A Day That Will Live in Infamy

But maybe there's more to the story...

I would note that General Smedley Butler predicted Pearl Harbor in his War is a Racket written in 1938:

In the Orient the maneuvering is more adroit. Back in 1904, when Russia and Japan fought, we kicked out our old friends the Russians and backed Japan. Then our very generous international bankers were financing Japan. Now the trend is to poison us against the Japanese. What does the "open door" policy to China mean to us? Our trade with China is about $90,000,000 a year. Or the Philippine Islands? We have spent about $600,000,000 in the Philippines in thirty-five years and we (our bankers and industrialists and speculators) have private investments there of less than $200,000,000.

Then, to save that China trade of about $90,000,000, or to protect these private investments of less than $200,000,000 in the Philippines, we would be all stirred up to hate Japan and go to war -- a war that might well cost us tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives of Americans, and many more hundreds of thousands of physically maimed and mentally unbalanced men.
Of course, for this loss, there would be a compensating profit -- fortunes would be made. Millions and billions of dollars would be piled up. By a few. Munitions makers. Bankers. Ship builders. Manufacturers. Meat packers. Speculators. They would fare well.
Yes, they are getting ready for another war. Why shouldn't they? It pays high dividends.

 Timeline of Japan/U.S. Relations

• 1904 - The Japanese destroyed the Russian navy in a surprise attack in undeclared war.
• 1932 - In The Grand Joint Army Navy Exercises the attacker, Admiral Yarnell, attacked with 152 planes a half-hour before dawn 40 miles NE of Kahuku Point and caught the defenders of Pearl Harbor completely by surprise. It was a Sunday.
• 1938 - Admiral Ernst King led a carrier-born airstrike from the USS Saratoga successfully against Pearl Harbor in another exercise.
• 1940 - FDR ordered the fleet transferred from the West Coast to its exposed position in Hawaii and ordered the fleet remain stationed at Pearl Harbor over complaints by its commander Admiral Richardson that there was inadequate protection from air attack and no protection from torpedo attack. Richardson felt so strongly that he twice disobeyed orders to berth his fleet there and he raised the issue personally with FDR in October and he was soon after replaced. His successor, Admiral Kimmel, also brought up the same issues with FDR in June 1941.
• 7 Oct 1940 - Navy IQ analyst McCollum wrote an 8 point memo on how to force Japan into war with US. Beginning the next day FDR began to put them into effect and all 8 were eventually accomplished.
• 11 November 1940 - 21 aged British planes destroyed the Italian fleet, including 3 battleships, at their homeport in the harbor of Taranto in Southern Italy by using technically innovative shallow-draft torpedoes.
• 11 February 1941 - FDR proposed sacrificing 6 cruisers and 2 carriers at Manila to get into war. Navy Chief Stark objected: "I have previously opposed this and you have concurred as to its unwisdom. Particularly do I recall your remark in a previous conference when Mr. Hull suggested (more forces to Manila) and the question arose as to getting them out and your 100% reply, from my standpoint, was that you might not mind losing one or two cruisers, but that you did not want to take a chance on losing 5 or 6." (Charles Beard PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT AND THE COMING OF WAR 1941, p 424)
• March 1941 - FDR sold munitions and convoyed them to belligerents in Europe -- both acts of war and both violations of international law -- the Lend-Lease Act.
• 23 Jun 1941 - Advisor Harold Ickes wrote FDR a memo the day after Germany invaded the Soviet Union, "There might develop from the embargoing of oil to Japan such a situation as would make it not only possible but easy to get into this war in an effective way. And if we should thus indirectly be brought in, we would avoid the criticism that we had gone in as an ally of communistic Russia." FDR was pleased with Admiral Richmond Turner's report read July 22: "It is generally believed that shutting off the American supply of petroleum will lead promptly to the invasion of Netherland East Indies...it seems certain she would also include military action against the Philippine Islands, which would immediately involve us in a Pacific war." On July 24 FDR told the Volunteer Participation Committee, "If we had cut off the oil off, they probably would have gone down to the Dutch East Indies a year ago, and you would have had war." The next day FDR froze all Japanese assets in US cutting off their main supply of oil and forcing them into war with the US. Intelligence information was withheld from Hawaii from this point forward.
• 14 August - At the Atlantic Conference, Churchill noted the "astonishing depth of Roosevelt's intense desire for war." Churchill cabled his cabinet "(FDR) obviously was very determined that they should come in."
• 18 October - diary entry by Secretary of Interior Harold Ickes: "For a long time I have believed that our best entrance into the war would be by way of Japan."

Gen. Butler foretold events to come clearly:

At each session of Congress the question of further naval appropriations comes up. The swivel-chair admirals of Washington (and there are always a lot of them) are very adroit lobbyists. And they are smart. They don't shout that "We need a lot of battleships to war on this nation or that nation." Oh no. First of all, they let it be known that America is menaced by a great naval power. Almost any day, these admirals will tell you, the great fleet of this supposed enemy will strike suddenly and annihilate 125,000,000 people. Just like that. Then they begin to cry for a larger navy. For what? To fight the enemy? Oh my, no. Oh, no. For defense purposes only.

Then, incidentally, they announce maneuvers in the Pacific. For defense. Uh, huh.
The Pacific is a great big ocean. We have a tremendous coastline on the Pacific. Will the maneuvers be off the coast, two or three hundred miles? Oh, no. The maneuvers will be two thousand, yes, perhaps even thirty-five hundred miles, off the coast.
The Japanese, a proud people, of course will be pleased beyond expression to see the united States fleet so close to Nippon's shores. Even as pleased as would be the residents of California were they to dimly discern through the morning mist, the Japanese fleet playing at war games off Los Angeles.
The ships of our navy, it can be seen, should be specifically limited, by law, to within 200 miles of our coastline. Had that been the law in 1898 the Maine would never have gone to Havana Harbor. She never would have been blown up. There would have been no war with Spain with its attendant loss of life. Two hundred miles is ample, in the opinion of experts, for defense purposes. Our nation cannot start an offensive war if its ships can't go further than 200 miles from the coastline. Planes might be permitted to go as far as 500 miles from the coast for purposes of reconnaissance. And the army should never leave the territorial limits of our nation.

Amateurs talk about strategy, professionals talk about logistics. In 1941, the following facts were known to all involved:

• World's Manufacturing capacity: Japan: 4%; USA: 29% [1]
• Japan had 11 aircraft carriers at the start of WW2, which had taken them 20 years to build.[2]
• America had 7 aircraft carriers at the start of WW2, but had 100 four years later, churning out an average three carriers per month.[3]
• Motorized vehicles per capita: Japan-less than one vehicle per thousand people; USA-200 vehicles per thousand people.[4]
• At the height of WW2, America was producing a jeep every 90 seconds. [5]
• The Japanese had no natural oil source and were dependent on American oil.

The Japanese knew all this, Admiral Yamamoto had calculated that they would be able to hold off the Americans for just six months, a prediction that was amazingly on target. For six months later at the Battle of Coral Sea, the Japanese advance was stopped and the fleet decimated a month later at Midway.

Anyone out there who is interested in Level Three knowledge on this would do well to check out Pat Buchanan's piece that highlights a compilation book done by Herbert Hoover and his perspective of World War II. Remember he was a bankster boy that got thrown under the bus as the fall guy for the Great Depression. In this book, Herbert Hoover has his revenge:

Today, 70 years after Pearl Harbor, a remarkable secret history, written from 1943 to 1963, has come to light. It is Hoover’s explanation of what happened before, during and after the world war that may prove yet the death knell of the West.
Edited by historian George Nash, Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath, is a searing indictment of FDR and the men around him as politicians who lied prodigiously about their desire to keep America out of war, even as they took one deliberate step after another to take us into war.
Yet the book is no polemic. The 50-page run-up to the war in the Pacific uses memoirs and documents from all sides to prove Hoover’s indictment. And perhaps the best way to show the power of this book is the way Hoover does it — chronologically, painstakingly, week by week.

Sources, as compiled by Richard Maybury in his tremendous book, WWII: The Rest of the Story and How it Affects You Today.

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1. Economic Geography, McGraw Hill, 1941

2 .Jane's Fighting Ships of WW2, Crescent, NY, 1989 pg 179-204

3. Mobilizing US Industry During WW2, Alan Gropman, Institute for National Defense Studies, National Defense University, Washington DC, 1996, pg. 96.

4. Why the Allies Won, Richard Overy, WW Norton & Co. NY, 1995, p. 224

5. "Does anyone care" Bob Green, Chicago Tribune, January 14, 2001, p. 2