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Old 08-01-2016, 07:13 PM
 
Location: St. Louis
3,287 posts, read 2,285,480 times
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Where were we?

Ah, testimony. ~35,000 pages of testimony and exhibits were collected for The Congressional Investigation Into The Attack On Pearl Harbor.

The history of this raid is fairly unique in that you can actually find the spot where the conspiracy theories started. Sen. Gerald P. Nye, whom I refer to as "the Sarah Palin of the 1930s" was giving speech to a crowd of America First supporters on Sunday afternoon, Dec. 7th, 1941. His speech was the usual; FDR is going to plow under every fourth American boy, he's running for dictator now, he wants to make the country Communist, he prefers New Coke to original Coke, the usual. While he was orating a paper was put on his podium notifying him that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. Nye didn't miss a beat and continued his speech. Then, after he left the stage, he confirmed the information with his staffers. When he was told the reports were real he said, "Roosevelt must have tricked them!"

Thousands of American dead, the US battleline rendered useless and all he can think of is his anti-FDR stance. Simply amazing.

Now a personal story about this you can skip without missing anything important.

Spoiler
I've always loved the Navy, at age 12 I decided I would sign up when I got the chance. This resulted in me getting sworn in fourteen hours after I graduated high school and reporting to boot camp that night.

My most esteemed neighbor, a man with a green thumb and three city lots of garden by his house, knew about my fascination with the Navy and came to me when I was fourteen with a mission. He had copies of all those books in the link above and he wanted me to find "the smoking gun" that must surely be somewhere in there. I attacked the project with a great eagerness, and a lot of help from the local librarians. (We didn't have Google in 1965. (I know, stone age living was weird.))

Sadly, after spending two years plowing through that material was forced to report that I had found no smoking gun. My estimation was the same as the Congressional Committee; lots of mistakes were made, but there was no deliberate wrong-doing by any American.

My neighbor, "Mr. Jackson", wasn't deterred, he just said, "We'll have to look elsewhere then!" Thankfully, he never found anything else for me to read on that. I did learn from him later that he was a veteran with combat time. He told me he had served with G. Washington at Valley Forge.


Glad you skipped that, aren't you?
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Old 10-29-2016, 03:52 PM
 
Location: Parts Unknown, Northern California
48,564 posts, read 23,974,759 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by OpanaPointer View Post
Shattered Sword is excellent!

The Attack on Pearl Harbor: Strategy, Combat, Myths, Deceptions by Alan D. Zimm is a concise analysis of the attack and an important addition to the knowledge base for this event.
I have just finished reading the book. My compliments to Zimm on his thoroughness and attention to detail, although at times he seemed to render his judgments less useful by his endless qualifying of all scenarios. When he asks what would have happened if......he speculates, qualifies the speculation with other concerns, qualifies the new conclusion with further information and so forth until you are left with as many probabilities at the end as you were at the start. I'm not positive that I see the value of this approach.

The most interesting chapter was the one where Zimm ruminates on what the outcome would have been if the Pearl Harbor base had been alerted in advance. He concludes that the Japanese would have lost half or more of their attacking aircraft. His scenario however was one based on the idea of 40 minutes advance notice. I sometimes fall asleep at night sort of gaming this out in my head, but I always allow for a few days of advance warning, time to recall the carriers and place them in an intercept position, time to not just get the fleet out of the harbor, but move it to where it could ambush the Kudo Butai.

One thing I go back and forth on is what would have been the ideal time to strike. Wait until the first wave was in the air and then jump the Japanese carriers with planes from the US carriers while the land based army fighters took on the first wave? Wait until, after the second wave departed or attack before they could launch?

I also have to take into consideration, the means by which the Japanese scout planes and spy subs could be fooled into believing that the fleet was still in the harbor.

In general I would recommend this book for those who already have a good familiarity with the events. If you don't, then you have never been interested enough to wade through this extraordinarily detailed account. You can skip some sections, such as the entire chapter devoted to the supposed 5th midget submarine which is an awful lot of time and thought put into what is ultimately still unresolved.

Finally, having read Shattered Sword before Zimm's book, I must say that Commander Fuchida has certainly taken some well merited lumps. His writings and reports on Pearl Harbor and Midway were tremendously influential for numerous historians, and it turns out he was, beyond argument, a chronic liar.
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