day of infamy

Oralboy: i'm extremely proud of the fact that I stand in opposition to atrocities against the innocent.

Another bald faced lie. You don't do that at all. You just make excuses and lie your ass off for that most heinous group of terrorists - us "governments".

My current sigline indicates that I do in fact stand in opposition to atrocities against the innocent.

Kind of silly of you to condemn me for doing something. And then, just one post later, pretend that I'm not doing it.

This is what results when someone starts a thread and then doesn't properly tell off trolls... I'd like to respond to a previous post which posed the rhetorical question, "If one is provoked to be punched in the face, gets punched in the face, did a punch to the face occur." That is not the right question to ask.

To make the analogy work one has to ask is the person who through the punch guilty of assault? Or some lesser degree of manslaughter/self-defense. I live in Florida and legally you could probably have legally shot the person in the face (as long as it wasn't in the back) and claim self-defense...

The point is... Kennedy had to die because he was a weak war time president and though his restraint was likely greater than any other politician who might have held office then he was blind to what America's intentions were from the start. It is possible to have racist intentions.

Thank you for that fine example of authentic frontier gibberish.

The following is what I have understood about Japan and the WW2 after reading several books from different sources.

The word "attack" enjoys of several valid interpretations.

Lets go back prior Pearl Harbor.

Japan was the empire of the fishing industry in the entire world. The US and England -of course- did envy such an empire.

When the WW2 was in progress, several weird situations happened, situations that you won't read in your book of history.

I can give an example.

While Germany was doing very generous contracts with several countries in South America, Asia, etc. to buy goods for war (from metals, clothes, even food) the attitude of England was to impose unjust contracts with the same countries of the world, where if these countries didn't comply with the England's imposition they will later punished economically. The goods obtained by England with such unfair contracts were strong punches in the liver area received by these small countries.

The US started to make excellent business providing goods for the war well, but at one point they found the opportunity to destroy the Japanese empire in both ways, the political and the economical.

Here is when "attacks" against Japan by the US started. The US managed to force others to stop providing fuel to Japan. This boycott wasn't necessary at all, because fuel was more than enough to continue with five more worldwide wars all of them at the same time, but the provocation was made to give impression of Japan being "the aggressor".

And the plan was successful, Japan gave several warnings to the US to stop the provocation, and even sent a declaration of war.

From here, is what we know it as "manipulation of information", this to say, from here is when you know what happened thanks to your books of history.

All FDR did was cut off Japan's oil source. It could have provoked war. His motive isn't clear

http://www.rationalrevolution.net/war/fdr_provoked_the_japanese_attack.htm

“What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is WHAT WE DO.” John Ruskin (1819 - 1900)

“When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.” Mark Twain

So I know this will probably be ignored or misconstrued but I feel that as a historian I should try to add some facts to the conversation. So first off I should start by saying that by December 7th 1941 we were already quite far along in a war against Japan if not one that involved actual boots on the ground. Since Japan's invasion of China in 1937 following the multiple 'incidents' that lead to them taking the northern regions of the country we began to funnel huge amounts of weapons, supplies, and ammo into China. With most of their infrastructure being lost in their withdrawal east it came down to the US to keep the Chinese war machine functioning. Our involvement in the war was so extensive that there is no doubt in my mind that China would have been conquered quite quickly without the aid of the U.S. This also doesn't include all of the economic restrictions imposed on the country who in the past was one of our biggest consumer of goods.

But on top of all of this before Pearl there was also the sinking of the Panay which actually could have lead to a declaration of war and would have worked perfectly with your idea that we were planning an actual combat war rather than a more informal war through our allies. But while Japan braced for the declaration we instead asked for monetary compensation for the damages. We put off actual combat between U.S. And Japan until they struck a military installation and forced our hand, not to mention just a few days after that they sank the allied Pacific fleet in the Philippines and invaded many U.S. Military installations in a very well planned assault that lead to the capture of huge amounts of American service men. Something which goes far behond just hoping we get hit so we can declare war, we were devastated in the early days.

I honestly believe that there were a lot of people wanting us to engage in a full scale war but I just can't see giving up Pearl, the Philippines, and our shipping lanes to China to achieve that end when we could have done it sooner the first time they attacked.

According to the Atlas of History's Greatest Disasters and Mistakes, as early as January 1941 the Secretary of the Navy and the U.S. ambassador in Japan reported that any war was likely to begin with a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.

The Atlas blames the two men in charge at Pearl Harbor, General Short and Admiral Kimmel. Only four of 31 antiaircraft batteries were in place on December 7. There were no anti-torpedo nets guarding the ships. More than three-quarters of the 780 antiaircraft guns were unmanned. The island had eight new radar stations but they were only turned on for a few hours each day. There was no program of aerial reconnaissance, though the island had 36 planes for the purpose.

The book also states that at 7:02 a.m. on December 7, a radar station in the north of Oahu detected inbound aircraft. ( The first wave of Japanese air attacks began at 7:53 a.m.) The only officer on duty in the Army Operations Center was Kermit Tyler, a fighter pilot with no radar experience. He assumed the aircraft were B-17 bombers due to arrive from the mainland and told the radar operator "Don't worry about it". The radar station shut down as scheduled.

The Atlas of History must have some supernatural sources. I know of no reliable evidence that the Secretary of the Navy knew of the proposed attack in January, 1941. The source for all of my comments about the Japanese here is At Dawn We Slept, Gordon W. Prange, et al, 1963. Prange served on MacArthur's staff in Japan as the Chief Historian. He interviewed many of the surviving Imperial Navy officers during that period.

In November 1940, the Royal Navy launched an air attack on the Italian naval base at Taranto. It was a rather poorly planned operation, hurriedly conceived and executed, using obsolete Swordfish attack planes--open-cockpit, two seater biplanes. Nevertheless, those few airmen managed to sink one Italian battleship, damage two others and damage two heavy cruisers. As can be imagined, it sent shock waves through naval staffs around the world.

Now according to Prange, Yamamoto Isoroku, the senior Japanese admiral afloat, ordered his chief of staff to initiate planning for an attack on Hawaii. I won't go into the reasons, but it made good military sense, but Yamamoto "kept it under his hat," because he judged (correctly) that it would be opposed by the Imperial Navy Staff. In January, 1941, Lt. Commander Genda Minoru returned from sea duty, and Yamamoto appointed him as his operations officer, and gave him specific orders to begin planning an attack on the ship basin at Pearl Harbor, Oahu, Hawaii. Genda recommended his long-time friend and military patron, Fuchida Mitsuo for the position of training officer. Both Genda and Fuchida accompanied the First Air Fleet on the cruise to Hawaii in late 1941, and Fuchida was the commander in the air of the attacking force. He had already been promoted to Commander by the time of the attack, and eventually reached the rank of Captain.

It is a bit much to believe that ONI (Office of Naval Intelligence) knew of the proposed attack at a time when only a few officers of the Imperial Navy knew what Yamamoto was proposing. Even more so in that the operations officer who planned the attack, Lt. Commander Genda, was only appointed in January, 1941.

It is certainly true that the U. S. Navy knew a lot about the Imperial Navy's plans and operations. ONI have already broken the protocol for Imperial Navy codes. As was common at that time, the codes were changed at the beginning of every quarter, and ONI was usually able to break the codes within two or three weeks. But the security of Yamamoto's staff was so good that most senior officers knew nothing of the attack until a few months before it was launched, when Yamamoto finally presented the plan, as a fait accompli, to the Imperial Navy's general staff. It is certainly hilarious that this book that PP cites would claim that the American ambassador knew of it in January, 1941, when Yamamoto was the only Imperial Navy officer of flag rank who knew of it.

ONI, ASA (the Army Security Agency) and the FBI all had hints of an attack by the Japanese in the Pacific. But they had no details. The most unsettling evidence was, or ought to have been, that the five largest carriers in the Imperial Navy--Kaga, Akagi (the flag ship of the First Air Fleet), Hiryu, Soryu and Shokaku--had simply dropped off the intelligence map early in 1941. ONI was unable to track them from that point until the attack on Hawaii. Zuikaku, sister ship of Shokaku, was only commissioned in September, 1941, and the cruise to Hawaii was her maiden voyage. The "disappearance" of these ships alone should have given ONI pause. Roosevelt authorized the dispatch of the war warning messages on November 27, 1941. As was noted in PP's post, Kimmel did nothing. General Short had a bizarre paranoia of fifth columnists, and took truly bizarre steps. U. S. Army Air Corps fighters were pushed to the center of their airfields, to get them away from perimeter fences, and the AAA lockers were put under lock an key. When the attack came, the Japanese were able to shoot up the USAAF fighters on the ground, and the airfield defenses were silent as people scrambled around trying to find the duty officer who had keys to ammo bunkers. In the Philippines, MacArthur did nothing, even though he had received the war warning message, and knew of the attack on Hawaii before the Japanese attacked his air forces.

I highly recommend Prange's book as the best ever written on the subject. It would take a lot of convincing for me to buy the version of the story offered here.