Misremembering Pearl Harbor. By historian Victor Davis Hanson.
Most Americans once were mostly in agreement about what happened on December 7, 1941, 80 years ago this year. But not so much now, given either the neglect of America’s past in the schools or woke revisionism at odds with the truth. …
On an early Sunday morning at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the Japanese Imperial Navy conducted a tactically successful, but strategically imbecilic, surprise attack on the U.S. 7th Fleet — while at peace and without a declaration of war. The assault [was] synchronized with subsequent bombing and invasions of the Philippines and British-controlled Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong, and some Pacific Islands …
Revisionist nonsense about why Japan started the war:
The Pacific war that followed Pearl Harbor was not a result of America egging on the Japanese, not about starting a race war, and not about much other than a confident and cruel Japanese empire falsely assuming that its stronger American rival either would not or could not stop its transoceanic ambitions. …
Revisionists often cite conspiracy theories that the Roosevelt Administration lured Japan into the war by previously limiting oil exports to Tokyo (a mere five months before Pearl Harbor) or by foolishly moving the 7th Fleet from San Diego to a deliberately exposed and not so well defended Pearl Harbor.
Such contrarian views fail to persuade because the one-sided source of tensions had been clear to all for a decade. Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931. It resumed its war with China by invading the mainland in 1937. In September 1940, it absorbed French colonial Indochina. The idea of a Japanese Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was informally circulating by 1940, as a blueprint of consolidation of the planned Japanese imperial wartime acquisitions of China, and the former British, American, French, and Dutch colonial territories.
The mercantile system was envisioned as a sort of Asian version of a would-be Napoleonic Europe but based on the supposed racial superiority of Japan and the propagandistic and cynical notion that even harsher Japanese imperialism would be less resented by Asians in the Pacific than then current nation-building colonialism of Western powers.
Such crude propaganda was never taken too seriously outside of Tokyo, given the Japanese mass civilian killings of conquered Asians in Nanking, China and the massacres that followed from the takeover of Singapore. …
The real reasons:
Japan attacked Pearl Harbor because it could. Its fleet was larger than the American Pacific 7th fleet (though not by any means the entire U.S. Navy). And in many categories of fighter aircraft, torpedoes, and ships, the Japanese Imperial Navy in late 1941 was temporarily superior to that of the Americans. …
Japan believed that, with the German army at the time of Pearl Harbor just a few miles from the suburbs of Moscow, the Soviet Union would likely fall within days. Hitler would then be free to consolidate his continental empire and soon vanquish remnants of the once proud allied opposition. In other words, Japan calculated that it might gain credit for the inevitable Axis victory before the war ended, and thus grab what it could before the spoils were fought over and divvied up to others. …
Tokyo had no real appreciation that the United States was already building a second fleet of modern carriers, battleships, cruisers, and submarines that would soon make the American navy larger than all the world’s fleets combined. …
Tokyo had no inkling that the anemic Depression-era American economy was capable of rapid expansionary growth. More specifically, the American gross natural product by late 1944 would outpace all five economies of the major combatants — Germany, Italy, Japan, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union — combined. …
Were there more viable strategic alternatives for the war-minded Japanese? Plenty. By 1941, the European colonial presence in the Pacific was mostly either weak or nonexistent. That reality offered the Japanese options to acquire resources without war with the United States.
Both France and the Netherlands had been under occupation by the victorious Germans since June 1940. Had the Japanese simply expanded their newly acquired Indochina concessions — appropriated from the Vichy French in 1940 — grabbed the equally orphaned oil-rich Dutch East Indies, and been content with conquering resource-rich, British-held Malaysia and its fortress port at Singapore — while bypassing Pearl Harbor and the Philippines — there would have been little likelihood even then of the United States entering the conflict. …
Admiral Yamamoto, the architect of Pearl Harbor, is often romantically portrayed as a mythical almost reluctant warrior who supposedly all along knew that he would awaken a sleeping giant by the attack. …
Nothing could be further from the truth. Yamamoto himself agitated for the surprise Pearl Harbor attack. And he even threatened to resign if a skeptical General Tojo and Emperor Hirohito did not grant him a blank check to bomb the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Hawaii, a diversion of resources many in the Japanese military felt was unjustified, especially with the ongoing and increasingly expensive quagmire in China. …
It was largely Yamamoto’s enormous ego, his tactical genius, and his strategic ineptitude, along with Japanese hubris, that explain the strategic idiocy of a brilliant but short-lived victory at Pearl Harbor.
As far as the December 7 surprise attack itself, it is best seen as the worst of both worlds — conducted expertly enough to ensure damage and thus incur American furor, but not so much as to cripple America’s war-making ability or to frighten the American public into submission. …
As it happens the three US carriers at Pearl were out to sea and not destroyed in the attack, but even the battleship situation could have been much worse for the Americans:
As far as the relatively old and slow American battleships of Battleship Row (most were built well before 1920), had their captains received advanced word of the Japanese approach and steamed out to meet the attackers without air cover, American fatalities might have been 10 times higher — given all eight battleships likely would have been sunk on the high seas well before reaching the Japanese fleet.
David H.:
I was surprised when entering Pearl Harbor on HMAS Melbourne in 1975 at the long, narrow channel joining the sea with the harbor and wondered why the Japanese aircraft had not bombed that channel to stop US Navy ships leaving the harbor. Unless I’m missing something…??
