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Remember

December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbour attack.

The image says it all.

10 comments to Remember

  • Ant

    A day that will make FDR’s name live in infamy. The greatest act of treachery ever perpetrated against his own country by a warfare/welfare president.

  • Much as I am willing to castigate FDR, he really did not think the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbour. The Philippines probably (so maybe he wanted to get rid of General Macarthur!).

    1) Any analysis of the prevailing military doctrines of the day would have suggested that the US Navy’s losses were so bad that Amerca was incapable of competing. True, being left with aircraft carriers forced a more modern strategy on the US military. After the loss of the USS Lexington and crippling of USS Yorktown at the Battles in the Coral Sea, there was every military excuse to appease the Japanese.

    2) You don’t park seven of your nine battleships in a target zone and leave an eighth, the flagship in a dry dock nearby.

    BTW the Japanese could have immobilised the entire Pacific fleet if they’d bombed the fuel depots.

    3) Churchill underestimated the Japanese, he thought they didn’t have the means to capture Singapore. The British losses in equipment and personnel in Singapore were terribly missed in North Africa.

    Let’s face it. Roosevelt wanted war with Germany and he wanted to pressure Japan into leaving China alone. From this to sacrificing the Pacific fleet is not a sustainable argument.

    Plus, I for one, am grateful for the arrival of US troops into Europe in the early 1940s.

  • From John Flynn’s The Roosevelt Myth:

    The events leading to Pearl Harbor have been extensively investigated, though there is yet much to be obtained. This much has been established completely and that is that the President and his war cabinet knew an attack was coming, though they did not know it was coming at Pearl Harbor. Whether or not they should have known is a point we cannot enter into here. The President had told the Japanese that if they made any further move in the Pacific the United States would have to act. The move expected was against the Kra Peninsula or perhaps Singapore itself, the Dutch East Indies or the Philippines. On November 27, just ten days before the attack, the President told Secretary Stimson, who wrote it in his diary, that our course was to maneuver the Japanese into attacking us.

  • jon

    In all the conspiracy-mongering regarding Dec. 7, 1941, I haven’t seen any explanation of how Roosevelt got the Japanese to bomb Pearl Harbor.

    I think that Roosevelt seeing something (a Japanese attack) as inevitable didn’t cause events to happen the way they did. If Bush thinks it’s inevitable that some Islamists will try to disrupt Iraqi elections next January, does that mean he and the terrorists have it all worked out?

    (Maybe I don’t want to hear the answers to that.)

  • Luniversal

    One way FDR got the Japs to bomb Pearl Harbor was by moving the Pacific Fleet to Hawaii from its usual base on the West Coast, with inadequate air defences and within range of the Emperor’s carriers.

    Simple, really.

    In the newsreel of FDR asking Congress to approve the declaration of war (what sticklers they were for quaint constitutional formalities in those far-off days), you can see him practically wetting himself in satisfaction at his own cleverness. “I got my war! On two fronts too!”

  • Rollo

    Says…..er……what, exactly?

  • J

    Thank you, Rollo – I thought no-one would ask.

    It says:

    1. Fuel oil burns with a smoky black flame.
    2. Ships stop floating after reaching a certain internal temperature.
    3. Warships look cool.
    4. Burning warships still look cool.

    Only joking, what it really says is:

    Any dramatic image, esp. of human suffering, will be given unreasonable emotional importance in the minds of those who have an axe to grind about politics or perfidy, or pacifism, or islam, or human rights or something like that.

    Actually, this gives me an idea – I could get random images from google, and caption them with ‘This says it all’ and see what pretentious guff people could come up with.

  • Al Maviva

    We had it coming.

    If we’d built more health clinics for poor people it would have never happened.

    It’s because of white, western imperialism that they did it.

    It was to prevent Prescott Bush from building a secret oil pipeline with the Nazis.

    Prescott Bush arranged Pearl Harbor, with the Skull & Bones club, and the Nazis.

    FDR Lied, People Died.

    Give peace a chance. There’s no such thing as a good war.

    It’s all about the Jooooos!

    Okay, sorry, sorry. Just a thought experiment to see if that BS sounds as stupid in the WWII context as it does today.

  • andy

    Okay, sorry, sorry. Just a thought experiment to see if that BS sounds as stupid in the WWII context as it does today.

    Far more so.

    The people spouting this shit off today would have (and should have) been shot for treason (and just for being spineless pussies as well)

  • Wild Pegasus

    It’s because of white, western imperialism that they did it.

    Mostly correct. FDR himself said that the goal was to handicap the Japanese so that they had no choice to attack, and their attack was centred on Hawai’i, an shining example of American imperialism over a non-white race.

    – Josh