New docs on Pearl Harbor attack emerge

[ElAurens]

Complete and utter nonsense.

[Sternjaeger II]

Originally Posted by ElAurens

Complete and utter nonsense.

And why would that be?

[swiss]

Originally Posted by Sternjaeger II

And why would that be?

Well, he read: 9-11 was a gov. conspiracy.

You wrote: Before 9-11 there were terror warnings

[Sternjaeger II]

Originally Posted by swiss

Well, he read: 9-11 was a gov. conspiracy.

You wrote: Before 9-11 there were terror warnings

hehehe too true

[Blakduk]

Regarding the opening comments of this topic- it's interesting to note the belief that the USN was caught completely unaware that an attack was imminent. In fact the USN did have good intelligence that a surprise attack was coming but didnt know where- the reason the Enterprise was not at Pearl Harbour when the attack came was because it was delivering planes to Wake Island where US Navy Intelligence guessed the attack was coming. Fortunately for the Enterprise a storm delayed its return to PH and it missed the attack.
Whenever there is a choice of explanation for extraordinary events between a grand conspiracy and incompetence, i know which is more likely to occur.

[Sternjaeger II]

Originally Posted by Blakduk

Regarding the opening comments of this topic- it's interesting to note the belief that the USN was caught completely unaware that an attack was imminent. In fact the USN did have good intelligence that a surprise attack was coming but didnt know where- the reason the Enterprise was not at Pearl Harbour when the attack came was because it was delivering planes to Wake Island where US Navy Intelligence guessed the attack was coming. Fortunately for the Enterprise a storm delayed its return to PH and it missed the attack.
Whenever there is a choice of explanation for extraordinary events between a grand conspiracy and incompetence, i know which is more likely to occur.

uhmmm although I can accept that a part of the political class of the time was incompetent, I wouldn't say the same of the US military.

I'm not saying that everybody in the chain of command knew it, but I'm wondering whether the consistent and concrete intelligence that had reached the higher spheres of the time was not being deliberately ignored or dismissed..

Come to think of it, it's the perfect plan: first you poke a potential opponent, then you just sit and wait for him to do the first move, possibly a dramatic, coward and big scale attack. Next thing you know you're in the game: industries working around the clock, hundreds of thousands of young men armed and sent to fight, but above all the war is being fought somewhere else, with no damage to cities, factories and population.

America might not have been willing to go to war again, but first thing they did was declaring war to Germany and send troops and ships to Europe.. even in the collective imaginary, it was a war to fight the Nazis, the Pacific war was never as "glamorous" or famous as the one in the ETO, and then again the US war effort was started and ended with Japan..

It's probably because I like playing the devil's advocate, but again I don't think for a minute that the fact that the USA was the only country to actually become the first superpower and gain so much economic and military strength after WW2 was a coincidence..

[Al Schlageter]

"People important enough" certainly thought a Pearl Harbor raid was possible. Until November the Fleet was on high alert and patrol patterns were flown that covered the area 1AF launched from. An attack at that time would have been spotted and probably would have found at least half the Fleet at sea.

BUT - In Winter the North Pacific is very stormy and no fun at all. The USN couldn't have made the raid thhat the IJN did, neither could the RN. When Winter hit, the "people important enough" felt that they were safe in relaxing a bit. The Fleet had been on War Alert status for six months, and ships and a/c were in dire need of long-postponed maintenance - not to mention crews (especially the Patrol Wing guys) needed a break too.

So the Fleet went off alert, and Patrol sectors shifted to basically ASW work south of Oahu. The Carriers were used to deliver planes to outposts instead of covering the Battle Line - all the CVs being away was why Kimmel had the whole Battle Line in PH that weekend; normally half would be at sea.

So the bottom line is that the USN was definitely alert for a PH raid until the weather made one impossible - except it wasn't impossible for the IJN.

The fact that Intelligence was 100% right about what the Japanese were doing in SE Asia distracted from Pearl too. We were watching the invasion fleets in the South China Sea and could not conceive that the Japanese would do the invasions without CV air cover.

from post #55, http://208.84.116.223/forums/index.p...ic=13339&st=40

[Blakduk]

My use of the term 'incompetence' was probably a little harsh- it's easy with hindsight to see what the plan was. My point was that it is more probable that mistakes were made by USN intelligence rather than a grand plan to get the Japanese to smash the USN pacific fleet at harbour. The idea that US politicians had knowledge of a plan to attack Pearl Harbour and allowed it to happen with their ulterior motive being to provoke the USA population into war is frankly ludicrous.

By the way, the USA did not declare war on Germany- Germany declared war on the USA. It was a serious miscalculation by Hitler.
Although Roosevelt wanted to go to war against the Nazis the political landscape in the USA was still set against getting involved in another European conflict- it was seen as a foreign war whereas the war in the Pacific was seen as a direct threat to USA security.

Post war the USA had a very different global strategy and was much more 'internationalist'- prior to WW2 it was very 'isolationist'.