Tomorrow is the 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, and there's a lot of buzz about a newly declassified memo from 1941 hinting of a coming attack. This is great fun for those who think everything is a conspiracy, so a small history lesson is in order:
hate to tell people who are all a twitter about this memo and other similar “revelations” but nobody in the American military or government was really surprised there was an attack on Pearl Harbor or any other major US pacific military asset. The entire Pacific was under a war warning and the entire US military was prepping for a possible Japanese attack somewhere. The US carriers were not caught at Pearl Harbor because they had been deployed to ferry aircraft to points in the western Pacific where an attack was anticipated, e.g., Wake Island.
Pearl Harbor wasn't a surprise of intent, it was a surprise of capability.
[. . .]
We learned a lot from Pearl Harbor but we really didn't learn not to attempt to read the minds of people from other cultures and ideologies We haven't learned to plan for the appearance of exceptional individuals changing the rule of the game.
Most importantly, we haven't learned to plan for things we can't possibly plan for or to admit that such scenarios even exist. Instead, we assume that all eventualities can be and should be planned for.
No doubt future historians will write “books” about how everything we will blunder into was in retrospect so obvious that the only reasonable explanation was some grand incompetence or conspiracy. In the end, we just really don't understand most of what is going on and never did or will. Life is about surprises good and bad.
The piece includes an interesting look at Adm. Yamamoto, a "rare and unpredictable outlier" who "was arguably the greatest naval mind of the 20th Century."
Comments
My father enlisted on January 7, 1942. I heard both sets of grandparents, uncles, aunts and parents speak their mind on this topic. Having served in the Navy, I know many mistakes were made:
Nearly the entire fleet was in Pearl Harbor except for the most valuable and modern ships. If you were preparing for war, you would have moved ships out of the harbor and dispersed them.
Though I was not alive at the time, I am persuaded that this was nothing more than bait. There was support to provide ships to England, but there were no funds to build new modern ships. All we basically had were the Great White Fleet and WWI ships. I think this was the club needed to make a decision.
However, looking at 911 also brings up the similar failures in communication and slow reaction. So maybe it was simply a blunder of the largest magnitude.
Mr. Larsen, are you actually suggesting the United States *wanted* its aging battleships - with thousands of sailors on board - to be sunk by the Japanese? Please tell me I have misunderstood you.
Not only would that have been inhuman, it wouldn't explain why some of them were raised and sent back into the war. Further, even though they were getting old, they had considerably more scrap value while still floating. Several battleship hulls, for example, were repurposed as aircraft carriers.