Difference between revisions of "Debate:Was it wrong for him to allow the attack in order to wake up the American public and motivate Americans to fight and win the war?"

Revision as of 17:33, January 31, 2007

Did he really?! I havn't heard of this but will research it. If he did know thEn he was wrong.

Ben

Are you sure that would be wrong if Roosevelt did know? I think effective war strategy makes those kind of decisions. In chess it's called a "gambit".

--Aschlafly 10:46, 1 January 2007 (EST)

I'm guessing that "him" was Franklin D. Roosevelt and "the attack" was Pearl Harbor. The conditions leading up to Pearl Harbor are extremely controversial and I don't think the idea that Roosevelt knew is accepted as fact.

However, there is an incident, about which there's no doubt, that raises a similar moral question.

Oops. I take it back. There is doubt. Oh, well. I read about this in Anthony Cave-Brown's book, Bodyguard of Lies, but apparently its truth has been questioned. Well, here's the story anyway: Dpbsmith 12:24, 1 January 2007 (EST)

During the Second World War, the Allies broke the German coding system known as "Enigma," a fascinating story involving the early development of computers and Alan Turing. The Germans did not know the code had been broken. The Allies were therefore continually faced with the moral dilemma of whether or not to act on the information they decrypted. If they were to act on it too often, the Germans would suspect the code had been broken and change the coding system, stopping the flow of information.

In November of 1940, the Allies learned, through a decrypted message, that the Germans intended to conduct an air raid on Coventry. They decided that it was more important to keep the secret of Ultra, their decrypting system, and therefore did not warn Coventry or take any protective measures. Germany attacked with three hundred bombers, killing over five hundred people, destroying tens of thousands of homes and a medieval cathedral. Dpbsmith 12:24, 1 January 2007 (EST)

Dpbsmith describes the dilemma extremely well. I've been meaning to add an entry on the Enigma, and hope to do so this afternoon.

I don't have a definite view about how to solve this dilemma. It's a good topic for debate and discussion. What's your view, Dpbsmith?

I do think it's clear that Roosevelt had advance warning of the Pearl Harbor attack, by the way. I think we may have moved one key aircraft carrier or battleship out of the way (moving more ships would have tipped the Japanese). Also, simply radar would have given us an hour's notice, and 2,400 sailors need not have died unless as a gambit for a greater objective.--Aschlafly 13:28, 1 January 2007 (EST)

I thought the incoming Japanese aircraft were seen on radar, but the radar operator couldn't believe they were really being attacked and misidentified them as an expected flight of incoming B17's? Dpbsmith 17:42, 1 January 2007 (EST)

Boy, that sounds very odd! But you may be right, and I have not researched this further.--Aschlafly 17:44, 1 January 2007 (EST)

Don't you think it would be good if you research these things BEFORE you present them as fact?

Here is a section from A Patriot’s History of the United States, by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen that addresses the matter:

Did Roosevelt Have Advance Knowledge About the Pearl Harbor Attack?

“Even as the last smoke billowed from the sinking ships in Hawaii, many people were asking how the United States could have been so unprepared. Historian Charles Tansill suggested that the debacle could only have could only have occurred with Franklin Roosevelt’s foreknowledge. Clearly, if a president in possession of advance warning had allowed hundreds of sailors and soldiers to die in a surprise attack, it would have constituted high treason. Why would any chief executive permit such a strike? In his famous book, Back Door to War (1952), Tansill accused Roosevelt of allowing a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to provide the United States with the motivation and justification to enter the war against Hitler in Europe. …but little new evidence was provided over the years until the 1980s, when John Tolland published Infamy, wherein he claimed to have located a navy witness who, while on duty in San Francisco, received transmissions locating Japanese carriers and forwarded the information to Washington. Adding to Toland’s revelations, a “Notes and Documents” piece in the American Historical Review disclosed that the FBI had acquired information from an Axis double agent named Duskow Popov (“Tricycle”), who had information on a microdot about the attack. Although Tolland and others maintained that Popov’s documents included a detailed plan of the Japanese air attack, it did no such thing. Tricycle’s data dealt almost exclusively with buildings and installations, but had nothing on ships, aircraft scouting patterns, or any of the rather important items that one would expect from a “detailed plan.” In 1981, Asian historian Gordon Prange published At Dawn While We Slept; following his death, his students Donald Goldstein and Katherine Dillon completed his work with new Pearl Harbor claims in Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History. The authors found Toland’s mystery sailor, Robert Ogg, who empathetically rejected Toland’s assertion that he had said that he had intercepted massive Japanese radio traffic. Meanwhile, Documents acquired from Japanese archives raised a more serious problem for the conspiracy theorists because they proved that the Japanese fleet had been under strict radio silence during the voyage to Pearl Harbor. The controversy refused to go away. In1999, Robert B. Stinnet’s Day of Deceit revived the argument that Roosevelt had prior knowledge of the attack with important new code-breaking information. But the crucial pieces of “evidence” that Stinnet employed often proved the opposite of what he claimed. He used precise intelligence terms—code breaking, interception, translation, analysis—interchangeably, which produced massive errors: An intercepted document is no necessarily broken, and if intercepted and broken, it may not be translated, and if intercepted and broken, and translated, it may not be analyzed for days, weeks, or even years. Some intercepts from November 1941 were indeed broken, but were not translated or analyzed until…1945! The entire argument of the revisionists hinges on the notion that FDR couldn’t get into the war with Germany without pretext. But Roosevelt had already had ample cause if he’d wanted to, to ask for a declaration of war against Germany. Nazi U-boats had sunk American ships, killed American sailors, and in all ways shown themselves hostile. Against a nation that declared war on Mexico over a handful of Calvary troopers or that had declared war on Spain for the questionable destruction of a single ship, Germany had long since crossed the line needed for a declaration of war. …Pearl Harbor was a Tragedy, but not a conspiracy. (A Patriot’s History of the United States Pages 594-595)

--Chris 11:18, 31 January 2007 (EST)

Mr. Schlafly, DPBSmith is right about the Japanese bombers appearing on the American radar screen. (Air Raid- Pearl Harbor!) American leaders, even those in the military, did not believe that an initial Japanese attack would come on Pearl Harbor. They believed such an attack would come on the Philippines, Wake Island, or Midway Island. As a matter of fact, the US carriers Lexington and Enterprise were ferrying F4F Wildcat fighter planes to further fortify Midway and Wake. Even the Secretary of War did not believe the news when it reached him. He exclaimed, "This can't be true! This must mean the Philippines!" --DuncanB 14:39, 9 January 2007 (EST)