A guy at work often goes on about how the Americans allowed Japan to bomb Pearl Harbor as a trigger to get involved in the war. They needed a big bang to get public opinion on their side. I don’t know all the details but apparently many indicators of attack were deliberately ignored. Give me the straight dope so I can squash him the next time he brings it up.
Well for popular history you can go with Walter Lord’s Day of Infamy
But if you really want to lay him away get At Dawn we Slept and it sequels December 7, 1941 and Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History.
According to the reviews The Verdict of History is particularly good at refuting the revisionist view of the attack.
“Over the years, there has developed a “revisionist” group of historians who claimed FDR Knew in advance about the impending attack on Pearl Harbor and he did nothing to stop it. In this excellent book by Gordon Prange, this somewhat questionable viewpoint is thoroughly destroyed.”
Note that Prange’s book was published back in 1985.
Much more information has come to light in the intervening 20 years. None of it persuades me that any conspiracy ever existed - we acted in ways time after time that are unbelievable if we knew ahead of time that the attack was coming - but every new revelation has meant another round of books on the subject. Just enter Pearl Harbor conspiracy into Amazon and see what comes up.
This review of a brand new book on the subject sums it up well for me:
In short, we can see clearly with hindsight what couldn’t be seen at the time. This is true for every disaster, from Pearl Harbor to Virginia Tech. It doesn’t spell out conspiracy, but the real world.
Many people felt that war with Japan imminent. But it was felt by the US millitary that Japan would attack and invade places closer to Japan like the Phillipines. Japan did just that and more. But no one really expected Pearl Harbor to be the target. And although they believed a war was coming, no one thought it was coming that soon or that the IJN would attack so quickly and decisively. So it’s easy for a lot of armchair generals to yell, “I knew it was coming! Our politicians HAD to know too!”
I figure the Paerl Harbor attack is a good example of the limitations of military intelligence (and I don’t mean this in a sarcastic way).
Many people assume that because the United States had broken the Japanese codes they must have been privy to everything the Japanese were doing. But there were limitations.
For one, a country sends an unbelievable amount of messages each day - even if the Americans had been able to read them directly, it would have taken a staff of tens of thousands to read through all of them. But it wasn’t possible to read them directly - interception difficulties, code breaking, language problems, and context combined so that it took days to translate each message. So the first priority was trying to figure out before the messages were read which ones were the most worth reading. Ones with lower priorities were put aside to be translated later, were usually pushed farther back by newer high priority messages, and some intercepts were never translated until years after the war ended.
Second, in order to be read a message had to be intercepted. Some of the most important information was never sent over the radio in the first place. The generals and admirals that were planning the attack on Pearl Harbor didn’t talk over the radio - they got together in person and worked out their plans in face-to-face meetings. Communications between areas were transmitted by telephone or couriers not radios. Radio transmission was the lowest link of communications where operational orders were sent out to units at sea or in the field. And these units were only given the pieces they needed to know not the entire plan.
Third, while the Japanese did not suspect that their codes were being broken, they did realize that radio transmissions gave away other information - even untranslatable messages told the general location and quantity of the radios. So the Japanese fleet heading towards Hawaii was briefed by messenger and ordered to retain radio silence during its move towards its target.
So what the American military intelligence staff had left to work with was a small fraction out of all the pieces to a puzzle. Saying that they had thousands of pieces of evidence sounds sufficient until you realize there were millions of other unknown pieces. After the fact, it was easy to go back and fit the pieces together in the correct way.
Look at the recent thread about “14 k of g in a fpd” - a bunch of intelligent people spent a huge amount of effort unsuccessfully trying to decipher that riddle. But if somebody had posted the answer it would probably have seemed obvious in retrospect and nobody would have believed how much frustration we experienced.
What’s more, we were pretty new at the mil-intel game at the time. Through much of the prewar years, we had practically no interest in outguessing foreign powers, and probably very little capability to do it if we’d wanted to. The Germans in particular got loads of info out of us during the 1930s by such simple means as working loyal immigrants in our army, or even impersonating US officers over the phone. cite
Under conditions like that where security had been so unimportant for so long, imagine being a complacent midlevel State official getting worrisome info on Japan from an underling. Your first thought would be for yourself, and being branded a troublemaking Cassandra if the tip didn’t pan out. If they shitcanned potential danger signs, I would not be one bit surprised.
And don’t forget that a popular thing to do in military circles is to designate an area with a nick-name (Target Alpha, Target Bravo, etc.). Before the deployment begins, the responsible parties would be informed of what each of those targets is. The decoded message then might inform the interceptor a certain target will be attacked at a particular time. The problem is the interceptor doesn’t know what the target’s real name is.
As far as the reading of encrypted Japanese messages goes, I’ll quote from Battle of Wits by Stephen Budiansky:
Why don’t you try asking him what’s it matter if FDR did know about the attack ahead of time? Does he think that we should exhume FDR’s corpse and put it on trial for treason? It was 60+ years ago and knowing the “truth” won’t prevent the war from being fought. (Also, given what we know about what the Japanese and Germans were doing [You know, committing war crimes.] it’s not like us getting involved in WW II was a bad thing. In fact, I’d say it’d be easier to prove that if we’d have gotten involved sooner, it would have been better for all parties involved.)
I don’t think he cares about the war persay. His interest is the grand conspiracy theory (or fact as he would claim).
Brief hijack: That’s spelled * per se*.
There was never any real logic to the Pearl Harbor conspiracy theories. At the time, the percieved strength of the fleet was the battleships, carriers had not yet been proven; and air power was even somewhat suspected by the old time admirals. Why allow the destruction of your best weapon when all you had to do was show an attempted attack? Let them bomb an empty Pearl Harbor while the fleet was waiting to counter attack, something like what was done at Midway. Or even leave one or two of the oldest ships in harbor to be sacrificial victims. It simply defies all logic to assume that anyone in command would allow for so little preparation and so great a loss when it was not necessary, even to start a war.
Can someone give me the bullet points of this stuff, because I have a freind that feels the same way. I just think the whole thing is illogical. You may as well blame Bush for 9/11.
The Americans had this problem before the battle of Midway. The Japanese messages kept referring to AF. The Americans did thought it might be Midway, but did not know for sure.
Using the underwater telephone cable link to Midway they instructed Midway to broadcast in the clear that the water plant was broken, and water rationing was being put into effect.
Sure enough the Japanese broadcast a message that AF was short on water. 
That is when the Navy knew for sure the target was Midway.
That’s pretty much impossible. Your friend already knows the bullet points - the Japanese Navy caught the Americans by surprise when they bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941. But your friend is rejecting this and believes there is a secret history that’s being concealed by the reality that everyone else believes - he’s rejected the simple version of events in favor of a more complicated version. So you’re not going to convince him by offering simple facts.
You need to slowly dismantle his pseudo-history by isolating the false facts he believes and showing how they conflict with the reality he accepts. Hopefully at some point, he’ll realize there is not enough “factual” evidence to support his theory and will reject it in favor of accepting mainstream history.
Unfortunately, this operation is often unsuccessful. Some people’s conspiracy theories are so nebulous, they have no firm evidence to refute - they’re swayed by vague suspicions and if you clear up one, they’ll just suspect something else. Other people buy their conspiracies in bulk - they believe everything is part of some conspiracy, so they don’t have any foundation of reality for you to work with. And other people are too committed to their conspiracies - if you point out a contradiction between one of their false beliefs and something they know is real, they’ll make the wrong choice and reject reality rather than accepting their other belief is wrong.
This subject came up in the now defunct Google Answers
http://www.tbrnews.org/Archives/a009ger.htm
The response contains a lot of references to Japanese and German documents which suggest that Hitler had a pretty good idea what was going on.
http://www.tbrnews.org/Archives/a009ger.htm
On November 28, 1941, at 11:45 AM, …
The Reichsmarschall brings up the matter of the Japanese air forces and wonders if they can obtain bases in the Pacific would they be able to effectively bomb the United States. To this the Führer replies that Japanese bombers do not have the range to fly from the nearest US islands of Hawaii against the mainland and return. Such attacks would have to be launched from aircraft carriers but before this could be done, the Japanese must first wipe out American naval units in the Pacific and including bases in Hawaii and on the western American coastline.
Roosevelt had cut of Japan’s oil supply, so it would be naive to assume that he did not expect them to react.
There is also the matter of the British having decoded both German and Japanese communications.
Churchill would have warned Roosevelt if he knew something was going to happen, and Roosevelt was itching to get formally involved, since the USA was informally involved up to its neck.
I’ve also heard that the Japanese were known to have taken great interest in a British attack on an Italian port using ‘Stringbags’.
I personally would keep an open mind on the subject, ‘conspiracy theory’ is probably too extreme, but to assume that Pearl Harbour was totally unexpected would be, perhaps, a little closed minded.
What was in them? Spoiled salami?
I think the term “stringbags” may require a wee bit of clarification.
They were a type of aircraft
Fairey Swordfish bi-planes - as far as I can see they were like no deposit bottles.
- pretty much one time use
Here is a bit of stuff about Taranto
The Fairey Swordfish
*It was a brilliant action, inflicting massive damage on the Italian fleet with minimal losses to the British. The Italians withdrew their fleet to the north, effectively removing it from the game board. The successful raid on Taranto suggested to Japanese planners that they might be able to imitate the same tactics for their own purposes. *
Here is a picture - scroll down to the thing that looks like a Sopwith Camel
Given that Churchill and Roosevelt were on extremely good terms, it is unlikely that Churchill would not have kept Roosevelt well informed of just about anything the British knew or suspected.
Were I a conspiracy theorist, I would suggest that Roosevelt deliberately provoked the Japanese to allow the USSR to release its Siberian troops for use in Moscow (until then the USSR was keeping them back in case of a Japanese attack).
As it is, I suspect that was more a case of rattling cages to see what would happen - but being certain that something would.
Churchill and the British intelligence knew of and tried to warn Stalin about the upcoming German invasion. Why then would they not warn us of an imminent Japanese attack?
(Stalin didn’t believe the Brits.)
The Fairey Swordfish remained in use pretty much to the end of the War- they helped sink the Bismarck and were surprisingly hard to shoot down, apparently.