I was almost 12 years old on Dec. 7, 1941, and vividly remember that time. I don’t remember any sort of hint in the big newspapers that were available in the area (the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Globe-Democrat) and the local paper, the Alton Evening Telegraph, of the possibility of invasion of the mainland U.S. A lot of absolute hatred of the Japanese, and a really rabid thirst for revenge, but no invasion talk of any kind.
There was a political issue also. MacArthur had two jobs. He was both the commander of United States Army Forces in the Far East and Field Marshal of the Philippine Army - so he was working for two different governments and giving orders to two different armies.
So on the morning of December 7, MacArthur was in a state of confusion. He knew the United States had been attacked but the Philippines hadn’t been attacked yet. So, influenced by President Quezon, he decided the forces in the Philippines should take no action which might be interpreted as the Philippines striking the first blow.
There are two things at issue here.
Firstly, Bremidon WWII is extremely well researched. Historians have access to personal correspondence, meeting notes, planning documents etc from basically every American political and military leader. The mountain of primary source material for WWII planning and decision making by the American government is simply immense in size, and historians have diligently written a mountain of books about this stuff. A huge array of websites contain references to these books and then many historians have written articles and etc directly on the internet about the war.
In that big, massive, Mt. Everest sized heap of source material it should not be hard at all for you to provide something to actually back up your claim that the American leadership entertained the idea that maybe Japan would invade, and if they did, they might reach Des Moines or Chicago. If you can find any evidence whatsoever, we can talk about it. Referencing the title of a documentary doesn’t cut it, if you could actually rewatch the documentary and tell us who actually said what you remember hearing–maybe it was a historian or maybe it was the narrator referencing some war plan or some meeting between Roosevelt and his commanders, then you could bring that to us and we could look into it. As it stands now, there is no evidence whatsoever that anyone in American leadership entertained the possibilities you are talking about.
Secondly, is whether or not such a fear is rational given the “Fog of War.” The answer is absolutely not. Pearl Harbor happened because we slightly underestimated the maximum operational distance of Japans planes and did not believe they would risk a carrier based operation that was at the very limit of their supply limit for carrier groups. We also did not believe they would choose to devote resources to an attack on Pearl given they needed to focus attacks on other areas. That was a bad analysis, with a slight incorrectness on capabilities. Your claim is that in WWII we might have not known the Japanese transport capability was ten times larger than it actually was. That just isn’t feasible, there were treaties in force for years limiting naval tonnage and different governments may have secretly violated those treaties but people were paying attention to this stuff. We did have spies, informants, and even plain vanilla diplomatic staff and ordinary observers. It is not in fact reasonable that in the 1930s and 1940s the Japanese could have, in secret, built ten times as many transport ships as they actually had. Just simply not possible. You can’t undertake that level of industrial production without it being noticed.
It’s also not all that plausible that they would have enough troops to fill those transports. The land war in China was very manpower intensive, not to mention they were involved in land battles across the islands of Southeast Asia.
In WWII military buildups did not happen secretly. Everyone knew for years in advance for example that Hitler was rearming and reindustrializing Germany. Germany knew for months that our troop buildup in the UK was preparing for a massive amphibious assault–he just was not sure where the assault would land. Japan could no more amass ten times its transport capacity in secrecy than we could have gotten all of the troop transport ships in and around the UK in secret or built up our troops in the UK in secret.
I’ll also say that here in the U.S., the History Channel has a lot of documentaries like you’re talking about. I used to like the History Channel back in the 90s before it was taken over by endless Nazi documentaries and really bad shows, but they even still show decent stuff on occasion. But the History Channel, even in its good documentaries does something that can be easily confused.
As an example, a typical documentary on Pearl Harbor will have a narrator talking about the actual attack, based on real historical documents and accounts. Then you might switch to some historian who gets some face time in the documentary, and he’ll say something like, “and you know, at the time of Pearl the United States only had one soldier for every twenty of the Japanese…if the Japanese had landed in California they very well could have pushed to Des Moines or Chicago before we could have stopped them.” That’s something a historian will say in a documentary basically for entertainment purposes, he’s not even really saying he thinks that would have happened, he’s just basically saying “if somehow the Japanese magically got to California it’d be really bad.” It’s not really a worthy thing to even consider since it’s so fantastical, but that’s something you might hear on a History Channel documentary. But that’s not the same thing as someone saying that Roosevelt was told in a briefing that they’d lose half the continental United States to an impending Japanese invasion.
An analogy to the recent Iraq war is apropos. Even if the mainland US had no full-time troops, the United States is big. Roughly as big as China which they had trouble occupying effectively. The very best that Japan would be able to do even in the very best circumstances would be to control a thin strip along the West Coast, and they would only be able to hold it until the US can organize an army to counterattack. It would bleed them much more effectively than China did. You’d have roughly the same number of troops as the USA had occupying Iraq but trying to occupy much more territory.
One factor was everyone thought Pearl Harbor was too shallow for a torpedo bombing attack. When you drop a torpedo from a plane it drops down a hundred feet into the water before rising and making its run to the ship you’re aiming at. Pearl Harbor is only thirty feet deep. (Taranto, where the British attacked the Italian fleet, is a deep water harbor.) So if you made a torpedo bombing attack, your torpedoes would just bury themselves in the mud.
The Japanese got around this by developing special torpedoes and dropping them from a low altitude so they only sank about fifteen feet.
This is actually turned around, a bit.
The reason that Taranto comes up in these discussions is that the harbor has a depth of less than 40 feet. The British re-engineered their torpedoes to go in at a shallower angle, and the Japanese studied the British actions and developed similar changes to their torpedoes. The U.S., however, simply ignored the Taranto example or figured that the Japanese would be unable to repeat the British efforts.
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The conspiracy idea doesn’t even make any sense; what made the disaster of the destruction of the Army Air Corps there so embarrassing was that MacArthur had been told of the attack on Pearl Harbor through official channels nine hours before letting his planes get caught on the ground.
He also already had a history of not following orders, even those coming from the commander in chief. When President Hoover ordered the assault on the Bonus Marchers stopped, MacArthur ignored him:
Indeed, there were two full strength infantry divisions in Hawaii, and the costal defense artillery on Oahu was very formidable, ranging from modern, mobile 155mm batteries that could cover the entire island from central locations to 16 inch naval rifles. Any landing attempt on Oahu in the wake of Pearl Harbor would have been cut to ribbons. The notion that the Army was drawing up desperate plans to fall back to Chicago is equally absurd; just in Pacific coast states there were two infantry divisions in California and another in Washington on Dec 7th, 1941.
I think I may have found a lead. There was two books published in 1909 titled The Valor of Ignorance by Homer Lea and The Conflict of Nations by Ernest Fitzpatrick. They’re examples of the invasion genre that was popular in the beginning of the twentieth century.
Both books describe a Japanese invasion of the American mainland. Lea’s book only has the invasion in California but Fitzpatrick’s has the Japanese capturing the entire western half of the country and fighting a climatic battle in the mid-west - pretty much the scenario Bremidon described.
Both books were translated into German and I suspect that the people who made the documentary Bremidon saw may have read them or at least heard of them.
The thing is both of these books were published five years before the first world war. Neither had any resemblance to the strategic situation that existed in 1941. As was common with the invasion genre, there were political messages. Both writers felt the United States needed to build up its military. Lea also said we needed to stop Asians from immigrating into America (his book featured Asian immigrants working with the invaders) and Fitzpatrick said America should form an alliance with Britain so we would be protected by a stronger power (in 1909, the idea that Britain could place the United States under its protection made sense).
Is it possible you are conflating this with the invasion of Malay?
As others have pointed out, Mac wasn’t particularly good at following orders from the US president, let alone any third world guy. Even if it were the case, there would be no reason to for him to leave his bright, shiny B-17s wingtip to wingtip on the tarmac.
He simply collapsed. Was shocked by the successful attack on Pearl Harbor and failed to respond. Even his most ardent supporters can’t explain off that.
Mostly likely the latter. It took a whole string of Japanese offenses for people to finally start to take them seriously.
No, it was MacArthur in the Philippines. Although from your quote it appears a similar situation occurred in Malaysia with Brooke-Popham.
Quezon probably had more influence over MacArthur than Roosevelt did. Quezon was there in Manila, not on the other side of the world. MacArthur didn’t have the independent power base in the Philippines he had in America - he pretty much served at Quezon’s say-so and there was nobody to stop Quezon from firing him. And MacArthur was being paid a fortune to serve as commander of the Philippine forces (when he was evacuated to Australia a few months later he took along his family, his staff, his refrigerator*, and five hundred thousand dollars.)
*Not really. The story that MacArthur took along a refrigerator (or a piano) when he was evacuated is now generally debunked.
I got your PM on this as well. You may have a point. I’ve been checking and it does appear the British used specially designed torpedoes during the Taranto attack. But it also appears they didn’t publicize this. It may have even been classified.
Admiral Kimmel testified that he had been told the Taranto attacks took place in deep water (ninety feet) and that attacks in shallow water like Pearl Harbor were impossible. The Japanese also believed Taranto attack had been in deep water and developed their shallow water torpedoes independently.
So while the actual facts about the Taranto attack proved a torpedo attack at Pearl Harbor was possible, the publicly known facts about Taranto pointed towards the opposite conclusion.
True story: the idea that carrots give you good vision is also based on British wartime secrecy.
Britain had a major radar network that allowed them to track incoming German air attacks. They obviously didn’t want the Germans to realize how well their radar system worked. But the Germans would be able to tell from the effectiveness of the British defense that there was some edge the British had.
So the British wrote up this pseudoscientific report that claimed that carrots gave you superior night vision and that British ground observers were able to spot German planes because they ate a lot of carrots. They published it supposedly to keep up British morale - but the real reason was to deceive the Germans over why their planes were being detected.
It worked so well that people still think carrots help you see better.
OK, is there a cite for this? (This, being that MacArthur was caught with his pants down is because he was afraid of being seen taking the first move.)
It doesn’t make sense. By the time of the attack, not only was the attack on Pearl Harbor over, but Wake Island and Guam had already been attacked as well.
Everyone and their dog were waiting for the Japanese to attack PI as a prelude to the expected invasion of DEA. The forces in PI should have been placed on higher levels. There is no reason why your claimed fear of being seen as taking the offense would have precluded taking the necessary defensive steps.
This theory does not explain why the planes were left on the ground completely vulnerable.
You don’t have to go back that far. The classic Philip K. Dick novel, The Man in the High Castle (the only decent novel Dick ever wrote - yeah, I said it - although 40 years ago I was of the opinion it was the best sf book ever) takes place in an alternate world in which Germany and Japan conquer an isolationist U.S. Admittedly, even there he has Japan controlling only the west coast, with the Rockies as a buffer territory between them and the German-controlled eastern half the country.
The Wikipedia page Axis victory in World War II lists a number of other works, before and after Dick, with similar themes.
There’s no question that a high level of hysteria existed, especially in California, after Pearl Harbor. And there are always some in the military who see first strikes and invasions everywhere, because that’s exactly what they would do. You can’t take it any farther than that, though.
There’s also Sixth Column by Robert Heinlein. Before looking at the wiki entry just now I thought it was written post-war in 1949, but it turns out it was originally published as a serial in January, February and March 1941 in Astounding Science Fiction. The story begins with America falling to the ‘PanAsians’. I might have to give it another read, I remember it as being rather racist but
Truth is stranger than fiction.
Convinced my mother! 
The Brits were “killing two birds with one stone,” however. Many foodstuffs were in short supply, but the disliked carrot was in surplus.
[hijack]I’ve mentioned my wife’s wonderful garden whose treats include gac, with ten times the beta-carotene of carrots. [hijack of hijack]I’ve discovered something interesting about star gooseberry tea – if there were interest I’d post in IMHO[/hijack of hijack][/hijack]
Thanks for taking the time to explain your opinions and your analysis. Let me respond.
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Citing the documentary. Agreed that it sucks that I didn’t tape it. I was asked to name the doc, and I did. We’re kind of moving the goalposts here, although I’m absolutely convinced that this is where the goalposts should have been in the beginning, if we are going to try to follow this one thread to the end. I’ll see if I can dig anything up, but it’s going to have to wait until I’m back from touring Germany.
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Several people have strawmanned what I said, but you actually took on what I said head on: that it is plausible that in the first day after the attacks that the military and political leadership swung from underestimating the Japanese to overestimating them. Thanks for actually responding to what I said and not what would have been easier to counter.
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I am not a WWII scholar, I do not claim to be, and I doubt I ever will be. I have, however, spent the last 20 years in Germany, so I’ve maybe picked up on a few different viewpoints that some of the posters on these boards might find interesting. This does not make me an expert, but I thought I would throw out something that those of you in the States might not have heard before. Tuns out I am right about that, at least.
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ie. Japanese soldiers in Asia: yes, we now know what strategy the Japanese followed, and in that respect it was fairly predictable as it turns out. What I am curious about is: were those soldiers pinned down in Asia, or could have Japan decided to blow China for the moment and gone full bore after the States to convince them to drop the embargo? Considering that Japan was often able to use local authorities to do their dirty work for them, would they have been able to risk quietly pulling out most of their troops? And yeah, I know next to nothing about the Japanese/Chinese side of things other than the main headlines which is why I’m asking.
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Secret buildup of transports. This is argument you make that is most convincing to me. Could Japan have possibly held such a large project secret? Doubtful, maybe even implausible, but certainly not impossible. In a cold analysis, I would agree with you 100%. Would I have agreed in December, 1941? I’m not sure. Give me time to think about this and see if I can come up with anything else to add any strength to this idea.
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The American Analysis (pre-war / post-PH): This is the rabbit hole I’m following at the moment. Once it became clear that the pre-war analysis was incorrect and that the capabilities of the enemiy had been underestimated, where can you stop the fall? What part of that pre-war analysis is immediately salvagable? I’ll probably come around to your point of view eventually, and I can’t really ask you to follow me while I chase Alice, but I still feel like there might be something interesting to find down here.
Oh dear. Does anyone have a reputable site where I can research WWII? Between all the sites that jump straight rom PH to Midway, the references to the History Channel, and the CT site, I’m going nowhere fast.
I’m going to have to give up for the moment anyway. I was hoping that the ICE would have a better Internet connection that the resional, but it’s turning out to be worse. Oh well. 