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there was a novel sometime in the 80s or 70s that the British intercepted a report from a Dutch submarine sighting the Japanese armada moving to Hawaii. the British didn't share this intel and even sunk the Dutch submarine so that they could not share the intel to the Americans.
Problem. All the Dutch subs were accounted for. None of them were anywhere near the route the Nagumo Kido Butai took to Hawaii. This renders the balance of this post moot.
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somehow this was just a novel but the British was certainly interested in drawing the Americans into war. remember its only a matter of time before the Brits have to capitulate to the Germans.
Not by Dec. 1941. They weren't losing any more by then.
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so they would do anything in their power to draw the Americans to relieve them or to help them in the war effort.
Churchill and Roosevelt at convened the American-British conversations to determine the future actions of the British and US forces. This is where the "Germany First" principle was first codified.
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and letting the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor even if they could have prevented it would have fit the narrative
And a very silly narrative it is. There would be no conceivable reason to allow a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor to succeed. Imagine that FDR knew and had the choice of a massive defeat or a great victory. Which one would he choose? Yep, the victory. "The sneaky enemy tried to ambush us, but we outfoxed 'em! Now, let's go after them! I know this is the wrong country and the wrong ocean, but I'm certain that Hitler will keep his promises THIS TIME!"
Problem. All the Dutch subs were accounted for. None of them were anywhere near the route the Nagumo Kido Butai took to Hawaii. This renders the balance of this post moot.
Not by Dec. 1941. They weren't losing any more by then.
Churchill and Roosevelt at convened the American-British conversations to determine the future actions of the British and US forces. This is where the "Germany First" principle was first codified.
And a very silly narrative it is. There would be no conceivable reason to allow a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor to succeed. Imagine that FDR knew and had the choice of a massive defeat or a great victory. Which one would he choose? Yep, the victory. "The sneaky enemy tried to ambush us, but we outfoxed 'em! Now, let's go after them! I know this is the wrong country and the wrong ocean, but I'm certain that Hitler will keep his promises THIS TIME!"
Back Door to War is so funny.
The British were in nearly as desperate straits as they were nearly a year earlier in June 1940. Then Britain had seen much of the British Army disarmed as they fled from Belgium and they were outnumbered in the air by a factor of4 to one. The British had the Royal Navy and the home fleet that kept the Kreigsmarine bottled up in the Baltic and Norway . Technology and tactics kept the Luftwaffe at bay and by Christmas 1940 the Battle of Britain was won but Hitler changed tactics. An element of the Kreigsmarine that was winning its Battle of the Atlantic was the U (Unterzee) fleet and it was very nearly throttling British Merchant Marine traffic. So GrossAdmiral Donitz was getting U boats as fast as German shipyards could make them and Donitz could use the fine harbors in France and Norway to forward base his U-boats. The Battle of the Atlantic almost defeated Britan forcing it to get the best terms it could get from Hitler.
The other change in tactics was the German efforts to take Egypt, the Suez Canal and British oil fields in Iraq and Iran. Although German forces in North Africa were an after though, to bail out Mussolini in the Balkans and Libya, The German General Staff came to see it as an opportunity. Cut-off British oil supplies and traffic from India, keep British empire troops defending India and with a little help from Japan, the ANZACs , Burma, Siam, the Dutch East Indies (occupied by the British in May 1940 when the Netherlands was occupied by Germany) and Malaya. If Hitler hadn't been so eager to destroy the Soviet Union securing the Middle East would have very likely won him Barbarossa when it came in 1942 for the Luftwaffe would have been in striking range of Baku from Baghdad. With the USSRs oil supplies burning the Red Army would have run out of fuel just like the Germans did during both the 1941 and 42 Russian campaigns. One fuel shortage kept them out of Moscow and the other gave them Stalingrad.
With meager fuel supplies the Soviets would have probably fled to Siberia and tried to keep up the fight from there. Maybe Stalin's oil men would have found the even larger oil finds in Western Siberia that weren't found until the 1960s! Stalin might have also listened more closely to Academicians Igor Kurchatov, Ioffe and Kapitsa. Men who knew about nuclear fission and the work of Hahn, Strasserman and Meitner.
Still doesn't explain why FDR would prefer a defeat to a victory. The former Assistant Secretary of the Navy always placed the Navy ahead of the Army in his heart. The idea that he would casually sacrifice many ships and thousands of American lives could only come from someone who hated him, no rational person would put forth such a bizarre plot.
BTW, the President's Naval Attache had a son on active duty at Pearl Harbor. Imagine the conversation:
FDR: We're going to have to put your son in deadly danger. I hope you don't mind.
NA: Anything, sir, just so long as we can get into a war we don't want to get into in the hope that Hitler will decide that he doesn't have enough enemies already.
I feel someone other that the Japanese knew they were going to attack Pearl Harbor. And the Philippines, Dutch East Indies and Malaysia almost simultaneously. Even the US had inklings that something was up. Maybe more than inklings?
In late 1941 the Russians knew Japan was not going to attack Siberia or Vladivostok. How could no one have known that operations involving necessarily larger preparations were underway? If some military intentions were known, how is it that other, larger ones were not?
I'm not generally a conspiracy theorist: no alien abductions, no JFK conspiracy, no Sasquatch. But in this case, I believe the accepted history in incomplete.
As a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, every Communist Party in the world supported Hitler from September, 1939 to June, 1941. When Hitler attacked Russia they all reversed course. Panic set in and defeating Hitler became their only objective. But how?
An unexpected, sneak, attack on US territory without a war declaration, figuratively and actually out of the clear blue sky was a Godsend to those who wanted the US to enter and stay in WWII. That Hitler declared war on the US and not the US on Hitler was only a precipitation of what would have happened anyway: US fighting in Europe. And thereby the salvation of Communism.
You contradict yourself in the last paragraph. If Hitler was going to war with the US anyway, why Pearl Harbor?
The American public was very aware that we would have to fight Japan and Germany, the polls in Nov. 1941, showed (numbers from memory) ~68% thought we'd have to fight Japan and 71% thought we'd have to fight Germany. We weren't happy about this, but we knew it would have to be done. The people that claim FDR needed an excuse to go to war just haven't done the reading. Twice in the second half of 1941 FDR's cabinet were unanimous in thinking that Roosevelt could get a declaration of war through Congress, without any attack on US property.
The show the trend of US thinking from the start of the war in Europe to the end of 1941. For those who want facts.
As for saving communism, we helped England survive and helped the Great Stalin take on the majority of German forces. The focus of that war was stopping fascism, not fighting a Cold War that hadn't happened yet. One war at a time is plenty. We had to fight two, ETO and PTO, and we succeeded.
I feel someone other that the Japanese knew they were going to attack Pearl Harbor. And the Philippines, Dutch East Indies and Malaysia almost simultaneously. Even the US had inklings that something was up. Maybe more than inklings?
Maybe innuendo is all the conspiracy theorists have?
You contradict yourself in the last paragraph. If Hitler was going to war with the US anyway, why Pearl Harbor?
The American public was very aware that we would have to fight Japan and Germany, the polls in Nov. 1941, showed (numbers from memory) ~68% thought we'd have to fight Japan and 71% thought we'd have to fight Germany. We weren't happy about this, but we knew it would have to be done. The people that claim FDR needed an excuse to go to war just haven't done the reading. Twice in the second half of 1941 FDR's cabinet were unanimous in thinking that Roosevelt could get a declaration of war through Congress, without any attack on US property.
The show the trend of US thinking from the start of the war in Europe to the end of 1941. For those who want facts.
As for saving communism, we helped England survive and helped the Great Stalin take on the majority of German forces. The focus of that war was stopping fascism, not fighting a Cold War that hadn't happened yet. One war at a time is plenty. We had to fight two, ETO and PTO, and we succeeded.
I meant after Pearl Harbor. Before it the US public was too isolationist to fight Hitler. After it, it was inevitable that the US would fight Hitler regardless of him declaring war first or not. Polls are one thing. There was no great outcry for war like there was on Dec. 8. Men weren't lining up at enlistment centers. Industry was not being mobilized aggressively. By summer 1942 it might have been too late for Russia, Stalingrad not withstanding.
It wasn't the US government that wanted to save Communism. It was the CPUSA. It had members in the US government that wanted and I believe worked to save it. That was their primary objective after Hitler invaded Russia. In the fall of 1941 it looked like Russia could only be saved by the US entering the war.
Planning for Pearl Harbor was already underway. Had the US forestalled it diplomatically US participation in the war would likely have been too late to save Russia.
I meant after Pearl Harbor. Before it the US public was too isolationist to fight Hitler.
No.
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