This is Chapter 3 of our book club for Samuel Eliot Morison's The Two-Ocean War, a history of the USN in WWII. It's finally time for the real action to kick off, with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor:
One point I think Morison doesn't cover is the sheer improbability of the attack. It was a massive logistical stretch for the Japanese to pull off, with the carriers barely having practiced the necessary underway refueling techniques before departing, and the torpedoes arriving only two days before the attack. And it was only a few months earlier that the Japanese had even gotten enough carriers to pull off the attack. While it's easy to draw comparisons to Taranto, the British there were attacking at night, which meant they didn't have to worry about Italian aircraft, either over the target or attacking the carriers. The Japanese didn't have the ability to make a night attack like that, which meant that a lot of their force was going to have to be dedicated to hitting the American airbases, and Shokaku and Ziukaku didn't join the fleet until the second half of 1941. Without their airgroups, it would have been impossible to both hit the airfields hard enough to protect the carriers and do significant damage to the fleet.1 And the whole plan was insanely risky, and could have basically come unglued if, say, the duty officer had taken the radar operator's warnings more seriously. Ships would have been buttoned up and AA guns manned, and while we can't say for certain what would have happened, the vast majority of the damage done during the attack happened in those critical first few minutes.
All of this makes a lot more sense of the focus by Kimmel and Short on keeping safe from sabotage and being ready to support a war further west. It's fairly common for people to assume that the enemy won't do something extremely stupid and risky, which means these plans succeed more often than they probably should. (For another example, see the Fall of France.) I do appreciate that Morison did his best to be fair to Kimmel and Short, and personally think there's a lot less excuse for commanders in the western Pacific, who we'll come to in the next chapter.
The narrative of the attack is pretty good so far as it goes, although with a few mistakes for reasons I don't understand at this remove. Notably, the bombs that sunk Arizona came from level-bombing Kates and not dive-bombing Vals, and she was formally decommissioned in three weeks after the attack. Also, for some unaccountable reason, he describes California as being the youngest ship there, even though West Virginia was two years newer. One thing I was expecting that didn't turn up was a longer discussion of the potential for an attack on the base facilities, which is often cited as a major mistake made by the Japanese. Morison himself indulges in some of this in Rising Sun in the Pacific, but here, it's relegated to only a sentence or two. I don't find the theory particularly convincing, as it relies on both a complete misunderstanding of Japanese strategic thought and a lot of worst-case theorizing about the effects of an attack, which more sober analysis shows would have taken maybe a few months to repair, not years.
I was also somewhat surprised by the lack of discussion of a "third wave", often cited as another mistake due to its presence in the movie Tora, Tora, Tora. In fact, it was entirely a myth created by Mitsuo Fuchida, and between the risk of American carriers appearing and the time required to recover, rearm and launch the planes, it would have been night when the planes returned, and the Japanese were not trained for night landings. But it turned out that Fuchida didn't even start talking about the third wave until 1963, when this book was written, so it was able to evade several decades of dubious history.
And then there's the weirdly long section on responsibility, which makes little sense at this remove. I suspect that it's here because "FDR knew about Pearl Harbor" was the 1963 equivalent of "9/11 was an inside job" today, and Morison doesn't seem shy about tying the history he's writing into the demands of the present day. This is made entirely obvious at the end of the chapter, but there are flashes elsewhere in what we've read so far. In retrospect, this tendency probably also explains the semi-conspiratorial tone of Chapter 1, and will hopefully not dominate other sections in the same way, even if he makes brief asides about it.
Also, for those interested, I wrote my own account of the battleships during Pearl Harbor as well as the aftermath.
1 This is something almost everyone who discusses previous attacks on Pearl Harbor in wargames misses. Those were done with fewer planes carrying lighter weapons, and couldn't realistically have done all that much damage to the fleet unless they wanted their carriers to be murdered by defending aircraft. ⇑
Comments
What I found to be most interesting is the sclerotic reaction to any intelligence garnered by the various intelligence agencies. It appears from my point of view that the entire intelligence apparatus was completely overcome with the need for secrecy as well as a good dose of serious bureaucrat-ism.
From Morrison's section about how intelligence got handed around after decrypting, it seems apparent that anyone with any kind of desire to get the job done and the information gleaned to the appropriate people was either moved out of the job or never took the job in the first place.
Of course, we're also dealing with a military at peace and one that had been at peace for the vast majority of the careers of the vast majority of the people involved. Yes, I know there were the banana wars between WWI and WWII, but those were not "real" wars to the vast majority of the services, with the possible exception of the Marine Corps. Virtually no one understood viscerally how to fight a war when it came time to have the war. Since they didn't understand how to do it, they didn't prepare for it, and didn't expect it.
Hence, the amazing series of events that led to the Japanese having a clear shot at the Pacific Fleet.
Belushi TD
"But it turned out that Fuchida didn’t even start talking about the third wave until 1963, when this book was written, so it was able to evade several decades of dubious history."
Fascinating catch.
I enjoyed the narrative about the improbability of the attack coming off. A warning being sent by Western Union and delivered hours after the attack was particularly memorable, along with the duty officer ignoring the radar operator.
In Chapter 1, Morison talks about leave and other quality of life policies required to keep volunteers in the Navy. Here "officers and CMOs to whom juniors expected to look for guidance" were on regular weekend leave. Wasn't the September 1940 draft filling the Navy by December 1941?
So why didn't the Japanese kill the fuel oil depot?
Debunking "FDR knew" sure takes excessive space for a 30-page chapter. The other conspiracy theory, which Morison breezes over in a couple of paragraphs, is the fear of spies/traitors of Japanese descent. "Every one of these rumors was later found to be false, and not one disloyal act was committed" (page 67). But higher on the same page, he tells an anecdote about one plane crash landing on Nihau, where the pilot teamed up with "a local Japanese" to "terrorize the unarmed populace for a week" until "a burly Hawaiian ... managed to kill him with bare hands and a stone." (an oversimplification of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ni%CA%BBihau_incident )
@Belushi
Sharing intelligence is always a balancing act, because there’s a very real need to keep things to as few people as possible to avoid leaks. It’s almost always possible to piece together “we should have known” in retrospect, even if that may not be fair to the people at the time. And in this case, they were also having to do all of this on paper, which makes things a lot harder than they are today.
I also think he's occasionally flat-out unfair. In particular, he brings up "the Japanese asked about fleet dispositions at Pearl, and this wasn't passed to Kimmel", but admits that they asked about fleet dispositions everywhere, which basically destroys that as a source of any sort of signal. The obvious conclusion of that is that they're gathering strategic intel, which tells you very little about where they're likely to attack.
@Le Maistre Chat
Actually, no. The Navy didn’t start taking draftees until the beginning of 1943. (I suspect in many cases, the volunteers were people who otherwise would have been drafted, but that’s beside the point.) Also, culture can take a while to change after it stops making sense.
Because it wasn’t their doctrine. This is the navy dominated by the cult of the “decisive battle”, and the enemy’s fleet is the target. Logistics aren’t. This was so deeply entrenched that never attempted an anti-shipping campaign with their submarines throughout the entire war, despite the US demonstrating how effective that could be.
And yeah, technically speaking there was one disloyal act, but I don’t blame him for the phrasing given just how unique Nihihau is in retrospect.