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Show Mystery Ship Delays WWII 4 ft':1 Two days before the Japanese fleet surprised the big American naval base at ''I Pearl Harbor in 1941, on De-!2(' De-!2(' cember 5. the Japanese carrier "i fleet came upon a lone 1 freighter. - j ; THE 31-ship Japanese fleet r was secretly headed for the 3 Hawaiian Islands to surprise I and kill thousands of Amer icans on the morning of December De-cember 7. When the freighter and fleet came within sight, the warships aimed their guns at the potential target. Should they sink the ship? That would certainly have been done had the freighter's radio crackled out news of the sighting. But the freighter turned away; its radio discreetly discreet-ly maintained silence. HISTORIANS have known of the existence of this ship for many years. The Japanese fleet commander acknowledged acknow-ledged it, but identified it only as a third-nation vessel. Now, a historian thinks he has identified identi-fied it. Robert Haslach, in a paper for the Sixth Naval Symposium Sympo-sium at the U.S. Naval Academy, identifies the ship as either the Russian "Urits-ky" "Urits-ky" or "Vinogradov," but most probably the "Uritsky." which had left Portland a few days earlier. COULD A signal from it have changed history? Was the Russian skipper aware of what he had encountered? Russia was then in a desperate sirug- ' - gle with Germany, and wanted no trouble with Japan. Japan was about to attack the U.S. and wanted no trouble with Russia. Ironically, "Uritsky" was carrying supplies from the U.S. to aid the Russian war effort. Or, is John Toland right in believing a few top U.S. authorities au-thorities knew of the existence of this fleet, and felt the best way to get America unified, and into the war, was to suffer an apparently unprovoked attack? |