A pilot in pajamas, a cocksure government,
and an ill-timed headline. Pearl Harbor was an impossible target…until it wasn't.
The loss of life at Pearl Harbor was absolutely devastating, but perhaps the most distressing
part of the whole thing is that Pearl Harbor shouldn't have happened in the first place. The
lead-up to the attack is packed with bizarre coincidences and straight-up luck, and it all
starts with the person who masterminded the whole thing – he didn't actually want to attack Hawaii.
According to the New York Times, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto felt there was no way
Japan could win a war against the United States. Yes, he came up with the plan to
launch a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, but he said it was, quote, "conceived in desperation."
Yamamoto had lived in the U.S. for years, even attending Harvard. He desperately
tried to stop his government from making an alliance with Nazi Germany. In Japan,
he was seen as a stooge of America, to the point that some people wanted to assassinate him.
When given the job of planning an attack on the U.S., he lamented that he'd been "assigned the
mission diametrically opposed" to his personal beliefs. But, he ultimately did what he was told.
The Pearl Harbor Visitors Bureau says there were others who were against
the attack. Admiral Osami Nagano, chief of the Naval General Staff,
also opposed the raid. But he presented the plan to Emperor Hirohito, who approved it.
"The Japanese Press is taking a seemingly bold attitude toward the United States today."
Still, people even tried to get the emperor to change his mind, including his own brother,
Prince Takamatsu, and the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal of Japan, one of his
closest advisers. Just weeks before the attack, Yamamoto was still hoping it wouldn't happen,
saying he wished the emperor would decide against war since Japan had little chance of success.
In 1941, neither the U.S. nor Japan actually wanted to go to war with each other ... yet.
Plans were definitely being put in place on both sides, and an eventual conflict had become pretty
inevitable, but it was to the advantage of both countries to put it off a bit longer.
According to History on the Net, Japan was low on vital supplies like oil, iron,
and food. America, on the other hand, didn't have as many fighter planes and warships as
their possible opponent and wanted to stall in order to catch up on the military side.
Then something explosive happened. While America and Japan were still negotiating diplomatically
and U.S. officials were specifically chastising their counterpart's aggressive stance,
the magazine United States News published an inflammatory article, stating:
“…how easy it would be for United States B-17 bombers
to blow Japan off the map in case of trouble."
It said America had wartime levels of the bombers at seven locations, all within attacking distance
of Tokyo. The article claimed the planes could travel 6,000 miles and easily drop incendiary
bombs on important cities and factories that were made of rice-paper and wood.
The information in the article was totally wrong. B-17s didn't have that kind of range
for one thing – but, the Japanese didn't know that. The article almost certainly made it to
Asia, and just five weeks later, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. It's more than possible
United States News thoughtlessly jump-started Japanese plans before America was ready.
There is a conspiracy theory that FDR knew Japan was going to attack Pearl Harbor and
let it happen so Congress would agree to join the war. While this isn't true,
what is true is that the American government and military absolutely should have known,
and the fact they didn't is almost unbelievable.
A declassified memorandum from the Office of Naval Intelligence
shows that three days before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt received a 26-page memo
detailing how Japan was looking to start "open conflict" in Hawaii.
According to historian Craig Shirley, just like with 9/11, the government
was unprepared because they had a "failure of imagination" and were, as Shirley describes:
"Kind of in denial because they didn't think anybody would be as audacious to move an army
thousands of miles across the Pacific, stop to refuel, then move on to Hawaii to make a strike."
In the months before the attack, Admiral James Richardson warned about moving the
whole fleet to Pearl Harbor, saying that it would be open to attack. In response,
Richardson was ignored and replaced, but he wasn't the only one. The Trumpet
shed light into others who warned about incoming attacks, reporting:
"The chief of naval intelligence was replaced
because he insisted that Pearl Harbor should be warned of impending attack."
In the year before, a Peruvian envoy in Tokyo, a top British agent,
a Korean agent, and a report by the navy itself all informed various government officials that
Pearl Harbor was going to be attacked. Yet, somehow, the military was completely unprepared.
"A Japanese air armada attacked the American Naval base at Pearl Harbor,
Hawaii – knocking out half the U.S. Navy in a few hours."
To be fair to the American government and military, there was a good reason
they didn't think Japan would attack Pearl Harbor: It should have been impossible.
According to the U.S. Naval Institute, yes, the U.S. did things wrong.
But more important and often overlooked were all the things that had to go right
for the Japanese. Apparently, as the U.S. Naval Institute reports it:
"Without the detailed planning and nearly flawless execution of the preliminaries,
the attack would have never succeeded."
Just three months before the attack, the Japanese military realized they had,
quote, "technical and operational shortcomings that needed to be fixed"
if they wanted to triumph. Japan knew the U.S. was monitoring their ships' radio messages,
so they had to devise a way to hide their plans, including using a special cypher.
Had America cracked it, they might have learned about the attack. On the other hand,
Japan needed to keep getting and correctly deciphering intelligence from U.S. radio
messages, especially those from Pearl Harbor. And information about the attack had to be contained,
specifically not getting to the ears of any foreigners.
This was all on top of the need for good weather and American mistakes to happen. Yet it all
played out according to plan. Everything the Japanese did came together. Luck was with them,
and America screwed up enough to make an audacious sneak attack come together almost perfectly.
The date of the Pearl Harbor attack was planned very carefully even down to a specific day of
the week – Sunday. Japan had done their research, and they knew that Sunday morning meant a whole
lot of soldiers would be at church off-base, not ready to defend their ships at a moment's notice.
This also increased the chances the attack would stay a surprise until the last minute.
Religion was quite literally used against Pearl Harbor as a weakness. Even those in the military
who didn't attend church weren't necessarily going to be ready to fight on Sunday morning.
Attacking on the weekend meant lots of people were also sleeping in and relaxing.
This is especially evident when you look at one of the four pilots who
managed to get a plane in the air to defend Pearl Harbor.
Lieutenant Phil Rasmussen was still asleep when the attack started at 7:55 A.M. Extremely groggy,
he got out of bed, grabbed a pistol, hopped into an outdated plane that hadn't been damaged yet,
and shot down a Japanese fighter before being forced to land, all while still in his pajamas.
America's battleships were the country's, quote, "strategic center of gravity in the Pacific,"
according to the Naval History and Heritage Command. There were nine of them, all named
after states, and they were vital to America holding off any aggression from Japan. And Japan
already had one more battleship than the U.S. did, so keeping those nine in good order was vital.
On December 7, one of these ships, the U.S.S. Colorado, was getting an update in California.
But the other eight were all in Hawaii, with seven of them lined up right next to each
other in "Battleship Row." The eighth wasn't far off, in the drydock. For a Japanese force
that was desperate to destroy them, they couldn't have asked for an easier target.
"You could see ‘em in the cockpit right there,
right above you. You could see them when they smilin' at you."
The battleships were sitting ducks. Twenty-four torpedo planes attacked the boats,
with 21 out of 29 warheads hitting their marks. The majority of people killed at
Pearl Harbor died when the Japanese bombers sank the Arizona, which the official Visitors
Bureau says was one of the first ships to get taken out. The Oklahoma also sank.
The National Park Service says a tenth "demilitarized" battleship, the U.S.S. Utah,
which was on the other side of the island, went down as well. None of them could be salvaged.
The immediate and devastating loss of life at Pearl Harbor is an excruciating piece of
American history. But most people don't know that the effects of the attack are still wreaking havoc
on the harbor. The wreck of the U.S.S. Arizona is considered sacred since it's the final resting
place of more than 1,100 sailors and Marines. This means the military is hesitant to mess with it at
all. That could become a serious problem, since the wreck also contains 500,000 gallons of oil.
According to the Belleville News-Democrat, the U.S.S. Arizona leaks more than 2 gallons
of oil a day. It's enough that visitors to the memorial can see the oil slick on the water.
At that rate, the ship will keep leaking for the next 540 years.
Don't worry. That's probably not going to happen, but the reality will be so much worse.
The Washington Post says experts believe the hull will deteriorate way before then,
and all those hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil will come streaming out into the harbor,
an event they describe as "catastrophic."
But the Huffington Post reports Pearl Harbor is already an environmental disaster. In 1992, it
was added to the Environmental Protection Agency's National Priority List of hazardous waste sites.
By 1998, the health department had to start warning people that eating
fish or shellfish caught in the harbor was a very bad idea. There are over 700
"documented areas of contamination," many of which date back to World War II. Over the years,
5 million gallons of fuel spilled into Pearl Harbor, making it half the size of
the infamous Exxon Valdez spill. The resulting oil plume is the size of 15 football fields.