To jrj@combatveteransforcongress.org
Dec 7 at 3:35 AM
December 7, 2016: The 75th Anniversary of the Sneak Attack by Japan on Pearl Harbor
The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor by the Imperial Forces of Japan, executed by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s strike plan “Z”, commenced at 7:48 AM Hawaiian Time. The base was attacked by 353 Imperial Japanese fighters, bomber, and torpedo planes in two waves, launched from six Japanese aircraft carriers. All eight U.S. Navy battleships were damaged, with four sunk. All but the USS Arizona (BB-39) were later raised, and six were returned to service and went on to fight the Imperial Forces of Japan in the WWII. The Japanese also sank or damaged three cruisers, three destroyers, an anti-aircraft training ship, and one minelayer. In addition 188 U.S. aircraft were destroyed; 2,403 Americans were killed and 1,178 others were wounded. However, important base installations such as the power station, shipyard, maintenance, and fuel and torpedo storage facilities, as well as the submarine piers and headquarters building (also home of the intelligence section) were not attacked. Japanese losses were light; 29 aircraft and five midget submarines were lost, and 64 servicemen killed. One Japanese sailor, Kazuo Sakamaki, was captured.
In the wake of the attack, 15 Medal Of Honor, 51 Navy Crosses, 53 Silver Stars, 4 Navy and Marine Corps Medals, one Distinguished Flying Cross, four Distinguished Service Crosses, one Distinguished Service Medal, and three Bronze Star Medals were awarded to the American servicemen who distinguished themselves in combat at Pearl Harbor. Additionally, a special military award, the Pearl Harbor Commemorative medal was later authorized for all military veterans of the attack
Japan’s Prime Minister’s Will Visit Pearl Harbor Today
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced he would travel to Pearl Harbor today, to recognize the 75th Anniversary of Japan’s attack on the home port of the, US Navy’s Pacific Fleet. Prime Minister Abe is the first Japanese leader to visit Pearl Harbor to “pay tribute [and] comfort the souls” of those who died from both countries during World War II. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto said that Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor “awoke a sleeping giant”. The attack was labeled “A Day of Infamy” by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In the next 3 years, 7 months, and 25 days, the US Armed Forces and their Allies in the Pacific Theatre, defeated the Imperial Forces of Japan. On September 2, 1945, General Douglas MacArthur, USMA ’03, USA, representing the Combined Allied Forces, accepted the “Unconditional Surrender” of the Imperial Forces of Japan aboard the USS Missouri (BB-63) in Tokyo Bay.
Pearl Harbor – 75 years on
In the below listed Op Ed, by Admiral James A. Lyons, Jr. USNA ’52, USN (Ret), who was the Commander–in-Chief, of the US Pacific Fleet, and the Senior US Military Representative to the United Nations, exposes the US military personnel who were responsible for failing to alert Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, the Commander-in-Chief of the US Pacific Fleet, and Lt. General Walter Short, who was responsible for the defense of Hawaii, of the pending attack by Japan, were accused of dereliction of duty following the attack. Admiral Kimmel was reduced in rank to Rear Admiral, and retired from the US Navy. Lt General Short was reduced in rank to Major General and retired from the US Army. Admiral Lyons recommends in the below listed Op Ed that Rear Admiral Kimmel and Major General Short have their honor, reputations, and ranks restored by Congress.
Joseph R. John, USNA ‘62
Capt USN(Ret)/Former FBI
Chairman, Combat Veterans For Congress PAC
2307 Fenton Parkway, Suite 107-184
San Diego, CA 92108
http://www.CombatVeteransForCongress.org
https://www.facebook.com/combatveteransforcongress?ref=hl
Then I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?” Then I said, “Here am I. Send me!”
-Isaiah 6:8
From: James A. Lyons, Jr
Sent: Monday, December 05, 2016 6:27 AM
To: Joseph R. John
Subject: Op-Ed – Pearl Harbor – 75 years on
My latest op-ed published in the Washington Times.
As an aside, it made the cover of the National Enquirer.
All The Best
Ace
James A. Lyons, Jr.
Admiral, USN (Ret)
Pearl Harbor, 75 years on
Remembering the grim day and an ongoing injustice
By James A. Lyons – – Sunday, December 4, 2016
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
The 75th anniversary of the Imperial Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor will soon be remembered again as a “Day of Infamy.” On Dec. 7, 1941, Japan launched over 353 aircraft from six carriers, flawlessly executing Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto’s strike plan “Z” and succeeded in crippling the U.S. Pacific Fleet.
How could the commanders in Hawaii be so unprepared when in Washington both the Army and Navy intelligence organizations had broken key Japanese diplomatic codes, including the high level “Purple” code in which Japan was conducting its peace negotiations with the United States? Whether the Japanese naval code “JN-25” was broken prior to the attack remains unknown.
In their new book, “A Matter of Honor,” by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, the authors provide information never before revealed. The authors make the case for restoring the personal reputation, honor and ranks of the two Pearl Harbor commanders who were unjustly made the scapegoats.
The second new book, “Into the Lion’s Mouth” by Larry Loftis, discusses the most successful British double agent, “Dusko Popov,” the real life inspiration for Ian Fleming’s James Bond and Popov’s relationship to Pearl Harbor. In short, the Japanese were fascinated by the British surprise airstrike at Taranto, which destroyed the Italian Fleet primarily by dropping torpedoes in relatively shallow water. They prepared questions and passed them to Germany who in turn gave them to Popov. He turned them over to the FBI on his arrival in New York in August 1941. The U.K. raid on Taranto became the blueprint for the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Mr. Loftis contends that J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI Director, never turned over the questions to the military or to the president. Former CIA Director William Casey made the same charges in 1988 and blamed Hoover for failing to share the information with the military. However, according to Mr. Summers and Ms. Swan, Hoover did turn over paraphrased versions of the question to military intelligence who failed to recognize the significance of this information.
Of the eight official inquiries, the most biased conducted was by Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts shortly following the attack. Neither Adm. Husband E. Kimmel, the commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, or Lt. Gen. Walter Short, who was responsible for the defense of Hawaii, received any information from the decrypted codes which would have alerted them to the Japanese fleet’s intentions. Yet the Roberts commission declared Adm. Kimmel and Lt. Gen. Short derelict in carrying their duties and held them solely responsible for the Pearl Harbor disaster. None of the 10 Washington officials authorized to receive the decrypted information was held accountable. Cover up?
The Washington officials authorized to receive the decrypted “Purple” intelligence, referred to as “Magic,” included the Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Marshall; Chief of Naval Operations Harold Stark; Chief of Navy War Plans RADM Richmond K. Turner; Brig. Gen. Gerow; head of Army War Plans; heads of both Army and Navy Intelligence, Secretary of War (Army) Stimson; Secretary of Navy Knox; the president and the Secretary of State Cordell Hull.
The president only saw brief summaries of “Magic” decoded information and at times only received verbal briefings. Further, Marshall and Stark at one point denied the president and secretary of State any “Magic” information for four months because they didn’t trust people around them. Of course, one person who did see Magic was Winston Churchill. The U.S. provided three “Purple” machines to the U.K. to facilitate their breaking of the code. Another machine went to the U.S. Army and two went to the Navy. Interesting, one “Purple” machine was sent to the naval station CAST at Cavite in the Philippines for use by Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Adm. Harold Hart. Astonishingly, none were provided to the Hawaii Commanders Adm. Kimmel and Lt. Gen. Short. What use MacArthur made of the Purple intelligence is unknown. Further, he was unprepared for the Japanese attack that destroyed our FAREAST Air Force at Clark AFB nine hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He was never held accountable.
One other aspect that is seldom mentioned is that the Dutch Army cryptanalysts had also broken the Japanese diplomatic code “Purple.” According to Brig. Gen. Elliot Thorpe, USA (ret.) when he was the army attaché in Java, Gen. Tec Pooten, CINC of Far East Dutch Army, provided him a decrypted message from Tokyo to the Japanese Ambassador in Bangkok which told of the upcoming attack on Hawaii, Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand. After sending four messages about the upcoming attack, Thorpe as he recalled was directed by our War Department to send “no more on this subject.”
“Magic” decrypted information held a wealth of information. There was the “bomb plot” grid message #83 of Sept. 24, 1941, which divided the fleet anchorages in Pearl Harbor into bombing sectors. We also had the Nov. 30, 1941 message to designated Japanese Embassies to destroy their codes, files, etc. Washington cleared officials also had the 14-part message on Dec. 6 1941, the Japanese response to the secretary of State’s Nov. 26 ultimatum, ceasing all negotiations to which President Roosevelt remarked, “This means war.” Yet none of this critical intelligence was passed to the Hawaii Commanders. As an aside, Churchill was getting much of this information as well. We do know it was his goal to involve “isolationist” America in the war.
The three principals that should have been held accountable were Gen. Marshall, Adm. Stark and Adm. Turner, who assumed responsibility for distributing the decrypted information for the Navy. It clearly is time for Adm. Kimmel and Lt. Gen. Short to have their honor, reputations and ranks restored. It is a matter of honor for the Navy, Army, and country to correct this terrible injustice.
• James A. Lyons, a retired U.S. Navy admiral, was commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet and senior U.S. military representative to the United Nations.
[Personal note on this: for over 40 years I have been a proponent of the position that FDR withheld information for the purposes of involving the U.S.A. in the war and to get himself out of the Great Depression. The first purpose is self-evident. However, few know that FDR kept the U.S. in the depression for longer than necessary by, among several wrongful acts, allowing the dollar to become the global currency, and by fixing the dollar to gold during this economic crisis instead of letting it float. By 1938, most of Europe was out of the depression as they prepared for war. FDR did not. Instead, this stalwart liberal insisted on domestic policies that included the National Recovery Act, unconstitutional on its face, called the Negro Ruination Act by integrationists. The NRA permitted businesses to fire colored employees before firing white employees, just one of many discriminatory and crony features. JPB]
Justplainbill's Weblog 
Our Military is Weak, by Dakota Wood
Our Military Is Weak. That Should Scare You.
Posted on Thursday, February 15, 2024
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by Outside Contributor
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50 Comments
Our government isn’t serious about defending the United States and its interests. In fact, it has fallen woefully short in carrying out this sacred obligation. I know this sounds harsh, but as we’ll see, the government’s own numbers prove the point.
That our military is weak is not an indictment of the men and women who have volunteered to serve. It is an indictment of a system largely defined by the government and those elected to high office.
That includes senior military officers whose primary obligation should be to ensure that our men and women have what they need to win in war—which is, after all, the primary purpose of our military.
Yes, many people will say the purpose of a strong military is to deter war, but deterrence derives from the belief of the enemy that they would be defeated in battle. So if our military is at great risk of not being able to win … well, it doesn’t have much deterrent value.
Our potential enemies can see this; the American public, not so much.
At present, the U.S. military is roughly half the size it needs to be. Moreover, most of its primary equipment (planes, ships, tanks, etc.) is 30 to 40 years old. Soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, and guardsmen are training only a fraction of what they should to be competent in battle.
Yet senior leaders in the Pentagon, White House spokespersons, and even members of Congress who have access to the facts (and should know better) continue to say that we have the best military in the world, as if saying so makes it so. It does not.
Let’s look at the numbers, using references from near the end of the Cold War, when the U.S. last confronted a major competitor on a global stage. Recall that until the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the U.S. maintained forces able to compete with the Soviets in many regions at once, primarily in Europe (in land and air) but also across the seas where naval power was essential.
Back then, Washington had to focus only on one capital and the ambitions of one authoritarian regime. Regardless of where military actions occurred, the signals reverberated to Moscow.
Today, the U.S. must account for regimes in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, and Pyongyang, and a host of smaller powers and terrorist regimes that challenge U.S. interests. They have different objectives and possess different cultures, values, and networks.
Just because the U.S. acts in the Middle East to thwart Iran doesn’t mean that China alters its activities vis-à-vis Taiwan or its push on territorial claims in the South China Sea, or that Russia lessens its assault of Europe or attempts to divide NATO. They pose different threats to the U.S. in different ways.
What they have in common is the objective of displacing the United States as a global power and reducing America’s ability to shape the future in ways that benefit Americans.
To compete on a global stage against a multitude of adversaries who collaborate against the U.S., at least opportunistically, America must possess military power commensurate with the realities of the current world, not one that is imagined years from now nor held in fond memory.
Consider the following:
In the late 1980s, the Navy possessed nearly 600 ships, keeping approximately 100 at sea on any given day. Today, it has 292 yet maintains the same number deployed, thus working both ships and crew twice as much. It is not uncommon for ships to be 15% undermanned.
In 1989, the Army had 770,000 soldiers in its active component. Today, it has 452,000, shrinking by 33,000 last year alone. By the end of this year, it will shrink further, to 445,000.
Since 2011, the Army has lost 121,000 troops, 22% of its force. The service is the smallest it has been since the 1930s. Most of its major weapons were purchased in the 1980s.
During the Cold War, the average Air Force pilot flew more than 200 hours a year and often exceeded 300 hours. Our pilots made fun of their Soviet counterparts for flying half that number. Today, the average Air Force pilot flies fewer than 130 hours, while their Chinese competitors fly 200-plus.
The average age of an Air Force fighter is 30, older than the pilots flying the aircraft. The average age of the majority of refueling aircraft is 60 years—as old (or older) than the parents of the pilots flying them.
Fourteen years ago, America committed to modernizing its portfolio of nuclear weapons. Since then, our nuclear enterprise hasn’t produced a single new weapon. Meanwhile, China has produced 100 nuclear missiles just the past year and is on track to quadruple its inventory by 2030.
Iran is near-nuclear, having amassed enough uranium enriched to 60% to make a half-dozen warheads in 30 days if it committed to push the enrichment process to 90%, which it is capable of doing. Iran already possesses the largest inventory of ballistic missiles in the Middle East and is placing satellites in orbit to refine militarily relevant technologies.
Although Russia has taken a beating in its war against Ukraine, it has moved to a wartime economy and is making more missiles and tanks now than before it invaded Ukraine. New equipment is rapidly replacing the old Soviet inventory that Russia has consumed or lost in the past two years.
And the soldiers who have survived the Russia-Ukraine war to this point are battle-hardened; U.S. forces last saw major combat when in Iraq, nearly 20 years ago.
Perhaps things wouldn’t be so worrisome if we could count on strong, reliable allies. Unfortunately, their story is worse.
During the Cold War, West Germany had 5,000 main battle tanks. Today, it has 300 Leopard IIs, of which fewer than 100 are considered operational. But that’s better than in 2021, when only 13 were available for deployment.
Germany’s defense minister has reported that the country won’t be able to field a ready division until 2025. Its military infrastructure is so decayed that it will take 300 billion euros (about $329 billion) and 50 years to modernize.
In the United Kingdom, the army is the smallest since 1710 and leaders have said they would struggle to put a single division in the field. Britain’s military services combined (160,000 service members) are smaller than the U.S. Marine Corps at 174,000. The Royal Navy possesses a mere 20 surface combatants.
France only has 19 large surface warships. In the days since the Cold War, the number of France’s tanks has dropped from 1,349 to 222 and the number of fighter aircraft from 686 to 254. A senior defense leader has questioned whether the French military could operate longer than four days in high-intensity combat.
Japan, a major U.S. ally in the Pacific, reportedly has such a limited inventory of munitions that its ships and aircraft could sortie only three times before having nothing more to shoot.
Back at home, 3 out of 4 young Americans are ineligible for military service, without a waiver, due to physical or mental health issues, obesity, criminal records, or substance abuse.
The recruiting environment is so bad that the Navy has increased the maximum age for new enlistees and has begun accepting enlistees in the lowest category of aptitude testing. In the Army, all captains are now automatically promoted to major. In the Air Force, all officers in flight school graduate, with less than one-quarter of 1% failing due to lack of demonstrated proficiency.
Many Americans perceive the military as more interested in pushing social policy agenda programs than in ensuring that our forces are able to win in combat.
Clearly, we have a problem.
All of this is captured in gory detail in The Heritage Foundation’s recently released 2024 Index of U.S. Military Strength. The point of the index is twofold: to inform Americans about the state of their military and to prompt Congress and the Biden administration to do something about correcting the multitude of problems in our country’s ability to defend itself and its interests in a very dangerous world that seems to be spiraling out of control.
Regular citizens can see to their needs for employment, food, medical care, personal protection, and spiritual fulfillment. They help each other in times of distress and routinely come together to celebrate successes in life. But they cannot defend the country at the individual or community level. That responsibility lies with the federal government, which is failing at the task.
This must change, and Americans should demand it. Waiting until the next crisis is upon us will be too late.
This commentary originally was published by The National Interest
Reprinted with permission from The Daily Signal by Dakota Wood.