Pearl Harbor: Yes, There Was Warning of the Pearl Harbor Attack
77 Years Later and We Still Can't Admit the Obvious
I enjoy Quora as a concept, rarely in its execution. It seems filled with busybody content mill users who pontificate on a variety of subjects they know very little about.
So, recently I ran across this question on this thread about whether there was advance knowledge by the US government of the attack on Pearl Harbor:
And noted with disgust, his answer that was essentially, “nope!”
I contacted the author, attorney Brent Cooper from Dallas, because that’s the kind of thing I do, and this was his tepid response:
“I think I said FDR knew something was up but not when and where. That is why certain precautions had been taken at Pearl”
As one can see from his response on Quora, that is a complete misrepresentation of his position. Here are the two relevant excerpts from his response:
The attack on Honolulu, which was a total surprise to the US, was regarded by Washington as treachery. A sneak attack.
And he ends his article with:
So according to the Japanese, they meant to declare war before the attack. Only there was a screw up and war was not declared until one and one half hours after the attack began, Hmmm.
To be fair to Attorney Cooper, I suspect he just has some low-paid content generator churn this stuff out. His profile shows he has 6500 answers. He’s not reviewing the output from his content mill. He’s just paying someone to generate 3+ posts a day on this one website to drive up his traffic and name identification for search engines.
And I think Cooper’s response shows the constantly moving goalposts of those arguing that there was advance knowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack. Was it just a general, generic, diplomatic awareness that war was likely? Was it slightly malicious where FDR put the fleet in harm’s way a little more than he should have? There’s a gradient of claims, that perhaps in its most focused application is that FDR knew there would be an attack, at Pearl, at 8am, on December 7th. I plan to flesh this concept out a bit more in another post, later.
But I do think Cooper somewhat fairly represents the general mainstream view on this topic: FDR knew nothing, the Japanese were like ninjas coming in the middle of the night to secretly attack the peaceful naval base where guys were just trying to play volleyball.
My friend Sam, one of the 19 readers of this meager substack, said he was shocked anyone still thought this thesis was controversial. He thought that everyone was basically agreed that there was advance knowledge. Yet among official historians and the public intellectuals, they still toe this line.
Here’s the Khan Academy basic summation of the stale mainstream history: it was a total surprise! The codebreakers just didn’t decode things fast enough. A familiar excuse. It was just the incompetence of the ‘intelligence’ community!
I was waiting to drop two documents on Attorney Cooper, but after his tepid response, decided it wasn’t even worth it.
The two documents were:
Well-known other facts:
The battleships and planes weren’t stacked neatly together to make them easier to bomb, they were just put that way for… reasons.
The aircraft carriers Lexington, Saratoga and Enterprise weren’t sent away a few days before Pearl to keep them safe, they were just out on a training cruise for… reasons.
The intercepted radio traffic by U.S. intelligence that showed an incoming Japanese fleet. The Stinnett thesis.
The U.S. cleared the shipping lanes to prevent any commercial ships from notifying the public that a huge armada was sailing for Hawaii.
The Pentagon told the Hawaii radar operators to turn off their radars at 7:00AM. Then when one of the operators, disobeying orders, saw the pattern light up at 7:02AM, he called command. They told him ‘not to worry about it’ and that it was just a bunch of B-17’s. By 7:20AM he’s frantically calling command telling him there’s no way it’s a bunch of U.S. bombers and their approaches were all wrong to be bombers. “Don’t worry about it” was the refrain.
Japanese mini-subs were being attacked that morning around Hawaii. Yet the submarine net blocking the harbor was down at the time.
It’s all just intelligence failures. Something as big as the military is bound to foul up a lot. These were just kids operating radar stations! People make mistakes!
Lloyd’s of London stopped selling “bombing insurance” to Pearl Harbor residents, even though $100 million in policies were issued, in August 1941.
Admiral Richardson was fired in January 1941 from command because he refused to rehome the Pacific Fleet from San Diego to Pearl Harbor. He said that Pearl was unsafe and prone to Japanese sneak attack. Richardson, an expert in Japanese strategy, twice refused a direct order from the President to rehome the fleet. He refused to line up his battleship fleet to be sunk in the harbor.
FDR promised Churchill that he would have the US enter the war against Germany and Japan at the 1940 Atlantic Conference.
A courageous code clerk in the British embassy, Tyler Kent, seeing the telegrams between then-Naval Secretary Churchill and President FDR, planning the second World War in 1940, was jailed and held incommunicado in Britain for the duration of the war. This was reported in the U.S. press. Kent’s mother made regular appeals for his freedom and many warned that this was going to happen.
And what I’m writing here is honestly just the tip of the iceberg.
And then the attack happened.
2,403 Americans died at Pearl Harbor.
There was plenty of warning that it was coming.
Politica | PEARL HARBOR SERIES:
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