I decided to read again “At Dawn We Slept” starting at page 1. The first few dozen pages surprised me with the extent to which both sides Navy staffs had kicked around the idea of an aerial attack on Oahu/Pearl Harbor/the US Fleet during 1930’s war games(bottom page 14 Japan and top page 33 US).
The subject was enlivened after the British success (hell they needed a success) with an airborne torpedo attack on the Italian Fleet at Taranto 12Nov1940.
Admiral Yamamoto wrote to high Navy colleagues on the subject in Jan1941 saying that if war with the US was inevitable then a surprise carrier borne attack on the US Fleet at Pearl Harbor could give Japan a head start.
Late in January the Peruvian Ambassador in Tokyo heard a rumour of an attack on Pearl Harbor and passed this on to the US Ambassador and it was duly passed to State Dept., Navy in Washington, Navy in Hawaii and was duly kicked around with many top people having a say. Com. McCollum at ONI dismissed the warning as “rumours”.
All this was against a back ground of much high level Navy discussion from December to February initially ignited by the British Fleet Air Arm torpedo attack on the Italian fleet at Taranto.
Fast forward to late 1941 – so despite all the above,
despite the Japanese Consulate in Honolulu sending home gridded maps of the Pearl Harbor fleet anchorage with various Fleet units mapped;
despite US Navy Intelligence losing radio touch with the Japanese carriers late Nov1941;
despite Japan changing Navy radio codes twice within a month, unheard of;
despite Japan instructing Embassies & Consulates to burn codes;
despite various “war warnings” to Pearl Harbor from Washington;
despite the Japanese invasion force observed moving south towards Malaya;
The disaster the US Navy had speculated about for years came to pass like clockwork; and within a few months it had turned out a bigger disaster for Japan.
The Martin Bellinger Report of 31 March 1941 was a prophetic document presaging what took place 8 months later.
books.google.com.au/books?id=VTxNNAzuQC0C&pg=PA15&lpg=PA15&dq=martin+bellinger+report&source=bl&ots=9DGpJJRFlh&sig=ACfU3U2f-X8VQzTrxxVqWNldeZVJKCtczw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjXzMGFnZrhAhUYWysKHY_JBpQQ6AEwA3oECAYQAQ#v=onepage&q=martin%20bellinger%20report&f=false
Makes you wonder if the decision was made to sacrifice Pearl Harbour to get the US public onside for a full-blown war.
I am aware of those speculations Anto but 10 hours later Japan attacked US forces in the Phillipines – the troop movements for which had been in motion and obvious to several nations intelligence agencies for days. As the Wiki says – “The invasion of the Philippines started on 8 December 1941, ten hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor. As at Pearl Harbor, American aircraft were severely damaged in the initial Japanese attack. Lacking air cover, the American Asiatic Fleet in the Philippines withdrew to Java on 12 December 1941.”
So the US was to be pitchforked into WWII with or without Pearl Harbor.
I have just found pages 839 to 850 of “At Dawn We Slept” titled “Revisionists Revisited”. This was written by Dr Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon, editors for Gordon Prange after he died in 1980. They run through counter arguments to the many variants on revisionist theories. I will post the scanned pages now and might add comments later.
page 839
page 840
page 841
page 842
page 843
page 844
page 845
page 846
page 847
page 848
page 849
page 850
I highly recommend this book: Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl by Robert B. Stinnett
to fill in what the US knew leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor. It depends on extensive interviews and government documents including numerous filled FOIA requests. Information that other accounts simply do not have.
Thanks Kuhnkat I see our National Library here has a copy I can get to read.