As many are aware, one camp holds the opinion that even if we did know, FDR did the right thing by allowing the attack. The rationale: it initiated America's entry into the war in time to preserve Britain as the last Allied foothold in Europe, from which it became possible to deploy troops for the eventual D-Day invasion.

Some of those who espouse this view believe that the 3000 lives lost at Pearl...

1. Were far the "lesser" of casualties that would have otherwise resulted if America had delayed or never opted to enter the war. To wit, the war would have been prolonged by years before either side surrendered, resulting in much greater loss of life on both sides of the conflict.

2. Prevented Hitler from global dictatorship. One argument is that after Germany conquered Britain, its ally Japan would attack the USSR from the East, to create a second front and overwhelm their already stretched resources. After subduing the USSR, a pacifistic America would be the only remaining deterrent to German/Japanese global conquest. The war still results in America's involvement, but in this setting, US soil would stage the horrific battlefield.

There are countless "what if" scenarios other than this, of course. But I personally see no argument that validates permitting the deliberate murder of one's own citizens for a hypothetical "greater good" that supposedly will be the end result.

The above is not meant to imply that FDR in fact did know the attack was coming and deliberately allowed it to happen. I just thought it would be interesting to outline how some would support such actions even if proven to be true. I don't agree.

But we declared war on Japan, which wasn't an Axis power at the time. Germany declared war on US after Pearl Harbor because of our insistance on supplying England despite the German U-Boat blockade, not because Japan attacked.

I appreciate your candor in stating your objectivity. You don't think that FDR or anyone else knew of the impending attack. I think we can look at history and decide that they SHOULD have known SOMETHING was coming, but they didn't have any way of knowing when, where, or how.

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Hello, all--

Sorry I've been away so long; I've been extremely busy with school and other issues in my life (mainly school, as anyone else here who's majored in engineering will understand). This week was the first time this semester that I have even had a chance to lurk, and what do I find but a new thread on my "favorite" conspiracy theory. Naturally I had to respond. Before I start, though, Jay, if you're reading this thread, I think you should become a professor and come teach at Indiana U. - Purdue U. Fort Wayne (IPFW to those who live in IN).

The number of members of this "camp" is actually rather small--the most notable being CT author Robert Stinnett, who attempts to sugar-coat his theory by claiming at the end of his book that "FDR did the right thing." Conventional wisdom among Pearl Harbor debunkers is that Stinnett did this in order to reduce the backlash (and number of potential libel suits) from the hundreds of his fellow WWII vets whom he accuses of complicity.

By the end of 1941, Britain was in no danger of being invaded or bombed into submission. The only way that Britain could have been knocked out of the war was through economic strangulation from the U-boat campaign. American merchantmen were already carrying supplies to Britain, and American warships were escorting British convoys. One US destroyer had been sunk and another damaged by U-boats, and FDR had ordered the Navy to attack any German ships on sight. There was no need for a war with Japan; in fact, the Japanese attack made matters worse, as many American and British warships and naval aircraft had to be transferred to the Pacific.


The United States had no significant numbers of trained troops or combat aircraft to send overseas at the end of 1941, and would not for the better part of a year. In fact, FDR's military advisors were begging him to delay entering the war as long as possible, to give them more time to prepare. Furthermore, the US had begun ramping up production and training in 1940; preparations were well along, but far from complete. There was little advantage in going to war at the end of 1941, and much advantage in waiting another six months.

The US began building a world-class army, navy, and air force in 1940, after the fall of France, to guard against just such an eventuality, and it was unlikely that the Axis powers would have been able to conquer America, at least not within a generation. By 1944 the US Navy was larger than every other navy in the world combined; coupled with the logistics involved in mounting an invasion over such great distances, the conquest of America was not a realistic possibility.

Obviously, fascist domination of the rest of the world would still have been catastrophic for the US, but FDR didn't need an attack by Japan to get into a war with Germany.

Many people who have read the book Failsafe or seen either of the movies based on it might disagree with you.

**Spoiler Alert**






In the book, set during the 1950s, the US accidentally nukes Moscow, and in order to placate the Soviets, the US President orders the Air Force to nuke New York.

Having said that, the argument that FDR knew about the attack and allowed it to go forward unopposed in order to get the US into a war with Germany is entirely specious. Can any of the proponents of a conspiracy explain how a non-surprise attack would not result in a war with Japan? They can't, because it would have. Furthermore, many people would have had to have been in on the conspiracy; any one of them could have blown the whistle to a prominent isolationist senator or representative, and FDR would have been impeached, removed, and hanged for treason; Stark and Marshall would have undoubtedly faced firing squads. OTOH, had FDR warned Kimmel and Short and ordered them to prepare an ambush, the leadership would have been insulated from any charges of treason; they could have claimed that they had to keep the information about the attack secret so as not to reveal their intelligence sources.

Another common CT fallacy is the idea that had the Japanese attack force been discovered and turned back, Japan would have called off the entire war. The senior Japanese leadership was mostly opposed to the Pearl Harbor attack as unnecessarily risky and diverting assets that could be better used elsewhere; Admiral Yamamoto had to threaten to resign in order to get his superiors to approve the plan. The Japanese had already decided on war, and would have attacked the Philippines and other US posessions whether or not the Pearl Harbor attack went forward.

In this case, such action would be completely unsupportable, because it would have been utterly unnecessary, as detailed above.

[edited for clarity]

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"When your statics problem becomes a dynamics problem, you're in trouble." --me

Moor's Law: "As you go from freshman engineering to Ph.D., the amount of work required per credit hour doubles approximately every 18 months." --me, inspired by Prof. Scott Moor

I'm sorry, but that's incorrect. Japan signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy in September 1940, significantly increasing tension in US-Japanese relations. Many CTs incorrectly claim that FDR allowed Pearl Harbor to be attacked because Germany would have been obligated to declare war on America under the terms of the treaty; actually, members were required to declare war only if another member were attacked. In fact, Japan did not declare war on the Soviet Union when Germany invaded in June 1941; CTs tend to ignore this inconvenient point.

Historian Richard Hill, although a Pearl Harbor CT, has come up with the most likely explanation for Hitler's declaring war on the US. Note that Hitler never declared war on any other country; he simply attacked. Hill feels that Hitler, who hadn't had any recent military successes, was simply trying to grab a share of the credit for Pearl Harbor. According to Hill, the Germans attempted to "retract" the declaration of war the next day by claiming that Hitler was merely stating the obvious; that US and German naval units were then shooting at each other (see my previous post). Of course by then it was too late.

I get the impression that turbonium is at best noncommittal about the CT. As to knowing where and when the attack would come, there were enough small clues that superior intelligence analysis might have pieced together to figure it out, but doing so would have required considerable skill and luck. CTs who claim that the clues were "obvious" are simply using hindsight.

[edited for grammar and clarity]

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--Doug

"When your statics problem becomes a dynamics problem, you're in trouble." --me

Moor's Law: "As you go from freshman engineering to Ph.D., the amount of work required per credit hour doubles approximately every 18 months." --me, inspired by Prof. Scott Moor

Just a few points if I may. Firstly the
decoding machine depicted in 3.Tora I suspect
was artistic licence by the director from
what has been said about JN25 and the
diplomatic code. Secondly, surely the chance to
waste 6 enemy flat-tops would have been too
much a temptation if the plans were known!

Sorry, I meant the film "Battle of Midway"
as regards the decoding machine.

Agreed - if Britain was going to have been defeated by Germany, it would have been around the time of the Dunkirk evacuation , when the Allies were at their weakest.

The other points you raised I basically am in agreement with, as well. The entire "what if" rationale of that view is unsupportable, imo.

Yikes! Well, I'm glad the people who champion this view as somehow acceptable didn't and don't make those decisions for us! (or do they?.....)

I think you missed the point a bit.
The Russians threaten with all out nuclear war because they were attacked.
So the Americans have either proof to the Russians it was unintentional,
or go first-strike, which would not have been fully successful.
So nuke New York or destroy the world.
What do you choose.

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Just so people don't get too confused, a little reminder about what encryption systems we had broken, which we hadn't, and what they carried, is in order.

Purple: This was the Japanese diplomatic cipher. It was a machine enciphered system similar in some ways, (but very different in others) to the German Enigma. It was used to communicate between the Japanese foreign secretary and his ambassadors and embassies. It did not carry any military orders or messages. We had broken Purple in 1940 or so and were reading it. As a result we knew that tensions were high. The "East Wind Rain" message was sent in Purple and was a warning to the embassies to be ready to destroy classified papers and other sensitive items once they heard the fake weather report. It said nothing about the potential target and there is no way that an intercept of the fake weather report would have changed things in Hawaii. Marshall and Stark had already sent the commanders there a message based on this, and other Purple decrypts, that told them to get ready. It began "This message is to be considered a war warning." Hard to get less ambiguous than that.

Oddly enough there were Purple intercepts that hinted that Pearl was a possible target. The so-called "bomb plot" message directed an intelligence agent working out of the Honolulu consulate to compile a list of what ships and what types moored in various parts of the harbor. However, it was lost in the shuffle of other intelligence and no one appreciated its significance at the time. Likewise for the "14-part" message sent just before the attack. While not an explicit declaration of war, the specified time of delivery (1:00 DC time I think) corresponded to the start of the attack in Hawaii. This might have set off some alarm bells as well, although any response would probably have been too late.

JN-25b: This was the Japanese Navy's operational code. We had not broken it prior to the attack (although we could pull out a word or two in any given message). The orders for the attack were sent in this, so if we had broken it, we would have had specific warning and could have responded as examples later in the war show. By June we had broken enough of JN-25b to give us warning about the battles of Coral Sea and Midway and the intelligence played a significant role in our successes in those battles. In 1943 JN-25b decrypts were used to target Yamamoto and and essentially assassinate him by shooting down the plane he was flying in.

Another point to consider here is that once the strike force set sail it maintained strict radio silence (despite the claims of some PHCT's). So there was no ability to do direction finding to indicate that the fleet was at sea. The Japanese also played a little deception by switching the call signs of the carriers to shore facilities to make it appear the carriers were in port.

As a final note, I've always found it funny that PHCTers think Roosevelt would allow the Navy to be sacrificed to get into the war. Roosevelt loved the Navy. As SecNav in the 1910's he had been involved in the authorization and construction of many of the ships present at Pearl. For instance he was one of the participants in the keel laying ceremony for the Arizona itself. IMO many who think that he knew about the attack, its likely consequences, and still let it happen fail to realize this.

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"If it was so, it might be, and if it were so, it would be, but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic!" - Tweedledee

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One of these days, I'm going to have to re-read "And I was There", Pearl Harbor and Midway - Breaking the Secrets by Rear Admiral Edwin T. Layton USN Ret. with Roger Pineau and John Costello. I originally read it, after buying it at Pearl Harbor in Jan of 1989. I remember it being a real interesting read, much of it was written in support of Kimmel, Short and Rochefort, dealing more with the communications (or lack of) between Hypo and Washington.

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We can't measure and we can't see..." - from Jimmy Buffett's What if the hokey pokey is all it really is about?

I'm really not convinced by Hill's theory. The army was still near Moscow, and the Soviet counterattacks (begun a couple of days before) showed no sign of being a great success (that was to come a few days later), and there was every reason (from the German viewpoint, with their slightly rubbish intelligence service) to assume that the Soviet armies were still close to collapse and could be finished off in the Spring. I just don't see how, even for Hitler, this would be viewed as a good reason to declare war.

Weinberg argues that Hitler was all for war with the US, on the basis that he felt that the Japanese Navy was far superior to the US one, and that it would allow his navy to attack any and every thing in the Atlantic. The order that unleashed the German Navy, giving it a free hand, was given on the night of the 8th/9th, 2 days prior to the declaration of war. To me that shows where his priority lay, in the freedom war with the US (who he held in very low esteem) gave him to finish of Britain, not in some slightly bizarre propaganda move.

September 1940 was viewed as the most likely time for invasion. Until the Luftwaffe held something approaching air superiority an invasion would have been incredibly risky, and that was not the case in May/Jun '40. It never became the case, but came closest in late August/early September.

Even with Luftwaffe AirSuperiority an invasion would have failed, the Germans were considering it as an extended river crossing. they had no specialised Beach landing Craft, they were to rely on barges towed across the channel with improvised ramps atthe bows to allow vehicles to disembark. Any invasion would have needed to capture very quickly an intact major port. Also the RN Home fleet would still have been a big barrier even without air cover.

As for 'unleashing' the german navy all we are talking about is a Submarine force, they had no surface fleet to speak of.

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Well, yes, I was avoiding going into all the reasons an invasion using rustled up and cobbled together barges would have been a foolhardy operation...then again, I'm not convinced they were serious about it anyway, at least Hitler never seemed particularly taken with the idea at the time.

Still the navy, though, and a formidable one in terms of its impact on the Allies, if not quite as formidable as it appeared in the imaginations of some in the German hierarchy.

Good point, The Allied invasion of Normandy showed just how hard it was to stage such an attack and the Allies had already Air and Sea Superiority.

As for ther German Navy, IIRC they basically had two "Real" battleships in operation: the Bismark (sunk in May 1941) and the Tirpitz, they didn't have any Aircraft Carriers. So, in hindsight, Operaton SeaLion, could be argued that it was a longshot at best.

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The point, however, is that the Wehrmacht had failed to capture Moscow before winter, as Hitler had hoped.

This is most likely true; however, as I pointed out, at no other time did Hitler actually declare war; he simply attacked.

My point exactly--the order had been given; why declare war, when he'd never bothered to before?

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"When your statics problem becomes a dynamics problem, you're in trouble." --me

Moor's Law: "As you go from freshman engineering to Ph.D., the amount of work required per credit hour doubles approximately every 18 months." --me, inspired by Prof. Scott Moor

This agrees with something else I recall (though I might be mis-remembered) - that the Navy and Army Air Force in Hawaii were more concerned with Japanese saboteurs as a threat to their forces, rather than an attach force, and planned accordingly (such as planes out in the open where they could be watched, but also, were easier to bomb).

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We should note also that this message was only to be used in case the US cut off normal communications (i.e. cable service) between Tokyo and the embassy and consulates in the US prior to the outbreak of hostilities. The US never did this; therefore, the message was unneeded and never sent (although a few American intelligence officers wasted much time and effort pursuing this red herring).

Unfortunately, some CTs would disagree. Mark Willey (who is to Pearl Harbor CTs what Der Voron and Cosmic Dave are to HBs) claims that the messages are deliberately vague and misleading. See here.

This was partly due to the fact that the Japanese were known to be attempting to collect detailed information about other US bases, such as Manila, Seattle, and the Panama Canal. CTs claim that the only possible purpose for such information is planning for an air attack; this is simply not true. One intelligence officer who testified that he had seen the message stated that he had assumed that the Japanese would reason that ships closer to the drydocks were more likely to be undergoing maintenance, and thus unavailable for combat.

As soon as he saw the 14-part message, Marshall consulted Admiral Stark, and ordered that the following radiogram be sent to all major US Army commands in the Pacific.

Unfortunately, atmospheric conditions prevented the relatively weak Army radio from being received in Hawaii, so, unbeknownst to Marshall, the message was sent by commercial cable. It was not marked "urgent" for some reason, and was not delivered until after the attack had begun.

Actually, the attack orders and plans were not sent in code at all; they were delivered by courier. Apart from the fact that they included maps, the main reason that Yamamoto used couriers, despite the fact that he believed that JN-25B was secure, was to avoid unauthorized decoding by bored communications clerks who might then start blabbing about a top-secret operation.

After the strike force had assembled in the Kurile Islands, routine messages to and from the ships were handled by undersea cable, in order to maintain radio silence.

The Japanese also left some of their radio operators ashore, because every Morse sender has a unique "fist" that another experienced operator can identify.

The current CT line is that US intercept operators were too skilled to be fooled; also, because some US bases had equipment for radio "fingerprinting" (taking a picture of an oscilloscope screen to exactly capture the waveform of a transmitter for identification purposes), the CTs claim that this procedure must necessarily have been in widespread use, and that it must have worked perfectly. In fact it was just beginning to be used. Recently declassified radio direction-finding (RDF) logs show intercepts of messages using the Japanese carriers' call signs; CTs contend that because US operators could not possibly have been fooled, the transmissions must be authentic. Commander Phil Jacobsen (see eta C's earlier post) has demonstrated, however, based on the dates of the intercepts and the bearings recorded, that these messages must have originated from Japanese bases, and not from the Pearl Harbor strike force.

Easily dismissed by the majority of CTs--FDR was so evil and Machiavellian that he would have done anything to get the US into a war the American people didn't want.

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--Doug

"When your statics problem becomes a dynamics problem, you're in trouble." --me

Moor's Law: "As you go from freshman engineering to Ph.D., the amount of work required per credit hour doubles approximately every 18 months." --me, inspired by Prof. Scott Moor

This is correct, especially for the Army, which had primary responsibility for air defense. The root issue, though, is a fundamental lack of coordination and communication between the Army and the Navy; Army commanders assumed that the Navy knew where the Japanese fleet was and would provide ample warning of any external threat; Navy commanders assumed that the Army was on alert against air attack.

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--Doug

"When your statics problem becomes a dynamics problem, you're in trouble." --me

Moor's Law: "As you go from freshman engineering to Ph.D., the amount of work required per credit hour doubles approximately every 18 months." --me, inspired by Prof. Scott Moor

What is true about the story that the Japanese ambassador to the US was left waiting in the US-Secretary of State's anteroom, while holding a declaration of war in his hand, at the time the attacks started?

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It was not an overt declaration of war. It was a 14-part message that concluded with (as far as the ambassadors knew) breaking off negotiations:

Thus, the earnest hope of the Japanese Government to adjust Japanese-American relations and to preserve and promote the peace of the Pacific through cooperation with the American Government has finally been lost.


The Japanese Government regrets to have to notify hereby the American Government that in view of the attitude of the American Government it cannot but consider that it is impossible to reach an agreement through further negotiations.

Of course, being an official document, it had to be typed cleanly. However, because of the sensitivity of the message, the Foreign Ministry specifically told the embassy in Washington not to use their regular secretaries. While a junior adjutant was hunting & pecking in a foreign language, they got the word that they were deliver the message at 1:00pm. In the event, they arrived at the State Department after 2:00, and after word of the attack had already reached Secretary of State Cordell Hull.

Edited to add: The above referenced site contains the full text of many of the relevant messages leading up the the attack.

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What about other points regarding prior knowledge? Such as...

In the BBC video "Pearl Harbor: Day of Deceit", United Press reporter Joe Leib attests that on Nov. 29, 1941, US Secretary of State Cordell Hull told him that Pearl Harbor would be attacked on Dec. 7, and that he showed him the actual transcript for the impending attack.

The New York Times reported on Dec. 8, 1941, on page 13, in an article titled "Attack Was Expected", that the U.S. knew of the attack a week earlier.

But to declare war on another country, just for the sake of it (which is how I interpreted your/Hills stuff, apologies if I misread), as some sort of propaganda distraction makes no sense. May as well spin the events in Russia, far easier and just as effective.

I think the thing is Hitler was always working on the next project long before the current one was finished (or had only just begun). The US seems to have been a target, at least for neutering, for a long time with him, and it was likely to be the next campaign as part of finishing off Britain. It's why German industry was partly shifted from aircraft and tanks to ship building in the summer of '41. So, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour, it seemed the right time to get the ball rolling. Whether it was a propaganda boost I think is secondary to the fact he saw an opportunity and took it. The fact he (and his intelligence lot) misjudged the US massively is par for the course for that regime.

I think Hitler had much the same problem with naval warfare as Napoleon did...it wasn't "real". Whereas invading Poland (or anywhere else for that matter) on the ground was a de facto declaration of war, merely sinking ships didn't seem that to him, so for the US an official declaration was needed in his mind.

Anyway...this is all horribly OT for this thread...sorry all!

Hitlers problem was losing ships. He wasn't prepared to risk his big units, it would be a blow to pride and honour etc they were symbols of his military strength rather than a serious fighting force. Unless you are prepared to lose them they are no good, all they do is tie down the enemy by being a fleet 'In being' but if all the enemy capital ships have to fight is your capital ships then you gain nothing. Also big ships need lots of resources and men to crew them, support them and keep them protected.
Even going back to WW1 the Imperial fleet was relectant to face the RN, Jutland ended in a stalemate as the Germans didn't hang around to fight and never came out in force again until the end of the war to surrender. By that time they had been robbd of crew to fight on the Western Front and supplies to keep them seaworthy.

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I'm not sure which I have more difficulty believing:
1.) That despite strenuous security measures by the Japanese, the Secretary of State had a written copy of their attack plans just two days after the fleet left Japan (and three days before Nagumo received the order to proceed with the attack). For our part, no one on the Purple reading list from the President on down was allowed to keep copies of the intercepts.
B.) That the Secretary of State would show such a thing to a reporter.
III.) That the reporter would not have the scoop of the century, and would have his testimony used by the administration's many enemies for years.

Searching the New York Times archives for the month of December, 1941, I cannot find any such article.

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Not to mention that any such orders were encrypted in a system we hadn't broken yet and sent in such a way that we couldn't intercept (thanks for pointing that out Doug/Spitfire). A more likely possibility is that Leib simply misremembered something Hull told him.

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"If it was so, it might be, and if it were so, it would be, but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic!" - Tweedledee

This isn't right. This isn't even wrong. - Wolfgang Pauli

The actual title is Betrayal at Pearl Harbor. See here for a skeptical review. The word "attests" implies that Lieb gave a sworn statement of the affair; to my knowledge he never did. I couldn't find a copy of Lieb's original article, but as I recall, he claimed to have earned Hull's everlasting trust and gratitude by not breaking a story that would have caused Hull serious embarrassment; therefore the Secretary of State felt that he could rely upon Lieb not to reveal that Hull was the source of the "leak." The fact is, Lieb did not reveal this purported conversation until many years later, after Hull was dead and could not corroborate Lieb's story. Lieb has no evidence to support his claim; in the face of all the evidence against such a conspiracy, we must accept that the most likely explanation is that Lieb simply misremembered some important details of the conversation many years later. Hull may well have told Lieb that the Japanese were going to attack America; FDR is known to have told his advisors at the end of November "we may be attacked as soon as next Monday." If Hull did show Lieb any classified documents, they were probably Purple decrypts (see eta C's previous post), which contained no information about Pearl Harbor. In short, this is most likely an example of a case where "FDR knew the Japanese were going to attack America" is transmuted by emotion, misinterpretation, and faulty memory into "FDR knew the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor."
I'll go to the library and check the microfilmed NYT and see if I can find this.

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"When your statics problem becomes a dynamics problem, you're in trouble." --me

Moor's Law: "As you go from freshman engineering to Ph.D., the amount of work required per credit hour doubles approximately every 18 months." --me, inspired by Prof. Scott Moor

Although there was sometimes method in Hitler's madness, often there was not. Also, I believe you are assuming that Hitler's only motivation was getting good press. It is entirely possible that he would want to grab a share of the credit in order to feed his own megalomania.

I strongly disagree with your contention that it would have been "just as effective." Goebbels would have had to have concocted some story about a German Pearl Harbor-scale victory, which would not be independently verifiable, and which the Soviets would have quickly denied. The US was admitting to Pearl Harbor, and the attack was the major news story all over the world.

This is an interesting theory--do you have any evidence, or are you speculating?

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--Doug

"When your statics problem becomes a dynamics problem, you're in trouble." --me

Moor's Law: "As you go from freshman engineering to Ph.D., the amount of work required per credit hour doubles approximately every 18 months." --me, inspired by Prof. Scott Moor

I'll go to the library and check the microfilmed NYT and see if I can find this.

That would seem to be the best thing to do. As for Joe Leib relating what he was privy to...

Originally Posted by Count Zero
I'm not sure which I have more difficulty believing:
1.) That despite strenuous security measures by the Japanese, the Secretary of State had a written copy of their attack plans just two days after the fleet left Japan (and three days before Nagumo received the order to proceed with the attack). For our part, no one on the Purple reading list from the President on down was allowed to keep copies of the intercepts.
B.) That the Secretary of State would show such a thing to a reporter.
III.) That the reporter would not have the scoop of the century, and would have his testimony used by the administration's many enemies for years.

Not to mention that any such orders were encrypted in a system we hadn't broken yet and sent in such a way that we couldn't intercept (thanks for pointing that out Doug/Spitfire). A more likely possibility is that Leib simply misremembered something Hull told him.

Points 1, 2 and 3 are simply speculation, or begging the question - you simply assume that it cannot be true because it would be 'too incredible', or if true, then 'this' or 'that' would have certainly happened. That is a logical fallacy.

And stating one's personal viewpoint - that the code was not yet broken as an 'indisputable fact', also does not falsify Leib's statements. Mr. Leib first spoke publically about what Hull told him as an elderly man, after keeping his word of secrecy no longer applied, since Hull was now deceased. You are dismissing his claims as "misremembered" facts, as if it were a foregone conclusion. Leib made a point of saying that the date he was told and shown for the attack was Dec. 7. He would have had to wrongly remember not only the precise date of attack was never told to him by Hull, but also have made up or have an imaginary memory of being shown the actual transcript.

However, most things can be traced to his pre-war views on where he felt all this was going. Megalomania is too easy a thing to conjure up to cover it, in my mind. It's akin to saying "he was mad". Not a particularly useful answer when there was always method.

Still no requirement to declare war. The US was already marked as an enemy, and the Germans were already being conditioned to view them as such, so there was still no requirement from a propaganda point of view to declare war.

Largely speculation, however Hitler was a ground forces man and the Wehrmacht had little experience of things naval (see the "what if" thread on Sealion, which I think has moved to BABBling). His whole outlook was about grabbing land, occupying countries, lebensraum...how do you get any of that at sea? As I say, speculation.

Are you saying that you have actual proof that JN25 (or any variant of) was broken before December 1941? please explain why this doesn't falsify Leib's statements?

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