Come to think of it, I recall reading Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (?), an alternative history of WW”, in which the USA is carved up by the Germans and the Japs, and slavery reintroduced into the US.

Oh, and Herbert von Karajan (see yesterday’s posting) becomes the boss of the New York Philharmonic.  This at the time when actually the man doing this was a chap called Bernstein.  Who is nowhere to be seen of course.

That amounts to a nationalist decence of FDR’s war, I think you willl agree.  But, to rephrase the above posting, is such an outcome plausible?

Plus, I think, and before Karajan moves in, New York gets atom bombed.

As usual you’re ahead of the rest of us (well, me at least) and we are pedalling furiously to keep up.

Does it matter if Hitler didn’t have any ambition to attack the US?  On an individual and non-governmental level it seems reasonable enough that Americans might want to help Britons when Britons were attacked by Germans even if those Germans had no plans to attack the Americans.

Of course, some did.

Also, I think Pearl Harbour ought to be spelt Pearl Harbor.

I don’t know why FDR was a “warmongerer.” But I do not buy some of the conspiracy claims.

One nice bit of hindsight is the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941. One can certainly argue that either Cordell Hunt, or FDR himself, deliberately provoked Japan and (but I insist this is a separate issue) took sides with the British Empire against Germany. It’s putting the two together and claiming that allowing the Imperial Japanese Navy to destroy most of the U.S. Navy’s Pacific fleet that is, I think, wrong.

First, it would have made a lot more sense to provoke a GERMAN attack, not a Japanese one. After all, what could FDR do if Hitler had declared war on Japan over the Pearl Harbor attack? Yes I know there was a Tripartite Axis, but there was also a Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939. Without the fortunate declaration of war on the U.S.A. by Germany and Italy, there was surely a case for Americans to say “stop Lend-Lease to the British, we’re fighting Japan.”

Second, it is well known that the Japanese did not hit the U.S. aircraft carriers the U.S.S. Enterprise and U.S.S. Lexington, which were on exercises at the time. The U.S. Navy adopted tactics based on carriers for most of the rest of the Pacific War, because they didn’t have the battleships and cruisers, initially, to do any differently. What conspiracy theorists do not understand, is that in 1941, the concept that battleships were largely pointless was not navy orthodoxy, even in Japan, otherwise, why target them? Perversely, if FDR had wanted ships in Pearl Harbor to be hit by Japan, I reckon the carriers WOULD have been there and at least half the battlewagons would have been deployed elsewhere.

On a related point, if the Japanese had simply targeted the fuel depots, the U.S. navy could have been immobilized for months. Cutting of oil convoys to Hawaii with submarine is a somewhat easier military objective than what the Japanese ended up trying to do.

Of course, FDR probably did expect a Japanese attack around December 7, but in the Philippines, not Hawaii. Much vilification has been done to General Douglas MacArthur over his preparations, another issue, but I think he was simply unlucky.

The reason why Roosevelt and his inner circle provoked Japan into attacking Pearl Harbout, with malice aforethought, was to bring the US into the War on the side of Stalin’s USSR, not on Britain’s.

Their astonishingly-well-documented “Grand Design” envisioned a post-War world entirely divided between the US and Stalin’s USSR.  All the European Powers and their Empires were to be divvied up.  We saw the acceleration of this policy at Yalta, which Dick Bissell, Director of the War Shipping Agency in WWII attended as a Brigadier-General. 

He did not like what he saw, and says so in his posthumous memoirs.  He went on to become Chief Economist to the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Europe post-war, and Deputy Director, Plans at CIA.  I have his personally signed photo on my living-room wall…

Pre-WWII, the traditional British British foreign policy aims were to retain the Empire, keep the sea lanes to the world open with the Royal Navy, and to prevent any power arising in Europe which could threaten Britain.  All three objectives failed.

As Roosevelt wanted them to.  Britain was just an offshore usinkable US Aircraft Carrier to him and his clique.

Tony Hollick

Much of what Tony Hollick says is untrue or unsubstantiated.

He ignores the facts about Pearl Harbor, in order to justify a conspiracy theory, the details of which I consider to require either ignorance or lunacy.

The claim that FDR wanted to get Japan to attack HAWAII in order to help the Soviet Union has no credible basis in fact. For those who find it hard to understand my point I stress: HAWAII.

For starters it is not clear that such a conspiracy would work. It also conveniently fails to account for the fact that Japan and the U.S.S.R. were not at war (though they had been, why not time the attack when Japan attacked the U.S.S.R.?).

No one in the moonbat fringe seems to be willing to accept that China was central to this issue. This was, after all, the humanitarian disaster that led to Japan’s expulsion from the League of Nations and it was the reason given for the economic sanctions of the U.S.A..

As I previously said: the attack on HAWAII was a surprise, claiming that Pearl Harbor was a deliberate target from FDR’s point of view is simply false. There is not the slightest evidence to support such a bizarre claim.

If Mr Hollick had claimed that the conspiracy was to provoke an attack on the Philippines, I would take him seriously. In fact, any claim that setting up Douglas MacArthur was intended for political reasons might be worth examining: I admit I don’t know.

But I do not take claims of deliberately throwing the Pacific Fleet away with anything other than contempt.

The rest of Mr Hollick’s statements sound confused. Are we to believe that a man who accepted the job of implementing the Marshall Plan REALLY thought in 1945 that the project was evil? Rather begs the question why he collaborated. It would be like General de Gaulle making his June 18 1940 speech and joining the Organization Todt in 1942. Weird.

I don’t care what the British objectives were in 1945, they are completely irrelevant to the Pearl Harbor attack.

In fact if anyone wants a good conspiracy theory: blame Churchill for Pearl Harbor. Surely someone can claim that ULTRA intercepted the battle plans and the British deliberately let the attack happen. I’m surprised no one has come up with a crafty chain of reasoning to propose this seriously.