Conspiracy: was Pearl Harbor an inside job? | HistoryExtra
"'Relations between Japan and Germany were, technically they had a treaty, but in spirit they weren't really that fond of each other. So the theory that by going to war with Japan, we would go to war with Germany was a little shaky but it in fact happened. A few days after Pearl Harbor Germany did declare war on the United States, in one of Hitler's oddest decisions...
If Germany had not declared war, what would have happened in Europe? It was a fatal decision on his part much like attacking Russia in 1941...
By starting a war in the Pacific, the US now had to be wary on two fronts, not one. It had to be wary in the Pacific and the Atlantic. Within hours and days of the attack, the US began shifting more ships from the Atlantic to the Pacific. That hardly helped the British. The US had to reduce its military forces in the Atlantic because it had suffered such terrific losses in the attack on Pearl Harbor. In addition, the Japanese on December 7th didn't just bring the United States into the war, they went to war with Great Britain...
Britain had another enemy: Japan. So war in the Pacific hardly improved the situation of the British... over and over, Franklin Roosevelt said, in effect, I can't afford a war in the Pacific. I don't have the forces for it at this point... the American Navy and American Army had told him: we're not ready for war in the Pacific. They didn't expect to be ready for war in the Pacific till 1942. So the idea that he was helping the British by instigating a war in the Pacific frankly just defies common sense...
If the United States knew that a Japanese fleet was on its way to Hawaii, there were far simpler and more productive ways to get into the war than by allowing principal fighting force in the Pacific to be crippled... they could take their fleet to sea, set up on a route they knew that Japan would likely take and ambush the ambushers... I don't think anyone on earth would've objected to what was a, would be a legitimate, sensible, rational exercise of the right to self defence if the US had encountered a Japanese fleet crossing the North Pacific with six aircraft carriers'...
‘People often cite the oil embargo as an out of nowhere belligerent act intended to leave the poor Japanese starving at home because they had no oil. And what it really was was, at long last the United States taking a definitive and powerful step to tell the Japanese: you have to stop what you're doing. They had already attacked China in 1937. That war was still going on. They had basically extorted North Vietnam, what is today North Vietnam or what was North Vietnam from the French after the French were defeated in 1940. Japan was an aggressor. It was on the move in the Pacific and the oil embargo came after it extorted, Japan extorted all of Indochina from the French, and Roosevelt said, that's it, we're cutting off your oil, which mostly came from the United States. It was in response to Japanese actions not a weapon to get them to declare war on the US’...
‘The evidence suggests that FDR was as dumb struck as anyone on December 7th. He had not foreseen this coming, and the first shot, let's take that quote at face value. If that's true that he wanted them to take the first shot it didn't mean that he wanted Pearl Harbor attacked. The Philippines were, as I said, an American possession and it seemed incredibly likely that as the Japanese Naval forces moved Southwest to invade Indochina, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaya, they wouldn't leave the American colony of the Philippines right smack in the middle of all those new conquests. They would be leaving the US in a position to reverse what Japan was doing, and the fear that the Philippines were going to be attacked was so great that after he received the war warning message that I mentioned earlier, the American Naval commander in the Philippines took his fleet to sea and scattered it to save it, because he was so convinced that what was coming was a Japanese invasion of the Philippines. Which indeed happened, on December 8th, Japan invaded the Philippines. If there had been no Pearl Harbor, the United States would have been at war simply because the Japanese attacked an American possession. And so if FDR meant I have to maneuver them into taking the first shot, he assumed I think that it would be the Philippines.’...
'Let me offer what I think is one of the most telling reasons why I don't think there was a conspiracy. FDR was not a one-man gatherer of intelligence. He didn't have personal spies in Japan who reported directly to him. He couldn't decrypt Japanese messages all by himself. He certainly didn't speak Japanese. Once you decrypt a a Japanese message you still have to translate it from Japanese to English. FDR sat at the apex of a pyramid of people, I don't how many, I don't know. Dozens, hundreds of radio operators, translators, code breakers, their immediate commanders, White House aides. All of those people would have had to know and elected not to do anything about it and it defies human experience that all of those people would have gone to their grave possessing this astonishing secret evidence of what would have been the most treasonous act in American history. The deliberate sacrifice of thousands of sailors and many warships just to get the United States into the war when there was so many other ways to do it...
I don't think people appreciate what was going on in the Atlantic at the time of Pearl Harbor. The United States had advanced far beyond the the laws of neutrality in its effort to help Great Britain. An American Admiral said after the war that the that Germany would have been well within its rights to declare war based on American Naval activity in the Atlantic'...
‘Whenever you have an event that is so shocking, so unfathomable, I think you've got a table set for conspiracy… when the word spread across the country of what had just happened that Sunday in Pearl Harbor there were a group of New York Elites having Sunday dinner an early Sunday dinner at a house in the suburbs of New York City. And the telephone rang. And the person who answered it came back and told the assembled smart people that Japan had just attacked Pearl Harbor, and one of the savviest members of that group told the others don't worry about it it's a hoax. He, they simply couldn't comprehend what had just happened. A member of Congress the next day said that America was stunned beyond belief. This was, this violated every sense of what they thought about the world.
And why was that? Well I can give you several reasons.
The American people have been told over and over and over again that their Navy was the best Navy in the world. On the morning of December 7th, copies of the New York Times arrived on the doorsteps of the East Coast with a story that had been printed the night before, and before the attack. And the headline of that story was: ‘Navy Superior to all others’. Well, by the time people read that story, much of the Navy was burning in Pearl Harbor. And so people were trying to reconcile how this great Navy could have been surprised and I think on one level the answer to them was oh there must have been a conspiracy.
I'll give you a couple of others.
Over and over the public had been told that Pearl Harbor was, an incredible fortress. It was called the Gibralter of the Pacific. It was, could not be conquered, and that it was searching far out to sea to make sure that it was safe. 24/7, said one newspaper were the air searches going around Hawaii. If anyone was approaching they would be detected long before they could reach the islands. Well that wasn't true. There were no searches. There never were any searches but that's what the public was told and I I assume it's just because newspaper reporters got carried away and kind of, to help everyone at home feel comfortable, boasted of something that simply wasn't happening. So the fact that an air raid had surprised Pearl Harbor conflicted with people's prior knowledge of what was supposed to be going on at at Pearl Harbor.
Also, and I think this is really important, the Japanese had been repeatedly described to the American public as an inferior military power. Their planes were second rate. Their aircraft carriers were not like America's. They suffered, in one astounding allegation, from limited eyesight, and a bad sense of balance because they had been carried on the backs of their mothers as children and it upset their inner ear. You know people were who worked in Japan were told: don't fly on Japanese Airlines because you'll crash. And suddenly here were these supposedly inferior people surprising the best Navy in the world at Pearl Harbor’"
