Counter-Currents
2,454 words
Robert B. Stinnett
Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor
Free Press, 1999
You know how Copernicus began his study of the heavenly bodies not to refute Ptolemy’s geocentric paradigm, but to restore it? The reference might seem like it’s from left field, but it perfectly suits what Robert Stinnett was trying to do with his 1999 work, Day of Deceit.
The book’s subtitle says it all: “The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor.” Stinnett, who was a Second World War veteran himself, doesn’t merely expose how President Franklin Delano Roosevelt deliberately goaded Japan into war in order to facilitate hostilities against Nazi Germany. He also demonstrates that FDR knew ahead of time where and approximately when Japan was going to attack, thereby putting much of the Pacific fleet and thousands of Hawaiian citizens in mortal danger. Ruthless and dishonest, yes—but for the greater good, according to Stinnett, since the Pearl Harbor attacks unified America and enabled its truculent elite to sell a bloody world war to its citizenry. All to beat those bad evil Nazis. But by focusing so much of Day of Deceit on the jaw-dropping skullduggery of FDR and his top brass, one begins to wonder if their efforts hadn’t been for the greater good. Perhaps the Nazis weren’t the evil ones after all?
Of course, the advanced knowledge theory of Pearl Harbor is nothing new. As early as 1944 Republican presidential candidate Thomas Dewey was questioning how the Pacific fleet could have been surprised if American codebreakers had broken Japanese codes months before the attack. After the war, US lawmakers were asking similar questions when they spearheaded investigations into Pearl Harbor. As early September 1945, a LIFE magazine article charged FDR with foreknowledge of the attack. Harry Elmer Barnes repeated this claim throughout his career, as did many revisionist historians and conspiracy theorists. After all, the advance-knowledge claim makes a lot of sense. FDR, not being an autocrat, could not simply declare war on Germany without the backing of the notoriously isolationist American people. He needed a casus belli. And what better way to achieve this than by goading the notoriously militaristic Japanese—a key German ally—into striking the first blow? There is much circumstantial evidence supporting this theory. It also makes for one heck of a plot twist in a war already brimming with plot twists. But is it true?
Well, yes. Stinnett makes it nearly impossible to read Day of Deceit and not come to that conclusion. As he ends his book quite definitively, “We knew.”
Day of Deceit tells the familiar story about the lead-up to Pearl Harbor, but with a heavy emphasis on cryptoanalysis and information flow. Most importantly, after over a decade of research, Stinnett introduces a great many heretofore uncovered primary sources which shed light on how much the Americans knew of Japanese movements and intentions—as well how much key players in the saga were prevented from knowing. Admiral Husband Kimmel, Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet, is the prime example. On practically every fifth page Stinnett reveals evidence of Kimmel being given faulty or incomplete information, or no information at all—information which would have enabled him to protect his fleet from the sneak attack that FDR and his inner circle knew was coming.
The prize among prizes in Day of Deceit however is the Eight-Point McCollum Memorandum, which Stinnett uncovered himself in 1995. This game-changing document, written in October 1940 by Lieutenant Commander Arthur McCollum, outlines the general strategy the United States ended up employing vis-à-vis Japan during the 14-month lead up to the Pearl Harbor attack. Whether or not FDR actually saw the document remains an open question, but the similarity between plan and practice in this case is quite remarkable:
- Make an arrangement with Britain for the use of British bases in the Pacific, particularly Singapore.
- Make an arrangement with Holland for the use of base facilities and acquisition of supplies in the Dutch East Indies [now Indonesia].
- Give all possible aid to the Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek.
- Send a division of long-range heavy cruisers to the Orient, Philippines, or Singapore.
- Send two divisions of submarines to the Orient.
- Keep the main strength of the US fleet, now in the Pacific, in the vicinity of the Hawaiian Islands.
- Insist that the Dutch refuse to grant Japanese demands for undue economic concessions, particularly oil.
- Completely embargo all trade with Japan, in collaboration with a similar embargo imposed by the British Empire.
The document’s paper trail goes from McCollum to FDR advisors Walter Anderson and Dudley Knox, who commented on it approvingly. It ends there, however. Despite this, Stinnett demonstrates how likely it was that this document fell into FDR’s hands, given how he followed each of the points above, starting in October 1940:
Roosevelt’s “fingerprints” can be found on each of McCollum’s proposals. One of the most shocking was Action D, the deliberate deployment of American warships within or adjacent to the territorial waters of Japan. During secret White House meetings, Roosevelt personally took charge of Action D. he called the provocations “pop-up” cruises: “I just want them to keep popping up here and there and keep the Japs guessing. I don’t mind losing one or two cruisers, but do not take a chance on losing five or six.”
Stinnett follows this up in his footnotes with historical examples of FDR following the McCollum Memorandum almost to a tee. Yes, in a court of law, Stinnett cannot prove that FDR ever read the Memorandum himself. On the other hand, with a document this radical and subversive, of course FDR would have left no record of his ever having read it. It would have been profoundly stupid of him to do otherwise. This basically is the nut of all conspiratorial thinking: drawing conclusions about the hermetically sealed inner workings of a process by looking only at its outer workings. We should remember, however, that all members of government are conspirators by definition. This then leads us to ask which is more believable: FDR following these points by coincidence or design? For example, exactly one day after the McCollum Memorandum was circulated, FDR decided to initiate Action F: place the Pacific fleet in Hawaii. When fleet commander Admiral James Richardson objected since this would unnecessarily provoke the Japanese as well as endanger thousands of lives, FDR fired him and replaced with the much less qualified Anderson, who happened to be his crony.
Stinnett dedicates many pages to the ins and outs of cryptoanalysis, and reveals how the US codebreakers at the time were the best in the world. They had broken the secret Japanese codes and were well aware of what they were doing at all times. But much of this intelligence was hidden from Kimmel in order to not jeopardize McCollum’s action plans. America had to goad Japan into striking first.
Lieutenant Commanders Joseph Rochefort and Edwin Layton were top intelligence officers during the war and were also lifelong friends with McCollum. Stinnett shows time and time again how these three deliberately kept Kimmel in the dark when it came to the Japanese. Could there have been collusion between them?
When Japanese emperor Hirohito sent a radio message to his fleet saying, “NITAKA YAMA NOBORE” (“CLIMB MOUNT NITAKA”) as a signal to commence the war, it was decoded along with other messages about the aircraft carrier Kasuga Maru and Japan’s Carrier Division Four. They were then sent to Rochefort’s office.
Rochefort and his staff distilled the bundle into the Daily Communication Intelligence Summary and delivered it to Admiral Kimmel for his scheduled 8:00 A.M. briefing by Edwin Layton on December 3. The summary’s contents had nothing to say about the NITAKA dispatch or [Joseph] Howard’s intercepts of the carrier Kasuga Maru and Carrier Division Four, whose mission was to attack American bases in the Philippines.
Other examples of Japanese intercepts being kept from Kimmel include Admiral Yamamoto’s message commencing the Japanese air fleet departure from Hitokappu Bay, the Maxon Alert, which contained dispatches from Japanese spies directing the preparation of bomb plots against Pearl Harbor, as well as Japanese fleet radio transmissions as they crossed the Pacific towards the Western Hemisphere.
Another one of Stinnett’s accomplishments was to explode the myth of radio silence. It has long been part of Pearl Harbor lore that the Japanese fleet had been able to catch the Americans by surprise simply because they kept mum as they raced across the Pacific. Cryptographers cannot decode what does not get broadcast. Yet, in the Afterword of the paperback edition Stinnett reveals that in May 2000, months after the hardcover publication, thousands of documents were released due to the Freedom of Information Act. These documents provide conclusive evidence that American cryptographers knew where and when the Japanese were going to strike—because the Japanese had not maintained radio silence after all. The very idea had been a fiction, one foisted upon Congress during the investigations of 1945 and 1946. And the American public bought it. Even such a distinguished historian as Stephen Ambrose was propagating this myth as late as 1999.
Stinnett also brings up repeatedly how important information somehow never found its way into any official Pearl Harbor investigations. This includes the testimony of chief radioman Homer Kisner, who worked closely with Rochefort, as well as that of cryptographer Joseph Howard, who intercepted Hirohito’s NITAKA message, and cryptographer Harry Hood, who intercepted Japanese messages during the period of supposed radio silence. Also omitted were the TESTM dispatches from American cryptographers to Rochefort’s Station HYPO in Pearl Harbor, which ultimately went to FDR and reveal how much Admiral Kimmel had been kept out of the loop.
Another recurring motif which deserves mention is all the secrecy surrounding Pearl Harbor. It’s as if the US government still has something to hide after all these years. In response to Congressional scrutiny following the attack, “all records involving the Japanese radio intercept program—including the White House route logs and their secret contents—were locked asway in vaults controlled by Navy communication officials,” according to Stinnett. Censorship of public documents was widely practiced.
Monographs prepared for FDR in the weeks preceding the attack have inexplicably gone missing. As early as December 11, cryptographers were ordered to destroy notes and personal memoranda. Stinnett himself had been refused many requests for classified documents.
Then there is the curious case of the Fourteenth Naval District routing slip in the National Archives. Apparently, Rochefort had received a request from Lieutenant General Walter Short to decode certain Japanese intercepts, but ignored it. Rochefort initialed a routing slip and kept the original letter, dated November 27. But in the Archives there was an additional slip with the same serial number dated January 1, 1942, weeks after Short had been relieved of his duties. Could this have been an attempt to make it seem as if Short had asked for Rochefort’s assistance after the attack. Of course, we have no way of knowing because the US military still refuse to release the letters. Yes, national security may have been a good reason for suppression and secrecy back then. But 55 years on?
Stinnett states it all quite adroitly:
The author contends that this extraordinary secrecy, which still remains in effect in 1999, is intended to distance the American government and particularly FDR from foreknowledge of Japanese attack plans.
Perhaps this is why Day of Deceit received such pushback from mainstream historians shortly after it was published: They were protecting the reputation of FDR. This is why I think that much of it was politically motivated. Take the Day of Deceit Wikipedia article for example. In it, we have a brief synopsis and then nine paragraphs debunking Stinnett’s claims. That’s it. It has nothing positive to offer, as if its purpose is to discourage people from reading the book rather than offering an evenhanded review. Having read Day of Deceit, I know it deserves at least that. Perhaps not all of Stinnett’s inferences are correct, and perhaps some of his conclusions are a bit of a stretch, and perhaps his book contains errors (what work of history doesn’t?), but Stinnett deserves a mountain of praise for uncovering all the evidence that he did. This includes, among many other things:
- The McCollum Memorandum.
- The testimony of Homer Kisner.
- The testimony of Harry Hood.
- The Fourteenth Naval District routing slips in the National Archives.
- The Maxon Alert, which was among the deceased Rochefort’s effects, held by his daughter.
- Proof that ten of Admiral Yamamoto’s intercepted messages are now missing from the National Archives.
- Proof that the log of the US ocean liner Lurliner, which captured Japanese radio chatter just days before Pearl Harbor, had mysteriously disappeared from the National Archives.
The Second World War remains quite the sacred cow in today’s politics. To question the righteousness of the Allied cause is tantamount to giving breathing room for Hitler and the Nazis, which our current leftist elite simply cannot allow. This is so because within the fascism, ethnonationalism, and race realism found in Nazism awaits the antidote to their power. Thus, focusing on the Roosevelt Administration’s deceitful provocations of Japan becomes dangerous. Yes, Stinnett brandishes his “so what if he did,” attitude regarding FDR, and pays suitable obeisance to political correctness. But if it is proven that the United States made an enemy out of Japan when it didn’t really need to, and then went to war when it didn’t really need to, and then lied about it for decades, then the seed of moral equivalency begins to sprout and one paradigm begins to bleed into another. If FDR was willing to sacrifice thousands of his own people under false premises and then initiate a war which killed millions and ended with atomic hellfire and the utter destruction of nations, how is he any better than Hitler? How is America’s so-called liberal democracy any better than fascism or Nazism?
Not only this, but if the door is pushed ajar with Pearl Harbor, imagine how far it can burst open with the Gulf of Tonkin or 9/11 or the October 7 attacks which launched the Gaza War in 2023. Any time you have an all-too-scintillating casus belli for a country, Day of Deceit now makes it fair play to wonder if behind the scenes there weren’t a number of hardened men desperate to secretly manufacture a reason for their warlike ambitions. And if thousands of their own people have to die to accomplish this, so be it.
America lost 2,476 soldiers, sailors, and civilians on December 7, 1941. 1,951 were taken prisoner, with most dying while in Japanese custody. But these are just numbers. As Joseph Rochefort stated after the war, Pearl Harbor “was a pretty cheap price to pay for unifying the country.” Yes, it was, but only for cold-blooded warmongers like FDR.
Enjoyed this article?
Be the first to leave a tip in the jar!
18 comments
“I just want them to keep popping up here and there and keep the Japs guessing. I don’t mind losing one or two cruisers..”
Yeah, it was A-OK for Roosevelt to “not mind” losing a “cruiser or two” – how many men were on those cruisers whose lives he considered expendable? He and his loved ones didn’t have to worry about being on the front lines, ensconced thousands of nautical from enemy lines.
My oldest uncle, a 23 year old transport pilot, was shot down and killed in WW II; my grandmother never recovered.
All monuments to Roosevelt – and Churchill too for that matter – should be razed and public toilets built in the place.
Emperor Hirohito did not radio the Japanese fleet.
“1,951 were taken prisoner”, so the Japanese landed in Hawaii?
There is good reason why people distrust historians.
The 1,951 Americans were picked up during Japanese attacks on Guam and Wake. I should have clarified that. Thanks for spotting it.
According to Stinnett, Hitohito did send a message to the Japanese fleet. It was “broadcast in plain Japanese” because Yamamoto knew that smaller vessels could not decipher an encrypted message. So he went with Code Book A which simply used code words. Stinnett includes images of the NIITAKA dispatch in the book.
I am looking at p. 378 of Stinnett’s “Day of Deceit” and it says “Admiral Yamamoto [commander in chief of the combined fleet] couldn’t take a chance on encrypting the message …” Elsewhere, p. 184, Toland’s “Rising Sun”: “Yamamoto sent a slightly longer cable …[Climb Mount Niitaka].” Walter Lord, “Day of Infamy”: “Admiral Yamamoto radioed the task force: …” (Gordon Prange, “At Dawn We Slept”, p. 445, said Admiral Matome Ugaki , Yamamoto’s chief of staff, issued the order.) Perhaps Stinnett is purposly conflating the “climb” order with the Emperor’s Dec. 8 declaration of war? Why not, since Stunnett served and was shot at during the Pacific War. However, the fact is the Emperor was nowhere near a mike in the Navy Ministry.
Correct again. Yamamoto sent the message after Hirohito gave him the go ahead, according to Stinnett. Thanks.
Very interesting. I have a wider theory, which I exposited once before. As a disclaimer, I’m really a newb in World War II compared to you guys, but I recently did the teaching company course on the Pacific theater just to get the dates of the battles in order. Take what I say with a grain of salt, but I think it deserves some analysis. Something struck me along these lines, with the theory of fore knowledge. Now, of course, you probably know that the Japanese struck other small targets when they hit Pearl Harbor. In particular, they attacked the Philippines as well. MacArthur was in command of the Philippines at this time. however, the Japanese squadron deployed to the Philippines was delayed by a storm. So say, when MacArthur got the news of Pearl Harbor, he went into his office and would not answer the door at all for an hour. So say, it’s one of the great mysteries of World War II, why he did that. He was supposed to immediately deploy an attack squadron against Japanese controlled Taiwan in response to an attack on Pearl Harbor. Instead, he delayed for an hour. The leading theory is that he was so thunderstruck by the attack on Pearl Harbor that he was incapable of acting. I find it highly doubtful someone who saw hot battle as a commander in World War I, would be reduced to a blubbering mess by a sneak attack somewhere else. finally he did come out and ordered the attack. The Japanese squadron arrived as the US planes were queuing up on the airstrip and destroyed them like it was a turkey shoot they say!
Now now, with this interpretation, what if there was a conspiracy, among commanders, which MacArthur was part of, and he was purposely delaying to allow the Japanese squadron to make it to the Philippines to destroy the American Air Force there.
Now, also, this. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Nimitz visited Pearl Harbor to assess the damage. He said it was really only superficial. The Japanese made three major mistakes. First of all, they didn’t destroy the dry docks, which would enable the Americans to repair the fleet in Hawaii rather than having to go back to the Pacific coast. Second, they didn’t destroy the fuel magazine, with similar advantages. Thirdly, the Japanese seemed unaware of the international date line, and attacked Sunday morning, so that most of the American skilled men were at church and survived the attack. if any of these things have not been true, American ability to wage war in the Pacific would’ve been greatly hobbled. So, in fact, we got quite lucky at Pearl Harbor, and it also makes you a question the intelligence of the Japanese. To point, this was an attack which could’ve knocked out the American ability to wage war in the Pacific.
of course, and they talk about this in the teaching company course, there was a huge amount of diplomatic pressure and propaganda of “Germany first” after the war with Japan started. That we should focus on defeating Germany before Japan. If the Americans simply were unable to fight Japan, because of damages in the Pacific, then this is what would’ve happened. It all fits together, sort of well. Those who wear the dark sunglasses would understand the political motivations for all of this.
What do you guys think?
I understand that the Pearl Harbor fuel depot was pretty obvious, so not targeting it was a big oversight. As for conducting the raid during church, it seems that didn’t figure into their calculations. I’d be inclined to chalk all this up to less-than-adequate planning by the Japanese. Moreover, other than Yamamoto himself, they badly underestimated American capabilities.
As for MacArthur, I ran this one by my Pacific War consultant. She considers it entirely possible that he had been told to delay; the Powers That Be definitely wanted a war.
“In 1940, Japan occupied northern Indochina, a step toward its goal of capturing the oil supplies in the Dutch East Indies. To stop Japanese aggression, the United States placed an embargo on the export of scrap metal, oil, and aviation fuel to Japan.”
While Japan’s deadly assault on Pearl Harbor stunned Americans, its roots stretched back more than four decades. As Japan industrialized during the late 19th century, it sought to imitate Western countries such as the United States, which had established colonies in Asia and the Pacific (with extreme and deadly force, see Philippines) to secure natural resources and markets for their goods. Japan’s process of imperial expansion, however, put it on a collision course with the United States, particularly in relation to China. (America westernized Japanese political and industrial direction, as we have now done with China, this to some degree actually promoted a culture change)
To a certain extent, the conflict between the United States and Japan stemmed from their competing interests in Chinese markets and Asian natural resources (not the mass murder and rape conducted by the Japanese forces in China). While the United States and Japan jockeyed peaceably for influence in eastern Asia for many years, the situation changed in 1931. That year Japan took its first step toward building a Japanese empire in eastern Asia by invading Manchuria, a fertile, resource-rich province in northern China. Japan installed a puppet government in Manchuria, renaming it Manchukuo. But the United States refused to recognize the new regime or any other forced upon China under the Stimson Doctrine, named after Secretary of State and future Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson.
This prompted Roosevelt to freeze all Japanese assets in the United States on July 26, 1941, which effectively cut off Japan’s access to US oil.” (more in the article – The path to Pearl harbor)
Destroying fuel supplies were calculated a less important since the US could replenish them quickly unless Japan planned to quickly blitz into the west coast. Sacrificing obsolete P 40’s was not a US plan since they had no other “more precious” aircraft to save, as we see in the first 2 years of the war. The Grumman hellcat was just as obsolete and the Japanese had a Turkey shoot creating 100 kill aces.
Also, organizing an immediate act of war or an immediate act of peace to deter war for us is always slow moving unlike the dictatorships for a few reasons, one being the multitude of varying interests and forces. Many influential business isolationists demanded continued commerce with Japan.
As Tom Hagen said in the Godfather, after we cut them off we should have expected it, although we did not expect it all the way to Pearl in the scale that it happened.
Correction Grumman “Wildcat”
Aside from the failure to destroy the tank farm and dry docks, little of military value was lost at Pearl. The battleships were WW I vintage and would have have been hopeless in a running battle with the jap surface fleet. The army fighters —P-40B tomahawks and P-36 Mohawks — were either obsolete (or obsolescent) and were no longer front line equipment. The aircraft carriers, which the usn could not afford to lose were rarely in port. the Japanese gained little militarily from the attack.
I’d be curious to know how much oil was in the tank farm~ does anyone have this info.
The Japanese failed to destroy the “tank farm”, oil, etc because they were after the bait laid out before them in the form of aircraft carriers that the US had “stupidly” parked at Pearl, only to be “fortunately” ordered out to sea in a quiet sector as the Japanese fleet steamed towards them.
The Japanese were not trying to start a war but to end it. From their perspective they were already in a war vs America which they were losing, and if they could have KOd the aircraft carriers and dictate terms of peace, there would have been no war. We probably would have got kicked out of Hawaii, but they would not have pressed further.
In truth the Japanese should have attacked the Soviet Union and crushed Stalin from both sides during Barbarossa. That would have ended the war and likely led to the exposure of FDR and his Stalin controlled government. Agents in high places in Japan argued for the Pearl Harbor attack instead, and America did its part by menacing Japan and letting it leak out through spies that America was gearing up to attack and destroy Japan
I heartily thank the author for treating us to some long-forgotten historical Revisionism. Many of these important questions remain today and should not be forgotten.
I have no doubt about the mendacity of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the perfidity of his regime.
But there remains a high evidentiary bar to hurdle in answering the question as to who-knew-what before the local miltary commanders were caught by surprise at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
And most of the historiography fails to measure up as promised. Unfortunately, Robert Stinnett’s Day of Deceit is one of them. We’d like to have the smoking gun ─ it definitely fits ─ but probability and actual proof are not the same things.
Most historians face a constant battle with restrospective analysis. We know now that the U.S. Government was reading many Japanese codes, so somebody could have known. And no doubt, somebody should have known. But did they?
The standard Pearl Harbor historiography was Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (1962) by Roberta Morgan Wohlstetter, a Columbia-educated RAND Corporation military intelligence analyst. She and her Neoconservative (ex-Trotskyite) husband, (((Albert Wohlstetter))) won many Presidential awards together and were treated to purple praise from a grateful Gipper in the 1980s, and so on.
The Google blurb (LINK) about the book reads:
“It would be reassuring to believe that Pearl Harbor was just a colossal and extraordinary blunder. What is disquieting is that it was a supremely ordinary blunder. It was a dramatic failure of a remarkably well-informed government to call the next enemy move in a cold war crisis.”
So a big blunder but with rather banal origins. This is a fairly strong thesis on the evidence, but there are overwhelming probabilities that FDR knew more in general than he ever let on.
In Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy’s delightful 1951 takedown of the Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, and other Truman Doctrine sacred cows, America’s Retreat From Victory, the Junior Senator from Wisconsin noted that General Marshall took a powder that fateful Sunday morning and could not be located for hours.
Well, the future Secretary of State and Communist appeaser, Marshall was a workaholic and had apparently gone golfing, as generals do. In those days nobody carried pagers or mobile phones.
I’m not a lawyer, but I won a grievance case or two before an arbitration judge when I was an IBEW Shop Steward. Most cases I lost, however, and a sympathic officer from the NLRB bluntly told me that I was not a lawyer, so trying to play “drug store lawyer” is bound to fail even if the cause is just.
One of the old-line Union negotiators taught me that in dicey grievance cases, if you can’t PROVE it, it didn’t happen. Documentation rules.
That is how the law works. And, and everything from blackmail from porn stars to Me-Too crusaders have no business bringing up scandalous matters decades later that were never not brought forward in a timely manner in the first place. Nobody cares if you are fighting the Patriarchy, honey.
Furthermore, if the accused is innocent, after considerable time, how do they credibly defend themselves and find the exculpatory evidence and the witnesses? That is not how real justice works.
I won my cases by meticulously combing their own corporate documentation and then showing disparate treatment to the judge.
Historiography is not black-letter-law and it allows for more nuances, but it should be held to high standards of evidence just the same.
I have no doubt that the Roosevelt cabal were in it up to their necks. But at the end of the day, the Japs still attacked Pearl Harbor and went to war without warning, leaving their own diplomats in Washington befuddled.
One way or another, this gave FDR a cast-iron excuse.
And the Japs weren’t going to go down quietly until two atomic bombs convinced the Emperor to make an unprecedented and “unthinkable” surrender appeal to the people ─ on the one condition that his divinity was respected and that he would not be tried as a War Criminal.
For more information, I would urge everyone to read the 2001 Book Review of Day of Deceit in the Journal of Historical Review, by Editor Theodore J. O’Keefe (LINK).
“Pearl Harbor: Case Closed?”
The Journal of Historical Review, Sept.-Dec. 2001 (Vol. 20, No. 5-6) page 70.
Editor Ted O’Keefe writes:
“The more important of these two books, [Stinnett’s] Day of Deceit (if only for its ambition), may provide some new evidence for a conspiracy including FDR as well as his underlings, but seems untrustworthy.
“Pearl Harbor Betrayed [by Gannon] is well worth reading, for its up-to-date consideration of the key questions as well as for the reasons stated above, but shies away from uncovering a conspiracy.
“The book that solves the Pearl Harbor mystery, however, remains unwritten.”
🙂
I think that the very presence of the McCollum Memorandum, the fact that it was given to FDR’s top aides, that FDR seemed to have followed the 8 points in the Memorandum, that McCollum was friends with Rochefort, that there is documentation proving that we had broken Japanese codes, that there was importent information not given to Kimmel, and that the claims of radio silence are proven falsehoods, makes the advanced knowledge theory highly reasonable. Of course I am basing this entirely in Stinnett, so if he is wrong, so am I. The thing is, Stinnett offer so much evidence, either he is the world’s greatest liar, or he’s telling the truth. There is no in between.
I’m not going to claim to be an expert on Pearl Harbor and I am not disagreeing. I hate FDR either way, whether his legacy is sliced, diced, or pureed.
For a court of law, the paradigms do have to be simplistic and Black or White. And if I had to push the button a certain way at FDR’s execution of sentence, I would do so in good conscience.
But in historiography we always have nuance.
Historiography is a process, not an outcome. Like the Scientific Method, we revise it endlessly. It might be forgotten but it never ends.
That is why the study and writing of History is revisionist (small r).
There are working paradigms that may or may not be revised at some time in the future with new evidence or by new experiment or by better reasoning, but in a strict sense there is no such thing as “settled science.”
The public have a hard time with a lot of this because they are told by the corporate mass-media what to think, and most people are not experts on certain problems anyway and just not able to dive into the weeds.
Take the Kennedy assassination bit. The only reason why people even today can’t come to terms with what happened in 1963 according to the Warren Commission and numerous later investigations, is because the media have milked the conspiracy and “rabbit hole” angle for over sixty years by asking offbeat questions and then deliberately leaving the key answers dangling. Generating entertainment as sensationalist (and fake) news is what they do. And published books are not that much better.
To their credit, the JFK assassination museum at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas staunchly presents the Warren Commission view plus any other evidence that has become available, whether for or against any conspiracy. They will record for posterity the oral histories of anybody who was there or had any connection to it, regardless of whether they believe in conspiracy or not. These collections can be most instructive ─ and unlike with the Holocaust, there is no censorship or enforced party-line whatsoever. They are not going to call you a Hater or a Denier if you think that you heard four echoey shots instead of three on that day.
Unfortunately, people are just not trained with any kind of critical-thinking skills, so they readily fall for the dumbest conspiracy theories, based on the lamest arguments and the most irrelevant whatabouts.
Like the bullet that fatally hit Kennedy and the one that did not fatally hit Trump, sometimes things just happen to work out that way.
🙂
The editing feature seems to be working again for me, so never mind.
Thanks
🙂
Oh dear ─ now I cannot edit my posts again. This really cramps my style. There must be some kind of software feature that incorrectly identifies me as a troll for editing my posts ad nauseam, and then resets after a long break. Sorry, I just like things to be spelled right and to make sense.
🙂
“Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” FDR was practicing the same deceit on the American people that Woodrow Wilson did some twenty plus years earlier. Both ran reelection campaigns promising to keep America out of the bloodbaths going on in Europe while secretly conniving to send U.S. soldiers to places where most Americans believed they would fight and die for reasons no sane person could justify.
Here is a clip of FDR’s promise to a huge, cheering throng on a 1940 campaign swing in Boston. “I have said this before again and again and again: your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars”
https://www.google.com/search?q=fdr%27s+1940+promise+not+to+go+to+war&sca_esv=19b551ade1306bfb&sxsrf=ADLYWIL04xaPzXBNWJV5D05fJ1Et6LdZ0Q%3A1724177312410&source=hp&ei=oNvEZvveFpuf5NoP9LW56As&iflsig=AL9hbdgAAAAAZsTpsDi6oK-BC6fLzkNqZdUCo6hpRx1P&ved=0ahUKEwj7ru-BlYSIAxWbD1kFHfRaDr0Q4dUDCBg&uact=5&oq=fdr%27s+1940+promise+not+to+go+to+war&gs_lp=Egdnd3Mtd2l6IiNmZHIncyAxOTQwIHByb21pc2Ugbm90IHRvIGdvIHRvIHdhckjae1AAWO15cAB4AJABBJgBphCgAbsiqgEJNS0xLjIuOS0xuAEDyAEA-AEBmAICoAKZC8ICBRAAGIAEmAMAkgcHNC0xLjAuMaAHuxw&sclient=gws-wiz#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:6fad366c,vid:JfSU-VGixjM,st:0
He was lying, of course, in that brazen way psychopaths like FDR and Wilson did as they go about betraying the people who put them in power. FDR was secretly working with Churchill early in the WWII outbreak to maneuver the U.S. into the war as documented by William Stephenson’s A Man Called Intrepid.
It’s going on today only with more stunningly outrageous extremes: last month, the psychotic Benjamin Netanyahu stood before our elected representatives in Congress, who, like trained seals clapped and cheered him on as he demanded that America go to war with Iran.
Any book about Pearl Harbor 1941 is not full, if there is no mention of the so called Operation Snow, of Harry Dexter White, and of Soviet hand in those processes in it.
If you have Paywall access,
simply login first to see your comment auto-approved.
Note on comments privacy & moderation
Your email is never published nor shared.
Comments are moderated. If you don't see your comment, please be patient. If approved, it will appear here soon. Do not post your comment a second time.