US attacked Japan to start WWII??

In My Humble Opinion
21

It certainly appears, from the quotes given, that he is trying to do a bit of revision. But then you would know all about the media and quotes taken out of context yes? So, I don’t think you’re mistaken in your interpretation but I don’t think it would be worthy of a Pit rant or anything.

The news on the sub here in Australia seemed to focus more on it showing that the US defintely had a good hour or so to prick her ears up and get ready for some shooting. One hour is not long though.

It would seem that the true interest in this story is more in substantiating exactly what happened that day.

22

Skogcat, that brings up another interesting question, what warning WOULD have been enough? Had all the alarms gone off, and everyone gone to battle stations, and the fighters gotten into the air, etc. It would seem that a one-hour warning, while perhaps not enough to turn defeat into victory, should have substantially blunted the attack, and made it far more costly for the Japanese.

Then again, there was the attack against US installations in the Philippines, which happened hours later. And STILL, with advance knowledge that the war had started, the US was caught ill-prepared and suffered devastating losses.

One of the books I’ve read, by Martin Caidin IIRC, argues that the US had even more advance warning. According to him, there were 2 Japanese float planes that scouted the harbor more than an hour before the attack, and they were seen. The strike force was tracked on radar for more than an hour. Also, a flight of US Navy planes from the Enterprise were also flying to shore at the same time, crossed paths with the Japanese planes, and were all shot down, well in advance of the attack. According to Caidin, Navy radiomen heard screams like, “Don’t Shoot!” and machinegun fire, over the radio from that flight.

23

It was Sunday, the ships in the harbor were all relatively dormant. Many of them probably didn’t have enough steam pressure to move at all let alone with any alacrity. I would assume that ammunition was stored in magazines below decks and not readily available. And there wouldn’t be anybody to bring it to gun stations anyway. Almost all personnel were ashore taking it easy. Just the task of finding transportation to get thousands of sailors back to their posts would have taken hours. In order to notify people to get back on duty, the word has to be spread somehow. Assembling mobile loud speakers, alerting radio stations etc. takes time. When the expected routine, Sunday off, is suddenly interrupted by a totally unexpected event the cumulative reaction time for thousands of people is many hours, not an hour or two.

And then there is the effect of panic and inertia. Author James Jones put an incident in the book From Here To Eternity that was based on a true story. In the book, during the attack the ammo magazine Sgt. refused to unlock the door to give out ammunition because the standing order from headquarters was that he could only dispense it on the signed order from the Company Commander, who was unavailable. And Jones, who was in the Infantry in Hawaii during the attack swore that this was true.

24

To point to more recent history, the chaos and confusion that erupted during the 9/11 attacks. We knew planes had been hijacked, but no one knew what was going to happen, and even after the first plane slammed into the WTC people still thought that it was an accident. Even after the second plane had crashed, people were still debating what to do for some time afterwards.

25

AP story on recovering the Japanese sub gave a definitely wrong impression when it states:

"But the military base and ships were not immediately placed on alert, which would have prepared the United States for the ensuing attacks.

‘They notified the Navy headquarters (in Washington) and they needed confirmation before they would act,’ Martinez said. `Remember, there was nothing to tell them that it was a Japanese submarine. It could’ve been anybody and it could’ve been friendly.’

That doesn’t jive with a well-researched account done two years ago. According to Day of Deceit by Robert B. Stinnett (2000) “Free Press”

“During the early hours of Dec. 7, crewmen of a minesweeper, USS Condor , sighted the periscope and conning tower of a Japanese submarine…At 3:42 a.m., a fluorescent wake neat the Condor 's port bow caught the attention of Ensign Robert McCloy. He focused his binoculars on the wake and discovered that it was caused by a periscope that was moving at about nine knots and stirring the waters to a brilliant glow…Two crewmen standing watch alongside him confirmed the sighting and realized it was not a US sub; they were forbidden to be submerged in the entrance channel and adjacent waters, which were in a Defensive Sea Area, a ten-square-mile zone where submerged vessels were prohibited. Admiral Kimmel had previously issued standing orders directing navy vessels to attack submerged vessels in the zone.”

The Condor then alerted the destroyer Ward , but they couldn’t find it at which point her captain advised that a sub had been sighted in the channel. While they were vainly searching, two midgets had slipped into the harbor as the antisubmarine net had been retracted expecting another Navy vessel.

The captains of the Ward and the Condor conversed in plain language “so that other warships and fleet command posts would be instantly alerted to submarine contacts.” They were acting on "orders issued by Admiral Kimmel months earlier:

‘When American warships definitely know an enemy submarine is in the area then they are to broadcast the information in plain language in order to sound the alarm and alert the proper people and put them in a state of readiness.’

The 15-min. radio exchange did reach the Communication Watch Office of the 14th Naval District. But the watch officer, Lt. Oliver Underkofler, was asleep and did not hear the loudspeaker report of the sub sighting."

In subsequent action, the Ward sank another sub as it tried to follow the Antares in to the harbor. Lt. Commander William Outerbridge then "radioed an alert in plain language over the special frequency: ‘We have dropped depth charges upon subs operating in Defensive Sea Area.’ Believing his first message wasn’t strong enough, he sent another: ‘We have attacked, fired upon, and droped depth charges upon submarine operating in Defensive Sea Area.’ These plain-language messages woke up Underkofler, who rushed to Ward’s report to the senior duty officer for the 14th Navy District, Lt. Cmdr. Harold Kaminski. Now it was up to Kaminiski to inform Rear Admiral Claude Bloch, the commandant of the 14th Distrct and the naval officer charged with protecting the fleet while in anchor at Hawaii. Kaminski received a busy signal when he dialed Bloch’s aide. He then called Admiral Kimmel’s office at the Submarine Base–a mile away–and reached the assistant duty officer, Lt. Cmdr. F. L. Black

26

The view held by most Japanese are skewed, but not that skewed. Most Japanese ignore - or are ignorant of - the Japanese invasion of Korea, Manchuria, etc. But until now I’ve never heard anyone claim that the attack on Pearl Harbor was “started by the Americans.”

I’m not sure if this Takehiko Shibata is claiming a causal relationship between the submarine sinking and the subsequent attack. He could have meant that it represents the beginning of the war.

27

I think that it is all nonsense.

I also think that Japan really had no choice if it was to fulfill its imperial ambitions in Asia as it needed the oil from the Dutch East Indies which had been embargoed by Holland which by this time had been occupied by Japan’s ally, Germany.

I think that Japan knew that it really had no chance to win an all-out war with the US, but figured that if they could knock out the US Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor that they might gain some breathing room and maybe even reach an accomodation with the US for hegemony in Asia.

On the other hand, I believe that the US needed a pretext to get involved in the Asian theatre, but US public opinion wouldn’t support going to war against Japan.

It is well known that the US had broken the Japanese codes by this time. I think that the US, especially President Roosevelt, saw an opportunity for a pretext for entering the Pacific war by allowing the Japanese to attack the osolete battleship portion of the fleet, while making sure that the aircraft carriers were at sea at the time.

The result was a propaganda coup for the US, but did not really affect its naval capabilities. Six months later, the Japanese task force which had attacked Pearl was virtually destroyed at Midway as a result of US knowledge of the plan. The US brought in additional aircraft carriers from the South Pacific and positioned itself to meet the attack. The Japanese were totally surprised and their navy was pretty much knocked out of the war.

28

I don’t believe that we allowed the attack for propaganda reasons. For one thing, Japan intended to break off relations with us, which would be accepted as a warning that they were about to attack, but the message was mistakenly not delivered and we didn’t have anything to do with that. I think that if things went as the Japanese intended we would not have been so resolute that Japan must be totally defeated - we would have gone to war with them, of course, but if we couldn’t characterize Pearl Harbor as a ‘sneak attack’ it would be hard to keep America too enthusiastic about it (especially when people our color were dying on the important side of the world), and a compromise or friendly conditional surrender might have ended the war instead of a nuclear attack.

29

The problem with that theory, galen, is the assumption that aircraft carriers are powerful and battleships obsolete. That is accurate doctrine at this time. But during WWII, battleships were still the kings of the seas. Carriers were not considered important naval assets until after the battle of Midway. The damage to the American Pacific battleships at Pearl Harbor was generally considered at that time a major blow to American naval capabilities.

It seems to me that the modern doctrine of the carrier battle group was started because of the severe damage to the battleships at Pearl Harbor – since the major American weapon had been hit hard, we had to develop a new tactic with what we had.

As for obsolescence… the battleship was a well-established weapon by 1940; USS Arizona had a hull number of BB-39. During the war, several battleships were built, from USS North Carolina BB-55 (1937) through USS Wisconsin BB-64 (1941), with 7 more authorized but not built or not completed. (Cite: DANFS Online ) This sounds to me like the continued production of a well-established technology.

The first American ship to be built as a carrier was USS Ranger CV-4 (1931). There was a major program of building carriers during the war, ending with USS Coral Sea CVB-42 (1945) (later USS Franklin D. Roosevelt CVA-42). (Same web site.) But they were still “cutting edge” technology, I think. This level of production seems to me like a lot of experimentation, and also a certain attitude of “secondary” ship.

30

I found the information about the Japanese submarine in a book published several years after the fact, Strange as It Seems, by Elsie Hix.
Apparently, the message about the enemy sub in “defensive sea area” was delayed, by routine chain of command.
As noted early on in this thread the messages didn’t reach Washington or the American military command until it was too late. Remember Occam’s Razor: The simplest explanation that covers all the facts is most likely the correct one. At the end of the movie Tora! Tora! Tora!, Japanese government officials are deepy distrubed, not about the attack–which the Japanese military had planed and kept top secret for about a year–but that their communications to Washington did not reach the U. S. government until it was too late.
In any case, the Japanese committed another major blunder: They did not touch the military oil tank farms, the submarine fleet, or the Pearl Harbor shipyards. Until sunken ships were raised, and damged ships repaired, the subarinnes, burning that oil and repaired in those shipyards, were nearly the only Navy we had in the Pacific for about a year.
In the historical book Presidential Campaigns, by Paul F. Boller, the authors note how Republican candidate Thomas Dewey, campaigning against FDR in 1944, tried to make Pearl Harbor and the President’s alleged foreknowledge of it a campaign issue. The military was aghast: A watchword of the time was “loose lips sink ships,” and if Dewey exploited this the military feared it would tip the Japanese off that the Americans had broken the Japanese Purple diplomatic code. The brass pointed out to Dewey that no coded message specifying Pearl Harbor as a target reached military command, again, until it was too late. :frowning:

31

I think that a couple of other things have been forgotten.

  1. The Japanese DID think they could win a war against America since the saw the US citizens a fat, lazy, rich and too cowardly to do anything against them. In reality they never thought it would come to a war. They figured that if they bloodied their nose, they would never have come after them. They would have been correct too, if they had done two things differently. If their declaration of war reached Washington before the attack, as planned, there wouldn’t have been the massive public backlash that there was. And if they had hit the mainland, say start at the north of California and run sorties with their planes as they moved to the south hitting 5 or 6 major cities, the citizens would have been screaming for protection so loudly that the US may not have gotten involved.

  2. They totally underestimated the production capacity which the US was capable of. They continued to make this mistake throughout the course of the war. The traditionalists didn’t believe it was possible to recover from the effects of Pearl Harbor over the course of the whole war - they thought it would take 5 to 10 years. They didn’t consider the naval yards a primary target since, by their thinking, the war would be over before anything major would come out of them. They didn’t hit the oil for the same reason - without ships the oil would just sit there.

As to the major question posed by yojimboguy, I think that his major goal here is to deny their responsibility in starting the war, but not so they won’t be culpable for the start, but so that they have another lever to put under the “America had no right and was immoral for dropping the nuclear bombs on us” routine. Really, the war was horrible while people were fighting it, but that doesn’t have any political ramifications now. What does have an impact are the nukes. If the Japanese weren’t the aggressors, then America would have been a large, overpowering force which through no fault of Japan’s, waged war on them until it was in a position to drop nuclear bombs on them, just to try them out (or some other such nonsense). In denying responsibility for the start of the war, they try to deny the reality of why the nukes were dropped.

Just my opinion, but I think it’s right :slight_smile:

32

Naval men knew the dreadnaughts were obsolete. When Billy Mitchell sank a ship with one bomb in, I believe, 1925, it made a profound impact on naval thinking. I stand by my “theory” which is not really a theory at all but a fact.

33

So profound an impact that they court marshalled him for advocating the U.S. put more effort into air power. The naval commanders consistently refused to believe him.

[Arthur Dent voice]
Ah, this is obviously some new usage of the word “fact” I
was previously unaware of.
[/Arthur Dent voice]

Actually, it’s also a new usage of the word “theory.” “Bizarre belief,” seems more accurate.

34

Originally posted by RealityChuck

This lends credence to a claim made by a peacenik I knew (his wife was my stepfather’s niece; the couple lived with us, along with their own two children, in a big house in Hermosa Beach, CA in the late Sixties).
He claimed that Roosevelt hatched a plot with someone–Allies or Axis I don’t remember–to start World War II in order to end the Depression. (This peacenik was of the war-is-good-business-invest-your-son philosophy–that is, he claimed it was his opposition’s credo.)

35

The connection with Billy Mitchell is that, from what this peacenik told me, the military planned to square off against Japan, for economic advantage (instead of converting to Communism, as the peacenik claims the people really wanted, in order to prosper economically). And that the military didn’t want Mitchell speaking up and ruining the surprise they wanted to inflict on Americans. :rolleyes: :mad: :frowning:

36

Some details:

  1. Bill Mitchell was running a rigged demo, perfectly calm day, no return fire from the bombed cruiser. Not exactly a fair example.
    It was actually the Japanese who demonstrated viable methods of attacking ships with airplanes.

  2. While carrier battles got the glory and press, the vast majority of sea warfare in the Pacific theatre was done Ship-to-ship.

37

Well,and the Japanese probably got their idea in the strike at Pearl Harbor from the strike at Taranto, which was successful.