The U.S. government deliberately provoked the attack on Pearl Harbour through diplomacy and/or fleet redeployment, and it was not by chance that the carriers of the U.S. Pacific Fleet weren’t at port when the attack happened.
Very confident. (90-95%)
By the way, the reason I assume I am personally more rational about this than the LW average is that there are lots of US Americans around here, and I have sufficient evidence to believe that people tend to become less rational if a topic centrally involves a country they are emotionally involved with or whose educational system they went through.
Are you referring to my belief regarding the attack on Pearl Harbor, or to my belief regarding my rationality on this topic in relation to the LW average?
I don’t have a lot of strong reasons to disbelieve you
Does that mean that you have some strong reasons to disbelieve me?
I want to know which things you’ve heard or seen that made you believe the United States government provoked the attack on Pearl Harbor. My best reason for doubting you is that I don’t recall hearing anything like this before from academics nor interested amateur historians nor conspiracy theorists.
My guess is that the biasing effects of being funneled through a country’s school system and subjected to its news are much weaker on those who would find LW interesting than the typical citizen.
For what it’s worth, I came across the theory before, in a pretty respectable setting: a popularization book by a historian, where many conspiracy theories (along with “mysteries” like Easter Island) where examined, usually with skeptical conclusions. The Pearl Harbor one was one of the few with a “possible, but unproven” verdict.
I read it long ago, in a Spanish translation from French. It seems the book has not been published in English. The original title is Dossiers secrets de l’histoire, by Alain Decaux.
That reduces the value of the example, IMO. Political conspiracy stuff relies on so much contextual material and government records that it’s hard for a foreigner to make a good appraisal of what went on. It would be like a monolingual American trying to make heads or tails of that incident decades ago (whose name escapes me at the moment) where a high-level Communist Party official died in a airplane crash with his family; was it a normal accident, or was he fleeing a failed coup attempt to Russia, as the conspiracy/coverup interpretations went? If you can’t even read Chinese, I have no idea how one could make a even half-decent attempt to judge the incident.
I want to know which things you’ve heard or seen that made you believe the United States government provoked the attack on Pearl Harbor. My best reason for doubting you is that I don’t recall hearing anything like this before from academics nor interested amateur historians nor conspiracy theorists.
I have never heard of the book Alejandro1 refers to, but I read a book from Togo Shigenori, the Japanese foreign minister during that time, and he makes a lot of good points how US diplomacy wasn’t focused on securing peace, but on forcing Japan into a war that could only benefit the USA in the long run. From his perspective, the oil embargo left Japan with no other reasonable option than to try to conquer the British and Dutch oil reserves in South East Asia; and I see as little reason to believe that the U.S. government wasn’t aware of this as he does.
Togo was an outspoken opponent of the war against the USA who made efforts towards more diplomatical exchange, which met little interest on part of the U.S. government. He was the thriving force behind Japan’s declaration it would uphold the Geneva Convention, which Japan did not sign. He was also the originator of a peace settlement with the USSR earlier. Lastly, he was also of Korean descent, originally having the surname Park. All this adds up to sufficient evidence for me to believe that he was not a nationalist warmonger, and therefore I take his analysis very serious.
My guess is that the biasing effects of being funneled through a country’s school system and subjected to its news are much weaker on those who would find LW interesting than the typical citizen.
LW readers seem to be better at evaluating arguments from different sides, but not necessarily at acquiring these arguments in the first place unless they are already interested in the topic. Also, the lack of history-related threads in the discussion area leads me to believe that there is no significant correlation between being interested in LW and being interested in history in general or historical accuracy in particular.
Regarding the first part, the truth of that statement critically depends on how exactly you define “provoke.” For some reasonable definitions, the statement is almost certainly true; for others, probably not.
As for the second part (the supposed intentional dispersion of the carriers), I don’t think that’s plausible. If anything, the U.S. would have been in a similar position, i.e. at war with Japan with guaranteed victory, even if every single ship under the U.S. flag magically got sunk on December 7, 1941. So even if there was a real conspiracy involved, it would have made no sense to add this large and risky element to it just to make the eventual victory somewhat quicker.
Also, your heuristic about bias is broken. In the Western world outside of the U.S., people are on average, if anything, only more inclined to believe the official historical narrative about WW2.
If anything, the U.S. would have been in a similar position, i.e. at war with Japan with guaranteed victory, even if every single ship under the U.S. flag magically got sunk on December 7, 1941.
This is suspect. The U.S. had greater industrial capacities and population than Japan, but that doesn’t guarantee victory. Rebuilding the navy would take a lot of time which the Japanese could use to end their war in China. Also, it was far from clear in late 1941 whether the USSR would withstand the German assault and whether the British would not seek peace.
Even in the worst possible case, I still don’t see what could prevent the U.S. from simply cranking out a new huge Pacific navy and overwhelming Japan. Yes, the production would take a few years to ramp up to full capacity, as it did in reality—but once it did, I can’t imagine what could save Japan from being overwhelmed.
Ending the war in China wouldn’t have helped the Japanese at all, even if they linked with a victorious German army in the Far East. An additional land army at their disposal could not prevent the U.S. navy steamroller from eventually reaching their home islands, whereupon they would be bombed and starved into surrender. (If not for the atom bomb ending their agony even earlier.) The Japanese islands are so exposed and vulnerable to any superior naval power that they could be lost even as the world’s mightiest army is watching helplessly from the Asian mainland.
The only theoretical chance I see is if Germany somehow conquered both the U.S.S.R. and Britain, and then threw all its resources on a crash program to build up a huge navy of its own and help the Japanese. But I’m not sure if they’d be able to outproduce the U.S. even in that case. (And note that this would require a vanishingly improbable long continuation of the Germans’ lucky streak.)
In the context of this discussion the important thing is what could be reliably predicted in 1941, so we should ignore the possible effects of the atomic bomb.
Assume that the entire U.S. navy is destroyed in January 1942. A reasonable realistic scenario, if everything went really well for Japan, may be this:
Germans capture Leningrad and encircle Moscow in summer 1942, Stalin is arrested in the forthcoming chaos and the new Soviet government signs armistice with Germany, ceding large territories in the west.
German effort is now concentrated on expanding their naval power. Germany has half of Europe’s industrial capacity at her disposal. The production of U-boats increases and Britain alone has not enough destroyers to guard the convoys.
Starvation, threat of German invasion and heavy naval losses to German submarines, leading to inability to supply the Indian armies, make Britain accept Hitler’s peace offer. Britain surrenders Gibraltar, Malta, Channel islands and all interests in European mainland to Germany and Italy, Singapore and Malaya to Japan and backs from the war.
China now obtains no help, no arms, no aircraft and surrenders in 1944, becoming divided among several Japanese puppet states.
The U.S. are alone, still having no significant navy. Hawaii is lost to the Japanese. Germany is aggresively building new ships to improve their naval power and potentially help the Japanese in the Pacific. Roosevelt dies in early 1945, as he did historically. The Japanese offer peace that would secure them the leading position in East Asia, willing to give Hawaii back.
Now in this situation, being a U.S. general, what would be your advice given to Truman? Would it be “let’s continue in a low intensity war against both Germany and Japan until we have a strong enough navy, which may be in 1947 or 1948, and then start taking one island after another, which may take two more years, and then, from the island bases supplied through the U-boat infested Pacific start bombarding Japan, until the damned fanatics realise they have no other chance than to surrender”? Or would it rather be “let’s accept peace if it’s offered on honourable terms”?
Even in that scenario, Japanese victory is conditional on the political decision of the U.S. government to accept the peace. My comments considered only the strategic situation under the assumption that all sides were willing to fight on with determination. And I don’t think this assumption is so unrealistic: the American people were extremely unwilling to enter the war, but once they did, they would have been even less willing to accept a humiliating peace. Especially since the Pacific great naval offensive could be (and historically was) fought with very low casualties, and not to mention the U.S. government’s wartime control of the media that was in many ways even more effective than the crude and heavy-handed control in totalitarian states.
Now, in your scenario, the U.S. would presumably see immediately that its first priority was navy rebuilding. (An army is useless if you can’t get it off the mainland.) This means that by 1944, Americans would be cranking out even more ships than they did historically. I don’t think the Axis could match that output even if they were in control of the entire Eurasia.
(The U-boats would have been a complicating factor. Their effectiveness changed dramatically with unpredictable innovations in technology and tactics. In actual history, they became useless by mid-1943, although Germans were arguably on the verge of introducing dramatically superior ones at the time of their capitulation. But in any case, the U-boat factor cuts both ways: Americans could swamp the Pacific with even greater numbers of U-boats and wreck the entire Japanese logistics, as they actually did.)
Even assuming a plausible scenario in which the US couldn’t defeat Germany, that doesn’t have anything to do with whether we could have defeated Japan standing alone.
Historically, we know it wasn’t that hard for the US—despite Japan attacking first, the US adopted a “Europe First” strategy that committed approx. 2⁄3 of capacity to fighting Germany. Despite this, the US defeated Japan easily—there are no major victories for Japan against the US after Pearl Harbor, and Midway was less than a year after Pearl Harbor. If the US strategy is “Japan First” (doing things like transferring the Atlantic Fleet to the Pacific), why should we expect the Pacific war would last long enough that Germany would be able to consolidate a victory in the east into driving the UK into peace and be able to intervene in the Pacific?
Also, why do you think an invasion of Hawaii was possible? The surprise strike was at the end of Japanese logistical capacity—I think the US wins if Japan tries a land invasion.
If the US strategy is “Japan First” (doing things like transferring the Atlantic Fleet to the Pacific), why should we expect the Pacific war would last long enough that Germany would be able to consolidate a victory in the east into driving the UK into peace and be able to intervene in the Pacific?
Remember the context: we are in the hypothetical where all US ships (Atlantic fleet included) were magically anihilated in the end of 1941.
I’m a big believer in not fighting the hypothetical, but there is no historically plausible account leading to the destruction of the Atlantic fleet. At that point, we aren’t discussing facts relevant to whether FDR knew of the Pearl Harbor attack ahead of time.
The hypothetical of Pearl Harbor as the most resounding success it could possibly be (US Pacific fleet reduced to irrelevance) and Germany winning the Battle of Moscow strongly enough that it has leverage to force the UK out of the war is reasonable for discussing FDR’s decision process. That’s all he could reasonably have thought he was risking by allowing Pearl Harbor. As I stated elsewhere, I think FDR gets his political goals with Japan firing the first shot—there’s no need for him to court a military disaster.
At that point, we aren’t discussing facts relevant to whether FDR knew of the Pearl Harbor attack ahead of time.
True, but I have joined this part of discussion reacting to this Vladimir_M’s comment:
If anything, the U.S. would have been in a similar position, i.e. at war with Japan with guaranteed victory, even if every single ship under the U.S. flag magically got sunk on December 7, 1941.
Could you spell out what you mean by different definitions of “provoke”?
Anyhow, I am more concerned about the word “deliberate.” The government is not a coherent actor; it does not have deliberate actions. For example, FDR explicitly rejected an oil embargo, yet oil exports stopped. Was this because his subordinates correctly interpreted his wishes? Or were they more belligerent? In Present at the Creation (p26) Acheson seems to say that he implemented the embargo by mistake, thinking that Japan had hidden assets that would keep the flow going. On the following page, he agrees to accept payment from a Latin American bank, but something goes awry, seemingly out of his control. Delong asks if FDR even knew of the embargo.
Regarding the first part, the truth of that statement critically depends on how exactly you define “provoke.”
I am more concerned about the word “deliberate.”
Provoking: presenting someone with a multitude of bad choices, one of them being to attack you.
Deliberate: proceeding with an action in the hope of achieving a specific outcome.
Deliberately provoking: presenting someone with a multitude of bad choices, hoping they will attack you because of this.
As for the second part (the supposed intentional dispersion of the carriers), I don’t think that’s plausible. If anything, the U.S. would have been in a similar position, i.e. at war with Japan with guaranteed victory, even if every single ship under the U.S. flag magically got sunk on December 7, 1941. So even if there was a real conspiracy involved, it would have made no sense to add this large and risky element to it just to make the eventual victory somewhat quicker.
The carrier fleet being operational was decisive in preventing an expected Japanese invasion of Midway and Hawaii, and recapturing Hawaii from the American continent would have been very difficult, if not outright impossible. What if China had surrendered or made peace with Japan? What if Germany captured Leningrad, Moscow, and Stalingrad? What if the Japanese nuclear weapon program had succeded? What if the public opinion had turned anti-war, as during the Vietnam War?
“Guaranteed victory” sounds like hindsight bias to me. Even if the US mainland could not have been invaded, that doesn’t mean the USA could not have lost the war.
Also, your heuristic about bias is broken. In the Western world outside of the U.S., people are on average, if anything, only more inclined to believe the official historical narrative about WW2.
The point is that the “official historical narrative” is different in different countries. For example, Japan has a strong culture of ignoring Japanese war crimes, in Polish textbooks there rarely is mention of Poland taking part in the partition of Czechoslovakia, Britons are generally unaware of the fact that GB declared war on Germany and not vice versa, many French think that the surrender to Germany was an action the government did not have the license to make, and so on.
The government is not a coherent actor; it does not have deliberate actions.
“The government” is an abstract concept. I am talking about a circle of people within the government who together had the power to provoke Japan, and to assure that the losses at Pearl Harbor were within reasonable bounds. I am not overly familiar with the way the U.S. government was organised at that time, but it seems to me that such a circle had to include either the president or high ranking intelligence officials, most likely both.
The carrier fleet being operational was decisive in preventing an expected Japanese invasion of Midway and Hawaii, and recapturing Hawaii from the American continent would have been very difficult, if not outright impossible. What if China had surrendered or made peace with Japan? What if Germany captured Leningrad, Moscow, and Stalingrad?
It wouldn’t have mattered for the Pacific war, except by prolonging it somewhat. Even if Japan had conquered every single island in the Pacific and Indian oceans, as long as the U.S. government remained in control of the U.S. mainland, as it surely would have, it still would have had enough resources and industrial capacity to outproduce Japan in warships and other naval assets by orders of magnitude and eventually roll back the Japanese conquests by sheer overwhelming strength.
Germany arguably had some chance to win the European war, but Japan was doomed from day one.
Also, as someone has already noted, the greater importance of carriers over battleships in WW2 is itself known only from hindsight, and contrary to the prevailing beliefs of the time.
What if the Japanese nuclear weapon program had succeded?
Well, yes, you can always conceive of some deus ex machina. But it’s implausible that fears about hypothetical Japanese superweapons would have influenced the strategic plans of FDR & Co. in 1941.
What if the public opinion had turned anti-war, as during the Vietnam War?
By 1941, FDR & Co. already had sufficiently strong grip on power that they comfortably knew that a war would allow them to seize complete control of the media (and all other means of propaganda) and ensure that this could never happen.
The point is that the “official historical narrative” is different in different countries
True enough, but thus typically has the form of the same official narrative with some additional spin, omission, and lying with regards to the relevant local details in order to accommodate nationalist sensibilities. In contrast, sensible, intelligent, well-informed, and yet radical criticism of the official narrative can be found, to my knowledge, only within the Old Right intellectual tradition in the U.S. (Which has been driven to the fringe for many decades, but its vestiges somehow still occasionally surface in the respectable public discourse.)
The carrier fleet being operational was decisive in preventing an expected Japanese invasion of Midway and Hawaii, and recapturing Hawaii from the American continent would have been very difficult, if not outright impossible.
American public opinion may have expected such invasions, but did any serious military experts? Earl Warren and FDR’s political pandering is not really strong evidence of a serious military expectation. Obviously, we know now that the Pearl Harbor attack was at the outermost of Japanese logistical capacity—they never planned an invasion of Hawaii, much less the West Coast.
Given the history, we know that transpacific projections of land forces were very possible for the United States (Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima). Why would an invasion of Hawaii be more difficult?
As an aside, I agree that FDR courted war because he wanted to join the European conflict. Lend-Lease and escorting convoys were not the acts of a neutral party. Likewise, the raw material embargos on Japan placed that nation in an untenable position. I upvoted you for asserting that FDR knew that Pearl Harbor would be attacked in time to make changes to defensive preparations at that base. From FDR’s perspective, a “surprise” attack that was a stalemate instead of a defeat would have served his political goal (war with Germany) just as well.
American public opinion may have expected such invasions, but did any serious military experts? Earl Warren and FDR’s political pandering is not really strong evidence of a serious military expectation. Obviously, we know now that the Pearl Harbor attack was at the outermost of Japanese logistical capacity—they never planned an invasion of Hawaii, much less the West Coast.
There were proponents of an invasion of Hawaii within the Japanese military cabinet; I think Genda Minoru was one of them. Plans existed, but were deemed too risky and unlikely to succeed.
I never said anything about an invasion of the US West Coast, but the Japanese invasion of the Aleutian islands was supposed to be the first stage of an invasion of Alaska. Had that plan succeeded, Japan would have been in control of naval bases within reasonable distance of the US West Coast.
Given the history, we know that transpacific projections of land forces were very possible for the United States (Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima). Why would an invasion of Hawaii be more difficult?
Guadalcanal and Iwojima were within range of US forward bases. Carrying out a large-scale invasion over a distance of about 4000km is not something any military power was capable of during WW2, to my knowledge.
Could you spell out what you mean by different definitions of “provoke”?
Well, “provocation” is one of those problematic words, in that nearly always, the party accused of “provocation” denies it—and the act itself is therefore nearly always done in a way that attempts for some plausible deniability. So even if there is agreement on the facts of what happened, there is usually room for debate over whether an act constituted “provocation.”
Anyhow, I am more concerned about the word “deliberate.” The government is not a coherent actor; it does not have deliberate actions.
Of course. But under FDR, he and his inner circle did act in a fairly coherent way (and by extension, so did the entire pyramid of New Deal patronage that they headed). There were certainly individuals and institutions within the U.S. government outside of their control, but by 1941, they had been mostly side-stepped and pushed away into irrelevance.
For example, FDR explicitly rejected an oil embargo, yet oil exports stopped. Was this because his subordinates correctly interpreted his wishes? Or were they more belligerent? In Present at the Creation (p26) Acheson seems to say that he implemented the embargo by mistake, thinking that Japan had hidden assets that would keep the flow going. On the following page, he agrees to accept payment from a Latin American bank, but something goes awry, seemingly out of his control. Delong asks if FDR even knew of the embargo.
I wouldn’t consider Acheson a credible source. Certainly, it’s very naive to take anything written by the political actors of the New Deal/WW2 era at face value, and disentangling the real events from the available information is a task of enormous complexity and difficulty. That rabbit hole is very, very deep.
It seems to me very different to say that it is difficult to assess whether something is a provocation than to say that there are some definitions of provocation under which it is and some under which it isn’t.
Do you think Acheson would lie about external facts, like whether he offered to let the Japanese pay with money in a Latin American bank account?
It seems to me very different to say that it is difficult to assess whether something is a provocation than to say that there are some definitions of provocation under which it is and some under which it isn’t.
If we could read minds (including those in the past), it would probably be possible to come to agreement about which concrete acts have been provocations in all cases, by looking for the mens rea: was the given act specifically motivated by the desire to induce a hostile reaction?
But since we can’t read minds, the practical criteria for what counts as “provocation” are murky, and they are typically a mixture of attempts to evaluate indirect evidence about motives and attempts to define certain acts in certain contexts as ipso facto provocative. So there is lots of difficulty on both fronts, even if there is a general agreement on what happened: it’s hard to evaluate the evidence about motives correctly, and there is also disagreement on which acts qualify as ipso facto provocative.
In this concrete case, some people would say that the actions of the U.S. government prior to Pearl Harbor were ipso facto provocative, i.e. that they were far outside of the limits of reasonable behavior of someone who is not actively trying to provoke hostility. Others would say that it isn’t so, and they’d presumably also claim that there is no clear evidence about motives to pronounce the verdict of “provocation.”
Do you think Acheson would lie about external facts, like whether he offered to let the Japanese pay with money in a Latin American bank account?
It strikes me as wildly implausible that someone relatively low in the pecking order, like Acheson in 1941, could have been in a position to make such tremendous history-shaping decisions on his own whim and without directions from above. So I think his account presents, at best, a strong lawyerly spin on the events with plenty of important omissions, even if there is no outright lying.
Now, why the oil embargo was instituted in this particular puzzling way, I don’t know. I’ve never found the time to sit down and study all the available sources in detail. However, it seems to me that the most probable explanation is that FDR and his clique wanted to execute the embargo in a duplicitous and plausibly deniable way (which would be very much within their usual modus operandi), so they tried to make it look like an underling did the paperwork of export licensing a bit too eagerly, and then also the Japanese unreasonably failed to do the correct bureaucratic procedure, etc., etc.
The “and it was not chance” bit? That requires the conspirators be non-human.
Carrier supremacy was hardly an established doctrine, much less proved in battle; orthodox belief since Mahan was that battleships were the most important ships in a fleet. The orthodox method of preserving the US Navy’s power would have been to disperse battleships, not carriers. Even if the conspirators were all believers in the importance of carriers, even a minimum of caution would have led them to find an excuse to also save some of the battleships. To believe at 90% confidence that a group of senior naval officials, while engaging in a high-stakes conspiracy, also took a huge un-hedged gamble on an idea that directly contradicted the established naval dogma they were steeped in since they were midshipmen, is ludicrous.
Not really. It wasn’t just “a carrier fleet” and “a battleship fleet”, it was a predominantly modern carrier fleet and an outdated battleship fleet that consisted mostly of WWI designs or modifications of WWI designs.
It was also consensus that if you were going to deploy carriers, the Pacific Ocean was a more promising theatre than the Atlantic ocean, due to (a) the weather and (b) the lack of strategically positioned air bases on land that were in little danger of being invaded, such as Newfoundland, Great Britain, West Africa, and so on.
Also, the U.S. Navy could have commissioned more battleships instead of carriers, but they didn’t, and that means they did have plans for them; most likely in the Pacific theatre. It was clear from the start that being at war with Japan would also mean being at war with Germany, so fighting only on the Pacific front was never an option.
I didn’t say they wouldn’t try to save the carriers. I said they would have hedged their bets by also dispersing some of the battleships. Your 90% confidence in your whole conjunct opinion requires a greater-than-90% confidence in the proposition that while saving the carriers, the people involved, all steeped in battleship supremacy/prestige for decades, would deliberately leave all the battleships vulnerable, rather than disperse even one or two as a hedge.
Also, the U.S. Navy could have commissioned more battleships instead of carriers,
Only in violation of the Washington and First London Naval Treaties. The US Navy could not have built more battleships at the time it started, for example, the Enterprise (1934) under those treaties.
I note that in the period 1937-to-Pearl-Harbor, which is to say subsequent to the 1936 Second London Naval Treaty that allowed it, the US Navy started no fewer than nine new battleships (and got funding authorization for a tenth), which suggests that they still seriously believed in battleships. Otherwise, why not build carriers in their place?
I didn’t say they wouldn’t try to save the carriers. I said they would have hedged their bets by also dispersing some of the battleships. Your 90% confidence in your whole conjunct opinion requires a greater-than-90% confidence in the proposition that while saving the carriers, the people involved, all steeped in battleship supremacy/prestige for decades, would deliberately leave all the battleships vulnerable, rather than disperse even one or two as a hedge.
But they did disperse some of the battleships. That’s why all the battleships at Pearl Harbor were outdated classes. They didn’t have that many outdated carriers, and carriers retain their value more over the course of time than battleships and battlecruisers do.
The ratio value:tonnage of capital ships sunk at Pearl harbor was significantly lower than the ratio value:tonnage of capital ships in the surviving fleets in the Pacific Ocean and elsewhere. This was never about carriers versus battleships, it was about vessels with high value versus vessels with low value.
Er? What battleships are you claiming were dispersed?
There were quite literally no newer battleships on active duty in the US Navy on December 7th, 1941 than the West Virginia, “outdated class” or no, sunk at Pearl Harbor along with her brand-new CXAM-1 radar. The only newer battleships in commission were the North Carolina and Washington, both of which were not yet on active duty because of delays caused by propeller issues.
Yes, I was referring to the North Carolina. She had already completed her sea trials, but was not yet headed for Pearl Harbor when the attack happened.
Also, of the 18 heavy cruisers the US Navy had in 1941 (all of them being post-WW1 designs), only two were present at Pearl Harbor.
Do you think that the U.S. government provoked an attack specifically on Pearl Harbor, or that they just wanted the Japanese to attack somewhere?
Where exactly do you place the boundary of deliberate provocation? That is, does not trying too hard to prevent the attack count, or had they have to be actively persuading the Japanese and moving the fleets into easily attackable positions?
Do you think that the U.S. government provoked an attack specifically on Pearl Harbor, or that they just wanted the Japanese to attack somewhere?
I think they wanted the Japanese to attack somewhere, but they were aware of the fact that Pearl Harbor was a likely target.
Where exactly do you place the boundary of deliberate provocation? That is, does not trying too hard to prevent the attack count, or had they have to be actively persuading the Japanese and moving the fleets into easily attackable positions?
I think they were actively persuading the Japanese to commit some act of war, and were not trying too hard to prevent the specific act of war that happened.
Thanks; I assumed the many upvotes came from people who considered my confidence level too high, not too low, but it’s nice to have someone actually confirm that.
I have seen a few low status conspiracy theorists advocating a position like this, and eventually started to agree that provoking an attack from an enemy is a strategy the US has used several times this century, my probability for this particular incident is still around 75% at most though
I’ll bite:
The U.S. government deliberately provoked the attack on Pearl Harbour through diplomacy and/or fleet redeployment, and it was not by chance that the carriers of the U.S. Pacific Fleet weren’t at port when the attack happened.
Very confident. (90-95%)
By the way, the reason I assume I am personally more rational about this than the LW average is that there are lots of US Americans around here, and I have sufficient evidence to believe that people tend to become less rational if a topic centrally involves a country they are emotionally involved with or whose educational system they went through.
I don’t have a lot of strong reasons to disbelieve you, but what evidence makes you think this is so?
Are you referring to my belief regarding the attack on Pearl Harbor, or to my belief regarding my rationality on this topic in relation to the LW average?
Does that mean that you have some strong reasons to disbelieve me?
Downvoted the comment for being bizarrely unresponsive, and the parent for being presumably reasonable in light of evidence that you refuse to share.
I want to know which things you’ve heard or seen that made you believe the United States government provoked the attack on Pearl Harbor. My best reason for doubting you is that I don’t recall hearing anything like this before from academics nor interested amateur historians nor conspiracy theorists.
My guess is that the biasing effects of being funneled through a country’s school system and subjected to its news are much weaker on those who would find LW interesting than the typical citizen.
For what it’s worth, I came across the theory before, in a pretty respectable setting: a popularization book by a historian, where many conspiracy theories (along with “mysteries” like Easter Island) where examined, usually with skeptical conclusions. The Pearl Harbor one was one of the few with a “possible, but unproven” verdict.
Do you remember the title of that book?
I read it long ago, in a Spanish translation from French. It seems the book has not been published in English. The original title is Dossiers secrets de l’histoire, by Alain Decaux.
That reduces the value of the example, IMO. Political conspiracy stuff relies on so much contextual material and government records that it’s hard for a foreigner to make a good appraisal of what went on. It would be like a monolingual American trying to make heads or tails of that incident decades ago (whose name escapes me at the moment) where a high-level Communist Party official died in a airplane crash with his family; was it a normal accident, or was he fleeing a failed coup attempt to Russia, as the conspiracy/coverup interpretations went? If you can’t even read Chinese, I have no idea how one could make a even half-decent attempt to judge the incident.
I have never heard of the book Alejandro1 refers to, but I read a book from Togo Shigenori, the Japanese foreign minister during that time, and he makes a lot of good points how US diplomacy wasn’t focused on securing peace, but on forcing Japan into a war that could only benefit the USA in the long run. From his perspective, the oil embargo left Japan with no other reasonable option than to try to conquer the British and Dutch oil reserves in South East Asia; and I see as little reason to believe that the U.S. government wasn’t aware of this as he does.
Togo was an outspoken opponent of the war against the USA who made efforts towards more diplomatical exchange, which met little interest on part of the U.S. government. He was the thriving force behind Japan’s declaration it would uphold the Geneva Convention, which Japan did not sign. He was also the originator of a peace settlement with the USSR earlier. Lastly, he was also of Korean descent, originally having the surname Park. All this adds up to sufficient evidence for me to believe that he was not a nationalist warmonger, and therefore I take his analysis very serious.
LW readers seem to be better at evaluating arguments from different sides, but not necessarily at acquiring these arguments in the first place unless they are already interested in the topic. Also, the lack of history-related threads in the discussion area leads me to believe that there is no significant correlation between being interested in LW and being interested in history in general or historical accuracy in particular.
Regarding the first part, the truth of that statement critically depends on how exactly you define “provoke.” For some reasonable definitions, the statement is almost certainly true; for others, probably not.
As for the second part (the supposed intentional dispersion of the carriers), I don’t think that’s plausible. If anything, the U.S. would have been in a similar position, i.e. at war with Japan with guaranteed victory, even if every single ship under the U.S. flag magically got sunk on December 7, 1941. So even if there was a real conspiracy involved, it would have made no sense to add this large and risky element to it just to make the eventual victory somewhat quicker.
Also, your heuristic about bias is broken. In the Western world outside of the U.S., people are on average, if anything, only more inclined to believe the official historical narrative about WW2.
This is suspect. The U.S. had greater industrial capacities and population than Japan, but that doesn’t guarantee victory. Rebuilding the navy would take a lot of time which the Japanese could use to end their war in China. Also, it was far from clear in late 1941 whether the USSR would withstand the German assault and whether the British would not seek peace.
Even in the worst possible case, I still don’t see what could prevent the U.S. from simply cranking out a new huge Pacific navy and overwhelming Japan. Yes, the production would take a few years to ramp up to full capacity, as it did in reality—but once it did, I can’t imagine what could save Japan from being overwhelmed.
Ending the war in China wouldn’t have helped the Japanese at all, even if they linked with a victorious German army in the Far East. An additional land army at their disposal could not prevent the U.S. navy steamroller from eventually reaching their home islands, whereupon they would be bombed and starved into surrender. (If not for the atom bomb ending their agony even earlier.) The Japanese islands are so exposed and vulnerable to any superior naval power that they could be lost even as the world’s mightiest army is watching helplessly from the Asian mainland.
The only theoretical chance I see is if Germany somehow conquered both the U.S.S.R. and Britain, and then threw all its resources on a crash program to build up a huge navy of its own and help the Japanese. But I’m not sure if they’d be able to outproduce the U.S. even in that case. (And note that this would require a vanishingly improbable long continuation of the Germans’ lucky streak.)
In the context of this discussion the important thing is what could be reliably predicted in 1941, so we should ignore the possible effects of the atomic bomb.
Assume that the entire U.S. navy is destroyed in January 1942. A reasonable realistic scenario, if everything went really well for Japan, may be this:
Germans capture Leningrad and encircle Moscow in summer 1942, Stalin is arrested in the forthcoming chaos and the new Soviet government signs armistice with Germany, ceding large territories in the west.
German effort is now concentrated on expanding their naval power. Germany has half of Europe’s industrial capacity at her disposal. The production of U-boats increases and Britain alone has not enough destroyers to guard the convoys.
Starvation, threat of German invasion and heavy naval losses to German submarines, leading to inability to supply the Indian armies, make Britain accept Hitler’s peace offer. Britain surrenders Gibraltar, Malta, Channel islands and all interests in European mainland to Germany and Italy, Singapore and Malaya to Japan and backs from the war.
China now obtains no help, no arms, no aircraft and surrenders in 1944, becoming divided among several Japanese puppet states.
The U.S. are alone, still having no significant navy. Hawaii is lost to the Japanese. Germany is aggresively building new ships to improve their naval power and potentially help the Japanese in the Pacific. Roosevelt dies in early 1945, as he did historically. The Japanese offer peace that would secure them the leading position in East Asia, willing to give Hawaii back.
Now in this situation, being a U.S. general, what would be your advice given to Truman? Would it be “let’s continue in a low intensity war against both Germany and Japan until we have a strong enough navy, which may be in 1947 or 1948, and then start taking one island after another, which may take two more years, and then, from the island bases supplied through the U-boat infested Pacific start bombarding Japan, until the damned fanatics realise they have no other chance than to surrender”? Or would it rather be “let’s accept peace if it’s offered on honourable terms”?
Even in that scenario, Japanese victory is conditional on the political decision of the U.S. government to accept the peace. My comments considered only the strategic situation under the assumption that all sides were willing to fight on with determination. And I don’t think this assumption is so unrealistic: the American people were extremely unwilling to enter the war, but once they did, they would have been even less willing to accept a humiliating peace. Especially since the Pacific great naval offensive could be (and historically was) fought with very low casualties, and not to mention the U.S. government’s wartime control of the media that was in many ways even more effective than the crude and heavy-handed control in totalitarian states.
Now, in your scenario, the U.S. would presumably see immediately that its first priority was navy rebuilding. (An army is useless if you can’t get it off the mainland.) This means that by 1944, Americans would be cranking out even more ships than they did historically. I don’t think the Axis could match that output even if they were in control of the entire Eurasia.
(The U-boats would have been a complicating factor. Their effectiveness changed dramatically with unpredictable innovations in technology and tactics. In actual history, they became useless by mid-1943, although Germans were arguably on the verge of introducing dramatically superior ones at the time of their capitulation. But in any case, the U-boat factor cuts both ways: Americans could swamp the Pacific with even greater numbers of U-boats and wreck the entire Japanese logistics, as they actually did.)
Even assuming a plausible scenario in which the US couldn’t defeat Germany, that doesn’t have anything to do with whether we could have defeated Japan standing alone.
Historically, we know it wasn’t that hard for the US—despite Japan attacking first, the US adopted a “Europe First” strategy that committed approx. 2⁄3 of capacity to fighting Germany. Despite this, the US defeated Japan easily—there are no major victories for Japan against the US after Pearl Harbor, and Midway was less than a year after Pearl Harbor. If the US strategy is “Japan First” (doing things like transferring the Atlantic Fleet to the Pacific), why should we expect the Pacific war would last long enough that Germany would be able to consolidate a victory in the east into driving the UK into peace and be able to intervene in the Pacific?
Also, why do you think an invasion of Hawaii was possible? The surprise strike was at the end of Japanese logistical capacity—I think the US wins if Japan tries a land invasion.
Remember the context: we are in the hypothetical where all US ships (Atlantic fleet included) were magically anihilated in the end of 1941.
I’m a big believer in not fighting the hypothetical, but there is no historically plausible account leading to the destruction of the Atlantic fleet. At that point, we aren’t discussing facts relevant to whether FDR knew of the Pearl Harbor attack ahead of time.
The hypothetical of Pearl Harbor as the most resounding success it could possibly be (US Pacific fleet reduced to irrelevance) and Germany winning the Battle of Moscow strongly enough that it has leverage to force the UK out of the war is reasonable for discussing FDR’s decision process. That’s all he could reasonably have thought he was risking by allowing Pearl Harbor. As I stated elsewhere, I think FDR gets his political goals with Japan firing the first shot—there’s no need for him to court a military disaster.
True, but I have joined this part of discussion reacting to this Vladimir_M’s comment:
Could you spell out what you mean by different definitions of “provoke”?
Anyhow, I am more concerned about the word “deliberate.” The government is not a coherent actor; it does not have deliberate actions. For example, FDR explicitly rejected an oil embargo, yet oil exports stopped. Was this because his subordinates correctly interpreted his wishes? Or were they more belligerent? In Present at the Creation (p26) Acheson seems to say that he implemented the embargo by mistake, thinking that Japan had hidden assets that would keep the flow going. On the following page, he agrees to accept payment from a Latin American bank, but something goes awry, seemingly out of his control. Delong asks if FDR even knew of the embargo.
Provoking: presenting someone with a multitude of bad choices, one of them being to attack you.
Deliberate: proceeding with an action in the hope of achieving a specific outcome.
Deliberately provoking: presenting someone with a multitude of bad choices, hoping they will attack you because of this.
The carrier fleet being operational was decisive in preventing an expected Japanese invasion of Midway and Hawaii, and recapturing Hawaii from the American continent would have been very difficult, if not outright impossible. What if China had surrendered or made peace with Japan? What if Germany captured Leningrad, Moscow, and Stalingrad? What if the Japanese nuclear weapon program had succeded? What if the public opinion had turned anti-war, as during the Vietnam War?
“Guaranteed victory” sounds like hindsight bias to me. Even if the US mainland could not have been invaded, that doesn’t mean the USA could not have lost the war.
The point is that the “official historical narrative” is different in different countries. For example, Japan has a strong culture of ignoring Japanese war crimes, in Polish textbooks there rarely is mention of Poland taking part in the partition of Czechoslovakia, Britons are generally unaware of the fact that GB declared war on Germany and not vice versa, many French think that the surrender to Germany was an action the government did not have the license to make, and so on.
“The government” is an abstract concept. I am talking about a circle of people within the government who together had the power to provoke Japan, and to assure that the losses at Pearl Harbor were within reasonable bounds. I am not overly familiar with the way the U.S. government was organised at that time, but it seems to me that such a circle had to include either the president or high ranking intelligence officials, most likely both.
It wouldn’t have mattered for the Pacific war, except by prolonging it somewhat. Even if Japan had conquered every single island in the Pacific and Indian oceans, as long as the U.S. government remained in control of the U.S. mainland, as it surely would have, it still would have had enough resources and industrial capacity to outproduce Japan in warships and other naval assets by orders of magnitude and eventually roll back the Japanese conquests by sheer overwhelming strength.
Germany arguably had some chance to win the European war, but Japan was doomed from day one.
Also, as someone has already noted, the greater importance of carriers over battleships in WW2 is itself known only from hindsight, and contrary to the prevailing beliefs of the time.
Well, yes, you can always conceive of some deus ex machina. But it’s implausible that fears about hypothetical Japanese superweapons would have influenced the strategic plans of FDR & Co. in 1941.
By 1941, FDR & Co. already had sufficiently strong grip on power that they comfortably knew that a war would allow them to seize complete control of the media (and all other means of propaganda) and ensure that this could never happen.
True enough, but thus typically has the form of the same official narrative with some additional spin, omission, and lying with regards to the relevant local details in order to accommodate nationalist sensibilities. In contrast, sensible, intelligent, well-informed, and yet radical criticism of the official narrative can be found, to my knowledge, only within the Old Right intellectual tradition in the U.S. (Which has been driven to the fringe for many decades, but its vestiges somehow still occasionally surface in the respectable public discourse.)
American public opinion may have expected such invasions, but did any serious military experts? Earl Warren and FDR’s political pandering is not really strong evidence of a serious military expectation. Obviously, we know now that the Pearl Harbor attack was at the outermost of Japanese logistical capacity—they never planned an invasion of Hawaii, much less the West Coast.
Given the history, we know that transpacific projections of land forces were very possible for the United States (Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima). Why would an invasion of Hawaii be more difficult?
As an aside, I agree that FDR courted war because he wanted to join the European conflict. Lend-Lease and escorting convoys were not the acts of a neutral party. Likewise, the raw material embargos on Japan placed that nation in an untenable position. I upvoted you for asserting that FDR knew that Pearl Harbor would be attacked in time to make changes to defensive preparations at that base. From FDR’s perspective, a “surprise” attack that was a stalemate instead of a defeat would have served his political goal (war with Germany) just as well.
There were proponents of an invasion of Hawaii within the Japanese military cabinet; I think Genda Minoru was one of them. Plans existed, but were deemed too risky and unlikely to succeed.
I never said anything about an invasion of the US West Coast, but the Japanese invasion of the Aleutian islands was supposed to be the first stage of an invasion of Alaska. Had that plan succeeded, Japan would have been in control of naval bases within reasonable distance of the US West Coast.
Guadalcanal and Iwojima were within range of US forward bases. Carrying out a large-scale invasion over a distance of about 4000km is not something any military power was capable of during WW2, to my knowledge.
Well, “provocation” is one of those problematic words, in that nearly always, the party accused of “provocation” denies it—and the act itself is therefore nearly always done in a way that attempts for some plausible deniability. So even if there is agreement on the facts of what happened, there is usually room for debate over whether an act constituted “provocation.”
Of course. But under FDR, he and his inner circle did act in a fairly coherent way (and by extension, so did the entire pyramid of New Deal patronage that they headed). There were certainly individuals and institutions within the U.S. government outside of their control, but by 1941, they had been mostly side-stepped and pushed away into irrelevance.
I wouldn’t consider Acheson a credible source. Certainly, it’s very naive to take anything written by the political actors of the New Deal/WW2 era at face value, and disentangling the real events from the available information is a task of enormous complexity and difficulty. That rabbit hole is very, very deep.
It seems to me very different to say that it is difficult to assess whether something is a provocation than to say that there are some definitions of provocation under which it is and some under which it isn’t.
Do you think Acheson would lie about external facts, like whether he offered to let the Japanese pay with money in a Latin American bank account?
If we could read minds (including those in the past), it would probably be possible to come to agreement about which concrete acts have been provocations in all cases, by looking for the mens rea: was the given act specifically motivated by the desire to induce a hostile reaction?
But since we can’t read minds, the practical criteria for what counts as “provocation” are murky, and they are typically a mixture of attempts to evaluate indirect evidence about motives and attempts to define certain acts in certain contexts as ipso facto provocative. So there is lots of difficulty on both fronts, even if there is a general agreement on what happened: it’s hard to evaluate the evidence about motives correctly, and there is also disagreement on which acts qualify as ipso facto provocative.
In this concrete case, some people would say that the actions of the U.S. government prior to Pearl Harbor were ipso facto provocative, i.e. that they were far outside of the limits of reasonable behavior of someone who is not actively trying to provoke hostility. Others would say that it isn’t so, and they’d presumably also claim that there is no clear evidence about motives to pronounce the verdict of “provocation.”
It strikes me as wildly implausible that someone relatively low in the pecking order, like Acheson in 1941, could have been in a position to make such tremendous history-shaping decisions on his own whim and without directions from above. So I think his account presents, at best, a strong lawyerly spin on the events with plenty of important omissions, even if there is no outright lying.
Now, why the oil embargo was instituted in this particular puzzling way, I don’t know. I’ve never found the time to sit down and study all the available sources in detail. However, it seems to me that the most probable explanation is that FDR and his clique wanted to execute the embargo in a duplicitous and plausibly deniable way (which would be very much within their usual modus operandi), so they tried to make it look like an underling did the paperwork of export licensing a bit too eagerly, and then also the Japanese unreasonably failed to do the correct bureaucratic procedure, etc., etc.
The “and it was not chance” bit? That requires the conspirators be non-human.
Carrier supremacy was hardly an established doctrine, much less proved in battle; orthodox belief since Mahan was that battleships were the most important ships in a fleet. The orthodox method of preserving the US Navy’s power would have been to disperse battleships, not carriers. Even if the conspirators were all believers in the importance of carriers, even a minimum of caution would have led them to find an excuse to also save some of the battleships. To believe at 90% confidence that a group of senior naval officials, while engaging in a high-stakes conspiracy, also took a huge un-hedged gamble on an idea that directly contradicted the established naval dogma they were steeped in since they were midshipmen, is ludicrous.
Not really. It wasn’t just “a carrier fleet” and “a battleship fleet”, it was a predominantly modern carrier fleet and an outdated battleship fleet that consisted mostly of WWI designs or modifications of WWI designs. It was also consensus that if you were going to deploy carriers, the Pacific Ocean was a more promising theatre than the Atlantic ocean, due to (a) the weather and (b) the lack of strategically positioned air bases on land that were in little danger of being invaded, such as Newfoundland, Great Britain, West Africa, and so on. Also, the U.S. Navy could have commissioned more battleships instead of carriers, but they didn’t, and that means they did have plans for them; most likely in the Pacific theatre. It was clear from the start that being at war with Japan would also mean being at war with Germany, so fighting only on the Pacific front was never an option.
I didn’t say they wouldn’t try to save the carriers. I said they would have hedged their bets by also dispersing some of the battleships. Your 90% confidence in your whole conjunct opinion requires a greater-than-90% confidence in the proposition that while saving the carriers, the people involved, all steeped in battleship supremacy/prestige for decades, would deliberately leave all the battleships vulnerable, rather than disperse even one or two as a hedge.
Only in violation of the Washington and First London Naval Treaties. The US Navy could not have built more battleships at the time it started, for example, the Enterprise (1934) under those treaties.
I note that in the period 1937-to-Pearl-Harbor, which is to say subsequent to the 1936 Second London Naval Treaty that allowed it, the US Navy started no fewer than nine new battleships (and got funding authorization for a tenth), which suggests that they still seriously believed in battleships. Otherwise, why not build carriers in their place?
But they did disperse some of the battleships. That’s why all the battleships at Pearl Harbor were outdated classes. They didn’t have that many outdated carriers, and carriers retain their value more over the course of time than battleships and battlecruisers do.
The ratio value:tonnage of capital ships sunk at Pearl harbor was significantly lower than the ratio value:tonnage of capital ships in the surviving fleets in the Pacific Ocean and elsewhere. This was never about carriers versus battleships, it was about vessels with high value versus vessels with low value.
Er? What battleships are you claiming were dispersed?
There were quite literally no newer battleships on active duty in the US Navy on December 7th, 1941 than the West Virginia, “outdated class” or no, sunk at Pearl Harbor along with her brand-new CXAM-1 radar. The only newer battleships in commission were the North Carolina and Washington, both of which were not yet on active duty because of delays caused by propeller issues.
Yes, I was referring to the North Carolina. She had already completed her sea trials, but was not yet headed for Pearl Harbor when the attack happened.
Also, of the 18 heavy cruisers the US Navy had in 1941 (all of them being post-WW1 designs), only two were present at Pearl Harbor.
Do you think that the U.S. government provoked an attack specifically on Pearl Harbor, or that they just wanted the Japanese to attack somewhere?
Where exactly do you place the boundary of deliberate provocation? That is, does not trying too hard to prevent the attack count, or had they have to be actively persuading the Japanese and moving the fleets into easily attackable positions?
I think they wanted the Japanese to attack somewhere, but they were aware of the fact that Pearl Harbor was a likely target.
I think they were actively persuading the Japanese to commit some act of war, and were not trying too hard to prevent the specific act of war that happened.
Upvoted, not for the assertion, but for the confidence level (I would give it 25-75%)
Thanks; I assumed the many upvotes came from people who considered my confidence level too high, not too low, but it’s nice to have someone actually confirm that.
I have seen a few low status conspiracy theorists advocating a position like this, and eventually started to agree that provoking an attack from an enemy is a strategy the US has used several times this century, my probability for this particular incident is still around 75% at most though