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During WWII, Guy Small was head of British intelligence.

In the 1980s, I worked in a small company and very well knew Guy's daughter, Anne. Anne and Royce Sullivan ran the company.

Anne knew that I was reading books on Enigma, and the history of WWII. So one day at lunch, she told me that the Brits had intel that Japan would attack Pearl Harbor about the first of December. Guy Small flew to Washington DC, and briefed J Edgar Hoover about the first of September. Why he chose to brief the head of the FBI escapes me, but that's what he did.

After Pearl Harbor, Small had a very expensive gold table top cigarette lighter that was engraved and given to him by Hoover. When he would have friends over, he would show off the lighter and laugh that it was Hoover's payoff for not ratting him out.

Fatuitous jerk that he was, Hoover may or may not have briefed FDR. The fact that Small couched it as a payoff would indicate that Hoover probably didn't brief FDR.

But the story from someone who was an eyewitness to much of what went on is that at least some people high in US government knew well in advance that the attack was coming. Whether that information ever reached the right people is another question.

Rankings mean nothing. Years back data suggested Oregon ranked second among states for crayfish production. Louisiana was responsible for the other 98%.

denton,

The official propaganda is that British agents smuggled an Enigma machine out of Germany, thus breaking Enigma's code. However, the reality is Polish methematicians deciphered Enigma.

Churchill was set to capitulate to Hitler. Polish fighter pilots convinced the RAF that Hitler's Luftwaffe could be whipped. In fact, it was Polish fighter pilots that taught RAF pilots how to shoot down ME-109's.

After the war, Churchill & Truman gave Poland to Stalin and back stabbed the Polish fighter pilots that won the Battle of Britain.

After Poland was under the evil rule of Stalinist Soviet Union, Churchill did reflect upon his treatment of Poland and Polish fighter pilots that enabled Churchill's famous speech about fighting Nazis with sorrow and regret. But that was far too little and way too late for the Polish who were forced into Stalin's bloody regime.

Evil always follows bad, and Operation Keelhaul was about as evil as it gets.

FDR was a lyin' POS elitist who should've been arrested, tried, and hanged for treason.

Americans are diverted by battles. Few dig behind scenes to examine dirty machinations of war, especially monetary beneficiaries of dead American soldiers.

Poland never surrendered to Hitler.

What Americans don't know won't hurt 'em. Besides, they're easy to propagandize.

BTW, A Question of Honor is an excellent read, and one of the best books I've read about WWII. I give it highest recommendation.

Doubly impressive considering they were on drugs....

Some horses can be lead to water, yet will never drink from the trough of knowledge.

"The two most ardent boosters of the Normandy invasion were Stalin and Harry Hopkins."

From here

Google Books, "Stalin FDR western front." Knowledge beats assuming and propaganda every time.

This is a classic ad hominem attack, logical fallacy that is used only when one is unable to refute facts.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I search for facts; hence, it ain't a theory if it's factual.

If you knew of the Tehran Conference as you claimed, that you'd of known than Stalin had FDR in his back pocket.

Churchill thought FDR was dangerous because of his close relationship with Stalin, who by the start of WWII had already murdered tens of millions in his purges.

With all the intelligence we had on the Pearl Harbor attack, we never at any moment before the attack had ACTIONABLE INTELLIGENCE. At no time before the attack, did all the necessary, verified intelligence, arrive on any one person's desk who could have prevented the attack. I have never seen any credible evidence that any one US leader had all the pieces of the puzzle before the attack.

And then again we still come back to the whole conspiracy, and I don't find the conspiracy credible at all. There is NO way someone wouldn't have talked...no freaking way.

Neat anecdote, but in this case, it really did matter for the Japanese. They had a large, and very competent navy and chose to square off with a larger and more competent navy (UK) and a larger yet somewhat un-proven navy (US).

But Japan was easily the largest navy in the Pacific.

You honestly believe that a Pearl Harbor conspiracy was taken to the grave by every last person involved in the conspiracy? You really believe that?

Don't tip to around the question, a simple yes or no.

Given the death tolls in WWII, having someone conveniently killed would not have been too damned difficult. Patton comes to mind....

That's an easy statement to make, but it's not the fact that SOMEONE can be killed. It's WHO would be killed, because there would have to be dozens, from high ranking to low ranking, to politicians and advisors. ALL would have to be killed, and you'd have to do so in a way that absolutely ensures NONE of them made any record at all of the conspiracy. How likely is that? How realistic is that?

And we know FOR A FACT that many who would have to be in the know were NOT killed...and supposedly took said secret do their grave.

I don't know, maybe some can see that actually happening...I just can't buy into something that fantastic.

I'm not sure it would have had to have been that vast a conspiracy at all. As you stated, there were lots of bits of intel within the U.S. gov't on threats leading up, but supposedly no one had put them all together in an actionable, or even plausibly actionable scenario. The number of people who would have had access to ALL the data available would have been very small, maybe just a handful or two. From that small group, it wouldn't be hard for it to have been a very committed bunch (think the inside schitshow that lead to Hitlery NOT being indicted when all the evidence was there to do so, or all the schit that J.Edgar ran while in charge of the FBI, or Fast & Furious, or the CIA gun running to the Middle East, or any number of other little "episodes" the .gov have done), or to have had just a few conveniently reassigned to missions that they never returned from, or natural causes, etc.

I'm not saying that it did happen, I'm only saying that it could have happened with just a small number of people involved.

Meth, math, whatever.

Yes. We owe an enormous debt to those three Polish mathematicians. They mapped the internal workings of the Enigma machine, and hand-built two of them. They smuggled one out to Britain, and one out to France before Hitler invaded Poland. The British one ended up at Blechley Park, with Alan Turing. The French unit.... nobody seems to know.

Had they not build two machines, and delivered one to two different Allied nations, the outcome could have been very different.

By the end of the war, Allied commanders were getting German orders ahead of the German commanders in many cases.

Yep, I do. You're obviously good with propaganda.

I can lead you to the trough of knowledge. Whether you remain loyal to propaganda is up to you.

Read Freedom Betrayed and get back to me.

Who knows? GunGeek, you might be the only American remaining that still believes that propaganda. However, most Americans know that FDR provoked the attack on Pearl Harbor and knew it was going to happen.

Like I've written before, I can only lead you to the trough of knowledge:

"Comprehensive research has shown not only that Washington knew in advance of the attack, but that it deliberately withheld its foreknowledge from our commanders in Hawaii in the hope that the "surprise" attack would catapult the U.S. into World War II. Oliver Lyttleton, British Minister of Production, stated in 1944: "Japan was provoked into attacking America at Pearl Harbor. It is a travesty of history to say that America was forced into the war."

Source

GunGeek, you need to do your own research. My advice is to head to your local library.

denton,

Thanks.

Sorry for the typo.

How do you know who had what intelligence?

If you haven't found credible evidence, you've been looking in the wrong places.

I've done it, I draw a very different conclusion than you do. WWII history has been a hobby of mine for over 30 years. Can't count how many books I've read on the subject. I just strongly disagree with your conclusions, and I strongly disagree with the conclusions of all the historians (and they are a small minority) that FDR just "let it happen". There is a lot of evidence, but I've never seen anything credible that any one person, including FDR, possessed actionable intelligence that would have prevented Pearl Harbor...not to mention the simultaneous attack on The Philippines. It's all Monday morning quarterbacking involving a few leaps of faith that just aren't there.

Spot on, but never could happen as long as there was a communist in the WH.

Not the biggest except maybe for a few hundred Canadian and Free Polish troops Normandy, August 1944.

The plan was that to avoid more of the regrettable friendly fire bombing fatalities, Allied troops would clearly mark their forward positions with yellow flares....

....the same color that Bomber Command pathfinders were using to mark targets.

GunGeek,

I'm good.

However, if I may, I believe one of your errors is your belief that FDR's knowledge of the attack on Pearl Harbor was a well-kept secret. It wasn't. Many people close to FDR knew we were getting ready to become involved in WWII. Churchill knew we would be entering WWII before Pearl Harbor. It wasn't a huge secret.

It's not a small minority that know of FDR's goading Japan to attack us, and that FDR had prior knowledge of the attack. I'd go with it being a small minority who believe as you.

Just the fact that we had cracked the Japanese Naval Code months before Pearl Harbor is extremely compelling evidence that FDR knew when and where the Japanese were going to attack us.

FDR knew where Yamamoto was before he knew where he was.