US War Entries - USS Maine,
Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, Vietnam, Iraq
By Larry
Romanoff, April 21, 2023
Photo Credit: USS Maine.Time Life Pictures/Bureau Of
Ships/National Archives/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
The USS Maine and the Spanish-American War
The Lusitania and World War I
Pearl Harbor and World War II
The Vietnam War
The Hijacking of Iraq
The USS Maine and the Spanish-American War
A number of crew members who sailed on board the
USS Maine. Library of Congress. Source
In the late 1800s, the US was already aggressively expansionist, looking
for nations and empires to conquer and, because American businesses had
invested heavily in sugar and tobacco plantations in Cuba, was looking for an
excuse to expel Spain from its colony. And so, in 1898, the US provided funding
and incitement to create a local insurrection, then sent the USS Maine to Cuba
"to protect American interests". Shortly thereafter, in the early
morning of February 15, an explosion destroyed the forward third of the ship as
it lay anchored in Havana Harbor, killing more than 270 American sailors on
board. A US naval court of inquiry declared that an external naval mine had
caused the explosion, and the US newspapers, with no evidence whatever, but
with the full support of the government, immediately accused the Spanish of
having sabotaged the ship. The US then declared war
on Spain, expelling the Spanish from Cuba, and using this momentum to also
brutally conquer the Philippines and Guam in the Pacific.
While Spain was at first vilified for this treacherous act, subsequent
investigations revealed that the explosion that sank the USS Maine had
originated inside the ship, divers discovering the armor plates of the ship
were blown outwards rather than inwards. The fault was initially attributed to
an accidental explosion of coal dust within an internal bunker, but there was
then much speculation about a bomb having been placed on board the vessel.
While it is true that many kinds of dust, including even grain dust, are
combustible in the right concentrations and can produce an explosion sufficient
to blow the walls off a wooden storage shed, coal dust contains nowhere near
the explosive power necessary to totally blow out the steel armor-plated hull
of a warship.
In any case, such an explosion would have ruptured the weakest portions
first, blowing out hatches and inner partitions rather than the armored hull.
The explosion could have been caused only by a powerful concentration of
explosives directed precisely at the hull and meant to blow the ship apart. In
this case, there is no likely possibility that the Spanish could have boarded a
fully-manned foreign warship with a sufficient quantity of high-powered
explosives, set the charges and then depart unseen and unchallenged. To claim
otherwise is just foolishness. The only possible conclusion, and one widely
accepted today, is that the US government willingly
sacrificed several hundred of its own sailors in a false-flag attempt to create
justification for declaring a war that had no justification.
The US Entry to World War 1 - The Lusitania
Anti-German demonstrations in Chrisp Street, Poplar, London in response to
the sinking, on the 7th May of the liner 'RMS Lusitania' by a German submarine.
(Photo by PA Images via Getty Images)
As always, the US military and the US president, in this case Woodrow
Wilson, wanted to enter another unjustifiable war but had no public
support. And as always, the US military found a way to create that public
support by either fabricating or provoking an enemy attack. The US entry to
World War 1 was another such operation which would become a pattern.
The Jews had already prolonged the war by promising Britain they would
arrange for the US entry to the war on the side of the British, in order to obtain a commitment to the granting of Palestine as a homeland for the
Jews. Wilson, already willing, now needed a
plausible excuse to justify this war to American citizens. And yet again, in
what would become a recurring pattern, the US government was willing to
sacrifice the lives of many people, including its own citizens, to create this
justification.
The Lusitania, a luxury British ocean liner, was repeatedly crossing the
Atlantic with thousands of passengers when the
US began to surreptitiously load this vessel with military supplies, ammunition
and armaments for Britain - which would make the ship a valid military target
for the German submarines patrolling the North Atlantic. The Germans became aware of the Lusitania's military cargo and informed
the US government that the ship would now be considered an enemy military
vessel and subject to attack. In an attempt to avoid civilian casualties, the
German government tried to place advertisements in American newspapers warning
passengers of the danger and advising them to avoid sailing on this vessel. But the mostly Jewish-owned newspapers in the US refused to publish the
warnings or acknowledge the German claim that the ship carried munitions, and
most travelers were apparently uninformed of the dangers. Moreover, since it was against US laws to
transport war materials and passengers on the same ship, most Americans might have trusted their government and ignored the
warnings in any case. [1][2]
"On May 7, 1915, a German U-boat fired a torpedo at the Lusitania,
provoking an enormous secondary explosion which sank the ship within about 15
minutes, with the loss of more than 1,200 lives.
Wilson's government exploited this tragedy as a pretext for the US to enter the
First World War, but American deceit went far beyond loading a passenger vessel
with ammunition and military supplies. The US in fact had tried repeatedly to
provoke Germany into attacking the Lusitania, but had failed. Acting on an
assumption that the Captain of the ship was too efficient at avoiding German
submarines, the US arranged for his replacement." According to one
documented report, Commander Joseph
Kenworthy was in the presence of the military commanders who ordered the
Lusitania's escort withdrawn, and noted that no other protection was
considered. Kenworthy wrote a book in 1927 titled, "The Freedom of the Seas", in
which he stated "The Lusitania was sent at
considerably reduced speed into an area where a U-boat (submarine) was known to
be waiting and with her escort withdrawn. The facts speak for themselves and
the only reasonable explanation of the actions of those involved is that they
planned for the Lusitania to be torpedoed."
During wartime it is considered mandatory for surface vessels to travel at
top speed and to pursue a zig-zag course so as to reduce the possibility of
being detected or caught by submarines. Further, since the German U-boats
tended to remain close to the coastline so as to intercept ships as they neared
their destination, the ships had been instructed to remain far from shore for
as long as possible during their voyage across the Atlantic. The Lusitania, however, had been ordered to slow to a moderate speed when
nearing British waters, and also to cease
zig-zagging and to plot a straight course to England, and was also instructed
to make her passage very near the coastline. Furthermore, her armed military escort vessel was ordered to withdraw, leaving the
Lusitania alone and defenseless in the submarine-infested waters of the
Atlantic.
.
The British and American governments hotly denied that the Lusitania
carried military cargo, and used the sinking to demonise Germany and inflame
public support for entry to the war. After the end of the war, the British
government tried desperately to locate and destroy the remains of the Lusitania
in order to prevent the truth from someday emerging. The British had their own
and other navies perform "exercises" in the area, in multiple
attempts to destroy with mines the evidence still lurking aboard the Lusitania,
but with only minimal success.
Subsequent investigations revealed that the
major secondary explosions that sank the ship had occurred inside the
Lusitania, since on that voyage it was secretly transporting 6 million pounds
of artillery shells and rifle ammunition, as well as other explosives. In 2008, divers discovered more than four million rounds of rifle
ammunition still aboard the Lusitania. A businessman who owns the rights to the
wreck and is funding its exploration, told the media that "There were
literally tons and tons of stuff stored in unrefrigerated cargo holds that were
marked cheese, butter and oysters", but that were in fact munitions.
The salvage divers reported that surrounding the ship were many mines and depth
charges that had been dropped by Britain after the war in its attempts to
destroy the evidence, but that had failed to explode as intended.
The US government under President Woodrow Wilson wanted so badly to have
another war that it deliberately loaded an enormous
passenger liner with thousands of tons of munitions and explosives, then sent
the ship directly into the path of German U-boats with orders to make itself as
vulnerable to attack as possible. The lives lost were
apparently a small price to pay for success.
The US Entry to World War 2 - Pearl Harbor
Among the many "conspiracy theories" that have proven to be true
after all, one of the most important relates to the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor in 1941. The official narrative was that the attack was a complete
surprise. This narrative was widely derided at the time, with nationwide public
disbelief, sufficient to pressure the US Congress into
holding another of their fairytale Congressional Investigations, in which they
refused testimony from qualified people and deleted many important facts from
the record. The mass media were fully onside,
ridiculing the testimony and those who questioned the official version of
events. In the end, Congress as usual simply whitewashed the event and swept
the matter under the carpet where it was so deeply buried it disappeared from
public consciousness. The media, the book publishers, and Hollywood conspired
to re-create a totally fictional tale about the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the
matter lay dead for about 60 years when suddenly past details began coming to
light. It is now generally accepted that the US
government knew of the impending Japanese attack down to the day and the hour, but refused to inform the naval officials at Pearl Harbor, wanting the
attack to proceed so as to justify American entry into the Second World War.
Thomas Kimmel, the grandson of Admiral
Husband Kimmel, wrote an article titled "12
New Pearl Harbor Facts", [3] in which he stated that "Critical intelligence was withheld from the local commanders to
ensure that the “surprise” attack was as spectacular as possible." Also, LTC
Clifford M. Andrew, a former U.S. Army
intelligence officer, who temporarily was assistant chief of staff, military
intelligence, general staff, United States Army is quoted as follows:[4]
"Five men were directly responsible for what happened at Pearl Harbor.
I am one of those five men ….. We knew well in advance that the Japanese were
going to attack. At least nine months before the Japanese attack upon Pearl
Harbor, I was assigned to prepare for it. I was operating under the direct
orders of the President of the United States and was ordered not to give vital
intelligence information relating to the whereabouts of the Japanese fleet to
our commanders in the field. We had broken the Japanese code … We’d been
monitoring all their communications for months prior to the attack …. It was a
lie that we didn’t have direct communication with Washington, D.C."
Stolley concludes by saying, “For the people of the United States both then and
now I feel sorrow, for a people to have been so misled, to have been lied to so
much and to have so thoroughly believed the lie given to them." [5]
By 1940 the US again wanted very badly to engage
in another war, this time under President Franklin Roosevelt - whom we
will meet again when discussing the opium trafficking in China. Once again, the
American president and the US military wanted war but had no public support. On
August 14 of that year, at the Atlantic Conference, British Prime Minister
Winston Churchill noted the "astonishing depth of Roosevelt's intense
desire for war". Churchill cabled his cabinet "(Roosevelt)
obviously was very determined that they should come in."
Roosevelt made many attempts to provoke attacks from Germany, but with no
success. As with the liner Lusitania in World War 1, the ocean liner Athenia
was deliberately sent into danger and was torpedoed but with minimal loss of
life, insufficient to precipitate war. The US engaged in repeated provocation
of the Germans, confiscating German merchant ships, shipping war materials to
Britain, supplying Germany's enemy with military vessels and aircraft,
escorting British convoys and even attacking German U-boats far from any convoy
or other threat. However, this openly aggressive stance did not provoke a
military reprisal from Germany so Roosevelt turned his attention to Japan. Since Germany and Japan had signed a mutual defense pact, a declaration of
war with Japan would also put the US into the European war against Germany.
Roosevelt therefore set about finding ways of provoking Japan sufficiently
to bring about a military retaliation to justify US entry into war. In October
of 1940, a US Navy analyst named McCollum wrote a memo containing "8
insults" that were deemed sufficient to force Japan into a war. Roosevelt executed this plan immediately and also added some other insults,
enraging Japan. The most serious of these was a total blockade of Japanese oil
imports, and forbidding the Japanese the use of the Panama Canal, impeding
Japan's access to Venezuelan oil.
Presidential advisor Harold Ickes wrote a memo to Roosevelt stating,
"There might develop from the embargoing of oil to Japan such a
situation as would make it not only possible but easy to get into this war in
an effective way". Admiral Richmond Turner likewise presented a report stating, "It
is generally believed that shutting off the American supply of petroleum will
lead promptly to the Japanese invasion of Netherland East Indies and it seems
certain she would also include military action against the Philippine Islands,
which would immediately involve us in a Pacific war". The next day FDR froze all Japanese assets in the US and cut off Japan's
main supply of oil, thereby forcing the Japanese into a war with the US.
According to recently unclassified documents, all military intelligence
information was withheld from Hawaii from this point forward. [6][7]
In March of 1941, a secret Navy report predicted that if Japan made war on
the US, they would strike Pearl Harbor without warning at dawn with aircraft
from a maximum of 6 carriers because the US Pacific Fleet was the only threat
to Japan's plans. By this time, Roosevelt had already ordered the US naval
fleet transferred from the West Coast to its exposed position in Hawaii and
ordered it to remain stationed at Pearl Harbor in spite of complaints by its commander
Admiral Richardson that there was inadequate protection from air attack and
no protection from torpedo attack. Richardson felt so strongly that he twice disobeyed orders to berth his fleet there and he raised the issue personally with Roosevelt. Very soon after that,
he was replaced but his successor, Admiral Kimmel, raised the same
issues without resolution.
By 1941 there were increasing signs that Japan intended to attack the US
fleet at Pearl Harbor. From a freedom of information release, documents
revealed that CIA Director Allen Dulles admitted that US
was warned in mid-November that the Japanese Fleet had sailed east past Tokyo
Bay and was on its way to attack Pearl Harbor. The volume of evidence was overwhelming by October and November of 1941,
yet Roosevelt ordered that information retained in Washington while revealing
little of substance to the military base at Pearl Harbor. On November 25, Secretary
of War Stimson noted in his diary that "FDR
stated that we were likely to be attacked perhaps as soon as next Monday. In
spite of the risk involved. . . we realized that in order to have the full
support of the American people it was desirable to make sure that the Japanese
be the ones to do this so that there should remain no doubt in anyone's mind as
to who were the aggressors."
In reading the entirety of the historical record, including transcripts of
diaries and records of meetings, many from recently unclassified documents, it becomes impossible to avoid the conclusion that Roosevelt and his staff
were fully aware of the impending attack on Pearl Harbor, down to the hour, and deliberately withheld
this information from Hawaii. There
is simply too much corroborating information. Pearl Harbor was neither an
accident nor a failure of American intelligence, and it was not the result of
brilliant Japanese military planning. Roosevelt
needed that "surprise" Japanese attack to justify US entrance into
both theaters of the war, and the sacrifice of a
few thousand military personnel was a small price to pay. Rumors began to fly
immediately after the attack, claiming that Roosevelt had full knowledge of
events and deliberately steered the US into a war he wanted. It wasn't the first time an American president had done this, and it
wouldn't be the last time.
American author Robert Stinnett wrote a book titled Day of Deceit in which he disclosed in exhaustive detail
the unknown circumstances of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, leaving the unmistakable
conclusion that almost everyone except the US military commanders in Hawaii
knew of the date and time of the attack and
that Roosevelt unquestionably and deliberately refused to notify Hawaii of the
coming attack. Stinnett even documents
that the US Army's Chief of Staff informed the Washington bureau chiefs of all
the major newspapers and magazines of the attack before it occurred - and swore
them to secrecy, an oath the media honored. Stinnett spent seventeen years in
research on Pearl Harbor and used more than two hundred thousand individual
interviews and declassified documents to arrive at his conclusions, making
devastating revelations about the circumstances. His
book was declared "A triumph of historical scholarship" that provides
overwhelming evidence of the claims.
Many authors, certainly including myself, have arrived at precisely the
same conclusions: that Roosevelt knew Japan would attack Pearl Harbor and had
received sufficient intelligence to be able to estimate the day and the hour of
that attack, and that he deliberately
sacrificed the lives of American servicemen in Hawaii because his handlers
wanted war and he wanted what they wanted. As
sickeningly distasteful as this is, there is no other possible conclusion.
The US movie studios have over the years committed substantial historical
crimes in misrepresenting most American wars,
feeding the public a desired narrative rather than the truths of their
government's behavior. Their
treatment of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was no exception. The US fleet
was not as damaged from the attack as many believe. The ships sunk at Pearl
Harbor were for the most part obsolete World War One era types and of rapidly
diminishing military value. Only one of the battleships, the Nevada, was
capable of moving under its own power. The
valuable vessels like the aircraft carriers were ordered out of the combat
area, with only the older World War 1 ships
being left exposed to damage or destruction. It is generally accepted that most
of those older vessels would have been no match for the modern Japanese navy
and would have been quickly destroyed in any battle. Military historians generally agree the US lost nothing of value at Pearl
Harbor -
all according to plan.
"A massive propaganda campaign on the so-called "Day of
Infamy" resonates in the US to this day. Most Americans remain
willfully blind to the fact that the sneak attack without declaration of war
for which the Japanese are endlessly vilified is standard US operating
procedure and has been employed by the United States in hundreds of unprovoked
attacks on completely innocent and defenseless countries around the world over
the past two hundred years."
The resurrection of historical truths is not always painless. I recall
seeing a special TV documentary on the Pearl Harbor attack some years ago,
where the program hosts interviewed (one) of the few survivors of that attack
who was still alive, a man well into his 80s at that time. He recounted how he
was thrown off his ship into the water by an explosion, and managed to climb
into a lifeboat. He said one of his close friends was in the water nearby, and
he reached out to grab the man’s arm and pull him aboard, but that the man was
so badly burned that all of his flesh came off in his friend’s hands. At that
point he could no longer continue, but broke into tears at the pain from that
memory which had clearly never left him. How
could you tell that man that the President of his country knew of that
impending attack but left him and his thousands of shipmates to their fate?
The Gulf of Tonkin and the US Invasion of Vietnam
Yet once again the US was determined to have another war, as was its
President, this time Lyndon Johnson. And once again, the war had no popular support among the American people
so the President and his staff once again concocted a story to justify to the
public yet another unjustifiable war. On August 4, 1964, President Johnson went
on national television and told the nation that North Vietnam had attacked
American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin, and that he had requested Congressional authority
to wage war against North Vietnam. "Repeated acts of
violence against the armed forces of the United States must be met not only
with alert defense, but with a positive reply. That reply is being given as I
speak tonight." Johnson said. The US Congress
soon passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution which provided Johnson with authority
to conduct military operations against North Vietnam. By 1969, over 500,000 US troops were fighting in Southeast Asia.
But Johnson and his Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, had lied to
Congress and to the American people. In
fact, North Vietnam had not attacked the USS Maddox, as the Pentagon claimed,
and the "unequivocal proof" of unprovoked attacks against the US warship was a complete fabrication.
In 1981, journalists re-examined the ship's logs and concluded that reports of
a torpedo attack by the North Vietnamese were unfounded and had been
fabricated. In 2005, an NSA secret study was
declassified, which concluded that there never were any
North Vietnamese vessels near the USS Maddox on the day in question when
Johnson claimed it had been attacked. The NSA report stated "It is not
simply that there is a different story as to what happened; it is that no
attack happened that night". Historian Robert J.
Hanyok concluded that the NSA deliberately distorted the intelligence reports,
thereby giving the US apparent justification to start a war with Vietnam, a war
that had no justification whatever.
The Hijacking of Iraq
A demonstrator carries an Iraqi flag during
ongoing anti-government protests in Baghdad, Iraq November 4, 2019.
Thaier Al-Sudani | Reuters
Many argue that the 9-11 event was a false-flag event to justify the
invasion and hijacking of Iraq. Whether or not this is true, the US government
and the media produced a veritable flood of “evidence” that Iraq needed to be
invaded for a multitude of reasons, a
main one being that the country was “within weeks” of having nuclear weapons
ready to launch against Israel. Of course, Iraq was ‘within
weeks’ of having these weapons for about ten years, all of which testimony was
proven to have been propaganda lies. At one point, then-President Bush told the
world that “a report came out of the Atomic [Energy Commission] - the IAEA -
that they [Iraq} were six months away from developing a weapon. I don’t know
what more evidence we need.” However, the IAEA
immediately issued a press release denying that they had ever issued such a
report, and that they were satisfied Iraq had no nuclear program. Except for one newspaper, the entire US
media ignored the IAEA denial and continued to repeat Bush's false report.
There was so much more. A document which was
widely circulated and publicised, purported to be an order placed by Iraq for
yellow-cake uranium, for assembly of nuclear weapons. That report was proven to
be a Jewish forgery produced by Israel's Mossad.
Someone did a tally and counted more than 900 separate lies that the US
government told to justify the invasion and hijacking of Iraq.
Libya was similar. The
US government and all the Western media were producing reports constantly that
Khaddafi was waging a brutal war against his own people, evidenced by massive
urban damage, bomb craters and dead bodies everywhere. However, the Russian Embassy in London took scores of satellite photos to
the BBC news managers and showed them that, in all the areas they had
referenced, there was absolutely no sign of damage of any kind. There was no artillery, no bomb craters, no
damaged buildings, and no bodies to be seen. The BBC ignored them and continued
to propagate the fiction, to help justify the invasion of Libya and the
hijacking of its oil. In all cases, the Jewish-owned media have been strongly
onside, cheering for every way that apparently only the Jews wanted.
And in fact, all 200 or so US wars have been the same - unjustified attacks
on innocent countries, supported by the most outrageous lies. This has never
changed. It is continuing today against Russia, China, and Iran.
*
Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 32 languages and
his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics
websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language
platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman.
He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and
owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor
at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international
affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently
writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is
one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When
China Sneezes’. (Chapt. 2 — Dealing with Demons).
His full archive can be seen at
https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/ + https://www.moonofshanghai.com/
He can be contacted at:
*
NOTES
[1] The Sacrifice of the
Lusitania
https://capitalismtheliberalrevolution.com/blog/the-sacrifice-of-the-lusitania/
[2] A Willful Murder: The
Sinking of The Lusitania
https://www.amazon.com/Wilful-Murder-Lusitania-Diana-Preston/dp/0385601735
[3] Thomas Kimmel
(grandson of Admiral Husband Kimmel), ’12 New Pearl Harbor Facts’,
The Barnes Review, November/December 2004, pp. 37-41.
[4] Roger A Stolley, ‘Pearl
Harbor Attack No Surprise’,
The Journal for Historical Review, Vol. 12, No. 1, Spring 1992, pp. 119-21.
[5] Japan in WWII - A
Casualty of Usury? By Dr. Ingrid R. Zundel on June 26, 2011
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/06/26/was-world-war-ii-fought-to-make-the-world-safe-for-usury/
[6] FDR Knew Pearl Harbor Was
Coming
http://www.nypress.com/news/fdr-knew-pearl-harbor-was-coming-EBNP1020010614306149999
[7] Did Roosevelt know in
advance about the attack on Pearl Harbor yet say nothing?
https://www.straightdope.com/21343027/did-roosevelt-know-in-advance-about-the-attack-on-pearl-harbor-yet-say-nothing
Copyright © Larry Romanoff, Blue Moon of Shanghai, Moon of Shanghai, 2023
