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The attack on Pearl Harbor is one of the most important events of the Second World War, firmly bringing the United States into the war as a united angry nation. It is also widely considered to have been a brilliantly planned operation on the part of the Japanese, carried out almost perfectly.
Stille makes two main arguments. The first key argument is that the Japanese plan for the attack was nowhere near as impressive as is often stated. That isn’t to say that they achieved some very impressive things while preparing for the attack – working out how to refuel their fleet at sea, how to operate large carrier air groups from multiple carriers, how to drop torpedoes into shallow water and creating a potentially ship busting bomb for their level bombers, but that there many flaws that might have been exposed if the American response had been better. One of the most significant was a tendency to produce a single plan and stick to it regardless of events – at Pearl Harbor the main example of this was lack of of a clear plan for what to do if the US aircraft carriers weren’t in harbour at the time of the attack. This meant that the aircraft that had been instructed to focus on any aircraft carriers had to make their own decisions about what to attack instead. Target selection wasn’t great, with many of the dive bombers allocated to carriers choosing to attack battleships, despite instructions not to waste their smaller bombs on targets they would struggle to damage but instead go for cruisers and other more vulnerable ships. Although the Japanese did have two alternative attack plans for if surprise was or wasn’t achieved, in either case their fighters weren’t used to escort the bombers and instead sent to attack US airfields. In the event surprise was achieved, so this didn’t matter, but if the Americans had been more alert and had been able to get more fighters into the air, then the unescorted Japanese bombers would have been very vulnerable. Choosing to send the bombers in in a long thin formation was also a mistake – by the time the second wave arrived enough anti-aircraft guns were manned to make sure that this cost the Japanese relatively heavily, exposing each bomber in the stream to a focused attack. We also look at the famous midget submarine attack, while Stille condemns as a foolish act that could very easily have alerted the Americans to the upcoming attack (indeed really should have done so!). Less familiar is the operation by the best of the Japanese fleet submarines, which were posted all around Pearl Harbor in the expectation that they would be able to sink a significant number of US warships as they left the harbour. This part of the operation was a total failure, with not a single US warship even damaged.
A second key part of Stille’s argument is that the losses at Pearl Harbor didn’t actually weaken the US Pacific Fleet all that much. At first glance this seems odd – after all of the eight battleships present at Pearl Harbor two were sunk and never repaired, two sank but were repaired, although didn’t return to service until 1944 and four suffered more minor damage. Of these one remained in service and two were back by February 1942. In the immediate aftermath of the battle the US Pacific Fleet was thus down to a single active battleship!
The most convincing aspect of Stille’s argument here is that these older battleships were simply too slow to operate with the fleet carriers, which Pearl Harbor had demonstrated would be at the heart of any future major naval battles. All eight were First World War vintage 20-21 knot battleships, making them at least 20 knots slower than the fleet carriers. It is true that when the damaged battleships came back into service they were mainly used as shore bombardment vessels, while the newer faster battleships entering service in 1942 onwards were used with the carriers, but we will never know what the US Navy might have chosen to try if they actually had all eight battleships intact.
Tucked away in the appendices is an alternative history version, in which firmer control from Washington gets the commanders on Hawaii to do their jobs properly, send out search planes, find the Japanese fleet and blunt the worst of the attack. The section dealing with the actual attack on Pearl Harbor is convincing, with the Americans able to take advantage of flaws in the Japanese plan to reduce the damage, leaving them with a largely intact Pacific Fleet. One possible alternative course of events after that is given, in this case suggesting that the course of events after a less successful Pearl Harbor wouldn’t have been that different to what actually happened. However one issue that isn’t address here is what might have happened if the American political leadership had come under pressure to use the intact battleship fleet to try and rescue the besieged US garrison of the Philippines. Much is made of the lack of suitable fleet oilers, but one of Stille’s arguments elsewhere is that the Americans were able to overcome other setbacks at great speed, so why not this one? It is sometimes forgotten that the surrender of Corregidor didn’t come until early May 1942, only a month before the battle of Midway. The US Navy would have thus had six months to try and mount a mission. A less positive version of events might have seen an intact battleship fleet, reinforced from the Atlantic, attempting to reach the Philippines, thus exposing itself to the exact sort of ‘decisive battle’ the Japanese always wanted, and who knows how that might have gone?
There is an excellent section on the American side of the story. This looks at what defensive forces were available, what information the top Army and Navy commanders at Pearl Harbor had, what their roles were, and what they actually did. It is fair to say that neither Admiral Kimmel, commander of the Pacific Fleet or Lt General Walter C. Short, commander of the Hawaiian Department of the US Army, emerge at all well. In late November they both received war warnings, but effectively kept their forces on a peacetime footing. Short does worse than Kimmel, actively making his forces less prepared than before the war warning. Most famous was his decision to line his aircraft up in the middle of the runways because he was afraid of sabotage. This meant that a large number of US army aircraft were destroyed on the ground – far more than if they had been dispersed into their revetments, even if saboteurs had attempted to attack the airfields! Several times we are told that entire formations of aircraft can’t be launched because their guns had been removed to be serviced, a remarkable reaction to a war warning! Very few were fuelled and armed ready to go. On Kimmel’s side anti-aircraft guns were left unmanned and unarmed, and his sizable force of patrol aircraft was entirely unused. The island’s information centre wasn’t fully manned, and its radar stations only turned on for short periods. Even the sighting and sinking of one of the midget submarines in the entrance to the harbour well before the air attack failed to put the Americans on alert. Both commanders dismissed the idea of a surprise air attack on Pearl Harbor, despite having carried out exercises against that very event, and being aware that the location of the main Japanese carrier force was unknown. Neither emerges well from this disaster.
This is an excellent analysis of the attack on Pearl Harbor, with an excellent examination of the Japanese planning, both for the attack itself, and what they expected it to actually achieve.
Chapters
1 – The Road to Pearl Harbor
2 – Yamamoto and the Great Debate
3 – The Japanese Plan
4 – The Striking Force
5 – The Pacific Fleet and Pearl Harbor Defences
6 – The Striking Force Approaches Pearl Harbor
7 – The First Attack
8 – The Second Attack
9 – The American Reaction and the Myth of the Second Attack
10 – The Forgotten Offensive: Japanese Submarines off Hawaii
11 – The Reckoning
12 – Why Pearl Harbor Matters
13 – Kimmel and Short: Responsibility Misplaced?
Author: Mark E. Stille
Edition: Hardcover
Pages:
Publisher: Osprey
Year: 2025