-Sh1fty- wrote:
Turquoise wrote:
Dilbert_X wrote:
Reciprocity wrote:
selective targeting with heavy bombers?
Yes.
Here's a better one, don't park you ships and planes in neat rows when you know an attack is coming.
Well... you do realize a lot of our fleet was out at sea during the attack, right? It was fairly calculated to have just enough ships present for it to hurt us while at the same time having enough of them away that it wouldn't cripple us.
If we had simply moved all of our fleet out, then it would've been obvious that we knew about an impending attack, and the resulting damage might not have been enough to sufficiently anger the public.
So now you're saying we let 3000 people die so we could go to war?
FDR essentially had to set up an attack for us to be willing to enter WW2. Believe it or not, the Republicans were ardently anti-war back then, and the American public was mostly against entering WW2 in the beginning because of the state of the economy and relatively recent memories of WW1.
Through trade sanctions, we essentially forced Japan's hand. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, it was more than a coincidence that we had a significant portion of our fleet out of the area. I suppose some of Japan's leadership might have put this together at the time due to the wariness of some of them in attacking us, but ultimately, pride overtook their logic in moving to attack us.
So yes, it was a very calculated move with a high amount of collateral, but it was necessary.
In many ways, the world was a lot more brutal back then.