TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Re: Hiroshima Marks 60th Anniversary of Atomic Bomb Attack

Re: Hiroshima Marks 60th Anniversary of Atomic Bomb Attack

Daryl Gibson (daryl.gibson@gmail.com)
Fri, 19 Aug 2005 21:03:47 -0700

> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Too bad the people who did not know
> about the possibility of Pearl Harbor did not read the Honolulu Adver-
> tiser the Friday before, when its lead story told about the very stong
> possibility of an attack by 'the Japs, over the weekend'.

True, the allies had been expecting an attack, but most people thought
it would be at Wake or the Phillipines. Who knows what the Advertiser
story said, or where they got their information. Because the United
States was intercepting and reading the Japanese diplomatic ciphers,
they knew something was coming. Should Kimmel have kept his eyes open?
Should Short have expected an attack? Certainly ... but they didn't.
They seem to have been moderately incompetent. If they had any idea
that the attack was going to happen that day, they wouldn't have been
on their way to a golf game when the attack happened.

> [TELECOM Digest Editor's note, continued:

> And although the Japanese had planned the attack for Monday morning,
> _someone_ neglected to recall the International Date Line. It was
> late at night Sunday when they started out from Japan; dateline
> moved it back to Saturday night. PAT]

This is just plain silly. Yes, the Japanese consider December 8, 1941
the day of the attack -- it was that day in Japan. But the Japanese
navy *planned* on attacking on Sunday morning -- when the fleet's
guard was down. And the planes took off from carriers a hundred miles
or so away from Hawaii, not from Japan! If you want to read more about
this, try the aforementioned book, Nakamoto's biography, or even the
movie Tora Tora Tora.

As far as the Kuwait attack, the State Department did not set it up --
unless you assume that they intentionally stationed a stupid
diplomatic officer in Iraq. When questioned about how the United
States felt about "border skirmishes among the Arabs," she reportedly
told them that the United States didn't care about border skirmishes.
The Iraqis considered it a border skirmish -- for whatever reason.
Obviously, the rest of the world didn't.

People are going to see idiotic conspiracies anyway -- but most of the
things that are cited are the result of a mix of stupidity and
carelessness.

Daryl

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