Could you please give us the name of this “documentary” so that we can judge whether we should take anything it says seriously? Lots of things show up on television that aren’t worth two seconds of dismissal.
I’d love to, sport. If I’d known we’d be having this conversation, I would have taped it so that I could refer to it more clearly.
“Pearl Harbor - Der Tag danach” on N24, a news and documentary channel here in Germany. They tend to be pretty serious as these things go, so no need for the scare quotes around “documentary.” Even so, I’ve been burned on these things before even by reputable documentary channels.
Still, it’s not as if they are making some weird conspiracy type claims here. The documentary more or less has the same view as most of the posters here. The attack caught the U.S. off-guard but shouldn’t have. The response was pretty hectic in the first hours with borderline panic. Roosevelt went to great lengths to “walk” to address Congress so that no sign of weakness would be shown to our enemies. A frantic attempt to figure out what to do next…so no real big bombshells in that way.
The bit about not being able to hold the west coast caught my attention, because I had not heard it put in such stark terms before.
One bit that I did not know was that Roosevelt called MacArthur in the Philippines to make sure he was on his guard. MacArthur replied that everything was great and they were ready for anything. Roosevelt was majorly pissed when MacArthur got crushed a few hours after Pearl Harbor mostly due to MacArthur’s inaction. It is modestly interesting and odd that MacArthur was able to hold onto his job after screwing the pooch that badly.
In any case, as we’re all here to fight ignorance, it would be really cool if you would post any easy dismissals you may have. You have no idea how conspiracy-nuts some of the folks here are.
Let’s treat an attack on the U.S. as a pure exercise in logistics.
The Pacific Ocean is huge and very empty. We know it took the carrier fleet that launched the planes that hit Pearl Harbor about a week to sail from Japan to Hawaii’s longitude. That’s maybe halfway. So another week to reach the mainland. Could they achieve any kind of surprise doing so? Look at the Phillipines campaign:
Any invasion of the U.S. mainland would need to scale that up immensely. You’d need more tankers, because the Pacific Ocean is completely empty at that latitude, more supply ships, more troop carriers, more of everything not just because of more troops but because it’s more troops for a much longer time. And a fleet sails at the speed of its slowest ships. The upper bound would be something like D-Day, whose fleet included 5000 boats of all types. That would be impossible across the Pacific. Still, you’d have to be talking hundreds of ships.
There would be no surprise attack. The ships could be harried as soon as they were spotted. Even assuming that Japan could pull that number of ships and troops away from the wars they were fighting against the British and Chinese, they couldn’t defend their rear all the way across the Pacific.
The U.S. would go into high panic. Every ship, every gun, and every troop in the country would be sent to the Pacific. We wouldn’t know where the landing would take place, though, so assume that the fleet makes a successful dispersal of troops on the west coast.
Now what? They are more than 5000 miles away from Japan who no hope of resupply or reinforcements. They would have to live off the land like Sherman’s troops in the south. Is there any reality of their fighting their way across the country to Des Moines or Chicago? For what purpose? To capture Washington?
The best case scenario is that this is a silly fantasy. Wars don’t work like this. In reality the Japanese never even tried to occupy Hawaii, a prospect an order of magnitude more realistic. Militaries draw up contingency plans for almost everything, because they are useful exercises in creative thinking. There was probably a plan if Britain decided to invade us. But even that was more likely than fighting Japanese in Des Moines. Little Nemo called this absolute nonsense. That’s the kindest way of putting it.
A big factor is sealift capacity. That’s a navy’s ability to move things like troops and their equipment by ships. And Japan only had about enough sealift to move around 15000 troops in 1941. You’ll see the pattern in their invasions following Pearl Harbor - they would invade in waves. They were forced into this because they had to land the first wave and then go back load more troops into the same ships to land the second wave.
Transports aren’t as fast as carriers or battleships. It wasn’t too bad in Southeast Asia where they were operating only a thousand miles or so from their existing bases. But moving troops across the Pacific from Japan to America would be over five thousand miles. That meant that the first wave of 15,000 troops that landed would be on their own for several weeks before the next wave of reinforcements landed. For comparison’s sake, the D-Day landings in Normandy landed 160,000 troops on the first day and over a million troops within a month.
And this ignores another major factor - oil. We think of the war as being a battle between Japan and the United States. But strategically, we were a sideshow. Japan didn’t declare war because they wanted Hawaii or California. They wanted control of the oil fields in the East Indies. So they weren’t going to waste their resources invading America when they needed those resources for invading the territory they really wanted.
It’s probably accurate. But looking at just the troop levels ignores the reason why Japan had more troops - they were already fighting a major war. Just because Japan had troops in service didn’t mean they were available for deployment. The troops that were fighting in China couldn’t be used to invade America.
Yes, that makes no sense at all, and is one reason why I half- believe in a lesser conspiracy that FDR thought the attack was coming in the Phillipines but ordered “Dug-out Doug” to be “caught by surprise”.
Yeah, maybe, maybe if the Japanese had done everything just right, US morale collapsed, complete surprise, etc, they could have taken Oahu. California? Not even with a “divine wind”.
Just to be clear: I am not suggesting that the Japanese had any chance at all of actually successfully invading and holding land. I agree with those who say that with what we know today, Japan would have been hard pressed to even get a small expeditionary force to the mainland U.S. As I already pointed out, the supply lines would be murder. But let’s look at things through the fog of war and make the justifiable assumption that noone in the U.S. was deliberately throwing the game.
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Hawaii is unexpectedly attacked, and a good proportion of the Pacific Fleet is gone.
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The Philippines are attacked, and not really with surprise anymore. And still, the U.S. gets pounded pretty badly.
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The U.S. would have had a good idea of the troop strength of the Japanese and of course the own troop strength would be known. These will not be cheery numbers. So where are those Japanese troops now? Hopefully tied up in Asia, but are we sure?
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Just how sure are we of the Japanese transport capacity? I mean, in 2013, we know that they had no way in hell of being able to transport the kind of troops for a large scale invasion, but in 1941, just how sure are we going to be? I’m pretty certain that noone really thought that the Japanese could just steam out to Hawaii and utterly destroy the fleet sitting there while remaining relatively untouched, but it happened anyway.
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Sure, any invasion plan would have to be exceedingly well planned out; but of course, right now, it’s looking like the Japanese had been planning Pearl Harbor and the Philippines for quite some time. If I’m sitting in the HQ right after those attacks, I’m going to be pretty damn paranoid about what else has been planned out for years.
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It’s not like the U.S. can really expect any help here. The Russians and the British are a bit preoccupied at the moment. They might be able to help a bit in the Pacific, but most of their energies are going to go towards surviving the European fronts.
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What’s the reaction of the average American going to be? Pissed? Scared? Confident? We know in 2013 what it turned out to be, but in 1941? Much (but not all!) of the Japanese command were quite confident that Pearl Harbor would be enough to cause the U.S. to call it quits in the Pacific. Looking at this kind of calculation from the U.S. perspective in 1941, why wouldn’t the Japanese make doubly sure? Even if they only took a couple of cities on the west coast, that would be a pretty hard psychological hit. And what’s to stop them from advancing once they have some solid bases of operations in California? They would be screwed over the long haul, and I’m sure that both sides would have known that even in 1941. If, however, you are running a campaign based on demoralizing the enemy (and we know that this actually what they were trying), why not take as much as you can, and then be generous about giving it back in return for lifting the oil embargo? (We know now that the Japanese did not have the capability to pull this off, but remember, we’re looking at this through FoW and we just got our asses handed to us. Twice. Inside of 12 hours)
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The Japanese have made a habit of taking down larger troop forces with alarming regularity. They have managed to take and hold huge areas of Asia; what reasons to we really have to think that they can’t do the same in the relatively sparsely populated western U.S? About the only hope we can have is that we are right about their weak transport capability, and we have to hope that we’re right that they cannot possibly keep a huge supply line over the Pacific intact.
To sum up, the Japanese are looking pretty damn invincible right now, all our political and military calculations seem to be worth less than our toilet paper, we have no idea how our population is going to react, we’re not sure how far the Japanese plans go, we probably can’t expect anyone to come to our aid, and we know that we are utterly unprepared.
From the perspective of 2013, we know that the Japanese could never have pulled off an invasion. Heck, if we’re going to take that kind of perspective, then we can clearly say that attacking the U.S. was clearly a mistake; the Japanese were never going to win over the long haul. I’m pretty certain that in December 1941, things looked a little different. And in the 24 hours after Pearl Harbor where the information is confused and incomplete, any leader not preparing for some sort of invasion is either extremely confident or extremely foolish and probably both.
I am disinclined to agree with your analysis. Wars work like this all the time, and if you don’t believe me, then take a better look at history: you won’t have to look far.
Before I start, I have to disabuse you of the assumption that the military leaders in 1941 were in possession of information that we have in 2013. Once something surprising has been done, it is no longer surprising.
Alone in WWII, we have a few good examples. The Germans would never be able to attack France around the Maginot Line, because tanks can’t go through trees. Oops.
Germany would never attack their buddy Stalin, because they’re best pals (well, Stalin thought so anyway), and it would be suicide. Which it was. But in they went. Oops.
Even the attacks on Pearl Harbor were held to be so unlikely, that they didn’t even have a 24 hour watch and that even when the Japanese fleet was detected and reported by the initial crew, it was ignored. Oops.
Wars are routinely won and lost by someone doing something way outside the bounds of what had previously been taken to be obviously impossible.
What would be the aim? Pure Psych-Out. Even Pearl Harbor was more or less just a Psych-Out operation from the point of view of the Japanese. What if they would have taken Yamamoto’s warning more seriously that bopping Pearl Harbor was not going to be enough to demoralize us? And because of this, they quietly ramped up their transport capabilities to inflict more serious damage? They did not, and they did not; but that’s applying 2013 information to 1941 decisions and that’s not allowed.
Also, it is a poor match to compare the frantic decision making in the 24 hours after Pearl Harbor to the “Plans” the military draws up for creative exercises. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader why this is so.
You also misapplied Nemo’s quote. Nemo was commenting on the feasibility of Japan invading with the capability we now know they had in 1941. That would be utterly impossible and would be “absolute nonsense” to argue otherwise. We are talking about the situation as known in 1941 and not as known in 2013; it is certainly not “absolute nonsense” to call the information at that time confused, incomplete, and terrifying for the American leadership. And thus, it is not “kindly putting it” if you ignore that the U.S. had nothing to put in the way of the Japanese military had they made a few different decisions.
This board is full of people who can’t stand to lose an argument. These two posts, though. Wow. You are hereby elevated to the Can’t Lose an Argument Wall of Fame. (Three more walls and it becomes a Hall of Fame.)
I’m sorry you feel that way. Do you have anything regarding my arguments to add?
It’s a lot of text but I thought Bremidon’s argument was reasonable.
Moderator Note
Exapno Mapcase, let’s refrain from personal remarks of this kind. If you wish to address Bremidon’s arguments, go ahead and do so. No warning issued, but let’s stick to discussing Pearl Harbor
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Assumes facts not in evidence, counselor. I can’t address the argument, because there is none.
We don’t know anything about this plan. I can’t find anything about the original documentary to judge its makers, and all we have to go by as to its contents is a random comment about such a plan’s purported existence 75 years after the fact. We don’t know who made it - the Army, the Navy, anti-isolationist groups, the Des Moines Chamber of Commerce as a scare tactic to get federal funds. We don’t know why it was put together or the purpose it was to serve. We don’t know what it said, whether it was a standalone plan, whether it was part of a series of multiple possibilities. We don’t know who saw the plan or what was done with it or whether it was tossed into a wastebasket and saved as a souvenir of somebody’s incompetence. Just as importantly, we don’t know when the plan was made. 1939? 1941? 1943? How can any intelligent comment be made on nothingness? I can’t refute the supposed mindset of what unknown people were thinking at an unknown time. There must be at least one actual fact present to be refuted.
And even given all that, please note that not one line of Bremidon’s two long posts provides any backing for anyone in the government to believe it was literally, physically possible for Japanese troops to get to Des Moines or Chicago. I can’t refute an argument that was never made.
I will note that I have never heard of any such plan. Nobody else responding to this thread has given any hint of ever hearing about such a plan. I can find no mention of such a plan in an Internet search.
Sorry. The idea that anybody outside the readers of Air War pulp magazine* took the notion that a Japanese invasion of the U.S. could reach halfway across the country seriously for as long as it took to type the words on the page is lunacy. And nothing in Bremidon’s posts make it any less so.
*Which is probably slandering the magazine, its "Fighting Daredevils of Today’s War, and the unmatchable Captain Danger, despite the propaganda of this cover.
I think the general American reaction to Pearl Harbor wasn’t “Wow, the Japanese are a lot stronger than we expected.” It was more like “Damn, those sneaky bastards sucker-punched us when we weren’t expecting it. Now that we know what’s going on, let’s kick the shit out of them.”
By the way, more or less the same thing happened in the Philipines and in AUS.
In AUS, the Japanese attack flew over a remote mission, which reported the flight to Darwin. This was after both Hawaii and the Philippines. The responsible officer formed the opinion that it was a small group of expected allied aircraft, and no warning was taken. The attack was successful, and bit of an embarrassment to both the government and the military. Information about the Darwin attack was suppressed at the time.
One thing we do know now is that Doug was very bad at following orders. No surprise that he was removed from command in Korea when he wanted to invade China: that would have been exactly in character.
So I prefer to believe the standard explanation: that he had been ordered to move to a war footing, but disregarded the order because he thought his ideas were better.
Here’s the line that started it all:
I already gave you a cite for the program and my own personal opinion of the channel. I’m sorry that I cannot give you a transcript that fulfills all your requirements.
I never meant to give the impression that there was some plan that they pulled out of some drawer somewhere and although I used the word ‘planning’ in my original post, I never meant to imply that they even bothered to flesh out any details. I was merely fascinated that Roosevelt was entertaining the idea at all.
I know that you may have forgotten, but the op for this thread is whether there’s any validity to the CT that Roosevelt somehow arranged for Pearl Harbor. I made my reference to that end. I did not mean for this to become the “Secret Plan to defend Des Moines” thread.
Sorry for my previous long posts, but I felt compelled to both correct what statement I was giving as well as giving my own analysis of it. In this spirit, I did give you my reasons for why I think it’s plausible to believe that in the first hours after all this started that the American leadership would be ready to believe the worst.
If you do not want to respond to my arguments and if you feel unable to respond to N24’s documentary, then I would prefer you refrain from responding at all.
Assuming you mean the American leadership, it’s a respectable analysis. And I’m only reducing it to the leadership because I’m unknowledgable about the average American’s knowledge in 1940-1941 about what was going on in Asia other than we should stay the hell out.
I don’t agree with this analysis completely, because it would imply an incompetence on the part of the political and military leadership even above the feckless demonstration that they gave us.
Consider: we know Japan is currently on a war footing, we know they need oil, we throw down an oil embargo that puts them in a corner, and (using your analysis) we know that they can reach Hawaii and give us a beating if they want to. How utterly stupid do we have to be to not be on alert 24 hours a day?
I prefer to believe that noone in the leadership really thought Japan would be capable of putting such a beatdown on the States. What happened in Pearl Harbor was still a gross display of incompetence, but at least it would not be suicidal incompetence.
The Philippines show that MacArthur certainly did not really believe the Japanese to be so capable, even after getting a warning.
My Dad and several others of that generation to whom I have talked all reported their reactions to the pearl Harbor attack in pretty much the same way.
I suspect that that was a general feeling among the populace.
One of the key factors was the lack of knowledge about the Japanese warplanes. The local commander underestimated the range of the Japanese plane. (And please note this is just one factor.)
(my emphasis) I’m having a difficult time taking the argument seriously. Are you not that familiar with WWII?
The Japanese were expected to attack the DEA to obtain oil as the US had cut them off. They did not have enough troops and resources to both attack the US and to invade the DEA and the Pacific islands.
No one in the military took an invasion of the US to be even the least bit possible.
Pseudo documentaries are really good at making up fantastic cases. Nothing I’ve seen here has been the least bit compelling. Maybe a civilian or two panicked, but where is the evidence that the Army was drawing up plans to make desperate stands outside of Chicago or where ever. It simply could not have happened.
The US army had about 43,000 troops stationed in Hawaii. As the carriers were not sunk, and would have provided sufficient air defense, the Japanese would not have been able to invade it, let alone go on to the west coast.