You’re underselling it. If he was the guard from this article:
Davis knocked him out by “throwing a beer stein” at him. The Thirties was a hell of a decade.
My dad contacted an FBI historian to get his uncle’s full story. Hoover, nemesis of corrupt big city machine police, wasn’t predisposed to hiring Irish Catholics in the first place. Making them agents who then bought their captives beer was beyond the pale.
Author Mark E. Stille Was just on a YouTube channel WW2TV to discuss his recent book Pearl Harbor: Japan’s Greatest Disaster and to destroy some of the popular myths concerning Pearl Harbor.
A lot of what he discusses has already been covered in other books, but there continues to be a lot of persist myths.
Among other things, he takes on Yamamoto’s reputation as a military genius and talks about the huge gamble this was. It could have been a complete disaster for Japan. Yamamoto pushed the operation without careful research on the feasibility.
It could very well have been in unmitigated disaster for the Imperial Navy. Yamamoto’s leadership style didn’t change much between Pearl Harbor and Midway; what was different was America’s preparation, already being in a state of war, and America winning the intellectual battle, etc.
It was quite a daring raid, but the incompetence of the American military leadership, the failure of imagination and the gross under appreciation of Japanese abilities allowed for the success. They just didn’t believe the Japanese were capable of a raid of this magnitude and at this distance from the home islands.
This was the one time that the US clearly lost the intelligence battle in the war. The US was still on peacetime mentality, and suffered badly from “us-ism” where they believed that Japan would act like the US would rather than what Japan was capable of (and of course underestimated their capacity).
For all the credit he gets for understanding the US industrial might, he completely misses the will of the American public to fight, how galvanizing this attack became, and how much this cemented the collective will.
As it was, it really didn’t do as much damage as the popular perception is. It sank some antiquated battleships in a war that quickly saw the supremacy of the carrier, in part due to this attack.
The attack plan had flaws, and a lot of things were ineffective and could have been executed better.
I haven’t read Stille’s book yet but in the video he talks about the confusion among the Japanese and the ineffectiveness of the second wave. in Attack on Pearl Harbor: Strategy, Combat, Myths, Deceptions, Alan Zimm goes through and analyses the attack, demonstrating how there were many missed opportunities.
Stille didn’t discuss this, but actually some feel that Japan did America a favor by sinking the older battleships. They were too slow to accompany the carriers and the trained crew were freed to serve on other ships. It also forced the debate on carriers vs. battleships, something that actually took Japan longer to realize.
There was still a lot of belief in many militaries, Japan certainly included, about the huge value of élan, that ineffable fighting spirit of derring (and daring) do. “He who dares, wins”, etc. Which crap really started with Napoleon, but probably had roots back to ancient times.
Modern industrial warfare (which I personally date from roughly 1900 forward, but the date’s not critical to the argument) is not much about that. Battle still takes bravery and guts and cool under fire. And always will as long as humans are involved. But honest planning, hard training, and detailed prep count for one hell of a lot more than individual or even collective fighting spirit.
Loser attitudes don’t win battles. But neither does élan as such. It’s very easy to élan yourself well out onto a limb which the opponent readily saws off for you.
Having a sleeping relative dumbass for an opponent that day helped the Japanese outcome tremendously. Which on the US side shows the same effect but in reverse. Their failure to do my “honest planning, hard training, and detailed prep” led to them having feet of lead that day.
For some reason, even though I was highly interested in military history – especially WWII – I never really talked with my parents about it.
The only thing I remember about their experiences was that my mother told me my dad had gone to the recruiter to sign up for the Marines the day after Pearl Harbour, but they wouldn’t take him because he’d been hit by a truck whilst walking across a street the year before; non-fatal, obviously, but it messed up his back. The Army rejected him for the same reason. After the Navy turned him down, too, he want back to school and finished his degree (MS in botany), and was one of the people hired by the government to go exploring in Mexico and Central America, looking for native American plants that could be used to replace some of the medicines and other products we no longer had access to after the Japanese took over the Dutch East Indies.
This is also true of pre modern warfare, it’s just that most armies had a very, very limited capacity for coordination, communication, and executing plans. So most armies relied on very simple tactics like “march your army or this location, line up, offer battle, either take it or pursue the enemy, eventually lay siege…”
Every once in a while you’d see a pre modern army capable of more advanced logistics than the other armies of their time, and in those cases the more logistically endowed army would win with ease. The most notable example, of course, are the Mongol steppe armies, that literally ran circles around their enemies.
Ehhh, I’m not so sure about that. Yamamoto had serious reservations about war with US, and did not seem to believe that the attack would be conclusive.
and
He saw the writing on the wall, and the army was going to drag the nation into war with the US. He didn’t think any plan would actually work, but Pearl Harbor would provide some sort of breathing room. All that said, Yamamoto was well known to be a gambler.
Oh-dark-thirty Sunday morning, Pacific Ocean, north of O’ahu. The attacking force had arrived on station undetected, and now began launching aircraft. The plan was to hit the Hawaiian bases at dawn – the fighters would go in first, to knock out the defending aircraft while they were still on the ground. Then the bombers would start on the enemy battleships and whatever other ships were moored at Pearl Harbor.
The attackers hit Hawai’i from the west, flying in across the Ko’olau Range. The plan was a complete success – the defenders were taken completely by surprise. No defending aircraft got off the ground; three battleships, a carrier and a sub were sunk, and other ships were damaged. 24 hours later, the attacking force had still not been located.
The date: 7 Feb 1932
The attacking carriers: USS Lexington (CV-2) and USS Saratoga (CV-3)
Planner and commander of the attack: Rear Admiral Harry Yarnell, USN
The reason: Army/Navy Grand Joint Exercise 4
The battleship admirals, of course, objected. Strongly. For one thing, attacking on Sunday was cheating. And if there had been an attack during wartime, surprise would have been impossible. Besides, everybody knew the Japanese lacked sufficient hand-eye coordination to attack successfully with dive bombers. The admirals complained loudly and vigourously enough that the referees reversed their decision, and the attack wasn’t even included in the post-exercise report, which said “It is doubtful if air attacks can be launched against Oahu in the face of strong defensive aviation without subjecting the attacking carriers to the danger of material damage and consequent great losses in the attack air force.”
But in 1938 Vice Admiral Ernest J King repeated the attack, with pretty much the same results. And Japanese spies in Hawai’i watched both exercises, taking careful notes to be sent to IJN headquarters in Tokyo. Their attack, of course worked equally well…
We Only Ever Talk About the Third Attack on Pearl Harbor
The Pearl Harbor Attack We Don’t Know About
There are none so blind as those whose career will be damaged should they see.
Unlike the various CTs about “FDR knew it was coming and let it happen to bring us into the war he wanted”, the suppression of this stuff ought to be the center of a snowball of CTs. But isn’t.
Japan’s problem was that they had found success in the crazy banzai and other frontal charges against the peasant army of the Chinese in the late 30s and early 40s. It would terrify the poorly trained peasants, scattering them.
The frontal charge even worked against the British and Indian armies in the Malay campaign where they were outnumbered three to one.
But it all started falling apart in Guadalcanal where they finally were stopped. In particular:
Underestimating the strength of Allied forces on Guadalcanal, Ichiki’s unit conducted a nighttime frontal assault on Marine positions at Alligator Creek (often called the “Ilu River” on U.S. Marine maps) on the east side of the Lunga perimeter in the early morning hours of 21 August. Jacob Vouza, a Solomon Islands Coastwatcher scout, warned the Americans of the impending attack minutes before it started; the attack was defeated with heavy losses to the Japanese. After daybreak, the Marine units counterattacked Ichiki’s surviving troops, killing many more of them. The dead included Ichiki; it has been reported that he died by seppuku after realizing the magnitude of his defeat.[60] In total, 789 of the original 917 members of the Ichiki Regiment’s First Element were killed in the battle.
They just ran into machine gun fire. Japanese loved getting close and personal in combat, charging at night with bayonets fixed. They endured all sorts of deprivations but still fought hard.
There are four specific statements there. What are you disagreeing with? Or are you referring to the later statement about how he misread the American will?
Yamamoto came with contradictions galore. While he recognized the strength of the American industry, and the impossibility of winning a protracted war, (like a lot of other military leaders, actually) he (also like a lot of other military leaders) knew that the only way to win was for America to sue for peace fairly quickly.
He forced the issue with the Pearl Harbor raid over the objections of the IJN leadership, threatening to resign with his staff if they failed to approve it.
He also began thinking about a Pearl Harbor raid well before the war with America was seen as inevitable or even before things got too heated a
Well, really, I’m disagreeing with all four of them since they are intertwined. Yamamoto and the IJN seemed to have thought the attack out as well as anyone could. They had known the air attack was feasible through many different demonstrations, they studied the attack on Taranto quite thoroughly, and seemed to know how limited the gains even a successful attack would create.
Yamamoto seemed to know how huge a gamble the attack was, but he was a gambler and was willing to take that chance. It wasn’t a sure fire plan, but it was really the best move they seemed to have unless they were willing to give up the conquered lands in China.
Yep. The combo of Japanese imperialism and US pushback over the previous ~20 years had pushed them into a corner: either abandon imperialism, or pick a real fight with the US to hold onto their gains.
The US sort of had a cat by the tail. They didn’t need to pull; the cat would do all the pulling, because the cat sure as heck isn’t just going to stand there with its tail trapped.
I don’t buy the theory the US carefully goaded the Japanese into that moment and method of starting the war. The US then would much rather the the Japanese had decided imperialism was too hard in the face of determined diplomatic opposition & blockades. But at the same time it seems rather inconceivable the Japanese would have backed down. Was that just US wishful thinking? Or just a slow uncertain meander towards a war for lack of any better ideas?
So are you disagreeing that there is a myth that Yamamoto was a military genius or do you believe he is a military genius and the historian is wrong?
Really? The attack was the best plan anyone could have been expected to have planned?
How about the risk / benefit ratio of using the mini subs? In the presentation from his book on the attack, Stille discusses this and points out that they didn’t accomplish anything yet the discovery and sinking of one of them more than an hour before the attack could have provided more warning to the US forces, had they had their act together.
Around 6:45 AM, a US Army minesweeper reported an unidentified submarine near the entrance to Pearl Harbor, prompting the Ward to investigate. Spotting the small sub trailing the USS Antares, the Ward opened fire, scoring a direct hit with her first shot, and then dropped depth charges to ensure its destruction. The sinking was reported immediately to naval command, but the warning was not acted upon in time to prepare for the coming air assault.
The mini submarine was detected and destroyed an hour before the attack.
The US forces should have been on a higher alert. Had they been on a higher alert, this news could have led them to be at battle stations with guns ready and ammunition at hand.
The USAAF had hundreds of planes there. Had they been on a higher level of alert and then received news an hour before the attack, it would have been a different story,
Had the US gotten a CAP up over the harbor, the Japanese attack had the Zeros off attacking air bases and none escorting the Kates and Vals. Without an escort, the torpedo and dive bombers would have suffered a lot more losses.
The target selection of the attack wasn’t optimal. Author Alan Zimm discusses this in great detail in his book, which I pointed out previously.
Prior to the attack, the Japanese send float plane scouts to confirm what they already knew, again risking alerting the US with no real benefit.
These are just a few of the deficiencies in the planning and execution.
But you believe no one could have been expected to do any better? Why is that?
I am pretty sure it is clear that I disagree with the historian.
As to your what ifs, Yamamoto knew that it would only work as a surprise attack. An hour’s advance warning wasn’t enough time to get everyone back to their ships and/or in the air in the peacetime mentality that the US was in on that Sunday morning.
If you were Yamamoto, what would you have done instead of attacking Pearl Harbor? How is it going to gain Japan any more advantage than the six months or so that Pearl Harbor seemed to have bought before Midway happened?
These are some really interesting questions and they have been debated by historians. I really recommend Japan 1941 Countdown to Infamy by Eri Hotta which really gets into the weeds on what was happening internally within the Japanese military and government.
History is always easier to understand afterwards, but I think you hit it on the head on the final question. There weren’t any really good options and the Western powers really misunderstood the Japanese.
I don’t know if there was a good alternative. The war was horribly destructive but what else should have been done?
The European powers had staked out empires in Asia. The US had had the Philippines as a colony but was on the path to allowing full independence. However, it had a greater problem with the concept of Japan as a colonial power than saying anything to the Europeans.
The whole history of the relationship between the US and Japan from the 20s up through the start of the war is beyond the scope of this thread, but there were problems with both sides.
The 1930 tariffs hit Japan really hard and led to a depression here as well Partly as a response to that Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, although there were other significant factors as well.
And, of course, rising ultranationalism and increasing militarism set Japan on a path that inevitably led to conflict with the Western powers.
With Japan initiating a war with China in 1937 then taking bites out of French Indochina in 1940 and 41, the US reacted to attempt to pressure Japan to stop.
The Japanese military was using US oil, scrap iron and such in their war in China so I’m not sure what the US should have done instead.
There were no easy answers, and maybe not even any difficult answers. Because of the dysfunction in the Japanese military and government (which was effectively run by the military) events just took a life of their own.
Another factor was the gross underestimation of Japan’s abilities and will. It would not have been difficult for the US to have made the Philippines defendable and put a serious damper on their plans for the area.
The US had started, passing the greatest peacetime increases in naval procurement with the Two Ocean Act of 1940, increasing the size of the Navy by 70%.
Granted that Britain was a bit distracted at the moment, they also could have made Malay and Singapore defendable, but they also failed to appreciate the danger.
Singapore was a naval base whose naval forces had been withdrawn to the European theater. Thousands of British and Imperial troops left to defend essentially nothing and sacrificed for nothing. Churchill regarded its loss as the greatest in British history (while at the same time was willing to hold Australian forces in Europe to defend the British Isles and let Australia be overrun if the choice came down to that)
America was in a position similar to 1916: a government sanctimoniously condemning war, while private concerns were making a nice buck off its continuation. Davis Brinkley, before Pearl Harbor, as a young reporter looked at a mountain of scrap metal on the docks at Winston-Salem headed to Japan. He saw a discarded set of bed springs and wondered if an American boy conceived on them might be destined to die by a gun smelted from them.
And before we gush rhapsodically on what a swell guy was Yamamoto, consider that his HQ on Rabaul was dug by POW labor shipped down from Singapore. Once completed, rather than interned in POW camps, the laborers were murdered while Yamamoto was poring over his maps a short distance away.
The lesson of all that for all time is that once a military-led authoritarian government takes hold in any country, there will be war(s) until that government is removed.
The nature of war is that it takes somebody other than the militant outfit to participate. Some will do so eagerly, some reluctantly. But participate they will. As the saying goes, “It takes two to choose peace, but only one to choose war.”
I’ve just started studying the Malaya campaign. I’ve read a some before but getting more into it. There’s a book coming out in the summer next year that I want to read.
a lot of Americans only think about Pearl Harbor and overlook the unbelievably large area Japan was attacking in Malaya, Singapore, Hong Kong, DEI, the Philippines, Wake Is, Guam, New Guinea, etc. Incredible.
The campaign was a debacle, and an embarrassment.
It was not Churchill’s finish hour. He demanded that the troops make a last stand and die rather than surrender. Insane. He didn’t care about the civilians.
There’s this hero worshipping of Yamato, with a myth that in opposition to all the evil simpletons in the imperial military leadership, he alone understood America, all while being a military genius.
Like is much more nuanced and complex, of course. While he was a pioneer in air power, he still couldn’t give up his love for battleships. Although he understood the scale of American industrial might, he completely underestimated its resolve and will. While the attack on Oahu was brilliantly conceived, the same approach lead to the utter failure of Midway.
AIUI/was taught, Japan was attacking all of those other places, and attacked Pearl Harbor to keep the U.S. away from those places. (Didn’t work.)
While that it absolutely true, he was far from alone in that myopic view. Heck, there are probably still Americans wanting to revive the Iowa class battleships.
Well, that disaster was precipitated mostly by us breaking the IJN’s codes and pretty much every break going in the US Navy’s favor. If the codes hadn’t been broken and the IJN’s luck had gone the way of Pearl Harbor, at least the carrier battle could have gone differently. After all, the whole point of the attack was to get the US Pacific fleet to join with them in battle. But the IJN was expecting to surprise the US again, and they expected they’d only have to face two carriers. Neither happened, and they lost four of the carriers they used against Pearl Harbor.
Midway was a gamble just like Pearl Harbor was. Neither was a great plan. But given the objective, I don’t see an alternative move.