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."
