Quote:
Originally Posted by dugan
I don't even want to know what you wanted us to say. I can take a guess that you're leading into one of those "Pearl Harbor was an inside job" conspiracy theories though.
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The question of Pearl Harbor has been explored in great detail, and the consensus that I accept is that it was a diabolical military attack ... not something that the Commander-in-Chief "allowed" to happen.
One thing that we must remember is that communication, and navigation, was
much more primitive in those days. We didn't have satellites orbiting overhead. Although much has since been written about the Americans "breaking" the JN25 naval code, this statement is rarely understood to mean that the cryptologists could only interpret the meaning of a small, very-scattered number of code-groups, and that there were often very large(!) unresolved gaps in the superencipherment. There were no computers (to speak of) in those days. In any case, there would be no messages to decrypt: the Japanese attack force observed strict radio silence from well before they left harbor in Japan, and the Japanese Navy did not send any messages to the fleet. (Admiral Yamamoto was
very aware of the technology of the day.)
Although people scream that the Pearl Harbor defenders "saw the incoming planes on radar," we must remember that, at that time, there were no micro-electronics of any sort. Therefore, we had only very primitive radar, and the Japanese Navy didn't have radar at all. (See:
http://ethw.org/Radar_during_World_War_II.)
The operators were reading oscilloscopes, not plot screens like you see in the movies, and they had to know within a very-few degrees in which way the antenna array was pointing ... which they did
not know. A radar echo could be anywhere along a line
in either direction, and there was plenty of noise. It was
long-wave radar, and "long" waves bounce and spread-out. Range was short and bearings were approximate. Ground controllers could not provide bearings guaranteed to hit their targets, and airborne radar did not yet exist. Furthermore, command and control systems needed to make timely use of the information
(such as it was ...) were also in their dirty-diaper infancy.
No GPS. Entire fleets navigated using log-lines, clocks, and sextants. The way that you knew that "the enemy was out there" was mostly when ... and
i-f ... you
saw them.
Finally, the US Navy could not
afford the losses that it incurred, both in terms of ships and sailors. It is inconceivable that any Commander-in-Chief would have "allowed" such a thing for any 'reason,' political or otherwise.
You see, America could have
lost the Pacific war on that single day. The Japanese military philosophy was always to deliver a single, knockout blow, and they almost succeded in doing that on December 7th. By almost every standard military measure, at the beginning of the war Japan held
all the cards in the Pacific. No one matched their raw military strength in the region, and no other country was in any position to challenge their dominance ...
and Japan knew it. Therefore: had the Japanese succeeded in wiping out the aircraft carriers (all
four of them ...), as they obviously intended, they
would have wiped out the Pacific fleet in a single stroke, and Hawaiians might be speaking Japanese right now.
As it was, they very nearly succeeded anyway. In the early days, World War II in the Pacific was desperately close to being lost.
Had Pearl sortied every one of its airplanes and sent them all in the right compass direction, it would have been a turkey-shoot for the Japanese. It is entirely possible that they
all would have been shot out of the sky, and Pearl would have been bombed anyway. If the Japanese had destroyed the aircraft in the air, they might have chosen other targets, such as fuel depots and high-command centers.
("Admiral Chester Nimitz died at his office desk, December 7, 1941," "the American cryptanalysts at Pearl Harbor were obliterated," and so-on. The could-have-been headlines are very grim.) We don't know for certain if the Pearl Harbor fleet was being followed by an invasion force that could have
seized a now-undefended Hawaii. It could have been a very different war, decisively ended (before it began) in the Pacific in a matter of
days. Yes, the Japanese Navy was
that powerful, and, in those days, we were not.
