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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries

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To: Raymond Duray who wrote (62656)	4/24/2005 10:39:18 PM
From: Slagle	Read Replies (1) of 74559

Raymond, This is one I've worked on a lot and the whole business is just shades of grey but extremely interesting. I had a favorite Aunt who was a WAC officer assigned to the OSS codebreakers in the Pentagon about a year after Pearl Harbor. She actually knew and worked with a bunch of these people and after the war collected lots of material on the subject which I have now in my possession. I have read part of the Stinnett book. Here are the facts: FDR used ever provocation possible to encourage a Japanese attack, especially after May 1940. In August 1941 he issued an order effectively freezing all Japanese assets in the US and then takes off on one of his two week incommunicado ocean cruises and lying to the press about the Japanese assets on the way to Astor's yacht. And Cordell Hull, Stimpson, Knox and others were working at maximum effort to produce a Japanese attack too, right down to the final US ultimatum that Hull and Stimpson delivered to Ambassador Nomura on Nov. 28, 1941. After that date FDR knew an attack was coming. But here is the main problem with the idea that FDR's high command knew that the Pacific fleet wwould be sunk at anchor in Honolulu: It was just not know that such a thing was possible, indeed the US carriers and aircraft would not have been able to have accomplished as much, and we thought we were the best. The only sililar action that had ever been attempted was by the Brits a year earlier at Taranto anchorage and the result was not impressive. The Japanese Naval air arm had been developed and trained in secrecy, our intellegence knew nothing about them, we were even unaware of the Zero and the long lance torpedo. American pilots had been facing the Japanese for years in China and feared them not but the was the Japanese Army Air. It was unknown to FDR that Japan possessed such a capability, hence there is just no way that a Japanese victory on the scale of Pearl Harbor could have been anticipated. An attack, yes but not a disaster. Slagle

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