You and are are not in disagreement about MacAthur being at fault. I agree with you, although it does need to be noticed that he was the Field Marshall of the Philippine Army from 1937 until July, 1941 when he was recalled to active duty for the US Army and put in command of the US forces there.
I don’t disagree with your assessment of him. In fact, he needs to be faulted for being blind to the growing Japanese threat next door. Being the most likely target, he needed to have taken it more seriously. He believed that the Japanese wouldn’t be ready for war until spring of 1942, for reasons I haven’t heard, but I strongly suspect it was because they couldn’t be ready sooner so it was simply easier to tell himself that the enemy wasn’t ready either.
If Admiral Kimmel and General Short were held responsible for their roles in not being prepared for the PH attack, then logic demands that MacArther should also have been so.
We won’t even go into the later record as a general. Needless to say I am not a fan of the man.
That all said, I think that more responsibility should also have been placed on his superiors in the US. The cultures of wartime militaries and peacetime ones are obviously completely different but the generals in Washington weren’t getting any better prepared.
I believe that this episode was in At Dawn We Slept. One late night someone happened to go by General Short’s office and saw he was personally checking the records of the inventories of rounds at the various locations. Prior to the breakout of war, this is the type of thing which generals were being judged by. I think that many of the commanders and countries didn’t make that transition to war very well. The top leadership should have been making the changes from looking at reports for ammo to asking tough questions concerning readiness months and months prior to PH.
I think everyone, Americans, British and Dutch alike underestimated the Japanese. Certainly the British command in Malay and Singapore did even worse.
So, yes, he should have been held accountable, but that doesn’t mean that others were also not at fault.
Parshall and Tully, while doing research for their book Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway, became aware from Japanese sources that some statements by Fuchida were not supported by the records.
My edition of that book includes mention of this, but there is Jon Parshall’s article (online copy):
from the Naval War College Review which brought this to the attention of Western audiences.
I have wondered how interrogators of axis prisoners determined if their subjects were lying. I imagine that your average German guy would say he didn’t know what that smoke on the horizon was, or why the Goldblooms mysteriously moved out unnoticed by their neighbors.
Unlike the European theater where certain differences could have swung the outcome, there really isn’t anything that could change the basic equations of the Pacific War. The Allies we’re going to win, no matter what.
The Japanese were better prepared on December 7, 1941.
The Allies were criminally unprepared.
The outsized difference between Japan and the US meant that the only hope for Japan to win the war was for the US to throw in the towel.
Given the differences, the only real discussion is “how” the US would have won, rather than “if.”
Any real fundamental change in Japanese strategy would mean that they would no longer be Japanese of the 30s and 40s. IOW, were they smart enough to certain blunders, they would have been smart enough to not get it into the war in the first place.
Most minor differences by the Allies would likely to have caused offsetting changes. For example, were the US to have done better at PH and caused more losses to the limited number of Japanese aircrew, the IJN would have been less likely to have blundered into Midway.
I still say, if they limited their attacks to the Dutch East Indies and the British possessions/colonies, they would have gotten everything they needed (oil, etc) and not gotten war with the USA. FDR would have been frantically looking for a excuse for war- but against the Nazis. Hitler would have given him one.
But yes, once the IJN sneak attacked us at Pearl, the war was over. Losing at Midway, bombing the oil tanks- all that just means the war is a bit longer.
Maybe, just maybe, a attack at PI, with a ultimatum before the first bomb hit-*maybe *FDR would have had issues getting Congress to declare. I am pretty sure they would have but it wouldnt have been all but unanimous, and the USA wouldn’t have been energized like they were with the Sneak attack at Pearl. *The USA went from 60% isolationist to 99% mad as hell in one day. *
And Maybe:dubious: an attack by the Japanese army upon Siberia might have allowed the Nazis to beat the USSR. It certainly would have been closer. If Russia collapsed, the war would have been longer.
As somewhat pointed out upthread, submarines went from scout vehicles to predators with battleships out of operation. Read Up Periscope or War Fish for more.
There was an attack upon Siberia but the Soviets fought the Japanese off, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battles_of_Khalkhin_Gol. In fact this failure by the Army gave the Navy the clout it needed to push for war into South East Asia instead.
So the attack on Pearl harbour is all General Zhukov’s fault
As later events showed, pre-Washinton treaty battleships, those going less than 24 knots, were useful for only two things:
bombarding an enemy shore where the enemy can hardly retaliate; and
escorting slow auxilliary carriers (those that went even slower than 24 knots.)
So even if those old battleships escaped damage during Pearl, they would have been inconsequential in the defense of Bataan and Corregidor, they would not have been of much help at Coral Sea and Midway, they might have reduced cruiser and destroyer losses at Guadalcanal, useless at Philippine sea and Iwo Jima.
But yes, they sank an enemy battleship at Surigao Strait.
That fact should have resulted in immediate, multiple courts martial and the utter destruction of about a dozen careers. Instead, the Naval Establishment rallied around the criminals until the pressure became so great it couldn’t be ignored.
It makes some logical sense to assume the Japanese Army was put off from the idea of attacking the USSR by their experience in the 1939 Nomonhan (as they called it) incident. But it isn’t actually true.
It goes along in part with discussions of the Pacific War suggesting the Japanese would have been better off for example concentrating on Allied logistics (eg. making PH oil tanks and other infrastructure the main target, a sustained anti-merchant ship sub campaign, etc). But whether that would have changed the final outcome or not, it wasn’t Japanese military thinking.
Similarly with Nomonhan. Although, relating the Nomonhan War to IJA’s plan to attack the USSR in 1941 tends to leave out two important facts from the Japanese POV. First, the IJA force at Nomonhan was mainly a single reinforced infantry division (later on elements of a second) against an eventually multi-division equivalent heavily mechanized Soviet force. The 1941 plan included over 20 IJA divisions and was predicated on the Soviets having weakened Far East defenses to meet the German invasion (although how accurate that assessment was open to debate, even in the IJA). Second, the 1939 war was a border dispute (between the Soviet client state Mongolia and the Japanese puppet state Manchukuo) gotten out of hand, in treeless western Manchuria. The 1941 plan was a determined attack through the heavily forested areas along the eastern border of Manchuria to seize the Soviet Maritime Province.
Anyway, the reaction to the 1939 defeat was a large build up in the IJA force in Manchuria. And after the Germans invaded the USSR the IJA pushed heavily for its plan to invade the Maritime Province prior to the 1941-42 winter. They even got cabinet approval to progress as far as readying and deploying the force. What derailed the plan was the Anglo-US-Dutch oil embargo. The IJN was of course less keen on a risky war which gave it little role (v USSR) compared to a risky war which gave it the prime role (the actual Pac War). But interservice rivalry in manipulating the political system wasn’t really the reason why the ‘go north’ plan was finally definitively scrapped in August 1941 after being held in limbo for awhile. It was external events which by that time only really left the choices of a massive Japanese climb down to try to negotiate an end to the oil embargo or else a war to try to end it.
Further back up that trail there were other choices, but not by then.
There is a YouTube video of one of the Shattered Sword authors where he describes contacting Japanese historians about Fuchida’s accounts, wary that he had to tread lightly since he though Fuchida was held in supremely high regard among Japanese WW2 historians. So he sent a very carefully, tentative, cautiously worded letter asking about certain inconsistencies.
Came back the reply: What are you talking about? Fuchida’s been discredited for decades. We don’t pay much mind to his writings anymore. What do you want to know?
A third use for the old battleships has been discussed: use them to supplement or replace cruisers in the night actions around Guadalcanal. They can take a lot more damage than a cruiser, and those cruisers were vital as escorts for aircraft carriers.
Also, it’s highly unlikely that an enemy battleship was sunk by gunfire at Surigao Straight.
I thought you wanted to fire McArthur and the Admiral at Pearl. What did malfunctioning torpedoes have to do with Pearl Harbor and the Philippine raid?
