On the face of it, President Roosevelt's daring gamble in providing a Japanese surprise attack on an unwarned Pearl Harbor appeared at the time to be a glorious success. Considering the magnitude of the political stakes in the game he was playing, the loss of a few strategically antique dreadnaughts and the death of three thousand men were trivial, indeed. Roosevelt's operations had enabled him to bring the United States into the war with a country strongly united behind him. That it turned out in this manner was only because of several strokes of almost incredibly good luck which could hardly been expected and which he did not deserve. But for these the surprise attack might well have proved the major military disaster in the history of the United States.
First of all, was the personality, policy and operations of Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, who commanded the Japanese task force that made the attack. He was a member of the Japanese moderate party which wished to keep peace with the United States. He was a personal friend of Saburo Kurusu who had been sent to Washington in the autumn of 1941 to aid Ambassador Nomura for this purpose, and he opposed precipitating war with the United States. Moreover, as a matter of naval strategy, Nagumo never approved of Admiral Yamamoto's bold plan to attack Pearl Harbor,
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believing it far too risky and likely to end in disaster. Nevertheless, due to the rigorous Japanese seniority rule, he had to be placed in command of the task force assigned to attack Pearl Harbor although his record as a naval officer was not distinguished.
Nagumo was nervous and worried during the trip from the Kurile Islands to Hawaii. As soon as the successful attacks of the Japanese planes on Pearl Harbor on the morning of the 7th was reported to him, Nagumo ordered the task force to head back toward Japan. If Commander Minoru Genda, who had handled the strategic planning and details of the surprise attack, or Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, who directed the actual attack on the 7th, had been in command of the task force and attacked Pearl Harbor again on December 8th, the Pacific War might have been turned in favor of Japan in the course of the next few days, or even few hours. As the most favorable outcome for the United States, victory could have been postponed for several years, at great additional expense and appalling losses of war vessels and manpower.
The machine shops and other mechanical equipment, the army and navy supplies, and the large store of oil at Pearl Harbor were highly vulnerable to bombing. The oil was still above ground. The planes that remained available at Pearl Harbor after the attack on the morning of the 7th could have put up no decisive resistance to Japanese fighter planes and bombers. The anti-aircraft batteries were not sufficient to repel another Japanese bombing attack, although they might have inflicted more damage than was the case on the morning of the 7th. With the machine shops, military equipment and oil supplies destroyed, the heavy cruisers and carriers that had been sent on to Wake, Midway and Johnston Islands might have been rendered helpless as soon as their oil supply ran out and been captured by the Japanese unless they had been scuttled by their own commanders. The damaged or sunk ships at Pearl Harbor could not have been reconditioned.
Admiral Yamaguchi, commander of the second Japanese carrier division, announced that he was ready to send out fresh planes for a third attack even on the afternoon of the 7th, and those which had been used on the morning of the 7th could have been made ready for a better planned attack on the morning of the 8th. Yamaguchi, Genda and Fuchida begged Nagumo to remain and continue the destruction at Pearl Harbor, but Nagumo refused, and Yamamoto declined to intervene and compel Nagumo to remain and press the
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attack, which would surely and inevitably have destroyed Pearl Harbor for a year or two, at least, as our great Pacific naval base in the mid-Pacific. To have recaptured Hawaii from the Japanese or defeated Japan from the Western coast of the United States would have been a colossal, prolonged and expensive undertaking and would have seriously reduced or slowed down our effectiveness on the European front.
It has been said that the Japanese could have landed and taken over the Hawaiian Islands immediately after attacks on the 7th and 8th. This is not likely because the task force did not have any landing craft for an extensive occupation. But with the American heavy cruisers and the carriers rendered useless after their oil and gasoline ran out, the Japanese could certainly have returned with all the landing craft and other equipment needed and very possibly taken over the Hawaiian Islands before the United States could have provided successful resistance. To be sure, General Short had an excellently trained army of over 30,000 troops in Hawaii, but with their facilities, equipment end armament devastated by Japanese attacks on the afternoon of the 7th and the morning of the 8th, their effectiveness would have been greatly impaired. All of these possibilities were clearly foreseen in a panicky message sent by the top Washington military brass to the Pearl Harbor command on the morning of December 9th which is described below.
Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, who ultimately succeeded Admiral Kimmel and directed the naval warfare which delivered the decisive victories over the Japanese in the Pacific, agreed with Genda and Fuchida: "Future students of our naval war in the Pacific will inevitably conclude that the Japanese commander of the carrier task force missed a golden opportunity in restricting his attack on Pearl Harbor to one day's operations, and in the very limited choice of objectives." Hence, it is no exaggeration to maintain that it was Admiral Nagumo's timidity, hesitation and lack of strategic vision and courage which transformed Roosevelt's desperate gamble of goading the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor from a major national calamity into a great American strategic and political success for the moment.
Nagumo did have some relatively minor considerations to support his hesitation about remaining to renew the attack on the 7th and 8th. He knew that the carriers Enterprise and Lexington were somewhere between Wake and
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Pearl Harbor with their escorts of heavy cruisers, and he did not know when the carrier Saratoga might be returning from the West Coast. He feared they might all converge on his task force if he lingered to devastate Pearl Harbor and the Army installations. He needed more fuel to indulge in any prolonged further action. His worries were actually unjustified, for Kimmel, right after the attack, had ordered Halsey and Newton to take their station with the two carriers southeast of Wake to await Nagumo's return and launch an attack on all or a part of his task force, and the Saratoga was only just leaving the West Coast. Nagumo would have been safe in remaining until he destroyed the installations and equipment at Pearl Harbor on the 8th.
Even with the benefit of Nagumo's stubborn timidity, the naval war with Japan might not have turned out to be a string of naval victories if our naval cryptanalysts had not been able to break the Japanese Naval Code JN-25 for the late summer of 1940 [this date should read 1942ed.]. Through Commander Rochefort and others it was then possible to supply Nimitz and other naval commanders with the Japanese naval battle plans before the major conflicts. This breaking of JN-25 and earlier Japanese naval codes was a long and slow process, the result of good organization and teamwork rather than the feat of any one genius in cryptanalysts. The work was started by Commanders Safford and Rochefort in 1923-1927 and not completed until late summer in 1940 [again, this date should read 1942ed]. Further checking was, of course, constantly required to deal with minor changes in the code, new ciphers and the like.
This assertion of the indispensable services of Rochefort and his associates is well confirmed by our defeat at Savo in August, 1942, when our naval forces were commanded by Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner and met heavy losses, only escaping virtual annihilation because the Japanese commander did not recognize the seriousness of the losses he had inflicted. As a leading naval expert on the Pacific War, and himself a crucially important participant, wrote me: Savo was a more disgraceful defeat than Pearl Harbor, but whereas Kimmel, who was surprised in the bargain was dismissed in disgrace, Turner came through his disgraceful performance at Savo in a blaze of glory and was allowed to continue as head of amphibious operations." My informant did not add that Turner was saved from possible further disgrace later on mainly by the genius of Admiral Raymond A. Scruance our real expert in directing amphibious warfare.
10.
Even with the aid of Nagumo, Nimitz, Safford, Rochefort, and Spruance, Roosevelt's gamble might have been temporarily frustrated if he had not had aid from across the Atlantic and from, of all persons, Adolf Hitler, through the latter's idiotically precipitate declaration of war on the United States on the Thursday after Pearl Harbor. Japan had failed to support Hitler in 1939, and especially in the summer and autumn of 1941. Hence, he did not have the slightest moral reason for honoring his formal commitments to Japan in the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis, but had every political and military reason for ignoring them. If he had been adroit and realistic, after the fashion of Churchill and Roosevelt, Hitler would have sent the American people a strong note of condolence over our losses as a result of the "treacherous Japanese surprise attack", and declared his firm neutrality in the forthcoming war between Japan and the United States. This would have seriously upset Roosevelt's intrigues with Churchill and their joint arrangements with Russia, as well as gravely hampering and delaying the prosecution of the war in both Europe and the Pacific.
Instead, in one of the most rash, ill-considered and fateful acts of his whole career, Hitler did not wait long enough even to discover the reactions of the American people to the Pearl Harbor attack, once the initial shock of our losses had worn off. He declared war on the Thursday after the Japanese attack on Sunday. This virtually destroyed the possibility of American anti-interventionists being able soon to demonstrate that the attack was due to Roosevelt's withholding warning information from Pearl Harbor. Of this the Intelligence and Communications operating groups in Washington were well aware at the time and might have leaked the information as a result of their indignation. Somebody, apparently, did leak this information to Dewey's headquarters in the autumn of 1944.
The directors of America First were actually debating about continuing operations when a rumor of Hitler's imminent decision on war arrived and frustrated this possible decision. Confirmation of this is contained in a letter written to me by the distinguished American industrialist and railroad magnate, Robert R. Young, on June 2, 1953. Young wished America First to continue even after Hitler's declaration of war:
I happened to be one of the three dissenting voices when the Directors of the America First Committee voted to disband on the Wednesday after Pearl 125 Harbor. I felt then and still feel that if the Committee could only have been kept going some of these people who will become national heroes could have been made to pay for their sins by their liberty or even by their lives. If the Republicans had not been equally corrupted they could have had the whole damned crowd in jail.
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