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View Full Version : Advance Warning? The Red Cross Connection


I. M. Esperto
26th Jun 2003, 20:27
http://www.usni.org/navalhistory/Articles99/NHborgquist.htm

TOM W. FREEMAN

Advance Warning? The Red Cross Connection

By Daryl S. Borgquist

Naval History, June 1999

Families of the Pearl Harbor commanders have been championing the theory that official Washingon knew when and where the 1941 Japanese attack would occur. Evidence of secret medical shipments prior to the attack is lending credence to it.

A previously unsubstantiated report that President Franklin D. Roosevelt requested the national office of the American Red Cross to send medical supplies secretly to Pearl Harbor in advance of the 7 December 1941 Japanese attack is beginning to look much more feasible.

Don C. Smith, who directed the War Service for the Red Cross before World War II and was deputy administrator of services to the armed forces from 1942 to 1946, when he became administrator, apparently knew about the timing of the Pearl Harbor attack in advance. Unfortunately, Smith died in 1990 at age 98. But when his daughter, Helen E. Hamman, saw news coverage of efforts by the families of Husband Kimmel and Walter Short to restore the two Pearl Harbor commanders posthumously to what the families contend to be their deserved ranks, she wrote a letter to President Bill Clinton on 5 September 1995. Recalling a conversation with her father, Hamman wrote:


. . . Shortly before the attack in 1941.................