marcos,
As you may be aware, Hitler had many friends in the Anglo-Saxon world. A fair smattering of the British aristocracy liked his approach to law and order, and weren't too put out by the anti-semitism of the National Socialists. In the U.S. Henry Ford and Father Coughlin were famously sympathetic to the Nazis. We've even had intimations on this thread the that American Red Cross turned a blind eye to the humanitarian horrors of the Holocaust.
Re: Was the information being suppressed or was there a failure to coordinate it, understand its full meaning, and communicate it efficiently to Pearl Harbour?
I've been trying to recall the book I read about 18 months ago that laid out the secret U.S. policy toward Japan in the months that led up to Pearl. Unfortunately, my records are incomplete and I can't retrieve the title immediately. The gist of the secret U.S. policy from early 1940 on (if the book is not fabricating the policy directive out of whole cloth) indicated that there was to be a multi-commodity blockade of the Japanese trade. Thus, scrap metal shipments from the U.S. West Coast were embargoed, oil from Maylaysia (British Protectorate) and the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) were to be ended, shipments of foodstuffs from S.E. Asia curtailed and several other steps, including the ending of all sales of manufactured goods from the U.S. This had the effect of creating a vast paranoia among the Japanese military and political elite who correctly reasoned that we were trying to cut off the essential materiel of Japan's war machine, and as they saw it, the nation's existence. This had the expected effect. Which was to create within the Japanese hieracrchy the will to strike at the U.S. and at our assets in the Phillipines in order to break the stranglehold that our embargo was starting to place on Imperial Japan. It was a calculated risk to take out the American fleet at Pearl and in Subic in order to free up the opportunities for the Japanese to regain access to the oil of Maylaysia and Indonesia.
Then, as now, it was about the oil.
-R. |
