At dawn on Sunday, 7 December 1941, aircraft began launching from the decks of the Japanese carriers Akagi, Hiryu, Kaga, Shokaku, Soryu, and Zuikaku approximately 230 miles north of the Hawaiian island of Oahu. The roar of their engines heralded the beginning of what President Franklin D. Roosevelt would brand “a day that will live in infamy.”
Relations between the United States and Japan had grown increasingly strained throughout the 1930s as Japan overran Chinese Manchuria in 1932 and then invaded China proper five years later. Finally, in July 1941, the Japanese occupation of French Indochina provoked Roosevelt to impose a trade embargo on the island nation. Great Britain and the Netherlands followed suit, the most drastic result being that Japan found itself without sources of oil. For the flow to resume, its armies would have to withdraw from both Indochina and China.
Japan could not survive as a modern nation without imported oil. The military, which had seized control of the government in the 1930s, gave the civilians six months to negotiate the resumption of imports, or it would secure a supply by force. But there was really nothing to negotiate: Japan was determined not to relinquish its conquests, and the United States would settle for nothing less. The Japanese carrier strike force sortied from the Kurile Islands under command of Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo on 26 November.
Japan went to war aiming to gain control of the oil fields and raw materials in what was intended to become its “Southern Resources Area”—the British and Dutch colonies in Southeast Asia and the East Indies. Whether the opening offensive should include an attack on U.S. Pacific possessions had been the subject of debate within the Imperial Navy. The chief of the Naval General Staff, Admiral Osami Nagano, believed it unwise to guarantee American belligerency. But the Commander-in-Chief of the Combined Fleet, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, demanded the neutralization of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, the only (potentially) enemy force in the area strong enough to pose problems to the Imperial Navy. Yamamoto had his way.
At Pearl Harbor, surprise was complete. Although an Army radar station detected the incoming Japanese planes, the duty officer who received the report assumed that the aircraft were B-17 bombers due to arrive from the West Coast. The first wave of attackers, 213 fighters and high- altitude- and torpedo-bombers, appeared over the fleet base at 0755. A second wave of 170 planes followed just under an hour later. By 1000 or thereabouts, the raid was over. Of the Pacific Fleet’s eight battleships, two were destroyed, two were sunk, one beached herself, and three escaped with relatively minor damage. Fortunately, not one of the fleet’s three carriers was in port. Ten other warships or auxiliaries were also damaged or destroyed. So were all but 47 of the 359 land-based Army, Navy, and Marine Corps planes on Oahu. Altogether, 3,681 U.S. service personnel were killed or wounded. The Japanese lost 29 aircraft over the island. All five of the midget submarines committed to an unsuccessful concurrent attack were lost as well.
For the short term, the raid achieved its objective. The crippled Pacific Fleet was unable to mount a challenge to the Japanese conquest of the Southern Resources Area, which was virtually complete by the beginning of May 1942. Over the long run, however, the attack was less productive. The units that comprised the shattered battle line had been obsolescent at best. The aircraft carrier, upon which the Pacific Fleet then had no choice but to rely, would emerge as the true capital ship of this new war. Furthermore, the Japanese had failed to hit Pearl Harbor’s repair facilities, submarine base, and immense oil tank farms. Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, the air group commander, urged Admiral Nagumo to launch a second strike; but Nagumo, who had always regarded the attack as a desperate gamble, preferred to go while the going was good.
Worse yet for Japan, the fact that the attack had come without benefit of a declaration of war filled Americans with a wrath that would push them across the Pacific into Tokyo Bay. Ironically, the Japanese had intended to deliver a war message shortly before the raid, but, owing to a Sunday morning staff shortage, the diplomats at the embassy in Washington were unable to transcribe and present it until afterward. This failure allegedly caused a shaken Yamamoto to remark, “It does not do to cut a sleeping throat.”
Perhaps what happened that morning has been less galling to some Americans than the question of how it could have happened. After all, a U.S. carrier had launched a successful “attack” on Pearl Harbor during Fleet Problem XIX in 1938. A devastatingly effective British air assault on the Italian fleet base at Taranto in November 1940 had set a real-war precedent that had, in fact, helped inspire the Japanese plan for Pearl Harbor. Visiting the Pacific Fleet base in the summer of 1941, British officers had cautioned that the Taranto Raid could be repeated there, but their warning went unheeded. Further, code-breaking was a major consideration. U.S. cryptanalysts had been deciphering much of Japan’s most secret radio traffic, but the Pacific Fleet commander. Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, and Lieutenant General Walter C. Short, commanding the Hawaiian Department, never received all the decoded information. Sifting through this mass of intercepts, with the advantage of hindsight it is easy to find a trail that points toward Pearl Harbor.
Reviewing the circumstances in the context of the international situation, several theorists have concluded that the Pacific Fleet was surprised because it was the victim of a conspiracy of silence. The theory contends that President Roosevelt and his advisors were eager for the United States to enter the war against the Axis Powers. The American public, on the other hand, was staunchly isolationist, convinced that intervention in World War 1 had been a mistake not to be repeated. The President was in need of an outrage so infuriating that the people would rally behind him in support of the war. Roosevelt and his men therefore set up the Pacific Fleet, intentionally withholding intelligence that would have alerted Admiral Kimmel to the immediacy of the threat. And, of course, it all worked to perfection: the people united in a steely determination to defeat Japan, and Germany obligingly declared war on the United States on 11 December. In short, the Pacific Fleet was sacrificed on the altar of Machiavellian statecraft.
Leaving aside the ethical issue, the conspiracy theory possesses an internal consistency. What it does not possess is proof. Its proponents account for the absence of evidence by explaining that the conspiracy was scarcely the sort of policy about which principals exchange memoranda. And, naturally, any other incriminating materials were weeded from the files. This argument has yet to win the assent of the historical profession. And, of course, the ethical issue should not be left aside: to posit that the President, the service chiefs, and the many mid-level officers who must have been marginally in the know would have icily offered up the fleet for destruction staggers the imagination.
How, then, can we explain the terrible surprise at Pearl Harbor? It is not necessary to conjure a conspiracy. Human error suffices.
For further reading: Edward L. Beach, Scapegoats: A Defense of Kimmel and Short at Pearl Harbor (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1995); Gordon W. Prange, At Dawn We Slept (New York: McGraw Hill, 1981): Paul Stillwell, Air Raid: Pearl Harbor! (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1981); H. P. Willmott, The Barrier and the Javelin; Japanese and Allied Pacific Strategies, February to June 1942 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1983).
