COULD PEARL HARBOR HAVE BEEN AVOIDED?

COULD PEARL HARBOR HAVE BEEN AVOIDED?

(Shelly Barclay, Lester H. Brune, Richard Dean Burns)

(Doris “Dorie” Miller, Frazer Chronicle)

This is the day that has lived in “infamy” for more than 70 years and been the defining moment in hundreds of thousands of people’s lives. It’s like the Kennedy assignation (where were you on that day, and at that hour). Kennedy was shot and died in November of 1963…..50 years ago last month, Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese, 72 years ago, before I was even born.

I’ve often wondered what events lead up to the bombing of the island paradise and why it had to happen. For whatever reason, I simply can’t envision any nation bombing the United States, could Japan have been so naïve that they didn’t think that the U.S. would retaliate…..in spades? War itself generally makes little sense, but the attack on Pearl Harbor in and of itself sparks the imagination…..and begs the question…..why?

Japan’s attack on December 7, 1941, almost defied logic then, and today as well, all these years later. The attack took 2,402 lives and left more than 1,280 injured, put a huge dent in America’s navel power, and scrambled a slumbering giant wide awake. The attack may have been a Japanese military coup short term, but cooler heads should have prevailed.

EVENTS LEADING TO THE ATTACK ON THE PEARL

A series of events led to the attack on Pearl Harbor, war between Japan and the United States had been a possibility that each nation’s military forces planned for since the 1920’s, though real tension between the countries did not begin until around the early 1930’s. The incident that sparked tensions to heat up between the two countries was the Japanese 1931 invasion of Manchuria.

Over the next decade, Japan expanded slowly into China which led to an all-out war between the two in 1937. In 1940, Japan invaded French Indochina in an effort to embargo all oil exports into China, including war supplies purchased from the United States. This move prompted the U.S. to embargo all oil exports, leading the Imperial Japanese Navy to estimate that it had less than two years of bunker oil remaining and to support the existing plans to seize oil resources in the Dutch East Indies. Planning had been underway for some time on an attack on the “Southern Resource Area” to add it to the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere that Japan envisioned in the Pacific.

Tensions further escalated over the Japanese when the military exerted increasing influence over government policy, adopting the creation of a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere as part of Japan’s alleged “divine right” to unify Asia under Emperor Hirohito’s rule, threatening already-established American, French, British and Dutch colonies in Asia.

After the embargoes and the asset freezes, the Japanese Ambassador to Washington, Kichisaburo Nomura, and U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull held multiple meetings in order to resolve the Japanese-American relations. But no solution or compromise could be agreed upon for three key reasons:

1. Japan’s alliance to Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy through the Tripartite Pact.

2. Japan wanted economic control and responsibility for Southeast Asia.

3. Japan refused to leave mainland China.

The U.S. embargoes gave Japan a sense of urgency, it would either have to agree to Washington’s demands or to use force to gain access to the resources it needed. In their final proposal, on November 20, 1941, Japan offered to withdraw their forces from Southern Indochina and not to launch any attacks in Southeast Asia providing that the United States, Britain, and the Netherlands ceased aiding China and lifting their sanctions against Japan.

There was, of course, a counter proposal by the United States six days later, November, 26, 1941, that would require Japan to evacuate all of China without conditions and conclude non-aggression pacts with the Pacific powers.

Prior to December 7, 1941, Japan pursued two simultaneous courses: to get the oil embargo lifted on terms that would still let them take the territory that they wanted…..and to prepare for war.

TORA, TORA, TORA

There were warning signs that an attack was imminent, the United States had broken the diplomatic code, and in fact, a warning had been sent from Washington to Pearl Harbor…..but it arrived hours after the attack had already happened. There also was early warning radar, and although Japanese planes had been spotted, the information was ignored.

At a couple minutes before 8:00 A.M. Hawaiian time, the first wave of 353 Japanese fighters, bombers and torpedo begin strafing and bombing Pearl Harbor, and raining destruction down on the unprepared Navel ship-yard. The Japanese force included 6 aircraft carriers, 2 battle ships, 2 heavy cruisers, 1 light cruiser, 9 destroyers, 8 tankers, 23 fleet submarines, 5 midget submarines and 414 aircraft, quite an armada no matter what the era was.

To understand how completely different war is today, all of the above listed naval power slogged across the ocean completely undetected. That in and of-itself was a huge military achievement and came as a profound shock to the American people. However to the United States military leaders, the shock was more subdued, there was complete disbelief and a sense of embarrassment how successful the Japanese attack was.

All told, the Japanese forces lost 29 aircraft, and five midget submarines lost, and 65 servicemen killed or wounded, and one Japanese sailor was captured. The following day, December 8, 1941, the United States declared war on Japan. Domestic support for non-interventionism, which had been strong, disappeared.

In quick succession, the support for Britain and the neutrality patrols by the United States were replaced by active alliances. As a result of the U.S. aligning itself with Britain on December 8^th both Germany and Italy declared war on the United States on December 11^th. The United States reciprocated the same day…..declaring war on both German and Italy.     

A FALSE HOPE

Although the United States was down on that December 7^th morning the country was far from out, the Japanese military completely misread not only a lack of preparedness, but read way more into the U.S. sentiment of non-intervention. Although the feeling was strong for peace at almost any cost, once there was an attack on U.S. soil, that sentiment completely melted away.

Possibly one of the most misunderstood of feelings in the entire history of warfare, was when the Japanese military decided to engage the U.S. navy on December 7, 1941, feeling that neutrality by the U.S. would hold them out of armed conflict…..of course history has completely debunked that theory.

Without doubt when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor December 7, it was one of the most important dates in United States history. It prompted the U.S. government to engage itself to join World War II in both the Pacific and the European theaters of war. It sadly also showed the people of the United States that living in an isolationist country did not mean that they were safe from attack. It was a sad lesson to learn, and one that came at a high price.

Relations between the two nations were crumbling, the Japanese were spreading propaganda about the United States in their own homeland, it seemed as if the people of Japan were gearing up for war before even the government, or the military leaders in the U.S. had realized what Japan was capable of.

The political niceties, the negotiations, speeches, the letters, decrees, notes and the embargos seemed to all grease the skids for war. If the United States had exhibited more of a readiness for war, Japan possibly might have aborted their plans for attack.

No matter the reasons why Japan attacked the United States, and the ensuing world-wide war that raged throughout much of the world, killing a staggering 48,231,700, the die was cast for an almost four year war that would reveal all sorts of revelations about the peoples that inhabit Mother Earth…..nobody escaped that.

HAVE A GOOD DAY!