A progressive social democrat,...so he was both.

The last 2 Iowas were instead of 2 Montana class.

This thread made possible by a combination of hindsight, stripping out the contemporary contextual elements, and the odd tendency to attribute everything to some sort of conspiracy.

The assertion that the administration wanted an open war is quite valid. Rather than 'baiting,' seeing it as a deliberate escalatory move to elicit some sort of response, is valid.

The notion that national command authority would willingly sacrifice a significant portion of their order of battle....not just anything, but capital assets that take years to a decade in peacetime to build, years to train, and a generation to build competency... for no military gain, is not credible. The question of naval aviation vs. 'big gun' ships was not yet settled in 1941, not in 1942, and arguably not completely settled until the last one was launched.

Plenty of evidence that the administration was capable of cynical, cold, and morally questionable actions. This wasn't one of them.




Why does everything have to be a cabalistic conspiracy carried out flawlessly by the same people we accuse of gross incompetence in the next post?

Or could it be that variables exist, uncertainty and mistakes are a thing, and fighting adaptive, smart people, let alone states, is hard?

Respectfully, I wish to rebut.  To wit:

1.  The principal aerial threat to capital ship was at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack was considered to be the aerial torpedo.  Pearl Harbor was considered to be too shallow to succesfully deploy aerial torpedoes.  The British successfully attacked in shallow water in November 1940 at the Battle of Taranto so the possibility that Pearl Harbor was vulnerable *SHOULD* have been known, but the successful Japanese use of a dummy wooden nose and break-away wooden fins greatly ramped up the damage over what conventional wisdom  would have expected in such an attack, more in point 2.

2.  Again, conventional wisdom was that Japanese aircraft were inferior copies of western aircraft.  Their actual capabilites were much greater, to the point that they could carry older 40cm armor piercing battleship shells that had been converted into armor piercing aerial bombs, whihc were alsso a surpise to the West.



Consider that the battleships present were basically WWI designs, and did nto have heavy deck armor, as large armor piercing aerial bombs were not known at the time of their design, nor was long range gunnery resulting in plunging fire through the deck possible due to the limitations in range-finding and fire direction.  So the capabilies of the naval level bombers were much greater than expected, whihc also increased the damage well beyond what conventional wisdom would expect.

3.  The attack was intended to create a window of 6 - 18 months where Japan had freedom of action in the Pacific without the possibility of interference by powerful American surface elements.  Japan presumed they could negotiate a favorable recognition of a fait accompli that legitimized their gains in CHina and the Pacific.  To that end, it was a successful - but it was a failure in that it also sowed the seeds of a resolute refusal to settle for anthing less than an unconditional surrender.

Rick-Oshay-

Fantastic post. Things like this make the history forum worthwhile. I agree with everything you said and I think your arguments are on point.

Not quite sure what you're rebutting.... I was just calling out the ridiculous premise in the OP.




I like the point on lack of protection against bombs and plunging fire, also gave the rare beast that is the coastal defense mortar it's time in the sun...




On the subject of the pacific war in general, I have spent far too little time but really enjoyed this one and will read it again:

My apologies for not being clear.  I was trying to make the case that IF knowledge was at hand that a specific attack on PH was forthcoming, that the level of damage would be believed to be much more minor that it actually turned out to be, and thus might have been considered "worth it" to get into the war on an active basis.

Pearl Harbor got us into a war with Japan.  Germany then declared war on the US.  If Germany had not done that, would the US have declared war on Germany?

FDR was an anti-American Progressive statist, fuck be upon him and his wheelchair.  He needs to burn for his evil internment of American citizens and other crimes.

The Japenese attacked Pearl Harbor and should have been destroyed for it.

The U.S. was already conducting combat operations against Germany.  Hitler's declaration was a formality that recognized actuality.

FDR was a Marxist half wit who was going to lose an election so he had to stoke up fear of an outside threat to draw attention away from his failures.

He will not be remembered fondly in the future nor should he.

You probably believe we didn't go to the Moon either, don't you?

No, the original plan was to build 6 Iowa's and 4 Montana's; which were basically all designed at the same time. When it came time to plan out the dry docks, steel armor supply and guns it was decided to build the Iowa's first and the Montana's later as the drydocks were full of Essex class carriers and despite the U.S. steel plants being greatly expanded there simply wasn't enough steel to build everything authorized. The guns were another bottle neck as there wasn't equipment (huge lathes with 75 foot beds) to build enough all at once, they had to be spaced out in time.
The navy decided to build the Iowa's & Alaska's before the Montana's because we had nine battleships with 16 inch guns (3 Colorado's, 2 North Carolina's and four South Dakota's) and 11 with 14 inch guns for fighting with the Japanese battleships, but not enough ships that had the speed to escort the Essex carriers. So the fast Iowa's and Alaska's got built and the Montana's got delayed until it was obvious they couldn't be built in time for the war at which point they were cancelled along with the last two Iowa's and last four Alaska's that had been laid down.

I do recall reading about it in the National Enquirer of all places.

I remember reading about a U.S. navy sailing vessel armed with 2 50 caliber Browning machine guns that was ordered to sail the Southeast Asian seas by FDR. The intent was to have the Japanese mistake the ship for a pirate and attack it to trigger a war between the U.S. and Japan.

Trying to discern how far back into history the chain of conspiracy goes is becoming a daunting task.
Here goes:
We know that George Washington was a pawn of Big Whisky, and that Lincoln conspired to lure the Confederacy into war in order to set in motion the destruction of the Constitution so that Wilson would enter WW1 to save the Rothschild Military Industrial Complex and allow Stalin to come to power ensuring the Forever War. When Stalin started losing to the Evil Nazis, Roosevelt was ordered to get America into the war so he baited the peaceful and easily fooled Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor, this both cleared the way for the ascendancy of Northrop-Boeing and allowed him to declare war on Hitler, so that ComIntern could finish infiltrating America's universities and launch its fluoridation assault on America's youth.
Using the foundations laid by Washington and Lincoln, Roosevelt oversaw the creation of the MIC and ordered the A-bomb to be dropped on the non-expansionist Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere because racism. Kennedy heroically tried to oppose the MIC, and so was assassinated by a cabal of the MIC, the Joint Chiefs, the CIA,the KGB, every local/state/federal LE organization in Texas, the Mafia, the Teamsters and the United Fruit Company(apparently the only people not involved were JFK and Oswald) so that the MIC could slaughter more Asians in Vietnam(Bell really needed thousands of helicopters to be shot down)and the FBI could create a phony Civil Rights movement(by assassinating both MalcolmX and MLK) thus allowing the CIA to fund itself via the Drug Trade to the black community.
The Space Race is in there somewhere to disguise the integration of Alien tech from 1947 into the CIA.
Oh, and Big Tech(actually DARPA funded, and managed and staffed by MK-Ultra zombies) finally achieved Gorgon Stare, allowing complete informational dominance over Congress, the media, SCOTUS, POTUS and the NFL.
This has been revealed to be orchestrated by Aliens, and this means we have to circle back to Atlantis, the Pyramids, the Aztecs and the Illuminati(aka the WEC/GloboHomo/NWO) whose main goal is child rape/cannibalism to
serve Lucifer in order to harvest as many souls as possible before the Rapture, currently scheduled for the January 20, 2025 inauguration of the Antichrist.

It's really strange how several low post count accounts with 2020-present join dates have started posting all sorts of spicy opinions lately.


Probably just a coincidence.