Help me SB.com, you are my only hope. Re: Pearl Harbor conspiracy

I'm starting to think that history schools are only comparable in brainwashing and ideological indoctrination and intentional mind closure to seminaries.

Yes again its about my dear soon to be MaS historian friend. And PH. Not a single god damn argument I tried works.
Listing stuff I'm dealing with.
"Ok, maybe FDR wasn't in the conspiracy, maybe Nimitz and MacArthur did it on their own".
"Yes maybe officially carriers had excuse to sail out as fleet scouts, but brilliant minds in USN had understood consequences of Taranto, and they knew that Japan had piled up its carriers in a single strike group".
"History is always written by the victor, USA had 70 years to make enough excuses and justifications to hide the conspiracy".

And on and on and on.

Do they even teach scientific method at all at history schools?

So dear SB, I've tried googling, but since I know its arguments that comes up often, I need best most rock solid collection of arguments that debunk PH conspiracy. RationalWiki won't do, I need heavier ordinance please.

 

Proving a negative, coming right up!

 

Seriously though, don't bother, if he's that stuck in his ways, laugh at him and walk off.

 

If the USA knew it was coming they would have sprung the mother of all traps and destroyed the Japanese fleet. HUGE propoganda victory and the Japanese would have to sue for peace immediately or face loosing in only a year.


Why would ANYONE in a position of power pass up on information that would let them become an instant hero, destroying the enemy sneak attack before it could strike...rather than enter the war by letting yourself be attacked.

 

Tried that line trust me.
"You see, if USA had won a quick victory over Japanese then FDR would have been unable to push USA to a war economy needed to defeat Germany. A sudden attack by and evil enemy is better rallying call than a swift victory using the foreknowledge. Latter case would simply not motivate USA public enough".

And I facedesk. Repeatedly.

How the hell can smart people believe in silly conspiracies...

 

No but they do teach a bunch of bullshit pseudoscience at time

 

I mean, I know a lot of all shades of liberal folks who come from Law and History schools. But absolute majority of all right wing/conservative folks who are above the level of soccer hooligans and street thugs come from those two places.

 

Sneak attack by the Japanese means no war with Germany because it's a war with, guess, Japan and the US won't start a war against Germany while they are busy elsewhere.

To get a war in Europe against Germany you do not start a war in the Pacific with Japan. It's on the wrong side of the world.

Really Hitler was very supportive by declaring war against the US on his own initiative. Roosevelt was really helped out of a bind there..

BTW some people don't want to be convinced even if they claim they can be.

 

Because it was an attack by a political opponent. America knew an attack was going to happen somewhere, they just didn't know or imagine the scale. But well politics, they used it to insinuate that... and well it never went away. *cries for humanity*

 

Well, you could tell him that I know someone in the Illuminati who told me that, actually, the plan from Majestic 12 was to sink the Japanese fleet as it attacked with a nuclear-tipped V2 (I hope he isn't a sheeple believing that Oppenheimer did invent the Bomb in 1945). Sadly, the masterplan was foiled by a brave individual who managed to discover the whole conspiracy by himself and who made the choice to sacrifice himself sabotaging the rocket instead of telling the world about it.

But, otherwise, yeah, it was a coincidence the carriers were away.

Thus, World War II and Plan B for the New World Order: the United Nations.

Try and tell me he wouldn't believe this explanation.

 

Even before the declaration, the Germans worked hard to piss off the American public, one torpedoed destroyer or merchantman at a time...

 

Ummmm, how exactly do you apply the scientific method to history? Its fairly hard to do experiments, and control groups are nigh impossible.

 

I think you will find most Historians are by nature deeply cynical individuals who trust nothing official and apply a lot of time trying to see what connections there are between documents (Which can be almost anything so long as it can be studied from pottery on up)
So the rules i was taught concerning documents
1 Who (Who is writing this document or commissioning it)
2 Why ( Why have they written or commissioned this document)
3 What (What is the nature of the document or object)
4 When (When was this written or made has something significant occurred between the event in question and the document objects creation)
5 Whom (To whom is document or object intended to read or seen by. Small inner group containing embarrassing information or as a public relations exercise to push a specific viewpoint of an event)

Plus a lot of analysis of numbers and other contemporary viewpoints to reach a "valid" viewpoint.

So apart from the Carriers being away from Pearl harbour and its apparent strong defences. If history had been slightly different and the Japanese Imperial Navy had found and attacked the United States Navy carriers instead then people might argue the Carriers were sacrificed to protect the Battleships instead.

In other words there needs to be some kind of evidence beyond speculation (useful as it undoubtedly is in historical research). To support a valid conclusion in terms of an historical conjecture.

 

Treated as observational and we can get what is most likely but not certainly the truth
Part of being scientific is NOT being 100% sure of your conclusions

Theoretically, maybe the US did know that Japan was about to attack Pearl Harbor but doubtful

The US thought they were going to be attacked although the Philippines was the most likely target. There were so many possible targets that it is hard to know where they might attack.
Reasons why Pearl Harbor was not considered a likely target is because
1. It was considered to be out of range. The Japanese Fleet had to use a fleet of faster civilian tankers with a jury-rigged fueling system
2. The Japanese fleet took a route that was not likely to be detected towards Pearl Harbor.

Maybe there were enough clues that somebody could have figured out where was planned to be attacked.
We always want to believe conspiracies though. . .Everything has a plan. Fact is that it is the case that most events are not some grand plan but just mistakes

 

Not saying you don't use data with history or anything, just that its a lot harder to narrow down a cause for something than with the scientific method because you can't isolate things down to one variable.

 

That is really with most things though

 

Dammit. I see that avatar of yours, and then I get the acronyms all mixed up!

I was always under the impression that Churchill had a hand in delaying vital intelligence that could've warned FDR about the attack, because he knew that the eventual counterattack against Berlin would be hard-fought without the US entering the war. Of course, that theory has long since been debunked. Or has it? Maybe that report was forged to make it appear to later historians who would discover it that the British were ignorant of Japan's encroachment, and the real report was tossed in a fireplace?

I imagine the truth of the matter, if it even exists anymore, is filed away in a place that looks vaguely like this:

 

Biggest issue we keep coming back is carriers sailing away "just hours before attack". AFAIK official story is that back then they were still just fleet scouts, and were sent to find where the hell combined fleet was. Could anyone of WWII nuts here please link some paper/article that says black and white that in Dec of '41 carriers were scouts in fleet doctrine and them sailing out makes sense and leaves no place to wiggle conspiracies in.

 

You could sell me on that part, but there was no need to suffer a couple of thousand dead and wounded and let the Japanese put a considerable portion of the US Pacific fleet out of action for several months in the process. FDR would still have his smoking gun if there'd been enough warning to intercept the first wave of Japanese bombers a few miles off the coast.

 

It was a conspiracy by a single Spacebattler sent back in time to send the carriers out early with faked orders!

Thus setting in motion events that would doom the battleships reign.

Why? Because they were pissed off by too many "Update Battleships with modern gear" threads!

 

I can see the reasoning behind why people think the American Government "allowed" the attack on Pearl Harbour to take place... Cause outrage amongst the American people and gain support, and perfect excuse, for entering the war: To grab land, power, presige and influence for the USA.

These are retrospective reasonings though, and so flawed. No-one at the time could have foreseen how the war would ultimately end up; in any respect. Japan was a powerful and resourceful enemy, there was no guaranteed victory for America.

Above all, I am certain that had they wanted to enter the war so much, the American Administration could have come up with a less bloody, but equally viable excuse.

 

But if 'the battleships reign' hadn't ended, SB wouldn't have "update battleships" threads, because all the real battleships would have modern gear.