If sinking the carriers were one of the main objectives of the attack, why didn’t one of their people on the island tell them they weren’t home? And, how many Japanese pilots made it back to their carriers? Just finding them would be a daunting task, I would think.
The answers to your questions are well documented in many books on the subject.
I do recall reading about a guy–an actual Japanese spy–who ran a tourist business near Pearl Harbor, and hence was able to get away with taking lots of pictures. Meanwhile getting a large fleet across the Pacific in secret took a lot of planning and a tight timetable that probably would not be able to respond to one spy’s assertion that the carriers were not in port. The Combined Fleet would have to sail and attack whatever was in Pearl Harbor, regardless.
Finally, how many made it back to their carriers? Pretty much all of them. These pilots were very highly skilled, well trained and drilled, and knew what they were doing.
First of all, the battleships were the main target of the attack, not the carriers. Battleships were the prestige ships, and carrier based fighting hadn’t proven itself in warfare yet. The sinking of our battleships ended up working out in our favor in a way as it forced us to rely more heavily on carriers, which proved to be the way to win sea battles in WWII.
Carriers were an objective, but they were secondary to the battleships. Sure, the Japanese would have preferred to sink the carriers, but without them there, no biggie. There was no reason to call off the attack.
Also, let’s assume that a Japanese spy did relay back that the carriers had left. What’s the Japanese fleet supposed to do? It’s not like the entire fleet had just left Japan the day before and could just turn around and go home. Moving an entire fleet like this takes months of planning and huge logistics. Crossing the Pacific takes time. They also couldn’t exactly just hang out and wait for the carriers to return, either. At some point the Japanese fleet was bound to get spotted by a reconnaissance plane for a fishing boat or something. The Japanese plan relied on surprise. Any delay in the attack threatened to lose the element of surprise.
The Japanese attack was carried out in two waves. The first wave concentrated on the battleships, and would have attacked the carriers as well if they had been present. The second wave primarily targeted cruisers and destroyers, with battleships and carriers as their secondary targets. Groups in both waves attacked airfields, and separate groups of planes provided air defense.
The Japanese lost 29 planes, 9 in the first wave and 20 in the second wave (U.S. anti-aircraft folks got their act together after the initial surprise attack). As far as I am aware, none were lost at sea because they couldn’t find the Japanese fleet. A fleet that big isn’t that hard to find once you know roughly where they are.
Before a flight took off it was given the location where the fleet was expected to be when it was scheduled to return. This was true of both the IJN and USN (the USN term was “Point Option”). If there was any serious deviation an escorting ship — probably a destroyer — would be left at that location to direct the flight home.
IIRC, they lost something like 30 aircraft, though this is just from memory. The majority got back.
As for the other question, they did have spies on the island who were keeping tabs on the fleet, but there wasn’t anything like real-time communications between those spies and the fleet. Nor would they have wanted there to be either way, as it would have put both at risk. I don’t know what the intelligence loop was between spies reporting stuff and it even making it to Japan to be analyzed, but I’d guess that alone was days if not a week or so…and it would have been a further lag between when the intelligence types vetted the data, it worked its way through their system, and was disseminated to the fleet as a whole, let alone transmitted to a fleet that was essentially in radio silence at sea.
I don’t believe the carriers were the top-tier targets, so it wasn’t that big a deal, at the time, that they weren’t there. The real worry wrt the carriers would have been…where the hell are they and are they launching a strike against us right now??
Great answer.
I would add the Japanese seemed to have a lot of faith in their submarines (midget submarines?) to pick off this or that and, maybe, a carrier but those didn’t work out well. Although, one did administer the coup de grâce on the Yorktown carrier after Midway (to be fair…Yorktown was in really bad shape). (and yeah…Midway is not the attack on Pearl, I know…just noting the Japanese kept just missing the American carriers)
Japanese submarines actually did a surprisingly good job of hitting US carriers early in the war. Apart from the coup de grace on the Yorktown at Midway, the Saratoga spent most of 1942 out of action undergoing repairs after being torpedoed on two separate occasions. The first was on Jan 11 1942 when she was torpedoed by I-6 which kept her out of the Battle of Midway, only arriving back at Pearl Harbor on June 6 1942, the last day of the Battle of Midway. She was torpedoed again, this time by I-26, on Aug 31 1942 during operations off Guadalcanal and was out of action again until Dec 13 1942. Additionally the Wasp was torpedoed and sunk by the submarine I-15 on Sep 15 1942, also during operations off of Guadalcanal.
I knew that the Japanese also bombed US bases in the Philippines (an American colony until 1946) on the same day as Pearl Harbor, but assumed that they were able to take them by surprise as well. No, they heard about the Pearl Harbor attack 9 hours before they were attacked, but because of miscommunication, inefficiency, and who knows what other factors, they still weren’t prepared. 7:48 AM Hawaii time, Dec 7, was 2:18 AM Manila time, Dec 8, because of the International Date Line, and they heard about it via radio almost immediately.
Over 100 fighter planes, bombers and support aircraft were destroyed. Who knows, without those initial losses the Bataan death march might have had far fewer casualties.
USAF “aircraft losses on the ground in the Philippines were similar to those sustained on Oahu despite nine hours available for preparations following the Pearl Harbor attack”
"Army chief of staff general George C. Marshall [10] . . . remark[ed] to a reporter a few days later: “I just don’t know how MacArthur happened to let his planes get caught on the ground.”
And all US facilities in the Pacific should have been on high alert; there had been warnings the previous month. “At the time of the Japanese attack, the US was expecting imminent war with Japan, beginning in any of several places, such as the Philippines”
29 out of 353 launched, or around 8%.
That would be USAAF or AAF at that time, not USAF, which did not come into existence until 1947.
Also, the attack was timed to match to a diplomatic action. Japan’s diplomats were scheduled to deliver their Declaration to the US Secretary of State in Washington DC just minutes before the attack took place. (In fact, the planes arrived early, so bombing started 5 minutes before the scheduled time. And the diplomats were late, delivering their message well after the attack.)
All this schedule had been planned well in advance. It would have been really hard to change it – to react to a spy’s warning, and then get a message to their diplomats off in Washington DC to ‘hold off delivering that Declaration till tomorrow’ – just not feasible.
Also a side note, since I heard it again in the discussion of Dec 7 on cable news…
AFAIK the line “I fear we have awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve…” was apparently the brainchild of some screenwriter for Tora, Tora, Tora not of Yamamoto himself.
True, and from Nov 1941 in the Philippines it was specifically the FEAF, the Far East Air Force.
Here’s one possible reason the response to Pearl Harbor in the Philippines was slow:
“MacArthur held the position that Japan would not attempt an invasion of the Philippines before April 1942.”
Having a good guess at the location to return to would make sense. Some of those planes would have the ZB (beacon recever) equipment out of action, eg damaged by enemy ,and have difficulty .
But the american carrier was transmitting a beacon , the YE part of the YE-ZB system.
See Mission4Today - YE-ZB 'Hayrake' Radio Navigation
I think its immediately obvious that if you put a directional antenna calibrated with the line of the fuselage, you can use any audio transmission and receiver as a rudimentary direction finder !. Just listen for the direction that gives the louder signal. Measuring the signal for visual indication, or identity info, thats another thing. There’s no sense thinking your carrier’s location is secret, there’s a swarm of aircraft making beelines to it ! Apparently it was very rudimentary , and tricked the japanese pilots once, when a bunch of japs went to land on Yorktown… they just trusted their beacon., the americans realising that sunset meant they could give their own location away.
Ah, deleted the bit where I was saying the japanese would have had a rudimentary direction finding system in each plane, and so would have a way to find their home carrier … it makes sense to have a general idea of where the carriers will be at that time, in case the radio signal is too weak or jammed ?
I never considered how the Japanese navigated back to their carriers. They lacked radar and other modern navigation tools. Yet, clearly they managed it.
The general question of “why attack Pearl Harbour” ?
They hoped that they could get USA to retreat and go into isolationism, over there in the Americas. This was lead on by the USA’s avoidance of war in Europe right ? Or at least, enter into the phony war situation with a lot of sabre rattling, and the odd skirmish but no concerted battle engaged… like the phony war at the time of Hitler’s invasion of Poland… a lot of talk …
But, Hitler didnt let that happen. Hitler’s view perhaps was that Japan was doomed unless he helped, and so he declares war too. So the USA vs Japan situation wasn’t actually tested.
One thing that is certain is that Japan had to invade Indonesia and Singapore, to get oil from seas around there, and shipping access to the rest of the world, via the Indian ocean for trade.
So what would they also need to for success at invading Indonesia and around to India ?
Well they can’t have American Phillipines there, the americans had already some blockades in place, and its seemed sure they would blockade the South China Sea , between Phillipines and China, cutting the Japanese sea lanes into two.
So They had the idea of a lighting disabling and demoralising first attack on the fleet battleships at Hawaii , and hopefully weaken the american carrier fleet too. This connected in with their thought that they had superior tactics training and technology, for which to win a war despite being behind in total nominal force (Japan reckoned they were at 70% of USA’s navy strength , using nominal values for the on paper accounting. )
But these things relied on d octrine abelief system, win which they elieved that if they wiped out the american battleships, the americans would have their own doctrines shredded… That since the american navy battle doctrine said to have battleships do this, and battle ships do that, if they didn’t have battleships they would be sent back to the drawing board, and remain away from the asian theatre at least as long as it took to resurrect the Pearl Harbour ships and build new battleships. Right ? Decades old doctrine can’t be changed just because WW2 is on, can it ?? the doctine says, send out carriers with a battleship escort. So if we destroy the battleships, the carriers are neutralised too ?
Um. in hindsight we can say that the battleships were optional . Things would have been better for the USA if they had them, but the Guadacanal campaign wasn’t just about keeping the Henderson airfield, it was about adjusting doctrine, top level, in off the record discussions, would have decided that the had to give the american military some experience … a limited plan invovling offensives and defense. to revise doctrine and give the military some confidence in it. So that just means that the Japanese hoped Pearl harbour would shatter american confidence and send them into “Oh hell, we were interfering in Asia, thats far away from the americas, let retreat back to America, and let asia fight its own war just as Europe fights its own war”. If America was going to test out its confidence and settle into a phoney war, well that wasn’t going to happen, because Hitler thinks through a situation where USA dominates Japan and wins strong influence in Asia… and decides its better that he keeps USA on its toes and hopefully split the USA’s forces so as to ensure its defeat. Hitler doesn’t think much of the Japanese plan to demoralise the Americans and yet not to threaten their homelands… Hitler declares war on the USA,
where its the situation of the phone war that Japan envisaged So the USA vs Japan situation is changed to add USA to the allies and Japan to Axis,
I think its just neglected as too easy, any one with a voice radio and a directional antenna can do it.But its also a bit moot, because the location of the aircraft carrier has been given away, there’s a bloody carrier load of airplanes heading toward it ,so they can break radio silence and communicate the current location right ? But still its nice to have a receiving station telling you that you have flown past your carrier, because its hidden by low cloud, or something, so you can turn back before you run out of fuel. Maybe it was only a tiny few % of planes might be able to miss the carrier by simple overflying in an large scale attack situation, but in training or doing recon, or small flight assignments, you can easily have the problem that the carrier is , for no reason, silent and hidden below cloud. or anyway they can set the beacon to have a weak signal, rather than strength you need to get an intelligible voice signal, or decodable encoded message out.
Takeo Yoshikawa, was a former navy pilot and a member of the IJN intelligence and was assigned the consulate with the cover as a vice-consul. He did extensive research on US forces in Hawaii, including detailed records of the USN ships.
From his research they knew that there would likely be at most three and more likely fewer carriers in port.
They didn’t attempt to recruit Japanese living in Hawaii as spies, distrusting their loyalty.
The strike force received intelligence communiques on 3, 4 and 7 December (Japan time) updating the situation through 6 December. He reported no balloons or torpedo defense nets. On 4 December, he informed them on the daily status of the battleships, carries and cruisers, with the final report stating nine BB, three light cruisers, 17 destroyers with four light cruisers and three destroyers in drydock, but no carriers. He also reported that the US military was not in an unusual state of alert.
The situation was actually a little more complicated than this.
Yamamoto was architect of the raid, and while he is often seen as larger than life in popular US accounts, he did make some serious mistakes. One of which was his mistaken belief that sinking an American battleship would demoralize the US public and lead to a negotiated end to the war. Clearly that was wrong.
In line with Yamamoto’s vision, the attack was designed to attack the American public morale and will to fight rather than maximizing the overall damage to the fleet. Their targeting could have been much better.
The actual planning fell on Commander Minoru Genda, the Air Staff Officer of the First Carrier Division. “Madman Genda” believed that the battleships should be scrapped and advocated airpower in an intuition which worshiped the big guns.
Genda favored attacking the carriers over the battleships, although seemingly telling his boss what he wanted to hear. A full 40% of the torpedo planes, 16 planes in total, had carriers as their primary target, with potentially a higher number of torpedoes-to-ship ratio than the BB. In addition, dive bombers from the second wave were assigned to the carriers as primary targets (and obviously not the battleships as they would have been ineffective).
There is indication that there were people in the Japanese military that preferred if the statement to the US actually came after the bombs starting falling. It wasn’t a declaration of war, at any rate, but a notice that Japan was ending the negotiations. The declaration of war came the next day.
The fleet was operating in radio silence so obviously sending messages was not an option.
Yoshikawa, and the Japanese in general, avoided the German spy in Hawaii, Bernard Kuehn. , as a bumbler more a liability than asset.
Kuehn sought to pump the local Japanese community for any useful information, yet another example of how he amateurishly risked exposure. One of his marks was the schoolmaster Masao Ikeno. Ikeno only knew Kuehn as a flattering, rare Caucasian who took an interest in Japanese culture, but after the attack J. Edgar Hoover made sure hew was one of the few Hawaii Japanese to be imprisoned.
BTW, I’m seated on a sofa next to Ikeno’s granddaughter as I type this and watching Netflix.
The naval love of battleships during the first half of the 20th century is often spoken about in these discussions but honestly it might actually be understated. The battleship - in the term-of-art sense, the specific type of warship started in the late 19th century and really starting when HMS Dreadnought was built, and continuing until the end of WWII - changed the world and altered foreign relations and the destiny of nation-states. It consumed tremendous portions of the military budgets of powers great and small. It was an obsession of countries to have them, or to try to limit their construction, in a manner similar to the nuclear arms race that followed them.