Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire FDR and the Japanese Attack on Pearl Harbor

Grace of God the Japs missed our carriers AND our oil reserves on 7 December 1941.
Also, both sides and the axis powers were working on the Bomb and other chemical and biological weapons individually. The Japs were every bit as evil as the freaking Nazis. Their record in China and the Philippines points this out pretty easily.
Reon

This. The insane clown posse of tin foil troubadours are raising quite the cacophony of conspiricist crap this evening.

The fact that the US and Britain for all intents and purposes pushed the Japs to the back burner as far as any meaningful offensive, particularly weapons and material, until after the war in Europe was won, should tell you where the chief concern was at.
Hitler was a freaking fool for going after USSR in 1941. That forced the German military to put Operation Sea Lion (invasion of the UK) on hold indefinitely.
It makes me wonder if Hitler had any knowledge of the Japanese plan to bring America into the war.
The Germans figured on a 5 or 6 month campaign to conquer Stalin and USSR , then they could probably sue Churchill into a negotiated peace.
Without US weapons on both European fronts, that was in all probability what would have happened.
FDR was Stalin’s bitch. Even Churchill thought so before VE Day, and for sure after in his giving Stalin Eastern Europe.
And supporting Shek over Moa and the communist set the stage worldwide for the next Century, probably more as far as Asia is concerned. With the Soviet Union gone, China is our biggest threat.
Everybody else knows it, and our enemies are taking advantage of that and our own gullibility.

Our Neonazi infiltrated govt has been destroying the US from within for them for quite some time.

I doubt the US would have "won" in WW2 had those oil reserves 3 miles farther inland been hit.

It could make one wonder if FDR even planned for us to lose the war.

The leftist NWO dimocommies and WEF cabal certainly don't want the US to survive the coming WW3. They have imported the Cabals mercenary army into the country to use guerrilla warfare to ensure we don't.

Nothing is as important to them as keeping the Satanic Illuminati Cabal alive.

I'm hoping China's PRC Nationalist, Xi, takes them and their financial empire and their other internationally illegal Bioweapons Labs out of Taiwan, just as I'm glad Putin took out their homeland strongholds and internationally illegal Bioweapons Labs in Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

Trump can then blame the carnage on the lowlife POS Dimocommies and hang those actions around the US Traitors Dimocommie necks.

Our Govt was working to destroy this country when they passed the 1913 Federal Reserve Act and income tax just as they were when they passed the Corporate Act of 1871 and later switched us to fiat currency or transformed it from a Republic to a slave holding of the Deep State Cabal. We at least became the latter with the world's financial center in London City on d sovereign ground, the world's Bank in the Vatican sovereign territory and the world military power controlled from the 10 Sq miles of Washington DC sovereign ground.

Treaty of 1871 anyone?

Many call that BS. For those who stupidly deny DC is Sovereign Territory then why did Trump say we needed to Federalize DC and take it over and clean it out.

The Japanese didn't attack us out of the blue for no reason at all, they attacked us because we were their primary source for petroleum products prior to 08/01/1941 when we declared an embargo on oil exports to "aggressor countries", including Japan. At that time Japan only had enough petroleum in storage to fuel its military forces for approximately 6 months, so they had to do something. Either bow to U.S. pressure regarding their war in China or attack the Dutch East Indies and take over the oil fields in Brunei. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto proposed the attack on Pearl Harbor to destroy the U.S. Pacific Fleet, as those ships were the biggest threat to Japanese expansion. Yamamoto told his superiors that destroying the U.S. Pacific Fleet would give the Japanese around 6 months of free rein if the 3 aircraft carriers, Enterprise, Lexington, and Yorktown, were sunk or severely damaged. They would have less time if those aircraft carriers weren't destroyed, but there were no other naval forces in the western Pacific that could stand up to the Japanese Navy at that time.

There is evidence that some people in Naval Intelligence were aware of Japanese interest in the berthing locations of the Pacific Fleet when it was in Pearl Harbor, but that information, the so called "Bomb Plot", was never passed on to Admiral Husband Kimmel, commander of the Pacific Fleet, or General Walter Short, commander of Hawaii. The U.S. Army was responsible for protecting the Pacific Fleet when it was in port, but General Short had very limited resources, particularly reconnaissance aircraft. Admiral Kimmel didn't have any long range reconnaissance aircraft, as the PBYs were owned by the 14th Naval District, not by the Pacific Fleet. Kimmel and his staff felt that the greatest threat from the Japanese was southwest of Hawaii in the mandate island chains that Japanese had taken from the Germans after WW1.

FDR relieved the previous Pacific Fleet commander, Admiral James Richardson, in 02/1941 because Admiral Richardson vigorously protested against the forward deployment of the Pacific Fleet from San Diego to Pearl Harbor. Admiral Richardson felt that the Fleet was much more vulnerable to Japanese attack in Hawaii than it would be in port on the west coast of the U.S. and that the deployment was being used as a threat toward the Japanese by the State Department in their on-going negotiations with Japan.

A lot of different things led to the Navy being attacked at Pearl Harbor on 12/07/1941.

If you're interested in the Pearl Harbor attack, Admiral Richardson wrote a book covering his thoughts and experiences, as did Admiral Edwin Layton. As an O4/O5, Layton was the Pacific Fleet intelligence officers from before 12/07/1941 thru 02/1945, serving under Admirals Richardson, Kimmel, and Nimitz. Admiral Layton's book is particularly interesting, as he was a close friend of Commander Joseph Rochefort, the head of the cryptographic operation at Pearl Harbor that put together the Japanese battle plans prior to the battles of the Coral Sea and Midway. It could be argued that Rochefort, more than any other single person, had the most influence on Admiral Nimitz's battle plan for Midway and the loss of the aircraft carriers Akagi, Hiryu, Kaga, and Soryu had a crippling effect on the Japanese Navy's ability to project its power. Midway was the beginning of the Japanese Navy's downward spiral and the turning point in the Pacific Theatre war, with Japan going to a defensive posture and the U.S. continuing its offensive posture.

How a task force of six fleet carriers and support ships could traverse the northern Pacific and launch an attack NW of Pearl without being detected?

This after months of negotiations with the Japanese and knowing well of possible hostile intent you would think US intel would know immediately the attack force left port....was this the worst itnellegiance blunder in US history or a conspiracy to reverse US public opinion on entering WWII?

Another thing, our aircraft carriers, the decisive weapon in the Pacific war, were conspicuously absent from Pearl at the time of the attack.

MAGA!

According to the Japanese, they only encountered one ship during their voyage to Hawaii, a Soviet freighter that didn't report the sighting.

There was a lot of infighting at Naval HQ in Washington. Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, the head of war plans, took it upon himself to dictate to Naval Communications and Naval Intelligence what intelligence information would be passed on to Admiral Kimmel and LtCdr Layton in Hawaii. Even conspiracy theory writers like Toland acknowledge the so called "Mutiny on the Second Deck" over the control/dissemination of intelligence information between Admiral Turner and the heads of Naval Communication and Naval Intelligence. It appears that the CNO at that time, Admiral Harold Stark, was a weak leader who allowed Turner to run the senior staff at Naval HQ. When Admiral King replaced Admiral Stark, he reassigned Admiral Turner as the commander of amphibious operations, a job that he excellent at.

FDR directed Admiral Hart, commander of the Asiatic Fleet in the Philippines, to outfit 3 small ships and send them out to shadow the Japanese fleet that was sailing south to invade Malaysia. If the Japanese sank any of those "naval vessels", that would be an act of war. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor occurred before the 3 ships could be outfitted, so sending them out to be sacrificed wasn't necessary. FDR wanted to maneuver the Japanese into firing the first shot and he succeeded in that, but I doubt that he ever expected to incur anywhere near the degree of damage that the Japanese inflicted at Pearl Harbor.

Two of my great uncles were drafted during WWII and spent time in the Philippines. They said if your family had money you could avoid the draft.

Short of some negotiated peace, which the American public would have never accepted after Pearl Harbor, there was no way the US was going to lose to Japan....hitting those reserves would have pushed the war in the Pacific back *maybe* 6 months, but even that's doubtful. Once the industrial might of the US kicked in, it was all over for the Japanese.

Thumper is always good for a little humor.

Yep, he cracks me up. He even acts like he believes the bullshìt he posts, he's all in.

Yes please. What "treaty of 1871"?


Because their mayor is not doing a good job?

That is and has always been true.

My dad was 18 years old, working in a steel mill in Chicago. S. Dakota farm boy.

America's industrial capability would have allowed us to win even if the Japanese had sent a 3rd attack wave on 12/07/1941. The lack of fuel oil in Hawaii would have been a problem in the short term, but nothing the Japanese did or could do was insurmountable. The shortage of oil tankers was a problem for the the U.S. Navy in 1942, as the old battleship that had been refloated and rebuilt after the Pearl Harbor attack couldn't be deployed forward, so the U.S. Navy fought the Guadalcanal naval battles with light cruisers and old heavy cruisers. Losing the carriers at Pearl Harbor would have been worse, since there weren't enough of them prior to the Independence Class carriers that started showing up in 1943. Most people don't realize how few aircraft carriers the U.S. had on 12/07/1941, just 7 that were combat ready; CV2/Lexington, CV3/Saratoga, CV4/Ranger, CV5/Yorktown, CV6/Enterprise, CV7/Wasp, and CV8/Hornet. The Ranger was only useful as an anti-submarine and transportation platform, so it stayed in the Atlantic where the threat mostly came from submarines. 4 of the 6 combat ready aircraft carriers were sunk by the Japanese in 1942, only the Enterprise and Saratoga survived the war, but they held the line long enough for U.S. industry to convert to war production and produce over 100 aircraft carriers before the war was over.

A question a bit off topic. How many aircraft carriers are presently in the U.S. Navy??

Thanks.

Of course each of those eleven has the combat capability of 20 1942 era carriers. Or more.