Attack on Pearl Harbor
On the morning of December 7, 1941, planes of the Imperial Japanese Navy carried out a surprise assault on the American Navy base and Army air field at Pearl Harbor, Oahu, Hawaii Territory, now Hawaii. This attack has been called the Bombing of Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Pearl Harbor but, most commonly, the Attack on Pearl Harbor or simply
Overview
The forward magazines of the USS Arizona (BB-39) explode after she is hit by a Japanese bomb
On November 26 a fleet of six aircraft carriers commanded by Japanese Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo left
On the morning of December 7, 1941, that Fleet's planes bombed all the US military air bases on the island (the biggest was the US Army air base at Hickam Field), and the ships anchored at Pearl, including "Battleship Row". Nearly every plane on the ground was destroyed; only a few fighters got airborne and opposed the attacking planes. Either battleships and twelve other ships were sunk or damaged, 188 aircraft were destroyed, and 2,403 Americans lost their lives. The battleship USS Arizona exploded and sank with a loss of over 1,100 men, nearly half of the American dead. It became, and remains, a memorial to those lost that day.
The first shots fired and the first casualties in the Attack on
The Japanese aircraft carriers were: Akagi, Hiryu, Kaga, Shokaku, Soryu, Zuikaku. Together they had a total of 441 planes, including fighters, torpedo-bombers, dive-bombers, and fighter-bombers. Of these, 55 were lost during the battle. The planes attacked in two waves, and Admiral Nagumo decided to forego a third attack in favor of withdrawing.
Strategy
The purpose of the attack on
Part of the Japanese plans for the attack included breaking off negotiations with the US prior (and only just prior) to the Attack. Diplomats from the Japanese Embassy in Washington, including special representative Admiral Kimura, had been conducting extended talks with the State Department regarding the US reactions to the Japanese move into Indochina in the summer. Just before the attack, a long message was sent to the Embassy from the Foreign Office in Tokyo (encyphered with the Purple machine), with instructions to deliver it to Secretary Hull just before the attack was scheduled to begin (ie, 1PM Washington time). Because of decryption and typing delays, the Embassy personnel could not manage to do so; that long message breaking off negotiations was delivered well after the intended time, and well after the Attack had actually begun. The late delivery of the note contributed to US outrage about the Attack, and is a major reason for Roosevelt's famous characterization of that day as "... a date which will live in infamy". Yamamoto was very unhappy about the botched timing when he learned of it sometime later.
Both pieces of the final message had been decrypted by the US well before the Japanese Embassy had managed to finish, and it was the decrypt of the second piece which prompted General Marshall to send his famous warning to Hawaii that morning -- the one that was actually delivered to General Short at Pearl several hours after the Attack had ended (there were transmission delays, and it somehow failed to have been marked as highest urgency).
Background
The Japanese move into southern Indo-China, beginning in mid-1941, provoked the major powers in the area into action, more than the diplomatic protest notes which had been the usual for nearly a decade: the United States, with Britain and the Dutch colonial government, imposed an embargo on strategic materials to Japan in July. This "threat" to the Japanese economy (and to the military's supplies) was intended to force a reconsideration of the move into Indo-China and perhaps even to the negotiating table. Roosevelt's decision to leave the Fleet in Pearl (closer to Japan than the US West coast, and so an increase in 'threat') is said to have been part of this response. The US, and other Powers', reactions seem instead to have increased the Japanese military's commitment to a conquer and exploit approach against areas holding the resources endangered by the new embargo. With very limited oil production and minimal refined fuel reserves, Japan faced a real, and serious, problem. The Japanese leadership took the embargo as the stimulus to activate plans to seize supplies of strategic material in Asia, particularly southeast Asia. They could not expect the United States to remain passive when those plans were activated; it was this which had already led Admiral Yamamoto to consider ways to preemptively neutralize American power in the Pacific.
His idea of an attack on the naval base at Pearl Harbor was one tactic to achieve this strategic goal. Japanese sources indicate that Yamamoto began to think about a possible strike at Pearl very early in 1941, and that, after some preliminary studies, had managed to start preliminary operational planning for it some months later. There was substantial opposition to any such operation within the Japanese Navy, and at one point Yamamoto threatened to resign if the operational planning were stopped. Permission to set up the operation was given in late summer at an Imperial Conference attended by the Emperor, and permission to actually stage the force into the Pacific in preparation for the attack was given at another Imperial Conference, also attended by the Emperor, in November.
Immediate outcome
In terms of its strategic objectives the attack on Pearl Harbor was, in the short to medium term, a spectacular success which eclipsed the wildest dreams of its planners and has few parallels in the military history of any era. For the next six months, the United States Navy was unable to play any significant role in the Pacific War. With the US Pacific Fleet essentially out of the picture, Japan was free of worries about the other major Pacific naval power. It went on to conquer southeast Asia, the entire southwest Pacific and to extend its reach far into the Indian Ocean.
Longer-term effects
In the longer term, however, the Pearl Harbor attack was an unmitigated strategic disaster for Japan. Indeed Admiral Yamamoto, whose idea the Pearl Harbor attack was, had predicted that even a successful attack on the US Fleet would not and could not win a war with the US, as American productive capacity was too large. One of the main Japanese objectives was the three American aircraft carriers stationed in the Pacific, but these had sortied from Pearl Harbor a few days before the attack and escaped unharmed. Putting most of the US battleships out of commission, was widely regarded--in both Navies and in most observers worldwide--as a tremendous success for the Japanese. The elimination of the battleships left the US Navy with no choice but to put its faith in aircraft carriers and submarines, these being most of what was left--and these were the tools with which the US Navy halted and then reversed the Japanese advance. The loss of the battleships didn't turn out to be as important as most everyone thought before (in Japan) and just after (in Japan and the US) the attack.
President Franklin Roosevelt signs the Declaration of War against Japan, December 1941.
Probably most significantly, the Pearl Harbor attack immediately galvanized a divided nation into action as little else could have done. Overnight, it united the US with the goal of fighting and winning the war with Japan, and it probably made possible the unconditional surrender position taken by the Allied Powers. Some historians believe that Japan was doomed to defeat by the attack on Pearl Harbor itself, regardless of whether the fuel depots and machine shops were destroyed or if the carriers had been in port and sunk.
US response
On December 8, 1941, the US Congress declared war on Japan with only one dissenting vote. Franklin D. Roosevelt both signed the declaration of war shortly afterward, calling the previous day "a date which will live in infamy." The US Government continued and intensified its military mobilization, and started to convert to a war economy.
A related, and still unanswered, question is why Nazi Germany declared war on the United States December 11, 1941 immediately following the Japanese attack. Hitler was under no obligation to do so under the terms of the Axis Pact, but did anyway. This doubly outraged the American public and allowed the United States to greatly step up its support of the United Kingdom, which delayed for some time a full US response to the setback in the Pacific.
Historical significance
This battle, like the Battle of Lexington and Concord, had history-altering consequences. It only had a small military impact due to the failure of the Japanese Navy to sink US aircraft carriers, but even if the air carriers had been sunk it would not have helped Japan in the long term. The attack firmly drew the United States and its massive industrial and service economy into World War II, leading to the defeat of the Axis powers worldwide. The Allied victory in this war and US emergence as a dominant world power has shaped international politics ever since.
Aftermath
Despite the perception of this battle as a devastating blow to America, only five ships were permanently lost to the Navy. These were the battleships USS Arizona, USS Oklahoma, the old target ship USS Utah, and the destroyers USS Cassin and USS Downes; nevertheless, much usable material was salvaged from them, including the two aft main turrets from the Arizona. Four ships sunk during the attack were later raised and returned to duty, including the battleships USS California, USS West Virginia and USS Nevada. Of the 22 Japanese ships that took part in the attack, only one survived the war.
There are many who say that the Japanese would have been wise to have attacked with a third strike to destroy the oil storage facilities, machine shops and dry docks at Pearl Harbor. Destruction of these facilities would have greatly increased the US Navy's difficulties as the nearest Fleet facilities would have been several thousand miles east of Hawaii on the West Coast of the States. Admiral Nagumo declined to order a third strike for several reasons.
· First, losses during the second strike had been more significant than during the first, a third strike could have been expected to suffer still worse losses.
· Second, the first two strikes had essentially used all the previously prepped aircraft available, so a third strike would have taken some time to prepare, allowing the Americans time to, perhaps, find and attack Nagumo's force. The location of the American carriers was and remained unknown to Nagumo.
· Third, the Japanese planes had not practiced attack against the Pearl Harbor shore facilities and organizing such an attack would have taken still more time, though several of the strike leaders urged a third strike anyway.
· Fourth, the fuel situation did not permit remaining on station north of Pearl Harbor much longer. The Japanese were acting at the limit of their logistical ability to support the strike on Pearl Harbor. To remain in those waters for much longer would have risked running unacceptably low on fuel.
· Fifth, the timing of a third strike would have been such that aircraft would probably have returned to their carriers after dark. Night operations from aircraft carriers were in their infancy in 1941, and neither the Japanese nor anyone else had developed reliable technique and doctrine.
· Sixth, the second strike had essentially completed the entire mission, neutralization of the American Pacific Fleet.
· Finally, there was the simple danger of remaining near one place for too long. The Japanese were very fortunate to have escaped detection during their voyage from the Inland Sea to Hawaii. The longer they remained off Hawaii, the more danger they were in, e.g., from a lucky US Navy submarine, or from the absent American carriers.
Despite the debacle, there were American military personnel who served with distinction in the incident. An ensign got his ship underway during the attack. Probably the most famous is Doris Miller, an African-American sailor who went beyond the call of duty during the attack when he took control of an unattended machine gun and used it in defense of the base. He was awarded the Navy Cross.
The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and the resulting state of war between Japan and the United States were factors in the later Japanese internment in the western United States. Another important factor were the racial views of General John DeWitt, commander of the West Coast Defense District. He claimed existence of evidence of sabotage and espionage intentions among the Japanese and Japanese descended in support of his recommendation to President Roosevelt that those of Japanese descent be interned. He had no such evidence.
In 1991, it was rumored that Japan was going to make an official apology to the United States for the attack. The apology did not come in the form many expected, however. The Japanese Foreign Ministry released a statement that said Japan had intended to make a formal declaration of war to the US at 1 P.M., twenty-five minutes before the attacks at Pearl Harbor were scheduled to begin. However, due to various delays, the Japanese ambassador was unable to make the declaration until well after the attacks had begun. For this, the Japanese government apologized.
Advance-knowledge debate
There has been considerable debate ever since December 8, 1941, as to how and why the United States had been caught unaware, and how much and when American officials knew of Japanese plans and related topics. Some have argued that various parties (in some theories Roosevelt and/or other American officials, or Churchill and the British, in others all of the above, or additional players) knew of the attack in advance and may even have let it happen, or encouraged it, in order to force America into war.
For instance, one position -- prominently discussed in Stinnet's recent book -- suggests that a memorandum prepared by Office of Naval Intelligence Lieutenant Commander Arthur McCollum for its Director, and passed to Captains Walter Anderson and Dudley Knox, two of Roosevelt's military advisors on October 7, 1940 was central to US Government policy in the immediate pre-war period. The memo suggests that only a direct attack on US interests would sway the American public to favor direct involvement in the European war, specifically in support of the British. Anderson and Knox offered eight specific plans to aggrieve the Japanese Empire, writing: "If by these means Japan could be led to commit an overt act of war, so much the better."
Examination of information released since the War has revealed that there was considerable intelligence information available to US, and other, officials. It was the failure to process and use this information effectively that has led some to invoke conspiracy theories rather than a less interesting mix of mistake and incompetence. The US government had six official enquiries into the attack - The Roberts Commission (1941), the Hart Inquiry (1944), the Army Pearl Harbor Board (1944), the Naval Court of Inquiry (1944), the Congressional Inquiry (1945-46) and the top-secret inquiry by Secretary Stimson authorized by Congress and carried out by Henry Clausen (the Clausen Inquiry (1945)).
One factor making an attack against Pearl Harbor 'unthinkable' was the shallow anchorage at Pearl Harbour. Such depths were generally considered to make effective torpedo attack impossible; at the time, torpedoes dropped from planes went deep before attaining running depth and in too shallow water (like Pearl Harbor) would hit the bottom, exploding prematurely, or just digging into the mud. But the British had proved that modified torpedoes could manage in shallow water during their attack on the Italian Navy at Taranto on November 11, 1940. The US Navy overlooked the significance of this new development. The Japanese had independently developed shallow water torpedo modifications during the planning and training for the raid in 1941.
US signals intelligence in 1941 was both impressively advanced and uneven. The US MI8 cryptographic operation in New York City had been shut-down by Henry Stimson (Hoover's newly appointed Secretary of State), which provoked its now ex-director, Herbert Yardley, to write a book (The American Black Chamber) about its successes in breaking other nation's crypto traffic. Most responded promptly by changing (and generally improving) their cyphers and codes, forcing other nations to start over in reading their signals. The Japanese were no exception. Nevertheless, US cryptanalytic work continued after Simson's action in two separate efforts by the Army's Signal Intelligence Service (SIS) and the Office of Naval Intelligence's (ONI) crypto group, OP-20-G. The US was able, in the period just before December 1941, to read several Japanese codes and ciphers. By late 1941, those groups had broken several Japanese cyphers (mostly diplomatic ones, eg 'PA-K2' and the 'Purple Code') and had made some progress against some naval codes/cyphers (eg, the pre-December version of JN-25), but very little against Japanese Army traffic. In fact, the break of the Purple cypher was a considerable cryptographic triumph and proved quite useful later in the War. It was the highest security Japanese Foreign Office cypher, but prior to Pearl Harbor carried little information about future events planned by the Japanese; the military, who were essentially determining policy for Japan, didn't trust the Foreign Office and left it, 'out of the loop'. Unfortunately, the two US groups generally competed rather than cooperated, and distribution of intelligence from the military to US civilian policy-level officials was poorly done (capriciously chosen and distributed), and furthermore done in a way that prevented any of its recipients from developing a 'larger sense' of the meaning of the decrypts.
Japanese intelligence efforts against Pearl Harbor included at least two German Abwehr agents, one of them a sleeper living in Hawaii with his family; he and they were essentially incompetent. The other, Dusko Popov a Yugoslavian businessman, was thought quite effective by the Abwehr, but was actually a double agent whose loyalty was to the British. He worked for the XX Committee of MI5. In August 1941 he was tasked by the Abwehr with specific questions about Pearl (see John Masterman's book on the Double Cross operation for the text of the questionnaire), but the FBI seems to have evaluated the effort as of negligible importance. There has been no report that its existence, or even Popov's availability as a double agent, was passed on to US military intelligence or to civilian policy officials. J. Edgar Hoover dismissed Popov's importance noting that his British codename, Tricyle, was connected with his sexual tastes. (?!) In any case, he was not allowed to continue on to Hawaii and to develop more intelligence for the UK and US.
Throughout 1941, the US, Britain, and Holland collected a considerable range of evidence suggesting that Japan was heading for war against someone new. But the Japanese attack on the US in December was essentially a side operation to the main Japanese thrust south against Malaya and the Philippines -- many more resources, especially Imperial Army resources, were devoted to these attacks as compared to Pearl. Many in the Japanese military (both Army and Navy) had disagreed with Yamamoto's idea of attacking the US Fleet at Pearl Harbor when it was first proposed in early 1941, and remained reluctant through the Imperial Conferences in September and November which first approved it as policy, and then authorized the attack. The Japanese focus on South-East Asia was quite accurately reflected in US intelligence assessments; there were warnings of attacks against Thailand (the Kra Peninsula), against Malaya, against French Indochina, against the Dutch East Indies, even one against Russia. There are reports of concern at the Pentagon and in the White House about Japanese plans for the SE Asian region. There had even been a specific claim of a plan for an attack on Pearl Harbor from the Peruvian Ambassador to Japan in early 1941. Since not even Yamamoto had yet then decided to even argue for an attack Pearl Harbor, discounting US Ambassador Grew's report to Washington about it, in early 1941, was quite sensible. There has been no report of a serious prior conviction by anyone in US or UK military intelligence or among US civilian policy officials that Pearl Harbor or the US West Coast would be attacked. The so-called "Winds Code" announcing the direction of new hostilities remains a curious and confused episode, demonstrating the uncertainty of meaning inherent in most intelligence information, and in this case, even uncertainty about the existence of some intelligence information, especially some years after the event.
Nevertheless, in late November, both the US Navy and Army sent clear and explicit war warnings to all Pacific commands. Uniquely among those Pacific commands, the local Hawaii commanders, Admiral Kimmel and General Short did little to prepare for war, including an attack on their forces, in their command areas. Inter-service rivalries between Kimmel and Short did not improve the situation.
As Nagumo's attacking force neared Hawaii, there is claimed to have been a flurry of later warnings to US intelligence and, even, directly to the White House or to White House connections. For instance, the SS Lurline, heading from San Francisco to Hawaii on its regular route, is said to have heard and plotted unusual radio traffic. That traffic is further said to have been from the approaching Japanese fleet. There are problems with this. All surviving officers from Nagumo's ships claim that there was no radio traffic to have been overheard by anyone; their radio operators had been left in Japan to fake traffic for the benefit of listeners (ie, military intelligence in other countries), and all radios aboard Nagumo's ships were claimed to have been physically locked to prevent inadvertent use and thus remote tracking of the attack force. Unfortunately, the Lurline's log (seized by either Navy or Coast Guard officers in Hawaii after its arrival) hasn't been found, so contemporaneous written evidence of what was recorded about what was heard aboard the Lurline isn't available. ONI is further said to have been aware of the eastwards movement of Japanese carriers from other sources (eg, the Dutch), but nothing in the way of compelling evidence on this point has yet turned up. Each of these points remains controversial.
Closer to the moment of the attack, the attacking planes were detected and tracked in Hawaii by an Army radar installation being used for a training exercise, mini-subs were sighted and attacked outside Pearl Harbor and at least one was sunk -- all before the planes came within bombing range.
Japanese consular officials in Hawaii, including spy and Naval officer Takeo Yoshikawa, had been sending information to Tokyo about conditions in Hawaii, and in Pearl Harbor, for some months. Some of this information was hand delivered to intelligence officers aboard Japanese vessels calling at Hawaii, but some was transmitted back to Tokyo. Many of the messages in this last group were overheard and decrypted; most were evaluated as the sort of intelligence gathering all nations routinely do about potential opponents and not as evidence of an attack plan. None of those known, including those decrypted later in the War when there was time to return to those remaining, explicitly stated anything about an attack on Pearl; the only exception was a message sent from the Hawaiin Consulate on 6 December, which was not decrypted until after the 7th and which thus became moot. No cable traffic (the usual communication method to/from Tokyo) was intercepted in Hawaii until after David Sarnoff of RCA agreed to assist during a visit to Hawaii immediately before the 7th; such interception was illegal under US law.
Locally, Naval Intelligence in Hawaii had been tapping telephones at the Japanese Consulate before the 7th, and overheard a most peculiar discussion of flowers in a call to Tokyo (the significance of which is still opaque and which was discounted in Hawaii at the time), but the Navy's tap was discovered and was disconnected by the Navy in the first week of December. They didn't tell the local FBI about either the tap or its removal; the local FBI agent in charge later claimed he would have had installed one of his own if he'd known the Navy's had been disconnected.
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