Pearl Harbor, history, and the problems of journalism

Myth versus reality

Confirmation bias and fallacies like post hoc ergo propter hoc are a common feature in conspiracy theories. They let the proponents of such theories avoid the hard, messy work of investigating cause and effect; it makes it easy to find “proof” for the theory without the laborious research good historians undertake.

Journalists – who usually pose as the brave debunkers of conspiracy theories – are also prone to these same fallacies. You find them at the center of the fashionable “argument by epithet” so beloved by places like the New York Times and Vox.

The Founders were racist
The Founders created the Electoral College
Therefore, the Electoral College is a tool of White Supremacy.

Pulitzer prize winning journalist Steve Twomey relies on similar muddled reasoning in his book on Pearl Harbor.

Twomey believes that he has unlocked the final secret of Pearl Harbor. America's leaders were surprised because America was racist.

It goes all the way up to the racial assumptions about the potential ability of the adversary. From big things to small things, America was complacent about where things stood on December 7.

If you read the American magazines and newspapers in 1941, it’s amazing how the Japanese were considered a funny, curious people, who were technologically inept. They were supposedly physiologically incapable of being good aviators because they lacked a sense of balance and their eyes were not right. It was even believed that the Japanese were bad pilots because, as babies, they would be carried on the backs of their big sisters and got bounced around, so their inner ear was knocked askew.
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Americans, as a rule, did not credit the Japanese with having deep reservoirs of logic, as Americans defined it. Usually, they fell back on race-laden stereotypes. They reduced the entire nation to ‘the Jap.’ The Jap was a creature of the mysterious East, strange and implicitly inferior. He was inept, easily led, premodern, and uncreative.

If Kimmel and Short had been as woke as your average journalism student, then Yamamoto would have been thwarted on 7 December 1941.

QED

The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

Thomas Huxley

Had Twomey researched like a historian instead of a reporter, he would have realized that life is rarely as simple (or simplistic) as his journalistic account portrays it.

Much is often made of the racism that is said to have contaminated U.S. pre-war thinking about Japan. It is not to be found in gaming. Game documents did include what were supposed to be racial characteristics of the enemy, but in the case of Japan the usual special characteristic was fanatical courage and devotion to duty. It was not stupidity or rigidity.

Norman Friedman, Winning a Future War

Far from dismissing the skill of Japan's soldiers and sailors on racial grounds, in fact, repeated studies right up to 1941 emphasized the technical proficiency and warrior ethos of Japanese servicemen.

Richard Frank, Tower of Skulls

The US press may have underestimated the Japanese due to racism, but the US Navy had few illusions about their main adversary. Moreover, if bigotry explains why the USN did not accurately assess Japanese capabilities, how then does one explain Britain's similar failure vis-a-vis the US?

During the interwar period it was not so much that the British failed to recognize that carrier effectiveness depended on the number of airplanes that they could launch. Rather, as the only navy with carrier combat experience, British naval officers presumed that the relatively small numbers of aircraft they could generate at any one time represented the best anyone could do. Admiralty assessments of the US carrier developments during the 1930s indicate that the British discounted, if not disbelieved, American claims about the number of aircraft operating at one time from US carriers.

Barry Watts and Williamson Murray, "Military Innovation in Peacetime"

The inter-war Royal Navy was convinced, incorrectly, that aircraft developed to operate from carriers would necessarily be inferior to their land-based counterparts. That was acceptable as long as carriers fought only other carriers. It was entirely unacceptable if carriers had to beat off repeated attacks mounted from land bases. Gaming forced U.S. officers to confront exactly that situation, and therefore to demand high performance of their fleet aircraft. That had enormous wartime consequences.

Norman Friedman, Winning a Future War

In some respects, the Navy was guilty of giving the IJN too much credit. Was it racist to expect Japan to behave as a rational actor and to avoid national suicide?

Related:

Should we be surprised that we were surprised at Pearl Harbor?

Was Yamamoto a military genius? Or just a reckless gambler who got lucky?

II

I'm a journalist whose job it is to explain to others things he doesn't understand himself. 

Scott Shane, NY Times reporter 

I am a journalist and so am vastly ignorant of many things, but because I am a journalist I write and talk about them all. 

G. K. Chesterton 

Two journalists who understand the absurdity of the central conceit of journalists and journalism: That it is easy to master difficult subjects quickly and then pronounce on them authoritatively. The headlines promise the final word and imply that there is no room for doubt. Behind the scenes, though, the reality of the work is less reassuring:

A typical reporter on deadline calls a couple of people and slaps something into the paper the next day. 

Scott Shane 

That's how a marketing conceit leads to the daily deception of the customer. 

Journalism selects, promotes, and rewards people who buy into this absurd idea. Thus, the “authoritative” stories and books are written by the people least capable of writing them. 

As they go about the work of of “slapping something into the paper” ambitious reporters understand that their work will only stand out if they fill it with headline-grabbing quotes, vivid personalities, and telling anecdotes. The bottom line is that professional advancement depends on gathering superficial fluff. 

In this lecture, Twomey is quite open about how ill-suited his journalistic skills were for the task of historical research. He also remarks several times on his focus on personalities and good stories. 

We engineers have an aphorism: The fact that something is desirable doesn't mean it is feasible. 

Steve Den Beste 

Unfortunately, this is not an idea that is top of mind with most journalists. It complicates things, makes it hard to keep to a narrative, muddies things up. 

III 

Michael Knox Beran, in Murder by Candlelight argues that the educated progressives of the Victorian era broke with the past by creating comforting myths about crime and evil.

The more one gets into the habit of thinking of evil as a byproduct of social or economic circumstances, or as an anomaly in the neural architecture of the brain, the harder it becomes for one to take it seriously as a permanent element of the soul, one's own included.

This mindset makes evil the sole possession of the Other, not a temptation that each of us face everyday. It is something that can be viewed at arms length. 

In The Invention of Murder , Judith Flanders notes that melodrama was “the predominant narrative form." of the nineteenth century. The mass audience flocked to entertainments where story-lines were simple and straightforward: “melodrama characters have preordained parts: a villain is a villain, and will not become a hero." 

Modern journalism, which began at this time, found its mass audience by adopting the forms and tone of melodramas. It was easier to sell newspapers if the story could be presented as a conflict between heroes, villains, and buffoons. It was easier to write the story if reporters and editors had a simple narrative to follow as they hurriedly generated copy for the next edition. 

This, in part, explains the continued popularity of “Republicans pounce” and “conservatives seize” headlines when scandals touch liberal heroes and Democrats commit gaffs. The templates of melodrama allow for no flawed heroes let alone false heroes. No matter what the facts are the narrative demands that they be presented in a form that sees each character playing their predetermined role.

Pearl Harbor: Real Conspiracies and crank theories

There were real conspiracies surrounding the attack on Pearl harbor. Not the crank theories that blame those old devils FDR and Churchill with enabling the attack. Those are palpably ridiculous. What we have instead are the usual political and bureaucratic behavior after a disaster: shifting blame, finding scapegoats, covering up embarrassing information.

In 1941 that meant making it appear that everything would have been fine if Gen. Short and Adm. Kimmel had not dropped the ball.

J. Edgar Hoover, for instance, wanted the FBI to be an international spy agency as well as a national detective bureau and an internal security organ. It would look, bad, therefore, if it turned out that the FBI bore any responsibility or even appeared to be less than perfect.

As a master spy and defender of the Republic, Hoover was pretty close to an abject failure. He was without peer as a bureaucratic infighter and empire-builder.

So, with the feral cunning common to rats and ambitious bureaucrats, Hoover did his utmost to make certain Short and Kimmel took the hit. The White House was told (falsely) that Hawaii had received all the intelligence on Japan that was available in Washington. Congressmen and Senators were informed -- confidentially of course -- about the lack of cooperation between the Army and Navy in Hawaii (another fib). Leaks to compliant reporters made sure the public knew who was to blame (not the FBI or its director). Trusted FBI agents were placed at the center of the official investigations. (Hoover edited the drafts of their reports and findings).

Honesty took a back seat to appearances. Long before Fernando, John E. Hoover knew it was better to look good than be good.

If successful empires had a handbook Rule #1 would be “Focus on one threat at a time” and Rule #2 would be “Never fight a big war without allies.” Hoover understood this instinctively. In focusing on Short and Kimmel the FBI was working with some very powerful allies.

It suited the political leadership in Washington, particularly the President, to place all blame for the disaster on the heads of the commanders in Hawaii. That offered the public a pat explanation -- essentially that the officers on the spot had been caught unaware. Once they were replaced, the nation could get on with the war effort.
Paul Stillwell “Plenty of Blame to Go Around”

Roosevelt ordered the fleet to Pearl Harbor over the objections of his senior Naval officers. Pacific Fleet commander Adm. James O. Richardson protested too vigorously; FDR relieved him of command and replaced him with Kimmell.

In pursuit of short-term deterrence, the fleet was placed in a vulnerable base that lacked sufficient infrastructure for training and maintenance.

In the summer of 1941 FDR adopted a hard-line against Japan. In doing so, he sided with old New Dealers like Harold Ickes and Henry Morgenthau and overruled his senior military leaders. This confrontational stance was at odds with the “Germany First” strategy FDR had previously adopted. The administration now risked an early war before the buildup of forces in the Pacific could be completed. Despite the increasing tensions in the Pacific, Pearl Harbor was denied vital armaments which went to higher priority recipients. Gen. Short asked for long-range patrol bombers; they were designated for the Philippines and China instead. He requested funds to build additional airfields so he could disperse his aircraft and make them less vulnerable to surprise attack. The War Department refused on the grounds that the risk of surprise air attacks was low. The same reason was given when anti-aircraft defenses in Hawaii were not allocated modern 20mm and 40mm guns. Fighter planes were transferred from Hawaii to Wake Island and Midway.

Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox went to Pearl Harbor immediately after the attack. He was initially sympathetic to the commanders in Hawaii. He was inclined to ascribe a large portion of the blame to the lack of resources rather than dereliction of duty. His final report written after he returned to Washington focused on the failings of Kimmel and Short. They had enough resources and information; they simply failed to use them intelligently and energetically.

That was the narrative that took hold in December 1941. It did not emerge by accident.

In Washington, immediately after the attack, President Roosevelt and the secretaries of War and the Navy were putting together an investigating team. Known as the Roberts Commission, it comprised two retired Navy admirals, two Army generals, and Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts. It was, in essence, a kangaroo court, placing blame for the Pearl Harbor surprise squarely on the two major commanders, Admiral Kimmel and Army Lieutenant General Walter Short. In fact, the powers that be in Washington had been no more prescient than Kimmel in foreseeing an attack, and they had the advantage of the code intercepts that indicated war would begin soon.
Stillwell, “Plenty of Blame”

As usually happens, the narrative contained few out and out lies. It misinformed by omission. Critical facts were buried. For instance, decades would pass before the public learned that the FBI had a double-agent who had been tasked with obtaining detailed intelligence on Pearl Harbor and the methods the Royal navy employed in its raid on the Italian Fleet at Taranto. None of the eight official investigations even mention Dusko Popov.


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Pearl Harbor: Failed deterrence

Throughout 1941 Britain and the United States attempted to deter further aggression by Japan. They failed. The reasons for this deserve careful study.

FDR explained his policy toward Japan as “speak softly and build three ships to their one.” He wanted to play for time while his military buildup swung the strategic balance decisively in America’s favor.

Tokyo could read trend lines too. If the choice was between a risky war in 1941 and a hopeless war in 1943, then Japan would move in 1941. Soft words could not obscure the rising threat to Japan’s position in Asia.

Although I feel sure we have a chance to win a war right now, I am afraid that the chance will vanish with the passage of time.
-Adm. Osami Nagano Chief of the Naval General Staff September 1941

FDR’s deterrence policy was also based, in part, on an illusion. Much of official Washing was in the thrall of bomber madness. They believed that if war did come a few dozen B-17 bombers in Luzon could tip the strategic balance in the western Pacific.

Japan knew better. They had high quality intelligence about Britain’s strategic bombing campaign against Germany. They knew that in 1941 the B-17 was not a war-winning weapon.

Britain’s policy was not so much deterrence as a desperate bluff. Pressed to the wall in Europe, the North Atlantic, and North Africa, she had few resources to spare for Malaya. Churchill confronted Japan because he felt compelled to support FDR’s hard-line.

Churchill’s policy was doomed from the start. British forces in the Far East were handicapped by uninspired leadership, doctrinal backwardness, poor training, and low morale.

The PM was largely unaware of this; the Japanese were much better informed. In addition to their own spies they benefitted from the USSR’s penetration of the British government. Before June 1941 Stalin shared intelligence with Hitler who shared it with Tokyo. After Germany invaded, the Soviet Union had every incentive to provide Japan with the intelligence that would convince them to strike south rather north into Siberia.

When the time came, Japan would not hesitate to call Churchill’s bluff.

Significantly, Japan also engaged in a policy of bluff and deterrence in 1940 and 1941. The advocates of an alliance with Hitler were convinced that it would force the US to rethink its support for China and the European colonial powers.

The historically isolationist United States would not try to counter the powerful German-Italian-Japanese alliance by siding with Britain, whose moon is already waning.
RAdm Oka Takazumi

The Japanese leaders, rather like modern American Neocons, believed that deterrence was best served by frequent bellicose pronouncements.

[Foreign Minister] Matsuoka's misunderstanding of America's national character seriously clouded his vision, wedded as he was to the notion that only defiance would garner U. S. respect.
Eri Hotta, Japan 1941

The net result of this deterrent strategy was to squander Japan’s one slim hope of avoiding war and economic strangulation. If the US and Britain saw Japan as an “appeasable nation” they might accommodate her while they focused on defeating Hitler. The Tripartite Pact and Tokyo’s hostile, unyielding public posture destroyed this possibility.

Three nations sought to avoid war in 1941. All three pursued a policy of deterrence. All three failed. These failures deserve careful examination just as we have spent decades studying appeasement and learning the “lessons of Munich.”

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Was Yamamoto a military genius? Or just a reckless gambler who got lucky?

His claim to genius rests on one masterpiece: Pearl Harbor.

On the "just lucky" side of the ledger, we have some serious failures.

1. He completely misread his opponent. He dismissed the US Navy as “a social organization of golfers and bridge players.” He expected the shock of Pearl Harbor to bring the US to the negotiating table. Failing that, he counted on his initial onslaught to buy Japan 12-18 months of US inaction that would let her solidify her gains.

The much-maligned Adm. Nagumo was much more astute. He argued against the Pearl Harbor raid precisely because it would preclude the negotiated settlement that was Japan’s best hope. No matter how brilliant it was operationally, it represented a grave strategic error.

The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish … the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature. This is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive.
Clausewitz, On War

The operational success also produced smaller short-term gains than Yamamoto promised. Defeat at Pearl Harbor did not paralyze the US Navy for 18 or even 12 months. Nimitz’s forces were conducting carrier raids against Japanese bases by February 1942.

2. Like many Japanese officers he was quick to believe that his enemies would act as he needed them to act for his plans to work. Hence, Midway.

Too much of the Japanese plan hinged on its flawless execution and too little margin for error was left to absorb the unexpected friction. While it is possible though inadvisable to to make such assumptions in the opening phase of a war against an unsuspecting victim (as in the case of Pearl Harbor), it is practically suicidal to assume that any complex plan can be executed perfectly in an ongoing war.
Michael Handel, Intelligence and Military Operations

3. He showed no real skill in the improvised war of 1942-1943.

"One cannot ignore the simple fact that not a single [Japanese] operation planned after the start of the war met with success
H. P. Willmott, Empires in the Balance

4. He had no sense of what Clausewitz called “the culminating point of victory.” Japan’s grand strategy called for victory through determined, protracted defensive warfare to force the US to accept a compromise peace. Yamamoto never really turned his mind to preparations for this phase of the war. He looked always for fresh opportunities for conquest: Midway, the Solomons, New Caledonia, Ceylon…

Japan reached its level of incompetence, where it fought with all its power and to the death. The battlefields of New Guinea and the Solomon Islands were simply too large and too far forward to suit its tiny logistical and transport capabilities....Japan was fighting precisely the war which least suited its material resources, a prolonged and costly battle of attrition beyond easy reach of its supply system.
Michael Handel and John Ferris, "Clausewitz, Intelligence Uncertainty and the Art of Command”

These hopeless adventures and impossible fantasies squandered irreplaceable forces and delayed preparations for the defensive struggle that would decide Japan’s fate and even her survival.

5. Japan launched the war to acquire vital raw materials. Yamamoto, who served as Deputy Navy Minister before he took command of the Combined Fleet, never developed a doctrine, a strategy, nor the forces necessary to protect the sea-lanes that carried those resources to the Home Islands. This failure left Japan practically helpless against US submarines. From 1943 onward, the Japanese war machine was slowly strangled even as her admirals dreamed of the “decisive battle” that would win the war in a day.

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Pearl Harbor: Clausewitz and the path to imperial suicide

In the summer of 1941 the US Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Harold Stark met secretly with Japanese ambassador Kichisaburô Nomura. The envoy was a former admiral and the two naval men were trying to prevent a wider war in Asia. The discussions led nowhere. Nomura had nothing to offer because his government was adamant that the “China Incident” could only end with a Tokyo victory.

Adm. Stark ended the conversation with a warning about the danger Japan faced if she persisted in her aggressive course. A war with America could only end as a disaster for Japan. Even if Tokyo won some initial victories, her destruction was inevitable:

You will be unable to make up your losses, while we, on the other hand, will not only make up our losses, but will grow stronger as time goes by. It is inevitable that we will crush you and break you empire before we are through with you.

Ambassador Nomura did not reply. How could he disagree? He understood the correlation of forces as well as Adm. Stark. War with America meant almost certain doom.

Yet, in December 1941 that was the course the leaders of Japan chose.

In On War Clausewitz writes that any war is shaped by the interplay of three forces: passion, reason, and chance. In his era the major challenge for a government was a deficit of passion; the populace often remained detached from the war and uncommitted to the cause. Government policy and military capabilities were constrained as a result. When a government could harness patriotic passion as Napoleon did in France the war-making power of the state made a giant leap forward.

Always, though, passion was harnessed by the state (reason) and military professionalism.

In the decade before Pearl Harbor, passion broke free from nearly all constraints in Japan. Military officers took it upon themselves to murder politicians and senior officers who were insufficiently supportive of military adventures. The Navy was forced to deploy tanks and machine guns to protect its headquarters against radical officers. Yamamoto was himself a target because he opposed the Tripartite Pact with Hitler and Japans invasion of China.

Army officers actually initiated hostilities in China and Manchuria with no notice to, let alone approval by, the government in Tokyo.

A pattern had been set: a hopelessly passive government accepting military aggression that it had neither initiated nor endorsed.
Eri Hotta, Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy

It is not strictly accurate to say that Japan’s leaders chose war. They chose to drift along and avoiud hard choices.

Eri Hotta:

There had been no clear-cut, overwhelming consensus among the Japanese leaders to take preemptive actions in the Pacific and Southeast Asia. Many remained hopelessly uncertain and ambivalent about their decision.
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Having talked themselves into believing that they were victims of circumstances rather than aggressors, they discarded less heroic but more rational options and hesitantly yet defiantly propelled the country on a war course.

Clausewitz:

No one starts a war-- or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so-- without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it.

Admiral Stark’s warning to Nomura was prophetic. Before the war the war ended Japan weas crushed and her navy was destroyed. The Pearl Harbor strike force was not spared. None of the twenty surface ships survived the war. By July 1944 the Kodo Butai ceased to exist as a meaningful force. Japan, which once led the world in naval aviation, no longer possessed a modern navy.

The US Navy did grow stronger by leaps and bounds. At Pearl Harbor Yamamoto massed all of Japan’s naval airpower: six carriers and less than 400 aircraft. By February 1944 the US Pacific Fleet could send nine carriers and nearly six hundred aircraft to strike Truk.

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Should we be surprised that we were surprised at Pearl Harbor?

The “intelligence failure” that wasn’t

Maybe the real failure is in our understanding of how intelligence works and what it can do

Puzzles and mysteries

Risks and Riddles

There’s a reason millions of people try to solve crossword puzzles each day. Amid the well-ordered combat between a puzzler’s mind and the blank boxes waiting to be filled, there is satisfaction along with frustration. Even when you can’t find the right answer, you know it exists. Puzzles can be solved; they have answers.

But a mystery offers no such comfort. It poses a question that has no definitive answer because the answer is contingent; it depends on a future interaction of many factors, known and unknown. A mystery cannot be answered; it can only be framed, by identifying the critical factors and applying some sense of how they have interacted in the past and might interact in the future. A mystery is an attempt to define ambiguities.

Puzzles may be more satisfying, but the world increasingly offers us mysteries. Treating them as puzzles is like trying to solve the unsolvable--an impossible challenge. But approaching them as mysteries may make us more comfortable with the uncertainties of our age.

It is tempting to reduce all intelligence questions to puzzles. It is appealing to think that Benedict Cumberbatch can single-handedly defeat the Nazis by breaking their unbreakable Enigma ciphers.

Unfortunately, life rarely imitates art when the stakes are highest.

If our intelligence systems and all our other channels of information failed to produce an accurate image of Japanese intentions and capabilities, it was not for want of the relevant materials. Never before have we had so complete an intelligence picture of the enemy.
Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision

In 1941, the commanders at Pearl Harbor thought they were solving a complicated puzzle. In reality, they faced an insoluble mystery. Tragically, as the US got better at solving the known puzzle, we became more vulnerable to strategic surprise at Pearl Harbor.

Without a theory, the facts are silent.
Friedrich Hayek

Every puzzle is grounded in a theoretical framework; that is what makes it challenging yet solvable. Intelligence work looks like a puzzle when analysts and officers can uncover new pieces of information which when fitted into an existing and valid theory provide timely warnings and actionable estimates.

With an invalid theory, facts are not always silent sometimes they become positively misleading. That is why we were surprised on 7 December 1941. Contra Wohlstetter, in the last half of 1941 we no longer had a “complete intelligence picture of the enemy.” We were blind and deaf.

This was not a failure of US intelligence. The Japanese Navy had invalidated our theories with series of sweeping, even revolutionary advances in their capabilities. Yamamoto then harnessed these new capabilities to overturn twenty years of Japanese strategic planning. And it all happened with almost perfect secrecy.

In 1941 our “Theory of Japan” was anchored on a few key premises:

1. In the event of war with Britain or the US, Japan would have to quickly secure access to the resources of the Dutch East Indies. Without these, her war economy would be strangled in a matter of months.

2. Given the distances between Japan’s bases and her targets, Japan would have to depend on her aircraft carriers to provide fighter cover and close air support for the invasions and land campaigns.

When Japan moved to occupy southern Indochina in July 1941 the carriers went south to support the invasion thus confirming this premise.

3. Strategic logic compelled Japan to engage the US Navy in the western Pacific. The long voyage of the Battle Fleet to the Philippine Sea would afford the Japanese submarines and land-based bombers plenty of opportunities to reduce the US strength prior to the decisive battle. Perhaps most importantly, this “home waters strategy” would conserve precious fuel (see point #1).

US analysts knew that Japanese war plans had been based on this logic for two decades.

4. We expected Japan to seize the strategic initiative with surprise attacks. In the Philippines and Malaya, surprise might be decisive. Such an attack on Pearl Harbor would amount to little more than an annoyance: Japan lacked the forces to mount a strategically meaningful attack that far from her bases. One cannot fault the US high command for focusing on the more dangerous and more probable threat.

All of these points were true and valid in January 1941. All of them had been falsified by 1 December 1941.

The puzzle had become a mystery. Worse, this transformation left few traces for the intelligence services to investigate.

The only way that the US could have known this is to have placed a spy on Yamamoto’s staff. That was their only hope of unraveling the mystery.

Paradigm Shift

Pearl Harbor's Overlooked Answer

Japan’s carrier force--known as Kido Butai--was evolving so quickly on the eve of the Pacific war that almost no naval intelligence organ would have been able to track, internalize, and gauge those capabilities.
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Kido Butai was a truly revolutionary weapon system for its time because it embodied the conceptual leap from single-carrier to coordinated multicarrier operations. Kido Butai ’s ascendancy would last only about six months before it was permanently mauled at the Battle of Midway, but during that time there was nothing else like it. The U.S. Navy would not acquire a similar sophistication until roughly late 1943--more than two years later.

No matter how many Japanese messages our code breakers read, we were never going to discover the secret. None of the important and useful information was included in diplomatic cables; Yamamoto’s new strategy was not broadcast to the nation nor was it shared with Japan’s allies.

There was no signal -- only noise.

Actually it was worse than that. Under the old, now outdated theory, the Japanese movement toward Malaya meant that the risk to Pearl Harbor had actually decreased.

All prewar assumptions about Japanese aggression had been based on the belief that Japan lacked the strength to mount more than one invasion attempt at a time.
H. P. Willmott, Empires in the Balance

Finally, underpinning all the risk assessments and intelligence estimates was one bedrock assumption: Japan was a nation-state and nation-states behave rationally. Launching an unprovoked surprise attack on US soil would drag Japan into an unlimited war with a country that had twice her population and 10 times her industrial capacity. In short, a war she was sure to lose.

No rational actor would do such a thing.

Pearl Harbor

This book demolishes many of the myths that have grown up around the attack.

You can listen to the "fireside chat" FDR gave to the nation on 9 December 1941 (here).

Two articles that examine the nature and causes of the intelligence failure:

How the Japanese Did it

Pearl Harbor's Overlooked Answer

Why the Pearl Harbor attack succeeded

Good discussion on the unavoidable conceptual limitations of intelligence analysis that made surprise highly likely on 7 December 1941.

Pearl Harbor's Overlooked Answer

Accurately assessing a potential enemy threat hinges on one’s appreciation of the enemy’s capabilities. If you don’t know what your adversary can do, it is nearly impossible to predict likely operational targets or ways to forestall attacks. In the case of the Pearl Harbor attack, the U.S. Navy had no real inkling of Japanese carrier warfare capabilities and therefore could not accurately assess likely operational targets. Not only that, but Japan’s carrier force—known as Kido Butai —was evolving so quickly on the eve of the Pacific war that almost no naval intelligence organ would have been able to track, internalize, and gauge those capabilities. An all-encompassing answer to the reasons for Japan’s surprise is elusive. But examining the extraordinarily rapid development of Japan’s carrier force in late 1941 reveals a stark picture of the U.S. Navy’s odds of being able to understand the type of foe it was going up against.

The most important facet of the Japanese attack—the thing that made it so stunning—was the sheer number of aircraft involved. The Japanese did not just assault Pearl Harbor; they simultaneously hit every major airfield across the breadth of Oahu—Ewa Mooring Mast Field, Naval Air Station Pearl Harbor, Naval Air Station Kaneohe Bay, Wheeler Field, Hickam Field, and others—to remove American airpower as a threat to Kido Butai ’s carriers. Simultaneously hitting so many targets required massive numbers of planes—183 and 171 in the two attack waves. That was unprecedented.

In fact, Kido Butai was a truly revolutionary weapon system for its time because it embodied the conceptual leap from single-carrier to coordinated multicarrier operations. Kido Butai ’s ascendancy would last only about six months before it was permanently mauled at the Battle of Midway, but during that time there was nothing else like it. The U.S. Navy would not acquire a similar sophistication until roughly late 1943—more than two years later. 

As Hayek said: "Without a theory, the facts are silent." And the US Navy did not have the theory that could have lead analysts to "connect the dots" in such away as to predict a carrier strike on Pearl Harbor.

The author covers this ground here is a pretty good lecture for those youngins' who prefer to take three times as long to learn half as much.

Operation Snow and the attack on Pearl Harbor

Pearl Harbor and the path to war

Two interesting articles on the run-up to the Pacific War.

A Strategy has to be able to work to be masteful

The author has made an in-depth study of the Japanese plans and actual attack. He is less than enthralled with the "genius" of Commander Minoru Genda and Admiral Yammaoto.

Japan's Decision for War in 1941: Some Enduring Lessons

Still, it cannot be denied that, in threatening Japan's economic destruction (and consequent military impoverishment), the United States placed the Japanese in a position in which the only choices open to them were war or subservience. "Never inflict upon another major military power a policy which would cause you yourself to go to war unless you are fully prepared to engage that power militarily," cautions Roland Worth, Jr., in his No Choice But War: The United States Embargo against Japan and the Eruption of War in the Pacific. "And don't be surprised that if they do decide to retaliate, that they seek out a time and a place that inflicts maximum harm and humiliation upon your cause."

The key lesson for today is to recognize that a policy can be morally right but strategically obtuse.

The U.S. insistence, after Japanese forces moved into southern Indochina, that Japan evacuate China as well as Indochina, as a condition for the restoration of trade relations, thus made no sense as a means of dissuading the Japanese from moving south. On the contrary, the demand that Japan quit China killed any prospect of a negotiated alternative to Japan's conquest of Southeast Asia (e.g., restored trade in exchange for Japan's withdrawal from Indochina). In effect, the United States went to war over China rather than Southeast Asia -- a volte-face of enormous strategic consequence since it propelled the United States into a war with Japan over a remote country for which the United States had never been prepared to fight. The fate of China, even of Southeast Asia, did not engage core U.S. security interests, especially at a time when Europe's fate hung in the balance. A war with Japan was, of course, a war the United States was always going to win, but Japan was not the enemy the Roosevelt administration wanted to fight. The United States could have settled its accounts with Japan after Hitler's defeat had been assured. Was denying Japan an expanded empire in Southeast Asia more important, in 1941, than defeating Hitler?

Remember Pearl Harbor

A recent book that challenges conventional history, paranoid conspiracy theories, and ill-informed revisionism. Highly recommended.


The defeat at Pearl Harbor was temporary. What we need to remember is the courage shown on that day and the determination and skill that let the US Navy recover so quickly. The Japanese were confounded and defeated because of that quick recovery.

New insight unto the day of infamy

Pearl Harbor 2.0

The “infamy” of December 7, 1941, is deeper than most Americans have ever imagined. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was almost certainly the result of a Soviet plot—“Operation Snow”—carried out by Harry Dexter White, a figure of enormous influence in the Roosevelt administration and a known Soviet spy.

Hoover and Pearl Harbor

I found this paper fascinating.

The FBI’s Role in the Pearl Harbor Attack(.pdf)

However, mounting new evidence clearly demonstrates not only that the Pearl Harbor commanders shouldered the blame unjustly but that the FBI secretly and shamelessly contributed to this result. Specifically, the FBI successfully: (1) shielded investigation of its own failures from all Pearl Harbor investigations; (2) acquiesced to the Commission Chairman’s perjury to Congress; (3) secretly influenced Congress’ report to protect the FBI at the expense of the Army and Navy; (4) secretly made false accusations against Admiral Kimmel and General Short; and (5) conspired to withhold evidence from the Attorney General.

Just another example of the sort of dirty bureaucratic games that Hoover played every day he was with the Bureau. That's old news but the article shows that Hoover's lies and distortions still color the historical record.