Was Pearl Harbor really a surprise? (1 Viewer)

[Jeremy Illingworth]

I agree that before the war the old brass failed to realize that air power was the new power at sea. While the Commonwealth nations treated the air force as a third and equal branch of the military, it wasn't until the late forties that the Amercicans did. In Jimmy Doolittle's excellent book there are many young officers who believe that air power will forever change the face of war at sea, but nobody listened. Doolittle was authorized to bomb derelict ships to prove his point and some naval officers suggested that the ships were in so little danger than they could station crew members on the during the attack. The notion of Japan using air power to attack Pearl Harbour was proposed as far back as the twenties but some people didn't believe that a little tiny plane could possible damage a great big ship.



I thought Hitler did that in the hopes that the Japanese would reciprocate with a declaration of was on the USSR.

jeremy

 

[todd s]

I read a book years ago about the Spanish-American War. Which was one of the wars that made us a world power. If I remember correctly. In the months prior to the war. US-British relations were very poor, almost to the point that a conflict was not to unreasonable. But, leaders in Britain saw the growing threat of the Germans uniting. And within a short time. British leaders were talking about their cousins across the sea. And attititudes changed.

On a more serious note. Its a good thing Ben Affleck and his friend were at Pearl Harbor and were able to down some of the enemy.

 

[Yee-Ming]

I've never heard that even the Nazis felt the Japanese went overboard. Naturally our history keeps pointing this out, and indeed Japan's reluctance, as compared to Germany's, to acknowledge their forebears' misdeeds continues to be a sticking point in relations.

And to Joe for another, as usual, fascinating read.

 

[Paul McElligott]

This week's "Deep Sea Detectives" had an interesting angle on U.S. "neutrality" before our entry into WWII. They were exploring the wreck of the German freighter Rhein, which was sunk in December, 1940, by Dutch and British warships off the coast of Florida as it tried to run the British blockade of German ships stranded in central and south America. The Rhein was herded into the ambush by an American destroyer and the Dutch and British ships were led to the ambush spot by other American ships.

Apparently, the sinking of the Rhein was one of the "provocations" cited by Hitler when he declared war on the U.S.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

There was a German business man named John Rabe in Nanking, China during the Japanese conquest. Rabe was a full party member and committed Nazi, who is known in some circles as "the Otto Schindler of the East". He donned a swastika armband, which gave him some protection from the Japanese, and used is position as an "ally" to save as many Chinese from rape, torture and murder at the hands of the Japanese military as he could. He also tried to get his government to put pressure on Japan and helped ensure that the atrocities were recorded and accounts of them were preserved to reach the outside world. His diary of the peroid is a primary source for accounts of what is rightly known as "The Rape of Nanking", and a refutation of the continuing denials of the even by the Japanese government. (Which to this day disputes accounts of what happened at Nanking and elsewhere during the war, as well as their human medical experiments and bio-warfare development labs in China.)

The late Iris Chang's book, The Rape of Nanking, offers a harrowing account of the nearly 400,000 unarmed POWs and civilians killed and the estimated 80,000 women and young girls who were raped, often gang-raped, sometimes also mutilated and in many cases finally murdered by members of the Japanese military between December 1937 and March 1938.

Yee-Ming:

Thanks. You are too kind.

Regards,

Joe

 

[Glenn Overholt]

Yes Joe, I am learning way more than I ever expected to about this - and it is nice!

The thought just occured to me that if this John Rabe was in China, he probably had no idea what was going on in the concentration camps.

When I think about it even more though, I don't want to know what a scorecard on this would look like! Yikes!

I can add that the Koreans are still mad at what the Japanesse did to them during WWII. It was several years ago when that came out (and probably not for the first time).

As for the initial question, I'd have to say no to that. If you did find out ahead of time, you'd make sure that at least some of the fleet got out of the harbor for a weekend of war games.

Glenn

 

[Yee-Ming]

Absolutely. On the other hand, didn't Churchill have to resist evacuating Coventry, to avoid tipping the Germans off that the British had cracked the Enigma coding machine? But then again, sending a few battleships out on the pretext of more training exercises is easier to conceal from the enemy than evacuating civilians from their homes.

 

[Haggai]

Arguments against the Churchill-let-Coventry-burn theory here, the gist of being it that even though they had some decrypted intelligence about impending attacks on that night, they hadn't been able to come to any conclusions about Coventry being a specific target.

 

[Greg Morse]

Part of the conspiracy that we knew has been why the carriers of the Pacific Fleet all "just happened" to be away during the attack.

Enterprise was returning from Wake Island
Lexington was enroute to Midway
Saratoga was in San Diego