Survival Arts: Neil Smith calls Mike Lorrey out on the floor

February 20, 2005

Neil Smith calls Mike Lorrey out on the floor

On a mailing list I frequent, list owner Mike Lorrey took an unfair swipe at an old friend of mine, libertarian science fiction novelist L. Neil Smith. I forward the message in its entirety, and Neil took the time to respond to Mike in an essay released today, "Under False Colors."

Mike has quickly responded by taking the argument to his own blog, in a post counter-titled "Under Honest Colors."

Posted by Russell Whitaker at February 20, 2005 01:52 PM | TrackBack

Comments

Don't want to get into the middle of anything here (as I consider both you and Mike as friends) but I'm amazed at how bad what Neil wrote was. Pretty poor quality. Given that he apparently doesn't know Mike, I can tell you I treat strangers with more respect, even the abrasive ones.

I pick out his claim about Hitler being no threat to the U.S. It amazes me, in fact, to see such a claim.

Does anyone really think he was going to leave all those escaped Jews in peace over there? That he would countenance the continued existence of a group, so despised, that he invented a whole new mechanism of destruction for them? Do you really think he'd allow them to run, gather strength, and perhaps return? That he or his Nazis could stomach the idea of Jews back on European soil in the future?

That, with an invigorated German Army, willing Japanese warriors, conscripts from the bottomless pit of human bodies what was Russia, Africa amd India; with a conquered Australia providing modern sea ports into the Pacific, with a reinstated Atomic programme no longer harassed by British commandoes or Norwegian Partisans, that he would leave a vibrant and powerful Empire not to mention one sympathetic to the Jews) intact? One capable and willing of also developing those atomic weapons with which to kick him from his Empire? And speaking of vibrant, how long do you think you're economic strength would last with the world closed off to your trade? Or perhaps you might have done a deal with him to allow you to trade - on his terms?

Would you really have been happy to rely on Canada to the north and the primitive societies of South America and Mexico to provide buffers against having to fight not a two, but four front war?

I'm a European. Never forget that no matter what you do for us, or how much you give us, we're notoriously difficult to please, and we're never happy with what we've got. Whether 2 years, 5 years or 10; with Europe, Russia, Asia, the Far East and Africa under his belt, Hitler would have come for you.

And that you can take to the bank.

Posted by: James on February 20, 2005 03:04 PM

PS - Of course, by "you", I mean the readers in general, not specifically Russell. Oh, and my typing sucks at the moment, so pardon the numerous mistakes :)

Posted by: James on February 20, 2005 03:07 PM

A couple pf points.

Even without our intervention both the Imperial Japanese Army and the Wehrmacht alread hopelessly bogged down even before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Though Hitler might have successfully held onto Austria and Czecheslovakia when he betrayed his non-aggression pact with Stalin he made the historically proven mistake of overextending himself with Barbarossa and was in a hopeless quagmire from that point on.

Same with Imperial Japan. While their annexation of Manchuria might have held sway--for awhile, anyways--their decision to spark an all out war with China via the casis belli of the engineered "incident" at the Marco Polo Bridge ended in a continuing bloody stalemate.

The truth is without our intervention all sides would have fought until mutual exhaustion claimed all the parties involved.

Points.

*Three fourths of the Nazis' losses were on the Eastern Front. Against the Red Army's Far Eastern Command under Field Marshall Zhukov. This is not including the German's auxilliary Italian, Romanian, Lithuanian, and White Russian forces.

*In the Pacific Theater, while we did hand the Imperail Japanese Navy a crushing defeat--and seized their chain of island citadels-- the overwhelming majority of their land forces (3 million strong) were tied down in the China theater for the duration of the war. In fact, by 1945 they had lost a half million KIA in China and another hundred thousand to Chinese, Dyak, British, and Filipino resistance fighters thoughout SE Asia.

*The sole reason the Japanese chose to take out Pearl was becuase they needed to seize more resources from SE Asia in order to break their ongoing stalemate in China which was heading to Imperial defeat.

*The Germans --who you claim would stage an invasion of the Mainland US--could not even conquer the UK which was just across the pond. After the Battle of Britain the Germans and Brits were effectively at a stalemate.

Like I said, without our involvement the end result would have been utter and complete exhaustion from all sides invovled. Not an Axis victory.

This is based on those aforementioned historical *facts.*

Not conjecture.

Posted by: Mark Quon on February 23, 2005 02:44 PM

This is based on those aforementioned historical *facts.*

Not conjecture.
---------------------------------

All very well, but you didn't address one of the pivotal points of my post; the atomic factor.

No U.S. intervention means no Manhattan Project. No Manhattan Project means no demand for skilled German Scientists. Which means no Scientists captured or defecting. Which means greater expertise for Nazi Germany (and through it's technology sharing arrangement, Japan too.) Which means Nazi Germany gets the bomb first. Which renders the quagmires (or future potential quagmires) of Russia, the British mainland and China irrelevant. The U.S. used the bomb so they wouldn't have to pay the price of victory in soldiers killed. Worked for the U.S. with Japan, why wouldn't it work for the Nazis?

On a sidenote, the attack on Pearl Harbour was an initiation of force. The U.S. therefore, under libertarian principles, is fully entitled to respond, yes? In which case, what was the appropriate response? Something more proportional? Or something proportional to the Japanese Imperial ambitions in the Pacific and SE Asia? (both areas of U.S. economic interest). Or nothing at all?

And if the U.S. did move against them, what of Nazi Germany? Would they, as an ally of Japan, then declare war on the U.S.? Or would we have to wait till THEY had a go at the U.S. too?

Posted by: James on February 24, 2005 11:26 AM

"All very well, but you didn't address one of the pivotal points of my post; the atomic factor.

Please read the following excerpt from _The Unfounded Fear of Invasion._

*******************************************

ATOMIC BOMB

Many people agreed that a conventional invasion would have been impossible, but worried that Hitler might have developed an atomic bomb before the US. Even if short of outright occupation, these people speculated, surely Nazi Germany would have had much more influence over the US with such a threat.

Strictly speaking, the US could have remained "isolationist" and still developed its own atomic bomb – indeed, it would have had billions of additional dollars to throw into the project, if it didn’t send armies over to Europe. So in order to truly justify the US drive into Germany on this point, one would have to argue that the US campaign against Germany slowed down the German development of the A-bomb more than it slowed down the US development.

Let me say that again in different words: We know that the US was able to develop the bomb before Nazi Germany in the actual course of history; that is, the US devoted some resources into bombing German cities and retaking Western Europe, and devoted other resources into the research at Los Alamos. At the same time, Germany was also devoting some of its resources into defending itself from (or rebuilding after) Allied air raids etc., and some of its resources into developing an atomic weapon. In the actual race, the US won. Now my point is that in order to say that the US entry into the war was necessary, you would need to argue that if the US remained out of the war (and perhaps quadrupled its spending on Los Alamos), then Germany would have won the race. Remember, the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons1 and never invaded the US, because we had them too. Right now plenty of countries have nuclear weapons, including China and Pakistan. Does that mean we are beholden to the Chinese, or does it just mean that we wouldn’t ever invade their country?

Back to the main issue, though: Why is it that the US developed the atomic bomb first – just luck? No, just as it’s not mere luck that the US could build the biggest navy in the world when the government decided on that policy. Because the US is (relatively) free, its economy is far more productive than those of other countries, especially ones ruled by dictators. Developing the atomic bomb took billions of dollars; the scientists involved didn’t know how to actually do it beforehand.2 The German war machine, though impressive, had neither the scientists nor the material resources to throw into the project. (Ironically, many of the people working for the US were brilliant European Jews who had fled Hitler’s armies.) Even the Soviet Union was able to develop its first weapons only by stealing the work performed in American labs.

(I can’t help myself; I must add this last thought. Isn’t it ironic that the US is so fearful of other countries developing atomic and now nuclear weapons, when the only country to ever use them on civilians has been the United States?)

***************************

You can read the rest of the article at:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/murphy/murphy92.html

"On a sidenote, the attack on Pearl Harbour was an initiation of force."
-----------------------------------------------

Yes, but it was one that was brought about by:

1)FDR's bellicose stance and rhetoric PLUS

2)the fact that we had bases in the Phillipines.

In fact, I would argue that reason #2 makes an even stronger case against foreign interventionism in that imperial adventurism inevitably require even more wars of expansionism in order to maintain present conquests. Such is the nature of empire building no matter how modest the nitial objectives.

"The U.S. therefore, under libertarian principles, is fully entitled to respond, yes? In which case, what was the appropriate response? "
------------------------------------------------

The appropriate response would have been to take up defensive posture and be prepared to hand the attacking Japanese naval fleet and devaststing couterstrike once we had word that an aassult was under way.

Instead, that vermin FDR did nothing since he needed a bloodbath in order to stoke the public sentiment in favor of the war he so very much wanted.

Also, followng an attack on Pearl there would have been plenty of Americans who would have been willing to go off AT THEIR OWN EXPENSE AND UNDER THEIR OWN VOLITION to take up arms against the Axis powers. Have you heard of the American Volunteer Group AKA the Flying Tigers, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and the Eagle Squadron?

And this would have happened even without a draft or massive mobilization and nationalization of this nation's people and resources which inevitably granted the USG way more power than could ever be healthy for any nation which valued it's inalienable liberties.

Posted by: Mark Quon on February 24, 2005 07:12 PM

That's an interesting read, although I'm somewhat dubious that it's a libertarian essay and not independent scholarship.

It also misses the point I made that, while the U.S. could in fact develop the bomb (I certainly never suggested it was "luck") it had a limited window of time to do it, for two reasons; the obvious one of being in a race with Nazi Germany, and also that those "billions" of dollars relied on internation trade predominantly, which couldn't be guaranteed after a possible German victory.

The claim that China or Pakistan having nuclear weapons doesn't make us beholden to them is false; They both have these weapons now. But No one did BACK THEN. The first to get them could very well have used them as leverage. We're lucky that the U.S. did first as they've no tendency to use them as tools of first-strike aggression. To believe the same of Mao or Stalin is naive, let alone Hitler.

The problem with the ZAP is the same problem suffered by gun control legislation; It works perfectly ONCE EVERYONE plays by the rules. With a respected system of laws, breaches can be dealt with. A system of law on the international level (and the force to back it up) just didn't exist in the 40's (doesn't exist now, either).

-----------------------
(I can’t help myself; I must add this last thought. Isn’t it ironic that the US is so fearful of other countries developing atomic and now nuclear weapons, when the only country to ever use them on civilians has been the United States?)
-----------------------------
In a word, no. The U.S. used them in it's own defence at a time when attacking civilians was the norm. That time for the U.S. is gone. For the nutcases of the world, it's not.

--------------------------------------
Yes, but it was one that was brought about by:

1)FDR's bellicose stance and rhetoric PLUS
----------------------------------------

What rubbish! Since when under the ZAP has "rhetoric" become an aggressive act?

-----------------------------------------
2)the fact that we had bases in the Phillipines.

So one nation's alleged faults forgives the faults of a future aggressor against them (if we can even properly consider them aggressors?) So essentially the U.S. had no one but itself to blame for the Japanese attack? Since ours was the first aggression, they're within their rights to strike? Hmm, where have we heard that one recently.... You may say you're not justifying the attack, but it does sound like you're coming awfully close to it.

The more I hear about ZAP, the more I'm convinced it can only work within a nation, not between them (especially when one or both are fascist/dictatorial).

-------------
The appropriate response would have been to take up defensive posture and be prepared to hand the attacking Japanese naval fleet and devaststing couterstrike once we had word that an aassult was under way.
------------------------

Why would we have to wait until the attack was under way? We knew they were coming, right? Or is preemption disallowed under the ZAP?

----------------
Instead, that vermin FDR did nothing since he needed a bloodbath in order to stoke the public sentiment in favor of the war he so very much wanted.
-------------------------

Why would the U.S. have the right to use force when they initiated the problem through their "Imperialism" in the Pacific? As the aggressor, haven't they forfeited the right to use force?

---------------
Also, followng an attack on Pearl there would have been plenty of Americans who would have been willing to go off AT THEIR OWN EXPENSE AND UNDER THEIR OWN VOLITION to take up arms against the Axis powers. Have you heard of the American Volunteer Group AKA the Flying Tigers, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and the Eagle Squadron?
----------------------

Sounds like independent volunteers were thin on the ground.

It seems that most of those Americans who would have been willing to go of their own volition did so; in the U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force, Conscription notwithstanding.

-------------------
And this would have happened even without a draft or massive mobilization and nationalization of this nation's people and resources which inevitably granted the USG way more power than could ever be healthy for any nation which valued it's inalienable liberties.
------------------------

By the time WWII had arrived, Prohibition had been and gone, with the resulting increase in the size of the Federal Government. The war may have been another excuse to cover for further Government encroachment, but that doesn't mean going to war was wrong.

Posted by: James on February 26, 2005 06:50 PM

[Excuse me for keepin my own typed replies brief but in addition to training four hours a day I also have to work and am spending time trying to get this lovely honey to fly out from the East Coast....]

"By the time WWII had arrived, Prohibition had been and gone, with the resulting increase in the size of the Federal Government."
------------------------------------------------

And what do you call NFA of 1934 or FDR's outlawing of the ownership of gold--to name just two exmaples--if not an unconstitutional expansion of the Fedgov?

"Sounds like independent volunteers were thin on the ground."
-----------------------------------------------

What do you call the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who fught in the Spanish Civil War?

As for the lack of volunteers on the ground, most of what I was referring to was BEFORE Pearl Harbor.

And while we are on that subject, read the article below to learn the true facts behind that.
**********************************************
The Pearl Harbor Deception
by Robert Stinnett
Independent Institute
December 7, 2003

Two questions about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor have ignited a controversy that has burned for 60 years: Did U.S. naval cryptographers crack the Japanese naval codes before the attack? Did Japanese warships and their commanding admirals break radio silence at sea before the attack?

If the answer to both is "no," then Pearl Harbor was indeed a surprise attack described by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a "Day of Infamy." The integrity of the U.S. government regarding Pearl Harbor remains solid.

But if the answer is "yes," then hundreds of books, articles, movies, and TV documentaries based on the "no" answer – and the integrity of the federal government – go down the drain. If the Japanese naval codes were intercepted, decoded, and translated into English by U.S. naval cryptographers prior to Pearl Harbor, then the Japanese naval attacks on American Pacific military bases were known in advance among the highest levels of the American government.

During the 60 years, the truthful answers were secreted in bomb-proof vaults, withheld from two congressional Pearl Harbor investigations and from the American people. As recently as 1995, the Joint Congressional Investigation conducted by Sen. Strom Thurmond and Rep. Floyd Spence, was denied access to a naval storage vault in Crane, Indiana, containing documents that could settle the questions.

Americans were told of U.S. cryptographers' success in cracking pre–Pearl Harbor Japanese diplomatic codes, but not a word has been officially uttered about their success in cracking Japanese military codes.

In the mid-1980s I learned that none of the hundreds of thousands of Japanese military messages obtained by the U.S. monitor stations prior to Pearl Harbor were introduced or discussed during the congressional investigation of 1945-46. Determined to penetrate the secrets of Pearl Harbor, I filed Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests with the US Navy. Navy officials in Washington released a few pre-Pearl Harbor documents to me in 1985. Not satisfied by the minuscule release, I continued filing FOIAs.

Finally in 1993, the U.S. Naval Security Group Command, the custodian of the Crane Files, agreed to transfer the records to National Archives in Washington, D.C. In the winter of 1993-94 the files were transported by truck convoy to a new government facility built on the College Park campus of the University of Maryland inside the Washington Beltway, named Archives II. Mr. Clarence Lyons, then head of the Military Reference Branch, released the first batch of Crane Files to me in the Steny Hoyer Research Center at Archives II in January 1995.

Apparently, the pre-Pearl Harbor records had not been seen or reviewed since 1941. Though refiled in pH-safe archival boxes by Lyons' staff, some of the Crane documents were covered with dust, tightly bunched together in the boxes and tied with unusual waxed twine. Lyons confirmed the records were received from the U.S. Navy in that condition.

It took me a year to evaluate the records. The information revealed in the files was astonishing. It disclosed a Pearl Harbor story hidden from the public. I believed the story should be told to the American people. The editors of Simon & Schuster/The Free Press published Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1999.

Day of Deceit was well received by media book reviews and the on-line booksellers, Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com, earning a 70 percent public approval rating. Day of Deceit continues among the top ten bestsellers in the non-fiction Pearl Harbor book category, according to Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com.

About 30 percent of the reviews have discounted the book's revelations. The leaders of the dispute include Stephen Budiansky, Edward Drea, and David Kahn, all of whom have authored books or articles on code breaking. To bolster their pre-Pearl Harbor theories, the trio violated journalistic ethics and distorted the U.S. Navy's pre-Pearl Harbor paper trail. Their efforts cannot be ignored. The trio has close ties to the National Security Agency, the overseer of U.S. naval communications files. Kahn has appeared before NSA seminars. The NSA has not honored my FOIA requests to disclose honorariums paid the seminar participants but has released records that confirm Kahn has been a participant.

Immediately after Day of Deceit appeared in bookstores in 1999, NSA began withdrawing pre-Pearl Harbor documents from the Crane Files housed in Archives II. This means the government decided to continue 60 years of Pearl Harbor censorship. As of January 2002, over two dozen NSA withdrawal notices have triggered the removal of Pearl Harbor documents from public inspection.

The number of pages in the withdrawn documents appears to be in the hundreds. Among the records withdrawn are those of Admiral Harold R. Stark, the 1941 Chief of Naval Operations, as well as crypto records authored by Commander Joseph J. Rochefort, the chief cryptographer for the Pacific Fleet at the time of Pearl Harbor. Under the Crane File transfer agreement with National Archives, NSA has the legal right to withdraw any document based on national defense concerns.

Concurrent with the NSA withdrawals, Budiansky, with the aid of Kahn and Drea, began a two-year media campaign to discredit the paper trail of the U.S. naval documents that form the backbone of Day of Deceit. One of the most egregious examples of ethical violations appeared in an article by Kahn published in the New York Review of Books on November 2, 2000. In that article, Kahn attempted to bolster his contention that Japanese admirals and warships observed radio silence while en route to attack American Pacific bases. Kahn broke basic journalism ethics and rewrote a U.S. Naval Communication Summary prepared by Commander Rochefort at his crypto center located in the Pearl Harbor Naval Yard.

About 1,000 intercepted Japanese naval radio messages formed the basis of each Daily Summary written by Rochefort and his staff. The Japanese communication intelligence data contained in the messages was summarized and delivered daily to Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet. Rochefort's summary of November 25, 1941 (Hawaii time) was not to Kahn's liking. It revealed the Commander Carriers of the Imperial Japanese Navy were not observing radio silence but were in "extensive communications" with other Japanese naval forces whose admirals directly commanded the forces involved in the Pearl Harbor attack. Because of the International Dateline, the "extensive communications" mentioned in the summary took place on November 26, 1941, Japan time, the exact day the Japanese carrier force began its journey to Hawaii.

In its entirety the Rochefort summary reads: "FOURTH FLEET – CinC. Fourth Fleet is still holding extensive communications with the commander Submarine Fleet, the forces at Jaluit and Commander Carriers. His other communications are with the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Base Forces."

The meaning of the summary is unequivocal: The commanders of the powerful Japanese invasion, submarine, and carrier forces did not observe radio silence as they maneuvered toward U.S. bases in Hawaii, Wake, and Guam Islands in the Central Pacific. Instead they used radio transmitters aboard their flagships and coordinated strategy and tactics with each other.

The summary corroborates earlier findings by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian John Toland. In the late 1970s, Toland interviewed personnel and obtained U.S. naval documents from San Francisco's Twelfth Naval District that disclosed that the "extensive communications" were intercepted by the radio direction finders of the U.S. Navy's West Coast Communications Intelligence Network. Doubleday published Toland's account in 1982 as Infamy: Pearl Harbor and its Aftermath.

Yet in his NYRoB article Kahn deleted portions of the Rochefort summary in the middle of the first sentence, profoundly diminishing its significance. Kahn's version: "Fourth Fleet is still holding extensive communications with the Commander Submarine Fleet."

Kahn violated basic journalism rules by deleting crucial words and not using ellipsis to indicate a deletion. When I cited these ethical violations to the editors of the NYRoB, Kahn offered an excuse and implied that Rochefort's summary was too long. "I had to condense my review," he wrote.

Kahn probably believes his deletion was insignificant because he denies that the Commander Carriers were involved in the Pearl Harbor attack. "The force that attacked Hawaii was not that of the Commander Carriers but the First Air Fleet," he wrote in his reply to my Letter to the Editor of the NYRoB (February 8, 2001). Kahn revealed his ignorance of the Japanese naval organization. The First Air Fleet operated under Commander Carriers, that is, Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, who was in charge of the entire Hawaii Operation.

Captain A. James McCollum, USNR (Ret), who served in San Francisco's Twelfth Naval District intelligence office (and later on the intelligence staff of Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz) accused Kahn of committing "journalistic crimes." "That critic, David Kahn, seems to have deliberately distorted some facts and even altered quotations...," McCollum wrote in his letter to the editors of the NYRoB on February 14, 2001. The letter was never published.

Stephen Budiansky continued his media blitz in the Wall Street Journal. In a December 27, 2001 Letter to the Editor of the Journal, Budiansky praised Kahn as "...widely regarded as the world's leading authority on the history of code breaking..." Then in following paragraphs, Budiansky mimicked Kahn and misreported the facts concerning the U.S. naval monitor station on Corregidor, known as CAST. He challenged the Day of Deceit account and wrote that CAST was located in Cavite, Philippines.

Budiansky's errors involving CAST reveal a poor understanding of U.S. naval communications intelligence operations. CAST was temporarily located at the Cavite Naval Base in 1936, then moved to Mariveles on the Bataan Peninsula. In October 1940, the station was relocated to Corregidor. The new quarters were located in an underground crypto center carved from the rock of Corregidor. CAST remained on the rock until the spring of 1942 when advancing Japanese troops forced its removal to Australia. Budiansky did not differentiate between the 1940-41 U.S. naval broadcast radio center at Cavite and the U.S. navy cryptographic monitor station on Corregidor.

The mistakes of the Budiansky-Drea-Kahn team concerning Station CAST worsen.

In the same Wall Street Journal edition, Edward J. Drea, a retired U.S. Army historian, also wrote a misleading account of the crypto operations at CAST in November 1941. Mr. Drea challenged a CAST report dated November 16, 1941, by its commanding officer Lieutenant John M. Lietwiler who reported to Washington that his staff was "current" in intercepting, decoding, and translating the Japanese navy's Operation Code.

Lietwiler was a highly trained crypto expert in deciphering the Japanese navy's main operation code known to Japan in the fall of 1941 as the Kaigun Ango-sho D, Ransuhyo nana (Navy Code Book D, random numbers table seven). He spent 1940 and most of 1941 learning the principles of decoding Code Book D from Agnes Meyer Driscoll, the brilliant Chief Civilian Cryptanalyst for the U.S. Navy. Ms. Driscoll was the first American to discover the solution of Code Book D, soon after Japan introduced it in June 1939.

Upon completing the Code Book D crypto course, Lietwiler was dispatched to CAST with the latest decoding details of Table Seven. He arrived and took command of CAST in September 1941. Lietwiler's expertise and devotion to his crypto duty meant nothing to Drea. In his letter, Drea demoted Lieutenant Lietwiler and described him as a "1941 writer."

Challenging my interpretation of Lietwiler's letter, Drea states: "Nowhere in the cited communications is the Japanese naval code mentioned." Drea is correct in the narrowest sense. To understand that Lietwiler was discussing the Japanese naval operations code requires a broader context.

Mr. Drea failed to comprehend Lietwiler's technical crypto language used in the letter. It was addressed to Lietwiler's counterpart in Washington, D.C., Lieutenant Lee W. Parke, another of the U.S. Navy's brilliant cryptographers. Parke had devised a crypto machine that automatically decoded the additive/subtractive columnar tables of Table Seven. Parke called his invention the JEEP IV and sent it to CAST by officer courier. It arrived on Corregidor on October 6, 1941, via the armed U.S. naval transport U.S.S. Henderson.

The construction of JEEP IV was specifically authorized by Rear Admiral Royal Ingersoll, Acting Chief of Naval Operations. In a memo dated October 4, 1940, Ingersoll wrote, referring to Code Book D: "an additive key cipher is employed in this code, and, although the method of recovery is well defined, the process is a laborious one, requiring from an hour to several days for each message. A machine is under construction which will aide in the mechanical part of the solution, but it must be accepted that current information will seldom be available immediately..." The Ingersoll memo directly connects the Lietwiler memo to the Japanese naval operations code.

Lietwiler refers explicitly to JEEP IV in the letter and adds that his Crypto Yeoman Albert Myers Jr., bypassed JEEP IV and was able to "walk across" the many columnar tables of Code Book D. Readers of the Wall Street Journal should know that Code Book D used columnar random number Table Seven in the fall of 1941. If Mr. Drea had done more crypto homework, he would have known the purpose of JEEP IV. It is fully spelled out in U.S. Navy files. JEEP IV is derived from Parke's unit whose secret navy crypto designator was GYP (phonetic = jeep). But he failed to understand the esoteric language used by the two code breakers.

I could point out more errors by the trio, but I will limit myself to one more. They refer to errors in dates in Day of Deceit. The so-called date "errors" they cite are not "errors" but are related to the geography of the International Date Line. Like many easterners who have never been west of the Hudson River, the trio does not realize that November 25 in Hawaii is November 26 in Japan. The mid-ocean date change between America and Japan is known throughout the world. It is the result of geographers establishing the Date Line in the Mid-Pacific. America's day begins in Guam, not New York.

Robert B. Stinnett is a Media Fellow at The Independent Institute in Oakland, California, and author of Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor (Touchstone, 2001).

**********************************************

"It also misses the point I made that, while the U.S. could in fact develop the bomb (I certainly never suggested it was "luck") it had a limited window of time to do it, for two reasons; the obvious one of being in a race with Nazi Germany, and also that those "billions" of dollars relied on internation trade predominantly, which couldn't be guaranteed after a possible German victory."
----------------------------------------------

Again, this is predicated on a German victory which would have been highly improbable following Hitler's decision to invade the USSR.

Without us BOTH THE USSR AND GERMANY WERE HEADED TOWARDS MUTUAL COLLAPSE.

Re-read the casualty figures from each of the major theaters of war.

" To believe the same of Mao or Stalin is naive, let alone Hitler."

Based on a total ignorance of history.

And please tell me how Mao would have acquired the Bomb if we had not intervened?

A quick history on the China heater of World War 2.

Follwoing the Xian Incident, Jiang had, however reluctantly, formed a united front with Mao's Red Army in their war aginst the Japanese and had effectively stalemated Tojo to the point where they were starting to lose hundreds of thousands of troops anually and were facing imperial defeat. Our embargo would have been the final nail in the coffin.

BUT following Pearl Harbor and our declaration of war against Japan, Jiang figured he could slack off on the war effort and begin concentrate in settlng scores with Mao. His KMT forces would maintain just enough pressure on the Japanese to ensure that he would receive arms and supplies from us which he hoarded with the eventual postwar showdown with Mao.

His scheme backfired. It allowed the Mao's Red Army which fought three quarters of all the engagements against the Japanese Army to acquire the repputation as the savior of China while marginalizing the KMT in the eyes of China's populace.

In the end it was the catalyst that allowed the Communists to win the postwar struggle.

Now. My point was that were it not for our involvement the war may very well have ended with both the KMT and Communists sharing power. Instead, the unintended conequences of our intervetion resulted in a Communist victory in China.

"Why would the U.S. have the right to use force when they initiated the problem through their "Imperialism" in the Pacific? As the aggressor, haven't they forfeited the right to use force?"
------------------------------------------------
Either you have willfully misunderstood my points or you missed what I was getting at.

Read below.

"What rubbish! Since when under the ZAP has rhetoric" become an aggressive act?"
-----------------------------------------------

I did not say that we commited an act of aggression against Japan.

I said that FDR adopted a hostile posture and made them think that they were in imminent danger of American intervention in the Pacific.

This led a Japan that was hopelessly quagmired in the Asian Mainland to conclude that it had no choice but to initiate a premeptive strike.

Posted by: Mark Quon on February 28, 2005 01:40 AM

If I may add a practical point...

The German atomic research at the end of the war was hopelessly backward. Their experimentation was with heavy water, which in time may have led to a fusion weapon, but that would only be if they also were developing fission techniques to act as the fusion trigger. They were not.

I would also argue that the American insistence upon total surrender prolonged the war and increased the casualties on both sides. It was a deliberate arrogance which has led to the mind-set that total war is an acceptable means of reaching political ends.

or something like that.

Posted by: Curt Howland on February 28, 2005 12:10 PM

"I would also argue that the American insistence upon total surrender prolonged the war and increased the casualties on both sides. It was a deliberate arrogance which has led to the mind-set that total war is an acceptable means of reaching political ends."
------------------------------------------------

EXCELLENT point. And one that I completely overlooked.

It would appear that both Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany made the same fatal error except they paid a far greater price for it.

Posted by: Mark Quon on February 28, 2005 04:47 PM

Curt, lets say the US, Britain, and USSR didn't insist on unconditional surrender. In what way do you suppose that doing so would avoid leaving those governments in place to fight another global conflict 10 or 20 years later, or leaving the populations of those countries merely offended at being defeated (like they were after WWI) rather than shell shocked into recognising that their whole fascist world view was wrong?

Posted by: Mike Lorrey on April 12, 2005 08:17 AM

Mr. Lory, how nice of you to ask.

In no way did being carpetbombed cause the citizens to re-think their governments. Both Japan and Germany were, after WW2, in no position to argue. They were occupied, their governments hand picked to aggressively support their occupiers, and the propaganda by said occupiers was focused on making sure they knew how much better off they were than if they had been occupied by "the other side".

One need only notice that the states occupied by "the other side" aligned themselves with "the other side", adopted the same kinds of government forms, etc.

Had their world view actually changed, they would not now have substantially fascist governments. Fiat currencies, cartelized industries, titular ownership of property but only by complying with vast government regulation, welfare and revolving door politics. If you need any help with the big words, do let me know.

Prior to WW1, with notable exceptions, defeated countries were MILITARILY defeated and then accepted as peers again over time. Making total war politically acceptable has the same kinds of effects that making a felony conviction follow the convict for their entire lives does. It changes the landscape away from independence and "getting on with life" and toward making friends with the local warlord (America being the biggest warlord right now) in order to ensure that you can get away with anything so long as you don't piss off your warlord.

One need only look at the fascists, little different than Hitler, that the US has supported merely because they didn't label themselves as "communist". Labels, Mr. Lory, not "world views", are what have been changed by force.

You call yourself a "libertarian", yet you continually advocate and apologize for the use of force against others. This is, in my opinion, yet another label used as an attempt to obfuscate what is actually being said.

To paraphrase Einstein, you cannot both advocate and eschew force.

Posted by: Curt Howland on April 12, 2005 11:41 AM

I believe this new article from LRC might be relevant to the discussion at hand.
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What We Can Learn From Woodrow Wilson’s Great Blunder

The Case for Staying Out of Other People’s Wars

by Jim Powell

The worst American foreign policy disasters of the past century have been consequences of Wilsonian interventionism. Critics have been dismissed as "isolationists," but the fact is that Wilsonian interventionism has dragged the United States into pointless wars and ushered in revolution, terror, runaway inflation, dictatorship and mass murder. It’s past time to judge Wilsonian interventionism by its consequences, not the good intentions expressed in political speeches, because they haven’t worked out.

Surely, one of the most important principles of American foreign policy should be to conserve resources for defending the country. President Woodrow Wilson violated this principle by entering World War I which didn’t involve an attack on the United States.

German submarines sunk some foreign ships with American passengers, but they had been warned about the obvious danger of traveling in a war zone. People need to take responsibility for their own decisions and proceed at their own risk. It was unreasonable to expect that because a few adventurers lost their lives, the entire nation had to enter a war in which tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands more people must die.

There never was a serious possibility that Germany might attack the United States during World War I. The German Navy was confined to German ports by the British Navy, and British convoys dramatically reduced the number of merchant ships sunk by German submarines. The German Army was stalemated on the Western Front, and over a million German soldiers were engaged on the Eastern Front. German boys and older men were being drafted to fill the trenches. There wasn’t any armed force available for an attack on the United States. Despite the suggestion, in German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann’s inflammatory telegram, about a possible alliance between Germany, Mexico and Japan, America was safe.

Wilson claimed that American national security was linked with the fate of Britain, but because the British Navy had bottled up the German Navy and neutralized German submarines, Germany wasn’t capable of invading Britain. In any case, Britain was struggling to maintain its global empire. The settlement following World War I had the effect of adding more territories to the British Empire. Why should American lives have been lost and American resources spent to expand the British Empire?

Why, for that matter, should the United States have defended the French or the Belgians? They were defending their overseas empires, and both had shown themselves to be brutal colonial rulers. The Belgians were responsible for slavery and mass murder in the Congo – the first modern genocide, involving an estimated 8 million deaths.

How could any U. S. president in his right mind have committed American soldiers to defend Britain and France, whose generals squandered lives on a stupendous scale? Britain’s General Douglas Haig, for instance, whose blunders figured in the deaths of 95,675 British soldiers and 420,000 total British casualties at the Battle of the Somme (1916). Another 50,729 French soldiers were killed. Haig not only wasn’t fired, but he continued to squander lives in battle after battle. It was amazing that a U.S. president would seriously consider conscripting Americans for European killing fields drenched in blood. There were the battles of the Marne (1914, 270,000 French and British soldiers killed), Artois (1915, 100,000 French soldiers killed), Ypres (Second Battle, 1915, 70,000 French soldiers killed), Gallipoli (1915, 50,000 British, Australian and New Zealand soldiers killed), Verdun (1916, 315,000 French soldiers killed), Arras (1916, 160,000 British soldiers killed) and Passchendaele (1917, 310,000 British soldiers killed).

There would have massacres even with better generals. As military historian John Keegan observed, "The simple truth of 1914-18 trench warfare is that the massing of large numbers of soldiers unprotected by anything but cloth uniforms, however they were trained, however equipped, against large masses of other soldiers, protected by earthworks and barbed wire and provided with rapid-fire weapons, was bound to result in very heavy casualties among the attackers…The effect of artillery added to the slaughter, as did that of bayonets and grenades when fighting came to close quarters in the trench labyrinths."

Woodrow Wilson didn’t need a crystal ball to understand that World War I wasn’t our war. He knew how the Europeans, with their entangling alliances, had stumbled into the conflagration. He knew how they stubbornly refused to quit. He knew how the Allied Powers had negotiated their secret treaties to carve up Europe and colonial possessions. He could see how hundreds of thousands of young men were being slaughtered in the mud.

It was claimed that the United States would have been threatened if a single power – Germany – had been able to control the entire European continent. But that was unlikely, since World War I had been stalemated for more than three years. The best the Germans might have hoped for would have been to annex Belgium and northwestern France, where much of World War I had been fought, as well as territories gained from Austria-Hungary and western Russia. If the Germans had won the war, they would have had a hard time holding their empire together because of all the rebellious nationalities, the same nationalities that figured in the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires. Most likely outcome of a German victory: costly civil wars ending in German collapse.

In any event, people have been fighting each other for thousands of years, and America managed to develop despite a succession of empires in Europe and elsewhere. America was in its infancy when Spain was the mightiest power on earth, enriched by precious metals from Mexico and Peru. During the late 1600s, the French King Louis XIV dominated Europe, persecuted Protestants and fought one war after another, but America thrived as a sanctuary. A century later, America broke free from the British Empire. George Washington, as the first President of the United States, wisely counseled his countrymen to stay out of European wars, and this policy was continued by his successor Thomas Jefferson despite French and British interference with U.S. shipping. The United States prospered while the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte organized the first modern police state, conquered Europe and marched into Russia.

America’s Founders had the humility and wisdom to recognize that the United States couldn’t prevent other people from fighting. If the United States had tried forcing "peace" on foreigners, this would have required raising and equipping an army, and fighting adversaries who knew their land much better than we did. We would have had to fight with allies whose motives turned out to be less pure than we had supposed. We would have made enemies we didn’t have before. In the end, we would have widened a conflict, and probably more people would have been killed than if we had stayed out.

The arrogant Wilson should have learned a lesson when he tried nation-building in Mexico, and the effort backfired. What could have been simpler than sending some American soldiers across the Mexican border to find a bandit and help install a good ruler down there? Yet Wilson’s intervention failed to find the bandit, failed to install a good ruler, killed people and made enemies.

Preoccupied with his good intentions, Wilson never seemed to have considered the possibility that intervening in Europe might do worse than fail to achieve peace. Because of historic resentments and staggering battlefield casualties, there was a lot of bitterness in Europe. Governments were nearly bankrupt, and people were hungry. They wanted vengeance for their suffering. The political situation was explosive. If one side were able to achieve a decisive victory, the temptation would be strong to seek retribution. So, Wilson intervened, enabled the Allied Powers to achieve a decisive victory, and the result was the vindictive Versailles Treaty with devastating political consequences that played out in Germany and around the world.

Apparently thinking only about what he wanted, he pressured and bribed the Russian Provisional Government to stay in the war, when he ought to have known that country had been falling apart ever since it entered the war in 1914. Wilson ought to have known that millions of Russian peasants weren’t going to be affected much one way or the other by what happened on the Western Front, the only thing that Wilson cared about. He ought to have known that Russian peasants were deserting the Russian Army by the thousands, to go home and claim land, and soon there wouldn’t be any army to defend the Provisional Government. If Wilson didn’t know these things, he didn’t have any business trying to play an international war game. Wilson’s blunders made it easier for Lenin to seize power on his fourth attempt in 1917, leading to more than seven decades of Soviet communism.

Wilson ought to have known he was playing with fire when, at the Versailles Conference following World War I, he participated in redrawing thousands of miles of national borders. He knew how nationalist hatreds had exploded in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and triggered the Balkan wars and World War I. Turkish nationalists expelled some 100,000 Greeks from the Anatolian Peninsula where many families had lived for over a thousand years, and large numbers of Greek women were raped and Greek men murdered. Turkish nationalists massacred an estimated 1.5 million Armenians.

Woodrow Wilson’s decision to enter World War I had serious consequences in Iraq, too. Because the British and French were on the winning side of the war, the League of Nations awarded "mandates" to Britain and France in the region. If the United States had stayed out of World War I, there probably would have been a negotiated settlement, and the Ottoman Empire would have survived for a while. The Middle East wouldn’t have been carved up by Britain and France. But as things turned out, authorized by League of Nations "mandates," British Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill was determined to secure the British Navy’s access to Persian oil at the least possible cost by installing puppet regimes in the region.

In Mesopotamia, Churchill bolted together the territories of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra to make Iraq. Although Kurds wanted an independent homeland, their territory was to be part of Iraq. Churchill decided that the best bet for Britain would be a Hashemite ruler. For king, Churchill picked Feisal, eldest son of Sherif Hussein of Mecca. Feisal was an Arabian prince who lived for years in Ottoman Constantinople, then established himself as king of Syria but was expelled by the French government that had the League of Nations "mandate" there. The British arranged a plebiscite purporting to show Iraqi support for Faisal. A majority of people in Iraq were Shiite Muslims, but Feisal was a Sunni Muslim, and this conflict was to become a huge problem. The Ottomans were Sunni, too, which meant British policy prolonged the era of Sunni dominance over Shiites as they became more resentful. During the 37 years of the Iraqi monarchy, there were 58 changes of parliamentary governments, indicating chronic political instability. All Iraqi rulers since Feisal, including Saddam Hussein, were Sunnis. That Iraq was ruled for three decades by a sadistic murderer like Saddam made clear how the map-drawing game was vastly more complicated than Wilson had imagined.

Considering Wilson’s global catastrophes, it’s remarkable that his interventionist policies have been adopted by Democratic and Republican presidents ever since. President Franklin D. Roosevelt followed in Wilson’s footsteps when he maneuvered the United States into World War II, after promising American voters that he would stay out. Within five years after Hitler’s defeat, more people than ever – some 800 million – suffered oppression from totalitarian regimes, in the Soviet Union, Albania, Bulgaria, China, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, East Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Rumania and Yugoslavia. Millions in Eastern Europe were liberated from Hitler, then handed over to Stalin. Both Hitler and Stalin murdered Jews. One might make a case that the war against Hitler was pragmatic, but since the United States was allied with Stalin, an even worse mass murderer, World War II couldn’t be described as a just war. And, one must not forget, the Pacific war occurred as a consequence of American efforts to thwart Japanese aggression in China, but China ended up going Communist. No justice in that, either.

President Harry Truman followed in Wilson’s footsteps with his undeclared Korean War that didn’t involve an attack on the United States yet killed more than 38,000 Americans. President Lyndon B. Johnson followed Wilson with his undeclared Vietnam War, still another war that didn’t involve an attack on the United States – over 58,000 Americans killed.

Again and again, seemingly easy interventions have become complicated, starting with Wilson’s fiascos in Mexico and Europe. The Korean War became a quagmire with its rugged terrain and Chinese hordes, the Vietnam War with its jungles and guerrilla fighters, and the Middle East with its cities and suicide bombers. We play to our strengths defending our country and play to our weaknesses intervening in the affairs of other countries where people speak different languages, have different ideas, live in places that are strange to us – and are embroiled in conflicts that have little to do with our national security interests. In some cases, such as the Balkans, the United States intervened in conflicts that have been going on for hundreds of years, before the United States existed.

And, yes, the United States has made enemies by intervening in ancient disputes between Jews and Muslims as well as disputes among Muslim sects in the Middle East. American blood has been shed defending unpopular Saudi kings and the Shah of Iran, and trying to maintain order in Lebanon and build a new Iraqi nation following the overthrow of Saddam. During the past thousand years, the Muslim world has produced kings, dictators and religious fanatics – it’s a region largely unfamiliar with religious freedom and constitutional limitations on government power. Yet Wilsonian nation-builders have imagined that they could somehow develop a nice liberal democracy by sending in soldiers and money. What we’ve seen, of course, has been terror and civil war.

Americans seem surprised when local people have opposed our well-meaning interventions, particularly after we helped get rid of an acknowledged evil like Saddam Hussein. But people don’t seem to want somebody else building their nation, even when they made a mess of it. They might want Americans to send money and sacrifice some lives, then go home. A small but determined terrorist minority can cause a lot of trouble for us.

An interventionist foreign policy requires a president with the highest level of foreign policy expertise, but there isn’t any method of assuring that only such people will occupy the White House. Many factors other than foreign policy expertise influence the outcome of presidential elections, such as a candidate’s personality, achievements and positions on other issues. In any case, the worst foreign policy decisions, such as entering World War I, the Korean War and the Vietnam War, have tended to involve a consensus among foreign policy experts – "the wise men," as Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas called them in their book about postwar policy. "The best and brightest" was David Halberstam’s phrase in his critique of the Vietnam War.

How could the experts be wrong? Predicting foreign policy outcomes is as difficult as predicting anything else. Intervening in the affairs of other nations means taking sides. It isn’t easy to predict which among many personalities and groups might emerge as enemies. Anyway, an outsider has a limited number of options, including support for a sympathetic regime and conquest, both of which would inflame nationalist hatreds.

The catastrophes Woodrow Wilson unleashed ought to serve as a warning that humility is urgently needed in U. S. foreign policy. It is not possible to control what other people do. We can only control what we do. We will have our hands full making this the best country it can be.

U.S. foreign policy ought to be guided by the following principles:

(1) Defend America from terrorism. The focus should be protecting the national security interests of the United States, not defending other countries from a wide range of threats. Nor should the United States try to counter political instability elsewhere. There has always been political instability in the world, and most of it doesn’t affect the national security of the United States. We should avoid having American forces permanently stationed in other countries. American blood and treasure should be reserved for safeguarding Americans. We should repeal proliferating restrictions on civil liberties which, enacted in the name of fighting terrorism, do little if anything to protect national security.

(2) Stay out of other people’s wars. By definition, these don’t involve an attack on the United States. We should phase out alliances that obligate the United States to enter wars unrelated to American national security interests, such as the NATO alliance obligating the United States to enter wars in which any of 19 member nations might become embroiled. The United States should phase out similar obligations in the Middle East, Korea and elsewhere. The more American resources expended in other people’s wars, the less are available to protect American national security interests.

(3) Don’t try to build other people’s nations. Independent nations cannot be built by stationing U.S soldiers in a territory and giving the government foreign aid. For better or worse, people must build their nations by making their own choices. People don’t want foreigners trying to build their nations, because the foreigners – in particular, a foreign government – would be making the choices. When the United States pursues nation-building, American soldiers are killed enforcing choices that local people don’t want. This essentially means American soldiers die in vain.

(4) Be open to the world. Maintain freedom of movement for people, goods and capital, among other things to minimize the risk that economic disputes escalate into political and military conflicts. We should abolish immigration quotas and welcome immigrants from all nations, except immigrants with known terrorist or other criminal backgrounds. Immigrants should perhaps be excluded from welfare state benefits (which, considering the debilitating effects of welfare, would probably give immigrants an advantage over those born in the United States). There shouldn’t be any tariffs, import quotas, antidumping penalties or other import restrictions. Nor should there be foreign exchange controls or other restrictions on capital flows. The goal should be to minimize government-to-government contacts and facilitate the entire range of peaceful, private contacts around the world.

More immigrants have come to the United States than to all other destinations combined. Immigrants created new technologies, built great companies, enriched American cuisine and the American language itself. This was anything but "isolationism." America became a rich and influential country precisely because of a willingness to learn from everybody.

America cannot save the world by fighting endless wars, but we can set an example. We must protect a flourishing free society which peaceful people are welcome to join or emulate in their own lands.

April 13, 2005

Jim Powell, a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, is the author of Wilson’s War, How Woodrow Wilson’s Great Blunder Led To Hitler, Lenin, Stalin And World War II (2005), FDR’s Folly, How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression (2003), and The Triumph of Liberty, A 2,000-Year History Told Through The Lives Of Freedom’s Greatest Champions (2000).

Posted by: Mark Quon on April 13, 2005 06:38 AM

. . . that vermin FDR did nothing [to protect Pearl] since he needed a bloodbath in order to stoke the public sentiment in favor of the war he so very much wanted.

Perhaps he wanted war because his efforts to prolong the Depression by lesser means were beginning to fail.

Posted by: Anton Sherwood on April 13, 2005 10:58 AM