Does Anyone Still Believe FDR Was Right to Blame Kimmel and Short?

Are you that daft man?

The"scrambler" phone was not a "secure" method of communication. Sure, it prevented your everyday Joe 6-Pack from listening in, but the process could be translated back into intelligible speech rather easily...This is why Bell advertised it as "privacy" & not "secure".

So, by all means tell Tokyo that we're had broken their codes.

FYI, Tokyo was also receiving these scrambler communications.

 

But virtue-signalling is exactly what "scholars" do to raise their own profiles. Doesn't mean they're right, merely that they've found a new bandwagon.

 

I second Takao's take on the question. Too bad they didn't hold MacArthur responsible for his contributions like they did the other two.

 

I assure everyone it will be enjoyable!

All of Michael Timothy Griffith's lies are laid bare. Mike even shows his complete lack of understand with gems like

For those who do not know...Fat Man, the plutonium bomb, was the bomb used in the Trinity test. The scientists were not sure it would work(the explosive compression would be enough to cause supercriticality), which was why it was tested.

Little Boy, the Uranium bomb, was not tested, because the physicists knew it would work as advertised...This, however, was not the problem. The problem was the detonator, in the last "Pumpkin" test, the Bomb sailed into the Pacific, without emitting the tell-tale puffs of smoke that indicated the detonators had fired off.

 

Confirmed!

These are not directly lies: He obviously has certain problems putting facts into a logical context.
This inevitably leads to quite weird viewpoints

 

I don

I don't think so. There is a lot of good information, reasoned evaluation, and historical context contained within the rebuttals. People have also become so myopic and self-validating in their perspectives that open debate is valuable. I'd hate to think that revisionism and virtue signaling so muddies our history that we lose sight of the truth. The further we get away from the events, and the more they are reinterpreted with a contemporary cultural bias, the less we understand what actually transpired.

 

This is a prime example of the absolute, silly, abject nonsense that you produce on Pearl Harbor (and also on Japan's surrender).

As many scholars have pointed out, Marshall could have called General Short on the scrambler phone (Marshall had one on his desk) and told him to put his forces on full alert and to have his planes in the air by 7:30 AM Hawaii time without saying a word about Japanese intercepts or code breaking. For that matter, as many scholars have also noted, Marshall could have given any number of plausible cover stories for this order, such as that a spy in Tokyo had warned that Pearl Harbor might be attacked that day, or that Russian fishing ships had spotted Japanese naval ships heading west a few days ago, etc., etc.

But not only did Marshall inexplicably and suspiciously decline to use the scrambler phone, he also refused Secretary Knox's and Admiral Stark's suggestion that he use the Navy radio system.

Even a dumb young lieutenant who was foolish enough to choose to send the crucial warning via Western Union would have had enough common sense to ensure that it was sent as a priority telegram and flagged as urgent.

These are the kinds of revealing facts and considerations that would have emerged in a court martial, which is why Admiral Kimmel wanted and formally requested a court martial, and which is also why the War Department refused his request.

 

Well, talking about absolute, stupid, abject nonsense: we're still waiting for the revealing,
irrefutable evidence from the Hoover-Ladd memos that has been referred to here several times

 

Well, whatever "big thick books with footnotes and sources" that gave you this lame explanation were written by people who either didn't know what they were talking about or who were trying to mislead.

Marshall's message was sent from the Army Message Center under the direct supervision of Col. French, who was in charge of the message center. The message was not sent as a priority message and was not marked as urgent because Col. Bratton, whom Marshall sent to take the message to the message center, did not instruct Col. French to send the message with that priority and marking. The originator of the message, or his representative, was the one who would specify the priority and the marking, not the signals person who sent it.

The signals person would follow whatever transmission instructions came with the message and would never presume to take it upon himself to determine the precedence and marking of a message, especially not one written by the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army.

Marshall's astounding and plainly suspicious conduct that morning was one of the things that first alerted me that there was much to Pearl Harbor than I'd been taught in school.

 

And what everyone fails to mention is that the wonderful scrambler phone between Washington and Oahu was a RADIOSCRAMBLER PHONE which suffered not only from interception, it was not a secure link, but its performance was negatively impacted by atmospheric interference. There was not a solid line, a phone line, between the mainland and the Hawaiian Islands until after the war.

 

Do should be very careful with such sentences: Japan is also called the land of the rising sun.
Knowing MTG as I do, he sees this as further crucial proof for his theses.

 

Oooooohhhhh....I was just going to spring that on Mikey. Since the first undersea telephone cable to Hawaii was not laid until 1957, I was going to asking him how this mystical device worked with no direct connection to Hawaii.