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Thanks to the Disney propaganda machine, America is again remembering Pearl Harbor -- and with it, at least two old historical controversies.
One is whether the military commanders in Hawaii responded properly to the alerts they received. The other is whether they were properly alerted at all, because President Franklin D. Roosevelt was supposedly trying to maneuver the United States into war, and if he sat on his hands and allowed a Japanese sneak attack, then the American public -- isolationist and almost pacifist at the time -- would be roused into a war furor.
It seems beyond question that there were warnings. Relations between the United States and imperial Japan had been deteriorating for most of the preceding decade, and by late 1941, American military and diplomatic strategists believed an attack was imminent.
Pearl Harbor was a possibility, but the Philippines (then an American colony) seemed more likely. So on Nov. 27, 1941, all Pacific commands were alerted that an attack might happen at any time.
Lt. Gen. Walter Short was the U.S. Army commander in Hawaii. Since there was no U.S. Air Force then, he was also in charge of the military airplanes that weren't under Navy control.
Short's greatest fear was sabotage, not an aerial attack. So he bunched all the planes together to make it easier to guard them from saboteurs. That also made it impossible to get them off the ground in time to defend against Japanese bombers, and made the American planes sitting ducks for Japanese bombing and strafing.
It was a judgment call, and he made the wrong call. But it can hardly be said that he failed to respond.
As for the U.S. naval commander, Adm. Husband E. Kimmel, he took few if any steps to protect the fleet at Pearl Harbor. Instead, he dispatched the carrier Lexington to Midway to strengthen its defenses, and the Enterprise was sent toward Guam.
At least one military historian believes that this saved the Pacific fleet from annihilation.
This argument comes from Geoffrey Perret, who in 1989
published an engaging military history of the United States
called A Country Made by War.
Perret points out
that the Japanese most wanted to sink American aircraft
carriers.
If Kimmel had sent out long-range air patrols in response to the Nov. 27 alert, he would have soon known that the Japanese were coming. He would have called back his carriers -- and they probably would have been sunk in deep water by Japan's superior force. He would have sent out his battleships -- where they also likely would have been sunk in deep water, rather than in the shallow waters of the harbor where some could be raised and rebuilt.
Thus Kimmel inadvertently thwarted the Japanese goal of putting America's fast carriers out of commission.
As for FDR, he saw war as inevitable, and sooner would be better any time after 1939. But that was a war with Nazi Germany, which he saw as the major threat to American interests. Congress and the public generally wanted to stay out of the conflict in Europe, no matter what the president thought.
In the Pacific, FDR seemed to be doing everything possible to avoid war with Japan. Imposing some trade sanctions was about the size of American response, even after Japan, in the process of taking Nanking in China, deliberately sank an American gunboat, the U.S.S. Panay, in international waters on Dec. 12, 1937.
If FDR had been trying to push the U.S. into war with Japan, that was an ideal provocation. But instead, his state department accepted an apology from Tokyo and agreed it was a mistake.
So it's difficult to believe that FDR was somehow aware of Japanese plans to attack Pearl Harbor and kept the information away from the commanders, so that there would be a sneak attack that would rouse the public into war.
America did get to war against Nazi Germany, but that was only after Adolf Hitler surprised everyone by actually honoring a treaty (the Tripartite Pact with Italy and Japan) and on Dec. 11 declared war on the United States, which meant that even the most steadfast isolationists in Congress had to support war against Germany.
Roosevelt was brilliant and often devious -- but how could he have known that Hitler would honor a treaty with Japan when der Fuhrer had just broken one by invading the Soviet Union?
At any rate, we're often advised to remember the lessons of Pearl Harbor.
And the main lesson seems to be that history is complex and confusing. Actions that appeared responsible at the time (Gen. King's precautions against sabotage) turn out to have been wrong, while actions that looked irresponsible (Adm. Kimmel's failure to order long-range reconnaissance) turn out to have been blessings. If there's another lesson here, I sure can't see it.
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