Review: The Pearl Harbor Myth

Another entry in the "Roosevelt knew about Pearl Harbor genre

Spain in the war isn't all good for the Axis

What If The Washington Naval Treaty Talks Collapsed?

More Battleships? A Naval Arms Race? Japan and Britain allies?

How do you get a World War II fought mostly with Biplanes & Battleships

An African Village is nearly wiped out, apparently by rampaging elephants, but the thoroughness of the destruction points to human hands.

Point Of Divergence is an amateur press magazine and also a forum for discussing AH and AH-related ideas.  Here is my comment section.

"They killed like men."  Janine Hart didn't move from the fetal position.  She didn't look up.  I looked down at her, huddled under a cot in the one partially intact building in what had been a small Ugandan town whose name I couldn't pronounce.

"Concrete walls six inches thick but they still nearly got her."  Jake Smith, the translator touched the portion of the wall where the door had been.

"You know this wasn't really elephants, right?" I said.

"Elephants rampage and kill people," Jake said.

"That they do.  It happens more in India than over here, but yes they do," I said.  How many people?"

"At least one hundred and fifty," Jake said.  "Maybe more."

"And one survivor," I said.  "If they really thought it was elephants I wouldn't be here."

Jake made a gesture that took in a panorama of smashed huts and more substantial houses.  "No shell holes.  No shell casings.  No tracks from trucks or tanks.  Lots of elephant tracks up to the town and to the smashed buildings.  Elephants could smash things up like that.  Nothing else short of a bulldozer of a tank could."

I wandered around the wrecked town, looking for patterns.  "The Ugandan army's been in a lot of these buildings."

"They looked for survivors and got the rifles and pistols out before looters got them," Jake said.  "And the ivory."

"How many guns?"

Jake shrugged.  "A dozen—maybe fifteen."

"And one person got a shot off," I said.  "They might have hesitated because of the laws against shooting elephants, but enough of them were poachers that I can't see that stopping them.  So why only one shot?"

Jake said, "It might have happened too fast.  Might have happened at night."

"It happened within a two hour window around dawn yesterday," I said.  "See if you get me a map of where they found the guns."

 As Jake walked over to the Ugandan army detachment, I tried to make sense of the scene.  I've got to admit that I was baffled.  That got worse as I correlated where the guns were with the positions of the bodies.  "Just like the other three," I said.

Jake said, "Three of them, huh?"

"I'm not sure if you're supposed to know that," I said.  "Oh well."

"Any survivors?"

I said, "Not until now.  And she hasn't said anything else."

"How is this like the other three?"

I thought about how much to tell him, then shrugged and said, "If there were guns in the houses everybody died in bed or at most barely got out of them.  Not guns meant they got some warning—maybe five minutes based on the positions of the bodies.  This was systematic.  Planned.  Everybody dead inside of fifteen minutes—probably less."

"Elephants aren't dumb.  Maybe this bunch got tired of people shooting at them," Jake said.

"So they studied the town, pinpointed where the guns were, came in at dawn and got into position.  Then they charged in from five locations simultaneously, bypassing houses without guns until the ones with guns were taken care of."

Jake thought about that.  "That doesn't sound likely, does it?"

"A human army couldn't have taken this place down any faster or more efficiently," I said.

"Well, they say elephants are smart—"

I shook my head.  "This would take so many cognitive leaps that—well bigger than man versus baboon."

"So someone trained them?"  Jake shook his head.  "Why?  Why not just go in and shoot everyone?"

"If they're trying to scare people this is more effective," I said.  "But the resources it would take for this level of training—and African elephants aren't as easy to train as Indian ones—"

A helicopter had been making ever wider circles as I looked over the town.  I didn't any sign that they had found anything.  I said, "Tracks converge on town and appear to

Yet another entry into the “Roosevelt provoked the Japs and knew about Pearl Harbor in advance” genre.  It differs from many of the earlier books in that genre in that it says that Roosevelt’s supposed actions were necessary and may well have saved the world from some very nasty times.

Basically the theme of this book is that in the summer of 1941 FDR was afraid that the Japanese would jump into the war with the Soviet Union, pinning down Soviet troops and making a Soviet defeat inevitable.  As a result, he responded to the Japanese occupation of southern Indochina with a series of actions such as the oil embargo that made it inevitable that the Japanese would turn south against the western Allies rather than north against the Soviets.

The book claims that FDR and people within his administration knew that those actions against Japan made a Japanese attack almost inevitable and had previously rejected them for that very reason.  Several high administration officials are quoted rejecting various elements of the sanctions against Japan before the German attack on the Soviet Union for just that reason.

Again according to the book, FDR and company had decided by the summer of 1941 that it was necessary for the US to enter the war because in the long-term the Axis was a threat to US security and the Soviets and British could not successfully counter it on their own, even with US arms.  FDR took a two-track strategy to get the US actively in the war.  First, he escalated US involvement in the Atlantic to the point where the US was essentially waging an undeclared naval war against Germany—firing at German U-boats on sight over a major part of the Atlantic, convoying merchant ships most of the way to Britain, etc.  Second, he continued to both provoke Japan and offer tempting targets for it, while pursuing negotiations with Japan to hopefully postpone any war in the Pacific until the US was more prepared for it—hopefully until the spring of 1942.

In the Pacific, FDR continued to keep the Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, in spite of the fact that the admiral initially in charge of the fleet felt that it was too vulnerable there and protested so strongly that he had to be replaced.  FDR and company also began building up US forces in the Philippines, but that buildup consisted primarily of offensive weapons like B17 heavy bombers rather than of defensive weapons.  Also the pace was fast enough to be provocative but too slow to actually offer much chance of actually defending the Philippines.

According to the book, the preferred FDR strategy seemed to be getting into the war with Germany directly through provoking incidents in the Atlantic.  When that didn’t work, he upped the ante in the Pacific by hardening the US negotiating position.

As to Pearl Harbor itself, the book offers no good direct evidence that Roosevelt knew about the attack in advance, but it does offer a lot of circumstantial evidence.  As to Roosevelt’s motive in not offering more specific warnings to the commanders in Pearl Harbor, the book claims that FDR was afraid that if the base was on alert the Japanese would abort the attack.  Roosevelt’s greatest fear was a Japanese attack on the British and Dutch in the Far East that didn’t include an attack on the US.  He had contingency plans to try to bring the US in anyway under those circumstances, but given the power of isolationism in the US, there would be no guarantee that the US would enter the war.

So why didn’t the commanders on the ground at Pearl Harbor (Kimmel and Short) put their forces on a more alert posture given the warnings they did receive?  The book claims that the “War Alert” of late November 1941 tied local commanders’ hands by telling them that the message should be given only to senior level personnel and that nothing should be done to alarm civilians in the area.  It also tied their hands by not rescinding their standing orders, which gave priority to training.  The book claims that Short, the army commander at Oahu, was initially very concerned about an air raid, but that his superiors made it clear that sabotage was the primary fear and that they were or should have been aware that his disposition of forces was designed to protect against sabotage and not against an external attack.

The book points out that at least one high Roosevelt administration official had prior to the attack stated that US policy was to maneuver the Japanese into firing the first shot while trying to avoid taking too much damage.  It claims that leaving the fleet at Pearl Harbor and not fully informing the local commanders was part of that policy.

All of this sounds like an attack on FDR and his administration.  The author claims that it is not.  He says that Roosevelt may very well have kept the Japanese from attacking the Soviet Union at its most vulnerable time in late summer of 1941.  He also says that US entry into the war was necessary to defeat the Axis, and that a major Japanese attack on US forces was the only way that would happen given US isolationism.  He says that FDR could have had no idea how devastating the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor was going to be, and in any case drastically underestimated Japanese military capability.  He also says that much of the destruction at Pearl Harbor was actually due to a fluke—a bomb going just the wrong place in the Arizona and causing far more US casualties than would have occurred under normal circumstances.

So, how much of this do I believe?  I do believe that the US oil embargo against Japan foreclosed the Japanese option of going against the Soviet Union.  It did so at a time when the Japanese were still debating that option.

A lot of people have claimed that the Japanese were unwilling to attack the Soviet Union because of the Soviet performance against the Japanese at Nomanham.  I thought that for a long time, but I no loner do.  Nomanham seems to have had more to do with internal Japanese military politics than with relative Japanese/Soviet power or fighting ability in the area.  The Japanese sent one green division into the fight, joined at separate times by tank elements, heavy artillery elements, and part of another division.  The Japanese made it clear that they were not going to escalate the battle to include other areas of the Manchurian frontier, thus allowing the Soviets to put a far larger portion of their local military power into the battle than the Japanese did.

Even given the almost inevitable Japanese defeat at Nomanham, local commanders were willing and even eager to go another round with the Soviets, and were in process of building up forces to do so when their superiors stepped in and stopped them.  I may be wrong on this, but I suspect that the Japanese army took advantage of the defeat to clip the wings of militaristic local commanders who had already gotten the Japanese into a war with China by their independent actions, and seemed likely to get them into another one with the Soviets.  Many of the people in the chain of command at Nomanham were purged or reassigned, which helped bring the local military under central control but also cost the Japanese most of the potential value of lessons learned in the fighting against the Soviets.

I’m guessing that the Japanese would have headed south even without US prodding, but that’s not a given.  They had not made a decision to do so before the embargo.

Did Roosevelt intend to divert the Japanese south away from the Soviet Union?  In hindsight it would have been logical for him to have done so.  If he did, he showed a lot of foresight.  I’m not entirely convinced that he did so deliberately.

Did Roosevelt want to enter the war?  Sure.  Did he know that war with Japan was almost inevitable by late November 1941?  Again, sure.  Did the commanders at Pearl Harbor know everything relevant to their positions that FDR and his administration knew?  No.  Did they know enough to know that they needed to be on the alert?  Sure.

Did Roosevelt know that a Japanese air raid on Pearl Harbor at the beginning of the war was a significant possibility?  Sure.  That was a Japanese option that had been war-gamed many times and had been warned against multiple times.  Roosevelt had to have known that the fleet was vulnerable there.

Did Roosevelt know specifically and certainly that the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor early enough to warn the local commanders?  I doubt it, but I wouldn’t be horribly surprised to be wrong.  Let’s say he did have specific knowledge of the coming attack and a general idea of the timing.  What could he have done differently that would have led to a better outcome?  Send the fleet to sea?  A bunch of old battleships and at best two carriers against 6 Japanese carriers?  Likely outcome: The fleet still loses a good many capital ships and it loses them in deep water with heavier casualties and no salvage options.  Keeping the fleet within air range of Pearl Harbor would help some, but probably not enough to avoid a US defeat.  Even if the US won that battle it would leave a murky situation.  Who really started the fighting?  Was it FDR playing games like he was doing in the Atlantic?  Having the fleet clash with the Japanese at sea would not leave the country united like having it attacked in harbor did.

Bring the fleet back to the US west coast?  That signals that the Japanese have a free hand in the Far East and might have led to a Japanese attack only on the British and Dutch.  Put Pearl Harbor on maximum alert, with everyone at war stations?  Might help, but it also might lead to the Japanese detecting the alert and deciding not to attack.  If the Japanese do attack and the US fleet cleans their clock then do the Germans still declare war?  Quite possibly no, which means that the US ends up fighting Japan while the Germans have far less to worry about on the western front.  Britain almost certainly could not have opened a second front without US help.  The Soviets almost certainly could not have finished the Germans off without a second front, and even if they did it would lead to Soviet control of most of Europe.

This isn’t to say that Roosevelt didn’t make serious mistakes.  He did.  He should never have put the Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor to begin with.  It was too vulnerable there and he knew it.  Once it had been there for a while and tensions with the Japanese started heating up withdrawing it would have sent the wrong signal, but he was foolish to put it there in the first place.  He was also foolish to put so many B17s in the Philippines. There he probably bought in to the arguments of air power advocates that level bombers were potent weapons against warships.  That wasn’t true, at least not early in the war.  B17s were virtually useless against ships in the early part of the war because they weren’t accurate enough, though with better techniques they did become useful later in the war.  Dive bombers and aerial torpedoes were effective against ships early in the war.  Level bombers weren’t.  Putting the B17s in the Philippines was a waste of good planes and good pilots, though it did make the Japanese less likely to bypass the Philippines and go against the Dutch and British only.

Roosevelt certainly didn’t realize how devastating a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor could be.  Almost nobody else in the US military did either.  The Japanese pilots at the beginning of the war were probably the best in the world in terms of bombing accuracy.  Roosevelt couldn’t have known about Japanese innovations like the bombs converted from naval shells that made the attack much more deadly than it would otherwise have been.

So, would I recommend the book?  Maybe, but with a read with caution warning.  If you read it, you might also want to read something stating the case for the other side too. 

Posted on Jan 3, 2012.

More Stuff For POD Members Only

What you see here is a truncated on-line version of a larger zine that I contribute to POD, the alternate history APA.  POD members get to look forward to more fun stuff.