Attack on Pearl Harbor

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History -- Military history -- List of battles -- World War II

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. 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 Pearl Harbor.

The Japanese planes bombed all the US military air bases on the island (the biggest was the U.S. Army air base at Hickam Field), and the ships anchored at Pearl, including "Battleship Row". The battleship USS Arizona blew up, turned over, 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. Seven other battleships and twelve other ships were sunk or damaged, 188 aircraft were destroyed, and 2,403 Americans lost their lives.

On November 26 a fleet of six aircraft carriers commanded by Japanese Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo left Hitokapu Bay headed for Pearl Harbor under strict radio silence.

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. The planes attacked in two waves, and Admiral Nagumo decided to forego a third attack in favor of withdrawing. Of these, 55 were lost during the battle.

Contents

Strategy

The purpose of the attack on Pearl Harbor was to neutralize American naval power in the Pacific. Japan had been embroiled in a war with China in Manchuria for some years. Planning had begun for a Pearl Harbotr attack in support of further military advances in January of 1941, and training was underway by mid-year.

Background

The invasion of southern Indo-China beginning in mid-1941 provoked the major powers in the area into action: the US, with Britain and the Dutch colonial government, imposed an embargo of strategic materials to Japan in July. This 'threat' to the militaristic Japanese government, intended to force them to negotiate, seems instead to have increased their commitment to a conquer and exploit approach. With limited oil and refined fuel reserves the Japanese leadership took the embargo as the stimulus to seize the supplies of strategic material in Asia. They could not expect the United States to remain unmoved by these attacks and saw the need to pre-emptively neutralise US power in the Pacific, hence the attack on the naval base at Pearl Harbor.

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 U.S. Pacific Fleet essentially out of the picture, Japan was free to conquer South-East Asia, the entire South West Pacific and 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 win a US-Japanese war. In the first place, 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 -- as a tremendous success. The U.S. Navy had no choice but to put its faith in aircraft carriers and submarines, these being most of what was left, and they proved to be the tools with which the USN first stopped and then reversed the Japanese advance. 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.

Furthermore, although the Japanese forces inexplicably did not consider them an important enough target to go back and destroy in a third attack, the base also had large fuel oil storage facilities, machine ships, and dry docks. A successful bombing of them would not only have resulted in massive fires that would almost certainly have devastated the base itself, but it would have also have crippled the operational range of much of the Pacific Fleet by robbing them of a major fuel supply and fueling center thousands of miles from the mainland in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Most significantly of all, the Pearl Harbor attack galvanised a divided nation into action as little else could have done. Overnight, it made the whole of America utterly determined to defeat Japan, and it probably made possible the unconditional surrender position taken by the Allied Powers. Some historians believe that Japan was doomed to defeat after Pearl Harbor, even if the fuel depots and machine shops had been destroyed and the carriers had been in port and sunk.

U.S. response

On December 8, 1941, the U.S. Congress declared war on Japan with only one dissenting vote. Franklin D. Roosevelt both proposed and signed the declaration of war shortly afterward, calling the previous day 'a date which will live in infamy'. The U.S. Government quickly began mobilizing its armed forces, and started to build up a war economy.

A related 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 the U.S. response to the setback in the Pacific.

File:Image:USSArizonaPearlHarbor.jpg
The USS Arizona burning after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor

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 U.S. aircraft carriers, but it firmly drew the United States 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 USS 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.

Despite the debacle, there were American military personnel who served with distinction in the incident. 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 attack has been depicted, more (or less) accurately, numerous times on film with the best known examples being:

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 invented evidence in support of his recommendation to President Roosevelt that those of Japanese descent be interned.

In 1991, it was rumored that Japan was going to release 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 release a formal declaration of war to the U.S. 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 release 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, in others Churchill and the British, in still others all of the above) knew of the attack in advance and may even have let it happen in order to propel America into war.

The arguments from hindsight reveal 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 more boring mix of mistakes and incompetence. The US government had six official enquires 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)).

US signals intelligence in 1941 was impressively advanced. The US had the capability in the period just before December 1941 to read several Japanese codes and ciphers. MI8 had been shut-down in 1929 by Henry Stimson (newly appointed Secretary of State) but cryptanalytic work continued in two separate efforts by the Army Signal Intelligence Service (SIS) and the Office of Naval Intelligence's (ONI) group, OP-20-G. By 1941, both groups had broken several Japanese ciphers (mostly diplomatic, eg 'PA-K2' and 'Purple Code') and made some progress against some naval codes (eg, the pre-December version of JN-25). 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. Unfortunately, the two groups generally competed rather than cooperated and the distribution of intelligence from the military to US civilian policy-level officials was poorly and sporadically done.

Japanese intelligence efforts against Pearl Harbor involved at least two the German Abwehr agents, one of them a sleeper resident in Hawaii but essentially incompetent. The other, Dusko Popov, was quite effective in Abwehr eyes, but unknown to them was a double agent whose chief loyalty was to the British. He worked for the XX Committee of MI5. In August 1941 he was tasked by the Abwehr with some 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 was even 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. (?!)

Throughout the latter half of 1941 the US, Britain, and Holland collected a considerable range of evidence suggesting that Japan was heading for war. But the Japanese attack on US assets in December was merely a side operation to the main Japanese thrust south against Malaya and the Philippines -- many times the resources were devoted to these attacks as compared to Pearl. Many in the Japanese military were not enthusiastic about Yamamoto's plan when it was first proposed in early 1941, and remained reluctant through the Imperial conferences in September and November which approved it. The focus on South-East Asia was accurately reflected in the 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 was even a specific claim of an attack against Pearl Harbor from the Peruvian Ambassador to Japan in early 1941. Since even Yamamoto had not decided to attack Pearl Harbor at that time, discounting Ambassador Grew's report was quite sensible. There has been no report of a serious 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 outbreak of hostilies remains a curious and confused aside, demonstrating the uncertainty of intelligence information, especially some years after the event. Nevertheless, in late November, both the US Navy and Army sent explicit war warnings to all Pacific commands. Uniquely, the local Hawaii commanders, Admiral Kimmel and General Short did little to prepare for war in their command areas. Inter-service rivalries between Kimmel and Short did not improve the situation.

As Nagumo's attacking force neared Hawaii there was a flurry of later warnings. The SS Lurline, on heading from San Francisco to Hawaii, is said to have heard and plotted radio traffic which is further said to have been from the Japanese fleet. All surviving officers from Nagumo's ships claim that there was no radio traffic to have been overheard; their radio operators had been left in Japan, and all radios aboard ship were physically locked to prevent inadvertent use. ONI is further said to have been aware of the eastwards movement of Japanese carriers, but nothing except suggestions has turned up on this point. The attacking planes were detected by Army radar being used for training, mini-subs were sighted and attacked ourside 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 about conditions in Hawaii, and in Pearl Harbor, for months. Many of these were overheard and decrypted. None explicitly stated anything about an attack on Pearl except a message of 6 December, which was not decrypted until after the 7th. No cable traffic was intercepted (illegally) until after David Sarnoff of RCA agreed to assist in a visit to Hawaii immediately before the 7th. Local Naval Intelligence was tapping telephones at the Japanese Consulate before the 7th, but the Navy's tap was discovered and was disconnected in the first week of December. They didn't tell the FBI about it; the local FBI agent in charge later claimed he would have had installed one of his own if he'd known the Navy had disconnected its tap.

The shallow anchorage at Pearl Harbour was generally considered impossible for effective torpedo attack. 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 summer and early fall of 1941.

Further reading

  • The monumental trilogy by Gordon W. Prange and his collaborators Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon, At Dawn We Slept (McGraw-Hill, 1981), Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History (McGraw-Hill, 1986), and December 7, 1941: The Day the Japanese Attacked Pearl Harbor (McGraw-Hill, 1988), is considered the standard work.
  • Walter Lord, Day of Infamy (Henry Holt, 1957) is a very readable re-telling of the day's events.
  • W. J. Holmes, Double-Edged Secrets: U.S. Naval Intelligence Operations in the Pacific During World War II (Naval Institute, 1979) contains some important material, such as Holmes' point that had the U.S. Navy been warned of the attack and put to sea, it would have likely resulted in an even greater disaster, as all the ships sunk would have been lost completely in deep water anchorages, along with a higher loss of life.
  • Michael V. Gannon, Pearl Harbor Betrayed (Henry Holt, 2001) is the latest examination of the issues surrounding the surprise of the attack.
  • Frederick D. Parker, Pearl Harbor Revisited: United States Navy Communications Intelligence 1924-1941 (Center for Cryptologic History, 1994) contains the most detailed description of what the Navy knew from intercepted Japanese communications prior to Pearl.
  • Henry Clausen and Bruce (?) Lee, title?, Crown (?) Publishing, an account by Henry Clausen himself of the secret Clausen Inquiry undertaken late in the War by order of Congress to Secretary of War Stimson. Clausen's effort was extraordinary, if only because of the exploding vest he wore as he traveled and the astonishing letter of authority Stimson gave him. His account supports the bumbling around in Washington theory, but not the Roosevelt knew and invited the Japanese in variant. He also thinks that Kimmel and Short both failed in their duty. He also faults General Marshall for committing perjury. It's worth reading.

Further reading - Alternative Theories

  • John Toland, Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath (Berkeley, reissue edition 1991) is an account of the various investigations of the US failure to be prepared at Pearl. He claims that Roosevelt had advance knowledge of the attack, which he deliberately did not use to warn the commanders at Pearl. Note that some of Toland's sources have said that his interpretation of their experiences is incorrect.
  • James Rusbridger and Eric Nave, Betrayal at Pearl Harbour: How Churchill Lured Roosevelt into WWII (Summit, 1991) which posits that while the Americans couldn't read the Japanese naval code, the British could, and Churchill deliberately withheld warning because the UK needed U.S. help. Nave was an Australian cryptographer whose diaries were used in writing this book. A check against them has made clear that some of the charges Rusbridger makes here are unsupported by Nave's diaries of the time.
  • Robert Stinnett, Day Of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor (Free Press, 2001) is a recent examination which concludes Roosevelt deliberately steered Japan into war with America. Stinnett's understanding of cryptography is quite limited and his conclusions regarding the cryptographic evidence are accordingly unreliable.

External Links

Alternative Theories

References

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