Especially in the light of intercepted military communications from the Japanese discussing an attack on the US. On the other hand, it seems odd that the military, even in the event of a conspiricy, would allow the fleet there to be so unprepared. Sure, they needed something to goad the American public into war, but any attack would have sufficed - why allow something so devastating? Our ability to rebuild and turn to a war economy was hardly assured. Government incompetence is more common than conspiricy.
Maybe more so. Soldiers are sacrificed in every war - the risk of death is inevitable. You can argue that the Axis would have won had the US not entered the war when it did, thus that sacrifice (or murder) is at least partly justified. Incompetance really can't be justified.
I must admit, when I first came across the theory of early warning or even goading/setup, about 20 years ago, I thought the American High Command was justified. As I grow older, I realize that once you give up one principal, other, more important ones, are soon to follow.
I disagree. Every ethical decision is a choice - they may be interconnected, but they are still solitary choices, and you can act against a principle without giving up your belief in that principle. "And the Anzio bridgehead, was held for the price of a few hundred ordinary lives" Is it really any morally worse than botching an operation, or letting people die to secure an important objective?
Well I also later learned of your founding father's original commitment to trade with all foreign countries, but to not ally with them, nor engage in their entanglements. Imagine if the U.S stuck with that one. Yeah I know, it IS tough, but WWII might have never even happened. It is a slippery slope to climb out of.
How do you figure? I can't see how the European outbreak of world war two can be blamed on the US. It was exclusively European. So was the beginning of world war one, the aftereffects of world war one and the depression being the basic causes of ww2.
It was not the beginning of WWI that was the cause of WWII , but it's ending. The ending would have been better and more "stable" without the U.S entry.
World war one would have ended in mutual, exhausted armistice because no side had a definite advantage? I can see that. On the other hand, the principle is somewhat unrealistic. Would have made for a wildly different (better?) 20th century. It would be nice for America to be isolationist....
Possible, but that's not to say that there wouldn't have been an even worse war in the place of WWII. There were plenty of sources of instability in the region in those days: the Bolshevik revolution, collapse of the Ottoman Empire, rise of America to parity with the various Imperial powers, etc.
America was not isolationalist, It freely traded with nearly everyone. Yes Europe would have been exhausted, Germany would have had few to blame for a much more tolerable 30s depression. (No Hitler) Americas rise might have been a little less dramatic, British Empire and other European power's hold over their colonies - weakened earlier. I think the world would be better off today, yes. War is a waste. We might not have had a space race(I think we would have anyway).
You know what I mean Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! We were very reluctant to be involved in the wars "of the old world." Although of course there were military operations in the Phillippines, we blasted our way into Japan, we fucked about with Mexico...etc. Possibly, but the line was not to blame America for the defeat, it was to blame a "failure of will" and internal sabotage. The depression wasn't caused by the first world war, either, and I don't believe that it was particularly exacerbated by the aftereffects. Some fan! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Don't think he would have found 20th century warfare productive... No they didn't blame America. They were plenty pissed about the treay terms(reparations etc). Previously to WWI the conflicts were at least of "interest" to the U.S. U.S problems from beginning to end.
Did President Roosevelt know about the Pearl Harbour attack before it occurred (through intercepted Japanese signals) because the American Naval Intelligence boffins had broken Code Purple, which was the Japanese Naval code); and if so, did he let it happen in order to pull the USA into the war? Just a thought
Nope, but I wonder about finding any sort of warfare productive. Which may or may not have happened without US involvement, had the Allied powers won. The Napoleanic wars? The Franco-Prussian war?
No I was talking about the war of 1812, war with the spanish(heh every rising power needs to kick over a spanish fleet as a rite of passage), the texas thing.
Having been stationed in Hawaii, I had a few years to study the attack on Dec. 7, 1941. For the first point any time the Fleet was in Hawaiian waters is anchored at Pearl for weekends, so the swabs, could have liberty and blow of some steam, normal deployment cruses were in the 60 to 180 day range, and it was always great to get back to port. The fleet had just returned from a deployment and was in for supply and refit, and this was the normal anchorage, nothing unusual, those births had been established for close to 20 years, and Pearl was the home of the Pacific Fleet. 28 May 1903, the first battleship, USS Wisconsin, entered Pearl Harbor, and in August 1919, the anchorage for Battleship row was opened. So there was nothing unusual about were the ships were anchored, or the fact that they were in Port. Hind sight is 20/20, and we were still at peace, and really didn't believe that Japan was ready to attack yet. We were reading some of the Purple Code, but the Purple Code was not the military code, and we had no capability to read the military code JN–25, at the time of Pearl Harbor, we didn't really start to read the JN-25 code until the Middle of 1942, just in time for Battle of Coral Sea and Midway,. Now for a fact the 14th paragraph wasn't deciphered until after the time of the attack at Pearl Harbor, it was only fully decoded at 1.25 pm Washington time, which is 7.55 am Honolulu Time, and the attack had already commenced The last paragraph of the 14th part reads as follows: The Message never used the words War, and never declared War as required by Hague convention. Most authors contend that if part 14 of the message from Japan to the United States had been delivered before the Pearl Harbor attack, the War between Japan and the U.S. would have been "legally declared". Among other nations, Japan, Italy and Germany were signatories to the Hague Treaty of 1907. One of the conditions they agreed to was: "The Contracting Powers recognize that hostilities between themselves must not commence without previous and explicit warning, in the form either of a reasoned declaration of war or of an ultimatum with conditional declaration of war."
The war of 1812 was with the British, sack and burning of Washington D.C. and the Battle of New Orleans.
