20. Dec. 2001
HAS SOMETHING LIKE THIS EVER HAPPENED BEFORE?
Wars where the true attacker is not the
nation which looks like an attacker?
The exploitation of new technological innovations (like the thermonuclear
device here, 50 years more modern than those the layman is aware of)?
The answer is affirmative.
Related to these cases with American wars, some of the pre-WW2
unknown facts
were, that both Japanese and German
military encryptions
were broken.
The Americans could read the Japanese navy transmissions,
and the
British could break any German military transmissions where they
put
their effort in any given day. The western allies knew, what was the next
bombing target, what squadrons were ordered to attack and what types
of bombs were being loaded. All this before the bombers had taken off.
To protect this encryption breakthrough a series of deceptions were used.
They claimed that some agents found this information, or that voice
direction finding had located those bombers (the radar was also secret).
Sometimes a reconnaissance plane was sent to locate something, like
a convoy, what already was known to be there.
This code breaking success was first revealed by Winterbotham 1974.
The Ultra secret, as it was
called, was successfully and tightly held,
though some 50 000+ people knew parts
about it (the code breaking
crew was huge, but most were carefully
hand-picked, reliable upper
class women). Any book touching strategic warfare aspects in WW2
and published before 1974 contains mistakes, because the authors
didn't have an idea about the depth of allied code breaking success.
The American side has been still more veiled, because the question
hangs in the air: if they acted then
like this, what are they doing now?
Has anything been changed? This is why
they have humiliated Pearl
Harbor commanders buried in disgrace,
the Magic successes hinted
some 40 years past the event and continuing difficulties to explain
what the "Flying Tigers" were
actually doing late 1940 and early 1941.
Volunteers helping a just cause are easy to understand, but there is
a more difficult question of how 3 squadrons of then-modern
P-40Bs
happened to be available for these
volunteers.
Even the US-Spanish war needs to be veiled again. Some 25 years
after the US admiral Hyman Rickover published his findings about
the internal explosion of USS Maine, there is a computer simulation
claiming that it is within the limits of possible, that an outside mine
explosion could cause the damage found at the wreck of Maine.
This incident of course could have been settled 100 years ago,
but for some reason the reliable research has been waiting. I'm
not supporting simulations against admirals, but an interested
reader should make his own mind...
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