The Pearl Harbor provocation.

The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 was a Hollywood script style staged event. In July, 1941 "the U.S., Britain, and the Netherlands instituted a total embargo on oil and scrap metal to Japan, tantamount to a declaration of war. This was followed soon after by the U.S. and the U.K. greezing all Japanese assets in their respective countries. The U.S. had clearly provoked the war with Japan and the embargoes were a clear and potent threat to Japan's very existence...

The Navy knew the Japanese were coming but did nothing to stop them. It is public record that the 181 approaching Japanese aircraft were on naval radar screens in time to launch a counter attack, but the order was never given. Consequently, the 151 U. S. planes that might have warded off the attack were destroyed on the ground.

The attack sank or damaged eight outdated battleships and a fleet of smaller ships, including some old four-stacker destroyers that had outlived their usefulness. Unfortunately, the raid also left 2,343 U. S. service personnel dead, 960 more missing, and 1,272 wounded.

The Navy's fleet of aircraft carriers and submarines were conveniently out to sea and survived to launch a counter attack against Japan. Naval leaders knew even in 1941 that future wars would be mostly won with the help of carriers and submarines, not slow moving, coal burning dreadnoughts, cruisers and other surface vessels. Were these old ships and their crews sacrificed for political reasons?

Other than the fact that Hitler poised a serious world threat in 1941, what other political reasons would there have been? Remember that the world was still struggling from a serious depression in the 1930s when the Axis powers began rattling sabers. A world war was a perfect solution to getting a sluggish economy stimulated again. Generating a Second World War worked like magic.

It is said that the United States was not geared up for the war so quickly. The US made a conversion of many factories into a giant war machine in a remarkably short time. It is obvious that a lot of planning had been going on before the war actually started.

For many an American citizen this is where they'd like to put a stop to the story of Japan, but, Pearl Harbor was only an intro to the ending. A script ending which was in it's own right unneccesary, not provoked for, another crime of war: the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Months before the end of the war, Japan's leaders recognized that defeat was inevitable. In April 1945 a new government headed by Kantaro Suzuki took office with the mission of ending the war. When Germany capitulated in early May, the Japanese understood that the British and Americans would now direct the full fury of their awesome military power exclusively against them.

American officials, having long since broken Japan's secret codes, knew from intercepted messages that the country's leaders were seeking to end the war on terms as favorable as possible. Details of these efforts were known from decoded secret communications between the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo and Japanese diplomats abroad.

In his 1965 study, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam (pp. 107, 108), historian Gar Alperovitz writes:

Although Japanese peace feelers had been sent out as early as September 1944 (and [China's] Chiang Kai-shek had been approached regarding surrender possibilities in December 1944), the real effort to end the war began in the spring of 1945. This effort stressed the role of the Soviet Union ...

In mid-April [1945] the [US] Joint Intelligence Committee reported that Japanese leaders were looking for a way to modify the surrender terms to end the war. The State Department was convinced the Emperor was actively seeking a way to stop the fighting.

It was only after the war that the American public learned about Japan's efforts to bring the conflict to an end. Chicago Tribune reporter Walter Trohan, for example, was obliged by wartime censorship to withhold for seven months one of the most important stories of the war.

In an article that finally appeared August 19, 1945, on the front pages of the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times-Herald, Trohan revealed that on January 20, 1945, two days prior to his departure for the Yalta meeting with Stalin and Churchill, President Roosevelt received a 40-page memorandum from General Douglas MacArthur outlining five separate surrender overtures from high-level Japanese officials. (The complete text of Trohan's article is in the Winter 1985-86 Journal, pp. 508-512.)

This memo showed that the Japanese were offering surrender terms virtually identical to the ones ultimately accepted by the Americans at the formal surrender ceremony on September 2 -- that is, complete surrender of everything but the person of the Emperor. Specifically, the terms of these peace overtures included:

Complete surrender of all Japanese forces and arms, at home, on island possessions, and in occupied countries.
Occupation of Japan and its possessions by Allied troops under American direction.
Japanese relinquishment of all territory seized during the war, as well as Manchuria, Korea and Taiwan.
Regulation of Japanese industry to halt production of any weapons and other tools of war.
Release of all prisoners of war and internees.
Surrender of designated war criminals.
Is this memorandum authentic? It was supposedly leaked to Trohan by Admiral William D. Leahy, presidential Chief of Staff. (See: M. Rothbard in A. Goddard, ed., Harry Elmer Barnes: Learned Crusader [1968], pp. 327f.) Historian Harry Elmer Barnes has related (in "Hiroshima: Assault on a Beaten Foe," National Review, May 10, 1958):

The authenticity of the Trohan article was never challenged by the White House or the State Department, and for very good reason. After General MacArthur returned from Korea in 1951, his neighbor in the Waldorf Towers, former President Herbert Hoover, took the Trohan article to General MacArthur and the latter confirmed its accuracy in every detail and without qualification.