us started war against japan in '41?

Real Japanese History Heroes

This Bud's for you my Japanese revisionist history writer. Who would have thought the issue of who startedr the Pacific War was a moot point. Not for you Mr. Japanese Revisionist History Writer, who insists on stirring up a hornest nest of nonsense.

So this Bud's for you!

We suppose the US Navy sank the sub in Tokyo Bay and towed it to Pearl Harbor to set the Japanese up. In fact the USA was fully aware of the attack, but were defeated by the might of the Imperial Japanese navy.

Just what was the sub doing in Pearl, an undersea survey of coral reefs? Today is a day for people sticking their heads in the sand and the water respectively.

 

not really.

but FDR probably didn't do all he could to prevent the Pearl Harbor attack. the information was out there and was being intercepted. I think it was ploy just to get an isolationist U.S. involved with the European war.

But hey, we came out okay so i'm not complaining!

 

This sounds a lot like the supposed attack by the Poles against Germany in 1939.

That is Bush the Younger's problem. He isn't making up a fake Iraqi attack that allows us to respond with righteous moral wrath.

 

I would submit that you would not allow the Japanese to destroy a large portion of the Pacific Fleet as a means of accelerating our involvement in the war. if that were the case, the Japanese would have bombed Pearl harbor to destroy a handfull of near to be mothballed ships.

Clearly as we have today, there was bad intelligence and arrogance breed from a feeling of isolation that, the Japanese were preoccupied with Southeast Asia, Manchuria and China, and America was half a world away.

 

just you wait.

Here's a prediction: THE SECOND GULF WAR will begin mid October. An anti-aircraft missile will hit one of our planes (god bless the pilot inside) and the TANKS will roll on in. THE CHIMP and his little chimpettes will run amok in Washington D.C. after the November elections.

To hell with Appleby's I'm going to Baghdad for some human barbecue.

 

eh, you could be right too.

but the information was clearly out there. it was being intercepted by American analysts as well. it's just surprising how intelligence failed so badly then.

 

You mean to tell me the movie Pearl Harbor contains historical inaccuracies?

Oh man, if we can't go to Hollywood to get our facts, whom are we to turn to? I can never watch another movie the same way again, knowing that some of the stuff may not be real.

 

Yeah, and the Nanjing Massacre and Unit 431 never happened either. And the comfort women? No, they were a figment of the imagination of thousands of Korean and Chinese women! Too many Shintaro Ishihara's of the world.

 

Re: Real Japanese History Heroes

Agreed. That Japanese sub was on a mission of war. This is sort of like saying (to use a hypothetical example) that "Well, they started it because they fired their anti-aircraft guns before we dropped our bombs."

According to this updated Yahoo! article, the Ward radioed its report back, but the official reaction was pretty much "Are you sure?" I don't believe that Roosevelt deliberately allowed Pearl Harbor to happen -- it was an intelligence failure. Gee, where have we seen that before?

Incidentally, let's not forget that on October 31, 1941, a full five-plus weeks before Pearl Harbor, the USS Reuben James was sunk by a German U-boat in the Atlantic. The German captain, BTW, thought he was shooting at a British destroyer.

Argue about the legality of the Reuben James being where it was, or the Ward doing its duty on patrol; it does nothing to change our being on the right side in that war.

 

I thought the standard, accepted account, was that

a) We pretty much knew war was coming
b) we still were surprised by the sneak attack. This was pretty stupid on our part, because that's how the Japanese had historically fought...sneak attack, dig in, negotiate to keep the gains.
c) To the extent we expected an attack, we expected it in the Phillipines, NOT Pearl Harbor.

It's fashionable to be ignorantly cynical. It's not right, but it's fashionable.

 

It's Unit 731. And of course America is to blame for WW2, aren't they responsible for all evil in the world?

 

I'd generally agree with this, except the part about the Japs "historically" fighting this way. There really wasn't much of a record to go by on this stuff - Russia on the Korean Peninsula in 1905, the invasion of Manchuria (and printing a full page announcement in every Chinese newspaper a month in advance would not have been enough time for Chiang to get his act together anyway).

But it's true that we DID expect the attack in the Phillipines, but that was more a case of military bad judgement than anything else. Their analysis of Japanese capabilitites was simply wrong.

PLUS the Japanese did a very clever thing - they knew that the US knew their code names for their Navy vessels, particularly the big ones. So they reassigned the names, giving the Carriers the code name used by some garbage scows or something, and renaming the garbage scows with the code names previously used by the Carriers. Then they used them in more or less "open" transmissions. Thus, our intelligence had solid info that "red bird" and "spring joy" et al were in Japanese home waters. Naval intelligence was shocked as hell when they suddenly appeared off Pearl.

And to borrow a phrase from Top Gun, it was certainly no secret to anyone that "tensions were high". It isn't like ANYBODY was sitting around planning vacations to Nippon or something.

But the main problem here is, once again, the title of the thread; can't Gringo-Tex put a ban on starting threads by people who can't read?

Like this dimwit who saw a headline aboout how the US may have fired the first shot ("gee, there's a hostile sub trying to enter our Naval Base - let's be nice to them") and posted it with an absurd title without ever bothering to figure out what the article was saying.

(and an aside to those wierd enough to be interested: did you know that the Dragon Lady herself, Madame Chiang-Kai-Shek, is still alive? She's 105 years old, and living in New York City. She goes for a drive around town every Sunday, accompanied by a phalanx of security people paid for no doubt with some of the billions she and her husband stole from China and the US taxpayers)

 

Then you're admitting you only read the headaline?

Or were the words too big?

 

Can't you feel the love. Bill, fidlerre posted the thread based on the revisionist thinking of the, and I used the term loosely "historian".

 

waht kind of bull is that ....The Japs started it by attacking Pearl harbour

 

But, ironically, those battleships WERE obsolete. The strategy of naval battles changed when planes could sink battleships (witness part of the Bismarck campaign, Pearl Harbor, Yamato, etc.) Battleships were only useful for sinking other battleships and laying down some preinvasion barrages.

None of the American carriers -- which were the main targets of the Pearl Harbor strike -- were in harbor. They proved to be the key to the eventual US victory in the Pacific theater.

 

The most disturbing part is in that last quote; rather than come to a fuller understanding of the War, and their culpability in horrible acts of aggression and savagery, the Japanese are still working full time on blaming everyone else.

To them, the war was an Anti-Colonialist struggle between Asia and the West. The fact that their concept was for all of Asia to replace their round-eyed masters with almond-eyed ones is one that seems to elude them to this day.

To their credit, Germany has wallowed in their own guilt for 50 years. They largely acknowledge what they did (oh there are the stray nutjob neo-Nazis, but everybody has some crazies) and regret it.

The Japanese really, deep down, don't much seem to feel they did anything wrong except lose.

Thus you get guys like this idiot: "See, see, we KNEW America started this war".

Which of course ignores the fact that this was such an unknown incident that it's now 50 years later and it's just coming to light.

Because the FACT that he is, in his own Japanese way, completely ignoring, is that whether this midget sub which was sneaking into Pearl was sunk or whether it sailed back home to Yokohama is completely immaterial.

The only significant action that day took place in the skies over Hawaii.

As for "starting World War II", well, forgive me, but THAT started when Japan invaded Manchuria. Sorry.

 

Okay, one more time.

According to William Manchester in "The Glory and the Dream" - and supported by what actually happened - we got wind that the Japanese were planning to attack the Philippines on December 8. (December 7 Hawaii time.)

Which they did.

The intelligence failure was the premise that Japan could not launch simultaneous major offensives thousands of miles apart. It had nothing to do with FDR.

We were also expecting - this part is an edit - a declaration of war. I know, I know, it was very eighteenth century of us. But even freaking Adolf Hitler was still declaring war at this point. In fact, again according to Manchester, the Japanese did declare war before the attack. They sent a coded cable to their embassy in Washington. Which, because said embassy was understaffed (they weren't about to keep any more people in Washington than they could possibly get away with at that point), meant that the cable could not be decoded promptly. The message was handed to whichever TOTALLY pissed off member of the State Department about two or three hours after the attack. "I was instructed to hand this message to you at 10:00 pm," or words to that effect, was the sheepish explanation.

Now, that would have given the Americans at Pearl something like ten minutes notice, so it was still pretty much a sneak attack. But remember, NO ONE did this kind of thing back then, at least in "civilized" warfare.

 

> But, ironically, those battleships WERE obsolete.

That didn't mean we thought it was ok that they were sunk. In fact, most of them were raised and used in the war. An attack that failed would have been just as successful in getting us into war as one that succeeded.

 

Not only that, but battleships have proved useful in support of amphibious landings providing artillery cover as evidenced by anyone that landed in the islands of the South Pacific during the Pacific Theater.

 

Fred, I don't know how familiar you are with popular opinions in Japan but you seem to be basing judgement of Japan based on very limited sources.

Most of us, as far as I can tell, do not share the views of Shintaro Ishihara and his ilk. Right wingers (in the Japanese sense of the term) who still believe the emperor to be god, hinder our relationship with other Asian nations and drive around in armored vehicles harassing those whom they don't feel aren't nationalistic enough, are in the minority. However, they are an extremely vocal minority and some of them tend to hold high positions in the government. And unfortunately, extremist views, rather than moderate mainstream views, get more press and paint a skewed picture of Japanese people.

I won't deny that there's a significant element of Japanese population that believe the country's wartime agressions were justified, especially among the older generation. Schools also aren't putting enough emphasis on Japan's actions in Asia and the Pacific. But the majority accepts the guilt and do not take the right wingers seriously.

 

True, dat.

WW2, in the Pacific at least, started in the 1800s the instant the Japanese realized that their only hope of not becoming "China, Mk II" was to become a European-style industrial and military empire. In fact, empire was Japan's best bet to avoid getting third-world-ized because they didn't even have many native natural resources with which to build an industrial ecomony - like, say, oil for instance. And, hey, all the other kids on the block were doing it, so why shouldn't they? From that moment on, the collision course with the other imperial powers including the USA was firmly set.

The thing that set Japan apart from most of the other Empires (except possibly the English) was their hubris, racism and brutality. The other imperial powers may have had plenty of blood on their hands, but to my knowledge they did not do anything like what the Japanese did in Nanking.

As for anti-colonialism, I think you give them too much credit. Sure, they trotted out the anti-round eye slogans to fool the credulous yokels but "pan-Asianism" was just a euphemism for "Japanese Empire" and their Asian brothers be damned if they didn't submit. Just ask the Koreans.