December 7, 1941 — Pearl Harbor.
What American doesn’t know this date? 1
I’m going to release this after Dec. 7 simply so as to not detract from the sadness that we feel over the sneak attack by Japan resulting in the deaths of 4,000 or so men and women, including civilians. Their sacrifice was a national tragedy. The more so, you will realize, as you read on. Their sacrifice was deliberate!
The blow was heavy, but hardly a mortal wound to America. We lost 18 ships and 263 aircraft. But the question has to be asked — what rational nation would put a tempting target in the path of a nation threatening to go to war with them? What were they thinking?
One has to realize that the nation’s population was solidly opposed to war, from virtually all sides of the political spectrum. Indeed, the Olympics were held in Germany in 1936. While there were tensions, there was one thing the American people knew, and that was that they did not want to be drawn into another world war. The wounds of WWI were not completely healed, being only twenty years in the past. The average American opposed war. National heroes like Charles Lindberg and Will Rogers oppose war. Republican and Democratic leadership opposed war. The communists who occupied the White House and the State Department opposed war. All sides opposed war with Germany.
The communist position is particularly interesting — they wanted peace because Stalin and Hitler had a peace treat, and Russia was not under attack. Naturally they didn’t want a war (yet). Even after carving up Poland, the Russians were happy to take half of Poland and call it even. But€¦ on that day in 1939 when German soldiers invaded “Russian Poland”, OMG, the reds all changed their tune overnight, and the clamor for a war, from the “far left” was loud and shrill.
Pressure began to build on Roosevelt to get us into the war, particularly from the procommunist crowd. Congress demurred. They would not declare war because they knew good and well their constituents did not want war. Roosevelt fretted. He sent war material through Canada to Russia, without which the Russians could have not resisted the German onslaught. 2 He pushed the limits of what he could do to get us involved, but the American people were absolutely not interested, and public sentiment would not budge.
The world appears to know what has been withheld from American history books. What’s amazing is that most Americans do not realize that President Franklin Roosevelt knew in advance that the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor.
Roosevelt knew, and he did not tell them. This is an irrefutable fact of history. We had broken the Japanese codes.
It was because Roosevelt knew that he needed an incident so terrible that every American would rise up and demand to be allowed to go to war against the Axis Powers — Japan and Germany. And why did he “need” that? Because his commitment, and the commitment of his entire administration to aid and abet the communists was the top of his agenda. The communists owned the White House before World War II even began! 3
Knowing these things makes it possible to understand what otherwise makes no sense at all in the realm of both domestic and international affairs.
For Further Reading:
Churchill said it, and who can question his credentials as an historian?
“Churchill wrote in his Nobel Prize winning series on WWII that FDR knew about the Japanese plans to attack Pearl Harbor. The following is from pages 602-603 of THE GRAND ALLIANCE, c1950. Churchill makes these points about his good friend and colleague FDR, accusing him of treason while knowing that the facts would eventually come out:
- Hawaii's commanders did not get proper warning.
- Churchill was not going to judge what FDR did at Pearl Harbor.
- FDR and he were very afraid that the US could not come into the war unless Japan attacked the U.S.
- Pearl Harbor was worth the price.
- FDR "knew the full and immediate purpose" of the Japanese at Pearl Harbor.
- FDR welcomed the attack.
And this amazing statement: "Nor must we allow the account in detail of diplomatic interchanges to portray Japan as an injured innocent..." That is an admission, granted forced by the facts, that Japan WAS the injured innocent, maneuvered into firing the first shot, as Secretary of War Stimson put it. Cabinet Minister Sir Oliver Lyttelton, expressed the same point on June 20, 1944, to the American Chamber of Commerce: "Japan was provoked into attacking the Americans at Pearl Harbor. It is a travesty on history ever to say that America was forced into the war. Everyone knows where American sympathies were. It is incorrect to say that America was ever truly neutral even before America came into the war on a fighting basis." - See PH VERDICT OF HISTORY, Prange, pp 39-40. 4
Even as we girded for war, and plunged into it, blood to our armpits, there were furious questions back home about why no warning was given. The government quickly provided two scapegoats — Admirals Kimmell and Short. 5
(Excellent article:
http://jamesperloff.com/2014/11/06/pearl-harbor-roosevelts-911/
On June 23, 1941, Interior Secretary Ickes wrote in a memo to Roosevelt:
There will never be so good a time to stop the shipment of oil to Japan as we now have. . . . There might develop from embargoing of oil 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.
The memo’s date is significant: the day after Germany and her allies (Italy, Hungary, Romania, Finland and Croatia) launched Operation Barbarossa: the invasion of the Soviet Union.
Benjamin Gitlow, founding member of the U.S. Communist Party, wrote in I Confess (1940):
When I was in Moscow, the attitude toward the United States in the event of war was discussed. Privately, it was the opinion of all the Russian leaders to whom I spoke that the rivalry between the United States and Japan must actually break out into war between these two.
1 (I know, I know, probably half of them, considering how little the younger generation knows, but I don’t count them as Americans, simply living aimless lives of self-gratification, and having no clue as to who they are or what their ancestors paid so they could be here.)
2 Yes, the winters were brutal, but Germans knew all about that. They had been there a mere twenty years earlier. What they had not calculated on was the millions of tons of American war materiel that showed up, enabling Russia to put those winters to good use. Without our help, Russia would have gone under the German boot.
3 Actually, they captured the White House during the administration of Woodrow Wilson! But that’s a story for another day. They have lost the ownership of the occupant (the president) several times, but have further entrenched themselves in the Executive Branch with every administration over the past 100 years.
5 Both men were exonerated in a 1944 investigation, but the findings were immediately labeled “TOP SECRET” for the duration of the war. http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/history/item/4742-pearl-harbor-scapegoating-kimmel-and-short
© 2014, Daniel D. New