On Hardball, Chris Matthews was drawing a parallel between 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. Speaking of the investigation into whether Roosevelt had prior knowledge of the attack, Matthews said that he would like to know how the government missed the fact that the" entire Japanese navy" was missing. In other words, the US Navy should have noticed that the Japanese navy was moving toward Hawaii But was it?
here is the battle fleet that attacked pearl harbour. http://www.ww2pacific.com/pearljp.html
It contained all the carriers afaik, but only a proportion (15-20%) of the japanese battleships, crusers and destroyers at the time.
The total japanese fleet can be seen at http://www.ww2pacific.com/japbb.html
According to this site it was “… by far the most powerful carrier task force ever assembled.” It contained all six of their “first line” carriers - which might imply that there were others (second line?) that were not included.
At a WAG I’d say that “the entire Japanese navy” is exageration for effect…
Grim
Its also a really stupid thing to say. We didn’t have spy satelites, radar was in its infancy, and we didn’t have a set of bases over the Pacific to watch out.
Well, it was a stupid thing to say because the government DIDN’T miss the fact that fleet was missing. They knew damned well it was missing and that they were unable to find it. Evidently Matthews knows absolutely nothing about the events leading up to Dec. 7.
That Japan was about to attack did not come as a huge surprise to the U.S.; what came as a huge surprise was that the focus of the attack was Pearl Harbor. The intelligence assessment of the time was that the Japanese attack would fall in the Western Pacific.
If memory serves, the task force that attacked Pearl Harbor didn’t even execute its full plan of attack. I believe the battleships were going to come in after the air attacks and shell the base.
I do know that one of the air group commanders, upon landing on his carrier, strongly urged the admiral in charge to launch another air attack. He had seen the fuel storage tanks and wanted to hit them, as opposed to bombing more ships. The admiral disagreed, because he was nervous about the American aircraft carriers who weren’t in port, as he’d expected. He didn’t want to have his carriers caught unawares and almost defenseless if an American carrier launched an attack.
On December 7th, 1941, the United States repulsed an amphibious attack on Wake Island by Japanese naval forces.
Therefore, by definition, their entire navy wasn’t at Pearl Harbor.
There are comments made by people on TV and there are facts. These two things may not always have any connection to one another.