Pearl Harbor: Toward a Taxonomy of Claims about "Advance Knowledge" of the Attack
When People Say "FDR Knew" They Often Mean Very Different Things
In further researching the Pearl Harbor attack, it’s clear that *any* claim that FDR had advance knowledge is considered a ‘fringe theory’ by the mainstream court historians.
But what is that advance knowledge theory in a nutshell? What claims are rejected as a fringe theory?
Let’s first start with the general thesis/explanation from the shameless court historians: “our military is just too damn stupid.”
This is a good summation of the weak explanations given by the mainstream as to why Pearl Harbor happened:
military - incompetence
intelligence - underestimating the enemy
military/intelligence - misapprehension of the enemy
intelligence - excessive secrecy
military - bad organization and internal systems
intelligence - not enough manpower
So, stupidity, bad systems, and not enough money.
The last one is my personal favorite because that excuse is government’s timeless and favorite explanation for its failures: we just need more money to do it right next time!
The only thing I would add to this list is the convoluted way in which the mainstream historians blame the isolationists for the attack. If only we had been prepared and heeded the warning signs! If only we had been more prepared with a wartime footing! If only we had doubled our fleet size and been ready for that sneak attack!
Even when confronted with total military failure, the third-term President found a way to blame the marginalized and largely disorganized isolationists because they had the audacity to even attempt to represent a nation that was tired of pointless wars.
When the powerful blame their failures on the powerless, when a President blames his failures on, at most, 3-5 Senators and maybe 5-10 Congressmen, it says volumes about the quality of that President’s character.
Anyhow, organizing these claims about ‘advance knowledge’ is important because without a firm grasp on the claims, the academic back and forth is largely chaotic, there’s no precision of the actual claims being made. There’s no way to debate a topic without firm definitions and a solid understanding of the actual claims being made.
When you read about dissenters and mainstreamers discuss this topic, when they blur the precision of their claims you can tell that they’re being dishonest. The dissenters don’t want to carry the burden of blaming FDR for war crimes, and the mainstreamers don’t want to deal with the mountain of evidence that undermines their fables.
Many of the dissenters are, I suspect, largely pulling their punches because they start from a conclusion and work backwards, or at least they wall off what they will accept and what they won’t accept. Roosevelt was, after all, perceived as a tremendously powerful political figure at the time and ever since in American memory. The long and storied careers of many of his critics were ruined for daring to oppose his regime. Frankly even today we are still feeling his political and social effects.
Cowardice is always convenient, and bold public claims generate endless anxiety.
I ran across a Pearl Harbor dissenter book this week that was 60+ years in the making. The book was published 40 years after the author’s death by his widow. There’s enormous energy collected to discourage dissenters on this topic, and a mountain of mainstream tomes to plow through before one feels they have the license even to confidently discuss the topic.
Among historians it seems plain that you can either write happy petit nationalism like Stephen Ambrose did and be showered with awards, or you can be bold and toil in obscurity for decades and get endless grief like Robert Stinnett.
Those are the stakes.
So is the ‘advance knowledge’ thesis just that FDR knew about a coming war with Japan and didn’t try to avoid it, or is the thesis that he wanted them to hit Pearl so he could avoid any political blowback for starting yet another World War? One is, in legal terms, negligence, and one is being complicit in the deaths of two thousand American servicemen.
It’s important to segregate these claims because the court historians relegate every dissenting viewpoint to the same trashcan. But if we sift through that trashcan I think we can see that there are several layers to the claims, where some are more confident than others in making the claims based on the evidence, testimony, and documents.
Here’s how I would organize the overall central claims for simplicity, as well as a graphic explaining the simple hierarchy of claims as to whether FDR had advance knowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack:
KEY CLAIMS———————-
DID THEY/ROOSEVELT TAKE STEPS TO CAUSE AND CREATE THE WAR ON PURPOSE?
Desire for WarDID THEY HAVE THE OPPORTUNITY TO STOP THE WAR AND DIDN’T?
WarmongerDID THEY KNOW JAPAN WOULD ATTACK FIRST?
First moverDID THEY KNOW JAPAN WOULD USE A SNEAK ATTACK?
Sneak attackDID THEY KNOW JAPAN WOULD ATTACK PEARL HARBOR?
Target: PearlDID THEY KNOW WHEN JAPAN WOULD ATTACK PEARL HARBOR?
Day of Infamy ForeknowledgeDID THEY HAVE THE OPPORTUNITY TO STOP THE WAR AND DIDN’T BECAUSE OF GENERAL INCOMPETENCE?
Bumbling BureaucratsWHO IS TO BLAME? WHO ARE “THEY”?
War PartyWHAT IS THE EVIDENCE SUPPORTING THESE CLAIMS?
Citations
So obviously 1 & 2 are similar, as are 3 & 4, but there are some important and slight differences.
The first, took steps to cause the war, is separate from the second, could have stopped and didn’t, in a few ways. The most basic is that one is commission and the other is omission, but more than that the world was generally at peace in the 1930’s. The United States did not have a vested interest in a major war in Asia. Setting the stage for that conflict was a precursor to a war footing that had to start.
The story of where Pearl Harbor started, by some accounts, starts 10-30 years earlier. Getting the international situation aligned for that potential conflict to come into direct conflict, is the first question. The second question is about that pending inevitability of conflict not being stopped by an effective diplomatic corps and also by effective diplomacy.
The third and fourth claims are separated by the question of surprise. You can know that an attack is inevitable without knowing that it will happen as a surprise. A massed military formation signals an impending attack, even if the attack is a shock. The Japanese were fond of using a surprise attack to sink ships. It is how they started war with Russia in 1904 at the Battle of Port Arthur.
The Battle of Port Arthur isn’t very popular in history textbooks these days, but it was certainly well known to the people in the 1930’s studying the Pacific rim.
Now, the fourth and sixth claims are certainly in conflict with one another: how do you have surprise when you know the date and location of the surprise attack? And the easy answer here is that the deception was not only with the public and the military, but also with the Japanese. The Japanese needed to be lured into the attack. They needed an appealing target. They needed to think that their plans were secure. They needed targets that made rational sense to a nation-state, their actions needed to be rational enough that the risk involved of starting a major war would be outweighed by the weight of the consequence: war with the economically powerful United States.
The Japanese knew they didn’t have the resources to sustain a long war. The attack on Pearl Harbor bought them a short period of time where they could put the Pacific fleet out of operation and they hoped they could negotiate a better deal at the end of it than they were being offered in 1941.
They knew that, and Washington knew that.
Japan did not want war with the US. There are scores of documents that reflect this in many sad ways. The Japanese asked for Roosevelt to meet and they would give him peace at any price, with no conditions, but Roosevelt refused.
The decision to start a war instead of prevent it, the decision to sacrifice 2,405 men to get into a war on false pretenses that would later kill tens of millions, were war crimes. The people responsible should have been punished.
I have hundreds of relevant documents I have unearthed from just one archive that I intend to share with you.
Oh s*** this email I never signed up for is never gonna end…
Correct.
But there are about a dozen documents that are so bananas crazy, that, well, I don’t know what to say. I really just want to show them to you, but I want to provide enough context for them to resonate. Just dumping them here seems like such a waste and teasing you with them as I’m doing presently seems uncharitable.
I will share with you that I have had, while sitting for hours on end in a University archive, several moments where it felt like something or someone was guiding me to answers in the documents. I would flip open a stack of a thousand pages and it would land on exactly the question I was trying to answer. Questions I was chewing over in my mind would be instantly and immediately answered the next day with a document that would scream out at me for attention.
So even if I wanted to stop, it seems like I’m being conscripted. If you unsubscribe, I’m just going to add you again.
Politica | PEARL HARBOR SERIES:
Pt 6 - Japs Were Trying to Escape Panama on Dec. 2nd
Pt 5 - Yes, there was Warning of the Pearl Harbor Attack
Pt 4 - ‘Very Bitter’ Housewife in ‘45 Notes Flaws in the Official Story
Pt 3 - Lloyd’s of London Cancelled Insurance Policies in August 1941
Pt 2 - Tips About The Pearl Harbor Attack 77 Years Late
Pt 1 - Pearl Harbor Revisionism