I failed to mark the 75th anniversary of Pearl Harbor yesterday, an error made worse by the rapidly diminishing numbers of people who were there and remember the attack first-hand. In 2016, the attack that precipitated U. S. involvement in the (already two years on) Second World War is almost as remote in time as Spanish-American War when I was in High School, and exactly as long ago as the Philippine-American War, which I never even knew of up until this morning.
While there's small danger of WW II being lost in a footnote, recent history rests on the shifting sands of fools and hasty thinkers; one TV network promoted their coverage in ads with a script that featured the line, "Seventy-five years ago, Pearl Harbor was under siege," which completely misstates the event with a single word: Japan was in no shape to stage a siege and never planned on one. Pearl Harbor was a hit-and-run effort. They'd hoped to cripple the U. S. Pacific fleet with a single stoke, leaving that ocean open to their advance. They nearly succeeded; British and U.S. possessions fell to Japan throughout the first half of 1942. It wasn't until the battle of Midway in June of that year that the odds began to turn.
There should be no need to point out the remarkable confluence of changing technology and pure luck that led to victory in the Pacific: all of the Navy's aircraft carriers were at sea on maneuvers on 7 December 1941. The submarine fleet was undamaged. Repair facilities and oil supplies were left largely intact. With those tools, and an angered nation (not to mention Congress!) behind the effort, Japan was beaten back. While submarine warfare was well-established in WW I, the airplane and aircraft carrier combination were still relatively new, a huge change for naval thinkers. They were able to adjust, with remarkable results.
Nevertheless, the attack was a major blow to the U.S. Navy. Admiral Hara Tadaichi summed up the Japanese result by saying, "We won a great tactical victory at Pearl Harbor and thereby lost the war."
There are many lessons to be learned from Pearl Harbor; that may be the most important one.
BUILDING A 1:1 BALUN
4 years ago
8 comments:
"Don't let the Army tail wag the Navy dog" is another lesson from the Pacific War, but unless one is a student of the conflict and its antecedents, that statement probably makes no sense. I do not think Yamamoto would have signed off on the PH attack if Tojo hadn't been all over the Navy to make a bold move and try to win the war in a stroke. There was a lot of concern about possible negative outcomes at high levels in the Navy staff. But that's just my opinion.
Both the US and Japanese strategic thinkers before the war completely misunderestimated the future dominance of the carrier. Admirals of both fleets, futurists in both nations, envisioned a struggle for dominance in the Pacific that would be decided by a gigantic Jutland-style gun duel between the superdreadnoughts of the IJN and USN.
Before WW2, the carrier admirals and battleship admirals were in a war of sorts themselves. That the Pacific Fleet battleships were taken out in the raid put the carrier admirals in the driver's seat. The big Japanese mistake was not following through with their 3rd wave attack which would have hit the dry docks and fuel farm, that would have extended the Pacific war for years.
I have been more of a student of the minds and thoughts of the people at the time of the 2nd world war. I am not as well versed in all the minutiae of the physical events that went on during the attack on Pearl, although I know some of it. The thing that I believe caused Japan to ultimately lose the war, was not misstep of some attack on the Pacific fleet or whatever, but in the manner with which they forced the U.S. into the war. They underestimated the resiliency of the American people of the time. By attacking the United States like this, it gave the people the central goal around which they could gather. After having just weathered nearly a decade of the Great Depression, the people were starved for a cause, and this fit right in perfectly with what they needed. The factories quickly moved into full production, the ship yards started building ships at full speed, munitions factories,etc. Everything was committed to the war effort within months. It was almost like a prayer by FDR had been answered, and he had the country pulling together like never before. All because the Japanese made the mistake of a sucker punch, that, while hurting us, didn't completely cripple us. The cynical among us might give some credence to the conspiracy theory's out there that say that say that the radio operator who intercepted some message about starting, or the radar operators who saw them coming from 130 miles out, but waited to say anything for awhile because they weren't sure, were acting on orders. That is not for me to say. I just know that the American people, when they act together,are an unstoppable force.
I would suggest that the American people acting on their own, are pretty unstoppable, too -- witness the technological advances of 1865 through 1941 and 1946 to 1960, most of them during peacetime and few, if any, as the result of governmental decree. as the Cold War heated up, there was a lot of noise about the good old war years and Uncle Sam started slammin' money into research, with mixed results. We got to the Moon but we didn't stay.
As Mike V notes above, even the tactical victory wasn't unalloyed -- the Japanese really should have hit the oil storage facilities at Oahu.
In a precursor to a continuing pattern, there were multiple warnings of various degrees of accuracy. And they all were not acted upon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCR-270
SCR-270s Today
After its use by the military, the Pearl Harbor unit (s/n 012) was loaned to the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon (along with a second unit to the National Research Council in Ottawa), who, unaware of its history, used it to image aurora for the first time in 1949. The technique was published in 1950 in Nature, and was a field of active research for some time. In 1990, after the radar had sat derelict for years, they received a phone call informing them of the historical nature of the radar, and requesting it be sent back to the US for preservation. It is now located at the National Electronics Museum near Baltimore.[1]
Roberta X, Point well taken. Government can never do as good of a job of motivation as good old capitalism. Just like the saying goes that a man will never work as hard for his employer as he will for himself. That is why, if Government would stay the hell out of the way, the American people would solve just about any problem that existed in the country today. Instead of forcing cafe standards on auto makers, just give them positive incentives to allow them to sell their cars for a lower price the higher the fuel economy that they get.
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