Why didn't your teacher tell you to get a clue?

Have you read Prange, Goldstein, & Dillon's
Pearl Harbor: Verdict of History? How anybody can read that & still believe FDR arranged the attack, I'll never understand. Or consider what FDR'd been doing in the Atlantic for over a year trying to provoke Hitler, or Congress, to declare war...
there is some merit to the allegation
Nonsense! It's a fantasy. It's a joke. It does not stand scrutiny. Everything FDR had been doing was designed to
frighten Japan out of attacking in the Pacific. (At Winston's express request, BTW.) It backfired. FDR's major objective was to aid Britain.
An attack by Japan on the U.S. did not aid Britain, it aided Germany, & FDR damn well knew it. He'd been informed so by Stark & Marshall, who were aware of Arthur McCollum's memo to this effect, even if FDR didn't see it himself. McCollum pointed out what Hitler had told his senior officers at around the same time: an attack by Japan would distract the U.S. & draw U.S. resources away from Britain. (This is the same McCollum the conspiracy loons falsely claim advocated war with Japan, contrary to McCollum's stated opposition.) In the event, that's exactly what happened, & if you bother to actually think, you'll see why: at war, U.S. forces have to be uniformed, fed, armed, & moved; at peace, not so much.
I'd also ask, if the objective was to provoke Congress to war with Japan, why an alerted Pacific Fleet wouldn't have served just as well. Wouldn't a very warm welcome for the attackers have served? Or just detecting the
Kido Butai as it was launching? Or within 500mi of Hawaii? At that time, I imagine detecting of an IJN task force so close would have had Congress saying, "Just who do those little yellow bastards think they are?"

Whether the military knew anything on the other hand is a matter of considerable debate. It is known they had broken Japanese diplomatic and naval codes but the problem with the Americans was that the Japanese naval fleet maintained a strictly enforced radio silence from the time they left their ports ...
Right on Purple, the diplomatic cypher. Wrong on JN-25, the main IJN cypher. There were some breaks in the superencypherment, but the U.S. didn't read JN-25 substantively until after Midway. (There was a lot of luck there.)
Right for the radio silence, which is a biggie in the conspiracy fiction. Unless you think the Japanese were in on it & are lying about keeping radio silence...

Pearl Harbour was warned to be on full alert and to be prepared for a possibility of an attack but the order arrived too late. Even if it had arrived in time it is unlikely they could've done more than inflict heavier losses on the Japanese.
Half right. Short should've done more to ensure there was long-range patrol out of Pearl, which was his responsibility (not Kimmel's, tho most people don't know it). And Short's response was in line with what almost everybody expected for the start of war: a wave of sabotage, not an air attack. (It's only with hindsight we hammer him for that one.)
Could Short have dispersed his fighters & met the Japanese with a strong AA & a/c defense? Certainly, & Japanese losses would have been considerably higher, especially to AA, maybe enough to change the outcome at Coral Sea, certainly enough to save
Yorktown at Midway.
OTOH, had Kimmel's ships been on higher alert, USN casualties would have been substantially greater,

since OTL, most sailors were ashore... (Don't even mention an actual sortie against the
Kido Butai,


unless you like the idea of 20,000 USN sailors KIA.


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I think there are several things that are known:
1) FDR wanted into the war
FDR wanted to aid Britain, which is not exactly the same thing.
4) When the Japanese rejected the terms and the US embargo was imposed, FDR knew very well that it would lead to war.
Wrong. FDR didn't intend the embargo to be total. Some hardline nitwit at State (Hull?) denied Japan any exemptions, which the embargo had allowed for, as FDR intended.
6) The US military was expecting war with Japan (there was a 'general war warning' sent on 27th November, so the attack was very far from being a 'bolt from the blue'.)
That message warned of potential Japanese attacks against Russia, Thailand, Borneo, or the P.I. It never mentioned, nor did anybody in DC ever contemplate, an attack on Hawaii. The task force sailing for Thailand had been sighted, recall, & it was believed (wrongly

) Japan was incapable of carrying out two major naval operations at once. (Yamamoto had a hell of a time getting all the CVs for Operation AI even so.)
5) The US knew that Japan was going to attack US interests on the 7th Dec because the declaration of an end to diplomatic relations was intercepted and decoded the day before before it was presented by the Japanese ambassador.
Wrong. It was decrypted overnight 6/7 Dec & in the hands of U.S. intelligence the morning of 7 Dec. Nor did it say anything definitive about Japanese actions, since the diplomats (even in Tokyo) didn't know war was imminent.
The evidence that FDR knew of the attack on Peal Harbor and deliberately sacrificed it is thin at best
It's a patchwork of rumors, deceptions, misunderstandings, & lies.
but the theory at least has a basis of fact in that the generally held 'bolt from the blue' legend isn't true.
Wrong. Japanese action was expected
somewhere. Pearl Harbor was the
last place anybody on the U.S. side expected it. Consider: MacArthur had the Purple machine, the Purple codebook, & the JN-25 codebook. Pearl was denied them. MacArthur had more B-17s than anywhere outside CONUS. Short had a handful of B-17s (IDK the number offhand) & orders to keep his aircrews on a training regimen. So did Kimmel. Do the math.
By December 1941 the USA was expecting an attack aimed at most at Guam, Wake, and the Philippines. To the point of the Battle of Pearl Harbor a trans-oceanic assault with a carrier fleet had not been done, and it was something completely without precedent. If FDR was angling to get into the war with anyone it was with Nazi Germany and they weren't biting at the bait.
Well said. Correct on all points. To date, an attack of this nature was still mere theory, & don't forget, Pearl was shallower than Taranto, so even the Brit torpedoes wouldn't have worked.
Something else to think about: the conspiracy theorists, by giving the "credit" to FDR, are fundamentally racist.

They don't believe Japanese were capable of achieving surprise & scoring a victory of this magnitude on the U.S. on their own...
It's not a conspiracy theory that the United States foreign policy at the time was one of provocation to Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
Nonsense! The objective
was not to provoke Japan, it was to
intimidate Japan into
not attacking, & to
pressure Japan to stop fighting China. (The "let Japan make the first move" you often hear is because the FDR wanted to blockade Japan, to aid China, but couldn't
without Japan doing something sufficiently provocative, first. He wanted to avoid
actual war over China, since over 60% of the public was against it...)
The undeclared war in the Altantic, which had been going on for months, and the US oil embargo against Japan was designed exactly to provoke the 'bad guys' into drawing first blood.
Wrong. It was designed to provoke
Germany. The total embargo, as noted above, was a gaffe. Positioning the Pacific Fleet at Pearl, also intended as intimidation, was also a mistake: Japan took it as an opportunity, not a threat.


I daresay, had the fleet been at San Diego, the attack would never have happened.
Bear in mind, also, IJN may have encouraged attacks on the U.S. in a mistaken belief attacks on Britain would inevitably bring the U.S. into war regardless.
Not to mention if the US was really upset about China they would have done something in 1937 when they first invaded as opposed to 1940-1 some 3-4 years after the fact, only when Germany is starting to become a threat.
Not that simple. Public opinion, & Congressional opinion, had moved some since '37, but while there was strong support for "doing something" about Japan in China, there was almost equally strong opposition to war, meaning the bulk of the public did not understand the issue.
I never said the later(about PH or 9/11), I just said US policy was encouraging some sort of preemptive strike from either Germany or Japan at the time.
Half right: from Germany, not Japan, as noted above.
FDR didn't "know" about Pearl Habor, but he did provoke Japan into making the first move with coercive diplomacy.
Wrong.
I think pretty much he didn't realize how much Japan had at stake that they -were- backed into the proverbial corner.
Right. That was what happened, at bottom, in the Pacific: U.S. diplomacy boobed in a major way,


not seen again until more/less giving Saddam the OK to invade Kuwait.
As Secretary of War Henry Stimson wrote in his diary of November 25, 1941: “The question was how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.”
This does not by any means prove the U.S. intended to be at war with Japan. As noted, the U.S. needed a provocative (hostile) act by Japan to justify a defensive blockade, in aid to China,
without going to war.
... Japanese simply didn't think they would get the total war. It was peculiar to their way of thinking that by taking the American fleet out of operation in the Pacific they would show their real Samurai power, the power of real Bushi of the Divine Tenno to those soft-hearted merchants Americans, and those Americans who are not real warriors in their hearts, having tried a few more attempts at striking back the victorious Imperial Japanese Army and Navy would finally ask for peace on Japan's conditions.
Doubtless there was some of that at play. More to the point, Japan had never fought over an essentially unlimited geographical area, against a united & determined enemy. The Russo-Japanese & Sino-Japanese Wars were both geographically narrow, against opponents rife with corruption & internal conflicts, & even against Russia, Japan only narrowly won. (More accurately, Russia lost, due to political chaos in 1905.) Japan was nearly bankrupt at war's end...

Moreover, Japan's senior military & naval leadership had no grasp of genuinely strategic warfare, or they'd have known they had no capacity to interfere with U.S. production, & would have done far more to protect Japanese SLOCs. Or not have attacked the Brits & U.S. in the first damn place.
Roosevelt wanted Japan to hit first
He most assuredly did not.
I think it is immoral to spread unsupported gossip. That what the fiction that Roosevelt knew is unsupported gossip. In addition to the lack of proof, it makes no sense to argue that FDR would let the fleet be destroyed
Amen.
Crackpot conspiracy theories are not welcome here.
LOL.



My thoughts exactly. (P.S. CalBear, I'd be interested in your comments on mine, one resident expert to another.

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