Thanks for posting that. What a fantastic piece of history that no one will ever read in the history textbooks. I love these kinds of stories that flesh out, and broaden what we already know about history.
You're welcome.
History is out there for the learning. You just have to go find it. Don't expect it to find you. Because when history comes looking for you, you are repeating it (usually the bad parts at that). It's all out there. just gotta find it.
Speaking of Broadening what we know of history.
Two of the biggest battles of the US Naval war in the Pacific has a LOT of errors in the history books. I'm not talking conspiracy crap here (I hate those guys) or revisionist historians with a political motive. I'm referring to errors made at the time that have made their way into the accepted histories and are wrong. In some cases intentional falsehoods.
Pearl Harbor, and Midway.
Especially Midway, a Lot of what we presume to know about the battle is false.
No ones fault really. Some historians accepted the words of a man they trusted and who was there. This man told tales according to what the listener wanted to hear and made the teller out to be more than he was. No one questioned him or the historians who wrote of what he claimed. Others in writing their history mearly parroted the previous historians works without doing their own original research, thus these lies crept into our collective memory of the battles.
Some of that was with Pearl as well with the tale told of the cancelled third wave. There never was any planned third wave to be cancelled. a Lie told years afterwards.
But a lot of the wrongness of Pearl was not because of the Lies of this one man, but were necessitated by the secrecy surrounding MAGIC and ULTRA, the breaking of the Japanese codes which was still classified long after the war was over. Most of the investigations into who was to blame for the fiasco never got the full story because the investigators themselves were not cleared for the information.
If you want to know of History that is rarely known, broadens the actual history, I suggest reading two books and an Essay. The Essay can be found online. The books you'll have to find at a store or Library.
"Pearl Harbor: Final Judgement"
By Henry C Clausen.
You can find a summary of the book here:
http://www.amgot.org/phclausn.htm which starts....
"In 1944, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, knowing that high-ranking members of the military had testified falsely before the various bodies investigating Pearl Harbor, selected a lowly major and young lawyer named Henry C. Clausen and gave him extraordinary authority to go anywhere and question anyone under oath, from enlisted personnel right up to Chief of Staff George C. Marshall. To this day, no member of the public knows the full story of Clausen's investigation. Over seven months during 1944 and 1945, Clausen traveled more than 55,000 miles (88,512 km) to interview and obtain sworn affidavits from nearly one hundred Army, Navy, civilian, and British personnel. Many of these people never testified before any other inquiry, including Congress. Clausen wore a self-destructing case containing ultrasecret decoded Japanese messages that forced witnesses to tell the truth and opened files that revealed a massive, inconceivable failure to exploit the priceless intelligence obtained by the United States in the months prior to Pearl Harbor.
"Clausen presented an 800-page report to Secretary of War Stimson - but because his report was Top Secret, he did not write a conclusion. That conclusion, and in fact Clausen's entire Top Secret report, would have torn apart the government of the United States and revealed the breathtaking secret capability of the Allies to crack Japanese and German codes. Henry Clausen is the last major living witness, the one person who can reveal, fifty years afterward, the real truth about Pearl Harbor.
The second book is "Shattered Sword: The untold story of the battle of Midway"
By Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully
Shattered Sword is a new, definitive account of the Battle of Midway, focusing primarily (but by no means exclusively) on the Japanese side of the battle. Throughout the book, the authors
make extensive usage of new Japanese primary and secondary sources that have not been utilized in prior studies. These include:
*The official Japanese War History series (Senshi Sosho),
*The translated carrier air group action reports of the four Japanese carriers involved in the battle,
*The comprehensive Japanese casualty figures found in Sawachi Hisae's groundbreaking volume on the battle (Midowei Kaisen Kiroku), and many others.
The result is an account that is grounded less on first-hand personal accounts (although these are found in plenty as well), and more on concrete operational data. This shift in focus has led to many important, and potentially provocative, re-interpretations of the conventional wisdom on the battle.
You can read the intro here:
http://www.shatteredswordbook.com/ShatteredSwordIntroduction.pdfThe Essay found online is written by Jonathan Parshall, one of the authors of Shattered Sword. In it he discusses the man I mentioned above as being the source of many of the lies, and how this man severely damaged our view of these historical battles. That man is Mitsuo Fuchida, The Pilot commander who led the planes in the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The Essay is called: "Reflecting on Fuchida, Or: A tale of three whoppers"
It is found on the website of the US Naval War College:
http://www.usnwc.edu/getattachment/612aa0c4-47a1-4107-afbb-17fa992adf5 9/Reflecting-on-Fuchida,-or--A-Tale-of-Three-Whopper
Happy reading. Would enjoy your take and reflections on it. Try the Essay first.
I joined the Navy to see the world, only to discover the world is 2/3 water!
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