A Date Which Will Live In Infamy

[MA-Caver]

Pearl Harbor Day 2009: three enduring mysteries

http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20091207/ts_csm/aunsolved

In the end, the Japanese achieved almost complete tactical surprise. And in that might lie the key to understanding Pearl Harbor, writes Hanyok, the former NSA historian.
The key could be not the surprise per se, but the skill of the Japanese. Most US analysis of Pearl Harbor probe for American mistakes, or they at least see the attack in an American frame of reference.
"But the key to understanding why the surprise assault was so successful lies in realizing what the Japanese did right," according to Hanyok.

The Japanese military were indeed brilliant strategists. They have had centuries of warfare experience to bring them up to that moment. They used tactics that could've been applied to air and sea though they were largely land-based fighters on their own island.
Studying the attack shows this, sweeping in from various flanks by air simultaneously and thus not allowing the enemy to focus on any one point and attacking various strong & weak points all at once during the first and second waves. Just bloody brilliant. Their intelligence gathering was also first rate... providing valuable information as to the berthing sequence of key ships in the harbor making it easy for the planes to pick and choose their targets.

The article also stated that it was completely out of our frame of reference. That no-one would DARE do such a thing. A mighty fleet of ships and a terrific military might built up from the last war and as Yamoto observed... "... a sleeping giant". Yet they dared to do it and succeeded... except for one fatal flaw... the destruction of the U.S. carrier fleet which inevitably helped in keeping the Japanese from expanding west of Hawaii.

Thoughts

 

[terryl965]

Yes they had alot of talent but they forgot what would come after Pearl Harbor, nobody thought about how we would retaliate.

 

[MA-Caver]

Yes they had alot of talent but they forgot what would come after Pearl Harbor, nobody thought about how we would retaliate.

I don't think that Yamoto was that short sighted. His famous "sleeping giant" quote shows that. They KNEW that such an attack would rouse the U.S. into retaliatory action and war. Yet they still chose to do so. Hoping to cripple the U.S. into immobility on the seas long enough to launch a land base invasion of the U.S. coast.
Again, what was their eventual failure was to destroy the carriers in this attack (and at Midway). They were disappointed that the carriers were nowhere to be found but went ahead with the attack anyway because of the battleships anchored there would prove just as dangerous to their carrier fleet and land bases and eventually the main home island of Honshū.

Their ability to sneak in close enough without detection to launch their aerial attack and the flight plan of the various bombers and torpedo planes shows careful meticulous planning. The false embassy bartering for peace in Washington was also a carefully laid smoke-screen to the attack.

 

[terryl965]

So true Ma-caver

 

[grydth]

I don't think that Yamoto was that short sighted. His famous "sleeping giant" quote shows that. They KNEW that such an attack would rouse the U.S. into retaliatory action and war. Yet they still chose to do so. Hoping to cripple the U.S. into immobility on the seas long enough to launch a land base invasion of the U.S. coast.
Again, what was their eventual failure was to destroy the carriers in this attack (and at Midway). They were disappointed that the carriers were nowhere to be found but went ahead with the attack anyway because of the battleships anchored there would prove just as dangerous to their carrier fleet and land bases and eventually the main home island of Honshū.

Their ability to sneak in close enough without detection to launch their aerial attack and the flight plan of the various bombers and torpedo planes shows careful meticulous planning. The false embassy bartering for peace in Washington was also a carefully laid smoke-screen to the attack.

Nice topic, but I must respectfully disagree on certain points.

The launching of the attack without the American carriers present was a fatal miscalculation. The failure to return with a second strike to finish the job left ships and port facilities available for a rapid build up and counteroffensive just months later.

The obsolescent battleships at Pearl Harbor were not nearly the threat to Japan that the carrier battlegroups would be.

The loss of those older battleships was no long term hindrance to a nation which had the ship building capacity we then possessed. For such allegedly great strategic thinkers to have failed to develope ways to effectively strike at mainland America and its production/transportation capacity was another failing which doomed them.

While much has been made of American racism, the Japanese racist view of America was another factor in their demise. It wasn't that we pale hairy barbarians thought nobody would dare attack us, but rather it was red hot anger that a nation would stoop to such a thing. My Father was one of millions who went to recruiting stations in the days after Pearl harbor... the Japanese assumed we'd quit, especially after high casualties... a miscalculation of a fury that resulted in Japanese cities burning just a few years later. The Japanese underestimated their enemies (not just America, but China), a failing that usually is terminal in sports or in war.

A tactical success... a strategic failure.