Critical Reaction to Zimm's Attack on Pearl Harbor?

David Vandenbroucke Discussion

I am an economist by profession.  I try to sit in the back of the H-War room and not make trouble for people who know what they're talking about.

Recently I read Alan D. Zimm's Attack on Pearl Harborwhich I found absolutely fascinating.  He reconsiders every aspect of the Pearl Harbor raid, from conception to aftermath.  He is highly critical of the Japanese on the basis of military competency (the Americans, too, of course).  The result is to turn much of the standard narrative about Pearl Harbor upside down.  

Has there been any critical reaction to his book?  What do the professional historians think of it?  Is it the ground-breaking work it appears to be?  Is Zimm just a crank?  Are his conclusions correct?  Are they surprising?  I find him very persuasive, but I am painfully aware that I don't have the background to evaluate the book properly.

Dav Vandenbroucke
Senior Economist
Office of Policy Development & Research
U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development
david.a.vandenbroucke@hud.gov

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The only real problem with Zimm's work is recent scholarship on IJN underway replenishment capability at the start of WW2 has made his point on the Japanese operating at beyond logistically supportable extended ranges from their bases than planned plain wrong.

I'm referring to this article:

David C. Fuquea, "Advantage Japan: The Imperial Japanese Navy’s Superior High Seas Refueling Capability" The Journal of Military History 84 ( January 2020): 213-235.

Short form -- The WW2 USN institutional narrative on IJN underway replenishment in "Beans, Bullets, and Black Oil. The Story of Fleet Logistics Afloat in the Pacific During World War II" is wrong,

And Zimm replied upon it in his analysis.

The IJN in fact had a large UNREP capability at the beginning of WW2 through to the 25–27 October 1942 Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands. It was this at start UNREP capability that made Pearl Harbor, the Darwin raid, The Indian Ocean raid and Midway possible.

It was the US Navy's use of Ultra code breaking and submarines to hunt down the Japanese tanker fleet that broke the IJN UNREP capability.

The consistent breaking of Japan's most secure naval code was not foreseeable in pres-war Japanese planning.

I think Zimm did a fair bit (along with Parshall & Tully) for revamping our understanding of Pearl Harbor. Gordon Prange's magisterial work was, to a large extent, 'captured' by Mitsuo Fuchida who was, to put it politely, an unreliable narrator, and both Zimm and P&T show the distortions and inaccuracies caused by that capture. My major critique of the book (if I remember correctly -- it's been a bit since I read it) was that Zimm tended to let the perfect be the enemy of the good in his analysis and that a fair number of things he criticized the Japanese for doing wrong during the attack were the kind of errors that happen in every battle, rather than being really reflective of incompetence.

(It does also show the way in which folks from other disciplines can make useful contributions to military history -- even, I suspect, economists.)

I agree with most of the above, that Zimm's book (which I reviewed favorably for the online Michigan War Studies Review) is a useful critique of the Pearl Harbor operation, touching on areas that Prange (and Fuchida) ignored or got wrong. The Japanese were certainly fortunate that the US commanders in Hawaii suspended the high alert state they had enforced through the end of November 1941; had they maintained this alert the Japanese would have encountered a fleet at general quarters with AA guns loaded and ready, and possibly as many as 80 modern fighters in the air. It's not hard to imagine the high attrition within the Kido Butai aircraft striking force and a much lower level of damage inflicted on the US defenders. Zimm also persuaded me that a follow-on attack on the US naval support infrastructure at Pearl Harbor was neither contemplated nor even possible, given what the Japanese had available. Finally, Zimm chipped away effectively at the myth of Admiral Yamamoto as a naval genius, a demolition task completed by Parshall and Tully in their book about Midway.

Alan Zimm's The Attack on Pearl Harbor: Strategy, Combat, Myths, Deceptions is a highly-regarded  analysis by a highly-regarded professional naval analyst (and naval officer). Trent Telenko is correct in noting that it has become OBE in the one respect of Kaigun at-sea refueling capabilities, but the implication of a broader full-spectrum underway replenishment capability is unwarranted, for they had not developed means for transporting and transferring large volumes of stores, let alone ammunition. Nor, fast oilers aside, did the Japanese have sufficient logistic shipping to support sustained major operations. Indeed, it will be noted that the examples he cites were all brief raids.

Telenko's assertion that "It was the US Navy's use of Ultra code breaking and submarines to hunt down the Japanese tanker fleet that broke the IJN UNREP capability," needs some important qualification. The application of the ULTRA cryptonym to USN COMINT product output      belongs to a later date than the brief period of effective IJN at-sea refueling capability and COMINT's actual role in the destruction was less central than he makes it out to have been. Note also that ULTRA was only ever a product cryptonym, not a system one as his statement might be taken to imply.

I had the pleasure of aiding Alan in his research for the book and later shared a stage with him (at his invitation) in a series of lectures at JHU commemorating the 75 anniversary of the attack. My text has been published in a brief book, together with supporting information: Undefending Pearl Harbor: How America's Strongest Bastion Became its Most Weakly Defended.

Just to pile on, I've talked to a number of naval and military historians about the book, to include Chris Gabel, Jon House, John Lundstrom, Jon Parshall, and Will O'Neil.

I tend to agree with most of them--for whom the book is on the whole quite effective. The book is quite valuable as an operations analysis of the attack and corrects many many misconceptions, not the least of which is the mythical "third wave" and the supposed vulnerability of its targets, including the oil storage farm.
Zimm, is more than "just" and ops analyst, he is no mean historian. I first encountered his work on the Flying Deck Cruiser in Warship International, he has a real talent for teasing out stuff from the evidence that tends to contradict "conventional wisdom."

HIs Pearl Harbor is right up there with books like Learning War (Trent Hone), Shattered Sword (Parshall and Tully), Black Shoe Admiral (Lundstrom), and Battle of Surigao Strait (Tully) in revising our understanding of World War II in the Pacific.
vr, John T. Kuehn, Ph.D.
FADM E,J. King Professor, Naval War College

I am always enlightened by these exchanges as they expose the gaps in my own learning. I became, as a professional matter, interested in military history, especially US, given my on teaching and later work experiences in East Asian history concerning interactions between China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam (the Confucian or Sinic World).
While the contributors to this discussion are all very capable historians of American reactions to Japanese activities in East Asia and the Pacific, I wonder if the discussion could be broadened by introducing Japanese reactions to American actions and their view of the world after 1930. We know the "how" of the Japanese attack, but do we think it useful to discuss the "why"?
Alternatively, I know Dr. Kuehn teaches at CGSC. When discussing disasters like Pearl Harbor, have you ever used the matrix used by Cohen and Gooch in Military Misfortunes? When I was Command Historian in Korea I found it useful in explaining in a very brief compass parts of the Korean War. I found it fairly easy to modify to suit my pedagogic purposes.

The question posed by Dr. Bernstein is very central and very fraught: just why did Japan embark on a war that many of her foremost thinkers believed it very likely she could not win? The overwhelming majority of works published by Western scholars are seriously infected with mirror-imaging, greatly reducing their value. But most of the literature by Japanese authors is little better. To modern Japanese, prewar Japan is a foreign land. 

Remarkably, many Western historians seem almost as lost when it comes to the motivations behind U.S. actions. 

I essay some answers in appendices A and B to my Undefending Pearl Harbor: How America's Strongest Bastion Became its Most Weakly Defended, which if nothing else provides a useful bibliography of most of the relevant literature published up to 2015. I am at work, sporadically, on a more thorough exploration of these issues, drawing on some more recent publications.

Dr. Bernstein's question is a very good one indeed. And William O'Neil response is equally compelling. For one Japanese ultranationalist, insider's view of the road to Pearl Harbor, please see my new book, Zen Terror in Prewar Japan: Portrait of an Assassin. In addition, the critically important role that expansion into Manchuria played in prewar Japanese thought must also be taken into account. 

William O'Neil:
>The question posed by Dr. Bernstein is very central and very fraught: just >why did Japan embark on a war that many of her foremost thinkers >believed it very likely she could not win? The overwhelming majority of >works published by Western scholars are seriously infected with mirror->imaging, greatly reducing their value. But most of the literature by >Japanese authors is little better. To modern Japanese, prewar Japan is a >foreign land.

I found Sadao Asada's work provides a compelling answer to that question, and he seems to have a firm grasp on prewar Japan. I strongly recommend this work:

Asada, Sadao. From Mahan to Pearl Harbor: The Imperial Japanese Navy and the United States. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2006.

The ruling Imperial Japanese military factions of the interwar-WW2 period was a classic example of the "irrational regime under pressure hypothesis" that has been rattling around the noonosphere since 9/11/2001.[1] [2]

The basic concept of the hypothesis is that for certain unstable regimes (or even stable ones with no effective means of resolving internal disputes peacefully, particularly the succession of power) domestic power games are far more important than anything foreign, and that foreigners are only symbols to use in domestic factional power fights.

The reason "Irrational Regimes" become more so under pressure are due to the internal power games of "I'm more militant than thou" take over. This militant behavior is driven by the need to show ideological purity and resolve -- "virtue signaling" in modern terms -- as it became the primary means of achieving power and gaining resources inside the ruling faction in-group.

This power-reward process becomes far more important than objective reality. Outside reality is merely a prop or symbol to be used in the internal power games. And as external pressure in terms of objective reality mounts in the form of increasingly angry armed foreigners getting closer, "Irrational Regimes" become more so under pressure

This positive feedback loop of militant behavior in the Intra-Nippon military factional politics lead to the extreme self-defeating militancy that dehumanized the Imperial Japanese state & people in the eyes of the American people and political leadership. Thus leading directly to the events of August 1945.

Imperial Japan's Ketsu-Go suicidal fight to the death strategy of 1945, after losing Okinawa, was the ultimate expression of irrational Imperial Japanese militancy in pursuit of an unachievable national policy goal -- maintaining the Japanese imperial system via a post-war armistice rather than unconditional surrender.

U.C. - Santa Barbara historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa has described this factional decision making in enormous detail, in multiple articles and books, trying to establish what the positions of each faction were at each point in the decision process.

Short form:
Survival of the Imperial House was the only concern to those that made the surrender decision, and they had to consider the military die-hards in that as that faction had a very different agenda.

Hirohito et al wanted to surrender on terms which let them stay in office, subject to an American shogunate which they expected would be temporary, and got those terms from the Truman Administration.

The Emperor and his supporters wanted to avoid an invasion because they believed it meant a coup by the Imperial Japanese Army die-hard faction, and such complete destruction and starvation that the surviving Japanese civilians would kick the Imperial House out after the defeat…plus face a likely Communist takeover following termination of the U.S. occupation.

So it was a question of the Emperor and the peace faction getting the military die-hards to stand down. That was what the A-Bomb meant - the Imperial Japanese Army wouldn't get a glorious last stand as they'd just all be nuked from a distance.

And in this decision making, the A-Bombs, plural, were decisive.

It is my opinion that the chemical tests of Japanese physicists working for the separate IJA &IJN nuclear programs had detected the difference between the HEU Hiroshima and Nagasaki Plutonium bombs, telling the Imperial Japanese Military that America had two different production methods for making nuclear bombs.

The Soviet attack was icing on the cake. It gave the Imperial House another argument to use on their military fanatics - that the Communists would conquer the place because the Imperial Japanese Military couldn't defend Yamato. This was an emotional, not rational, argument.

This is why neither the chiefs of staff of the IJN & IJA provided zero support for the final coup attempt.

[1] The Noonosphere is the whole huge realm of ideas that are current and moving around from person to person. See the history of the concept here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noosphere

[2] The term "Irrational" is usually replaced with much less academic, and more derogatory, terms.

Since I opened this aspect of the discussion, I may as well comment too. In order to get a greater understanding we must consider a Japanese view of the world. We can find examinations of this in the various works of Akira Iriye as well as the several works of Dorothy Borg. Understanding the dilemma faced by the post-1919 Japanese military, especially the army, is also important. One should look at Mark Peattie's work as well as the older monographs by Richard Storry and Ben-Ami Shillony. James Crowley's work on Japanese national security policy in the 1930s is also instructive. Please do not ignore Ed Drea's work on the Japanese army and his interesting doctoral dissertation on the Japanese general election of 1942. James Crowley's work on translating Japanese semi-official history should not be overlooked neither should the work of Christopher Thorne. There are many other authors one can consult but I don't want this post to turn into a bibliography. To further complicate matters we should also consider the state of the world in July 1940 and the perceived military-diplomatic options for Japan, the USSR, Nazi Germany, the British Empire, and the USA.

I hope this expands the discussion a little.

Dr. Bernstein is quite correct to add these titles. Especially the mention of Ed Drea's work and the earlier work of Crowley and Peattie. Mark Barnhart and Japan Prepares for Total War should also be mentioned.

I am sure that Rich Frank's new work on the Pacific War includes some cogent prose on this topic, although it is on my reading list and I have not consumed it yet (but I will).

Finally, Will O'Neil vectored me to Japan's Road to the Pacific War series and it too, including the editor's comments has much to offer on this fascinating story of "why" go to war when the prospects seemed so dismal. Short answer is, of course, the slippery slope, and it was squarely in China.
However--shameless self promotion here-- I must add that if anyone wants a broad contextual trajectory suggesting some answers/questions, I might recommend my own A Military History of Japan, published by Praeger in 2015, a work of synthesis that provides key context from Meiji onwards and even before in the roots of Japan's long and troubled history as an imperial polity dominated by the Samurai class legacy after the Heiian Period.

vr, John T. Kuehn

Being a disciple of William of Occam I am prone to parsimony. We have puzzled over Japan's road to (self)destruction in the 1930s and 1940s and I cast my mind back to Political Science 101, learning about "status quo powers" and "non-status quo powers." The two main Axis partners were in the latter category and those in charge desired control of resources as well as the states and territories where those resources were located. Ergo, marches of conquest. The largest status quo powers, the USA and UK, were in the way -- tangentially, at least. To my mind the most interesting question is, could Japan have exercised restraint and pursued its Pacific Rim hegemony without directly confronting the USA? Here we get into murky territory, with the embargoes, economic & military support for the Kuomintang, etc. And if the Japanese had refrained from attacking the Pacific Fleet and our forces in the Philippines, what would it have taken to provoke America to declare war? Diplomatic coercion and third-party support was one thing, but isolationism was pretty strong on this side of the ocean, I think.

John K. is right, we have a lot more to read.

Ralph, after reading Dennis & Peggy Warner's book on the Japan/Russia war, I am convinced that personal ego of the Togo grandson of Marquis Togo Heihociru Sodeyosh who was trying in Pearl Harbor to emulate his grandfather's victory over the Russians . Also the long standing perception that Japanese were not up to talking on a Western Nation.

Walter McIntosh
Bluff, New Zealand.

Mr. Telenko's offered posting, allows am hoping for some reply which had been considering bringing forward as subject on H-war. It does inn ways relate to hese thoughts about historical evidences and decisions leading to war in the 1940s and Pacific region.

Prof. Brodie[UCLA/Rand Corp.], offered against the backdrop to Vietnam war, his slim volume, Escalation and the Nuclear Option[1966] a probable insight and reflection on this subject matter; his final chapter, the Appendix was devoted to The Intractability of States: A Distinctive Problem. In his thoughts of that time, he delved into some of the psychoanalytic thoughts of the day concerned with anti-violent influencing of an Adversary. Here, the effort to relate psychology to analysis of political problems and governmental decisions comes more focused.
As his chapter points out governments as composed of persons, both individual and groups. In particular n p.145, he calls attention to what psychoanalysis offers, not in the examination of state to state relations but, "the profitable area is rather relations of individuals within each state, especially those factors which account for the rise to power and to influence of particular persons, groups and cliques, and which determine how those persons or groups exercise their power and the devious and usually extremely subtle ways by which individual psychic quirks can be translated into foreign policy...........'that psychology---is a science dealing with human behavior."
He is writing against a background of then existing experts of the generation who were recognized a "Soviet experts" and their ability to contribute to understanding the Communist and Russian mentality and behavior in relations.

And to add another log on this fire, I would cite Alter's translation: "my son beware: of making many books there is no end, and much chatter is a weariness of the flesh." (Qohelet/Ecclesiastes 12:12) Having citied that verse, I would add that a good way to understand the Japanese motivations is to understand both the proximate and the somewhat deeper background - we should try to understand the world of 1940 and its effect of the Nazi triumph in Europe and Asia - to wit John Lukacs, The Last European War: September 1939-December 1941 and Akira Iriye, The Origins of the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific.

To give a tentative answer to Ralph Hitchens, personally, I don't think the Japanese wanted to exercise restraint given the way the world looked in the summer-fall of 1941 - they did not want to miss out on the division of the spoils.

H-Warriors,

I must say that in the 20+ years I've participated in H-War, this has been one of the most educational/interesting threads!

Happy to eavesdrop, and thanks, Rob Kirchubel

William O'Neil,

Regards this --

"The application of the ULTRA cryptonym to USN COMINT product output belongs to a later date than the brief period of effective IJN at-sea refueling capability and COMINT's actual role in the destruction was less central than he makes it out to have been. Note also that ULTRA was only ever a product cryptonym, not a system one as his statement might be taken to imply."

No.

We are deep in a Jon Parshall and Anthony P. Tully "Commander Fuchita's Three Whoppers at Midway" class moment regards the real history of IJN at sea refueling capability in the Pacific War.

And to be frank, most of the big named foundational Pacific War historians, to include both Jon Parshall and Anthony P. Tully now getting to play either the role of Commander Fuchita (I'm looking at you Samuel E. Morison) or the English Language historians who did not talk to the Japanese historians for 15-20 years.

The list of historical works and authors that Fuquea throws well deserved elbows at for getting the IJN's underway replenishment capability wrong includes the following:

o Samuel E. Morison, History of United States Naval Operations in World War II
o Clark Reynolds, The Fast Carriers
o Gordon W. Prange, At Dawn We Slept, the Untold Story of Pearl Harbor
o Paul Dull’s Battle History of the Imperial Japanese Navy (1941–1945)
o David C. Evans and Mark R. Peattie, Kaigun: Strategy, Tactics, and Technology in the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1887–1941
o Jonathan B. Parshall and Anthony P. Tully, Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway

As for ULTRA and the dates of the extermination of IJN fast tanker UNREP capability, it was all after Midway and the breaking of the JN25 code.

The following are two paragraphs from the conclusion of David C. Fuquea's article:

"Conclusion
In the next twenty-four months of the war, whatever monopoly or superiority
regarding underway refueling the IJN possessed completely disappeared. Japanese
naval leaders, even after the death of Yamamoto, still understood the critical
importance of speed and fuel to any plan and, therefore, the need to sustain the
fleet with underway refueling. Yet, in June 1944, at the Battle of the Philippine
Sea, the remnants of the Kidō Butai, now under the same Admiral Ozawa who
employed underway refueling so well during the Indian Ocean operation, sortied
with only four oilers in support of the Kidō Butai. In October, off to the Battle
of Leyte Gulf, he sailed with only two. Admiral Kurita, well acquainted with the
importance of oilers at Midway, had none despite carrying the main effort in
the same battle. Kurita stopped his fleet to refuel in port only 800 miles from
his objective because underway refueling was no longer a capability for the IJN.
Doctrine still remained. Training and practice conducted early in the war had
perfected the skills. Leaders still understood the need. Yet, the “fast oiler” and
tanker fleet and the specialized equipment they carried was gone.

By Midway,103 losses included three of the sixty oil-carrying vessels available to
the IJN six months before. USN submarines and aircraft took two more by the end
of the year. Limited industrial capability turned toward replacing the lost carriers,
cruisers, and destroyers from Midway and the “streetfight” in the Solomons, not
oil carriers. In 1943, the IJN lost twenty-four more oil tankers, twenty-two to the
torpedoes of U.S. submarines. Half of the losses were “fast oilers,” including three
of the seven that had sailed against Hawaii. The following year, as was the case with
the entire Japanese Navy, the results for underway refueling were worse. Thirty-six
oil tankers sank to the bottom, two thirds victims of submarines. In response, the
Japanese could only field three additional vessels. The last nine months of war did
not leave many targets, but nine additional tankers went down. By war’s end, only
three of the original sixty oil-carrying vessels available to the IJN in December
1941 still floated. The IJN’s capability, once a monopoly, was shattered."

David C. Fuquea's article "Advantage Japan: The Imperial Japanese Navy’s Superior High Seas Refueling Capability" is a stud, frame and baseboard tear down and remodeling of Pacific War historiography.

This is a great time for young, up and coming, military history master's and graduate students. The whole of the Asia-Pacific War historiography related to IJN operations from America's 1941 oil embargo through Midway is now up for rewrite and they get to be on the ground floor of doing so.

Prof. Lewis Bernstein writes: "Since I opened this aspect of the discussion, I may as well comment too. In order to get a greater understanding we must consider a Japanese view of the world."

Forgive this Japan-focused medievalist for stepping in to the 20th C, but I haven't seen Eri Hotta's book mentioned.

Hotta, Eri, Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy. First edition. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013.

As Dr. O'Neill states: "The overwhelming majority of works published by Western scholars are seriously infected with mirror-imaging, greatly reducing their value. But most of the literature by Japanese authors is little better."

Perhaps there's something I'm missing as a non-specialist in this era, and it's been a few years since I read Hotta's book. For those looking for technical data, military hardware, or even tactical decision making, other books are better. But in my admittedly limited reading, I find that some of the "why" writing on Pearl Harbor in English is by Western (usually American) authors who can at best read the translated official transcripts of IJN and political leader "meetings" and try to shoehorn their preconceptions of what the Japanese were thinking into these sources. Hotta does an excellent job in my opinion of delving into a wider range of sources, such as personal writings and documents, that help build a more complete picture of the disjointedness of Japanese "strategic" "thinking." Whether or not Hotta's book "is little better" or not I'll leave up to the group, but it's certainly different than most approaches I've seen from some Japanese scholars focused on the trees and not the forest, or many Western scholars working with incomplete source bases and somewhat dated cultural conceptions. That isn't meant as a shot at any particular historian or author already mentioned in this thread, as the ones I'm familiar with like Edward Drea, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Mark Peattie, Akira Iriye, and Sadao Asada are all obviously great.

Lewis, The question of why Japan decided to jump in has been dealt with at length, but Yamamoto's concerns give a clue. He was a member of the "Treaty Faction" of admirals who resided in the Naval Ministry, heirs to Kato Tomasaburo (and who also included the unfortunate Admiral Nomura Kichisaburo, another moderate who had almost been assassinated in the wave of violence after the approval of the London Treaty in 1930-31). Yamamoto opposed Japan's decision to become a member of the Axis, believing it would lead to war with the Western powers. This earned him a spot on the assassination list, which is why he was moved from the Naval Ministry to become head of the Combined Fleet, it was easier to protect him if he worked on the Battleship Nagato.

At any rate, it was the Tojo regime's fear that Japan would miss out on the spoils of war that Germany (not so much Italy) was reaping. The decision was one of let's get in and get something before all the pickings are gone. This seems such a trivial decision to start a war with such a questionable outcome, but for that reason it probably rings truest.

The great irony of course was Japan's attack on December 8 (Tokyo time) came three days after the Soviets counterattacked at Moscow, an event which if Japan had waited might have made her reconsider. Then again the die was cast, eh?

My question, what was Japanese intelligence on the Soviet offensive? They had open lines of communication with the Soviets, and of course the Soviets had many high placed spies in Japan. Did Tojo et al. realize that they had just joined the losing side, or was it too early for them to have made this calculation because of the fog of war surrounding what was happening to culminated, freezing, HEER all along the Eastern Front?

vr, John T. Kuehn

Will et al. David C. Fuquea has been shaking the trees for some time. His "Task Force One: The Wasted Assets of the United States Pacific Battleship Fleet, 1942," came out in JMH in 1997, yet the "battleship" myths remain and are applied unthinkingly to the aircraft carrier debates of today. (e.g. aircraft carrier is obsolete just like battleships were in 1941).
Americans--including military historians-- seem to hang on to their myths, naval and otherwise, according to Thomas Kuhn's paradigm logic, refusing to reconsider even when presented with overwhelming evidence. Gasp, I have even noticed myself exhibiting such behavior.

Parshall's "3 whoppers"--which Will mentioned, is a case in point. I have a colleague who refuses to read anything Parshall or Tully write anymore because he believed all three of Fuchida's whoppers as sacrosanct truth. He decided that anyone responsible for such "scholarship" could not have anything useful to say.

Will is correct-- the fields are "white unto the harvest" for rewrites of America's naval operations in World War II (among other things). Hey, maybe eventually people will even remember that Frank Jack Fletcher was one of the heroes of both Coral Sea and Midway, to say nothing of the Battle of the Eastern Solomons. It is a great time to be a naval historian. We are finally coming out from under the long shadow cast by S.E. Morison.

vr, John T. Kuehn
Fleet Admiral E.J. King Professor
Naval War College

Professor Ledbetter's note fills me with chagrin - I have not read Eri Hotta's book although it is in the stack on my night stand. I shall get to it forthwith.

As for the timing of the Pearl Harbor raid, did the Soviets trumpet the start of their winter offensive and how good was Japanese army intelligence in re the Red Army? More importantly, when did they understand that the Germans were losing the war? This realization did not dawn on the resistance groups in Western Europe until Stalingrad. And how much of Japan's actions were based on an examination of American divisions in 1940-41?

Regarding Admiral Fletcher, did he ever speak to Morison or his assistants? If not, why? The aircraft carriers were the fleet's most valuable asset and had to be preserved until the new Essex class ships would join the fleet. These new ships do not appear in great numbers until the seizure of the Marshalls.

I am certainly with Dr. Kuehn in looking for a much more favorable assessment of Vice Adm. Frank J. Fletcher's performance in the first year of the war. Samuel Eliot Morrison doubtless listened too much to Admiral King and any number of other (mostly aviator) senior officers who denigrated and shamelessly second-guessed Fletcher's performance in those early carrier battles.

John Lundstrom's revisionist portrayal of Fletcher was long overdue. What I've taken away from Lundstrom as well as other recent historians is that Fletcher had the misfortune to command early in the war, when "systems" were still in development, technology moving fast but not fast enough, and a lot of what worked so well later in the war just didn't give consistent satisfactory performance during the first year. Radios, radar, reconnaissance procedures, all were intermittently deficient, forcing Fletcher to stagger along on "a wing and a prayer" in all of his battles. Mitscher and McCain and the host of their capable subordinate carrier admirals in the Fifth and Third Fleets later in the war had much more certainty about what they were facing.

In Fall 1941 Japanese options were constrained by events which were not of their own, except of the war in China. Firstly, the pact signed between Germany and the Soviet Union (August 23, 1939) was considered as a violation of the Anti-Comintern Pact (November 25, 1936), especially after the Japanese defeat against the Soviets (Nomenhan Incident, May-August 1939). Secondly, the Japanese government were probably in the dark about Operation Barbarossa. Thirdly, even if the Japanese would have had the mood to seriously engage the Soviets in Siberia and the Far East again, they simply didn’t have the tools to do so, just because of the war in China. Fourthly, the oil embargo decided on August 1 by the U.S. after the success of the German offensive in the East (although officially motivated by the occupation of French airfields in Indochina) was adding an indirect protection to the Soviet Union. Therefore the embargo was leaving no other choice than an offensive in the Pacific, allowed by the availability of the Japanese Navy, in opposition to the Army’s commitment in China. So the surprise in December 1941 resulted more of its location (Pearl Harbor) than of its probability of occurrence.

Japanese intelligence about the Soviet winter offensive, whatever it was, could only affect the decision to strike Siberia. It would not affect the decision to strike the USA and capture the southern resource areas, because the factor compelling those decisions - the oil embargo - remained in place. Japan was still running out of oil regardless of what happened at Moscow.

Re: Fletcher question from Lewis. I had a conversation with John Lundstrom who thinks it had to do with Fletcher not making time for an interview with Morison after the Midway operation but before Guadalcanal. The short story is that Fletcher was exhausted after Midway (remember, he'd just had a second carrier "shot out" from under him) and declined to meet with Morison. Morison, the Harvard Don, was offended and another opportunity never arose because of the planning and execution of Watchtower I and Fletcher's deployment to South Pacific until Saratoga was torpedoed and Fletcher injured. By that point Morison had evidently decided to take the course he took in his narratives re: Fletcher. So Lundstrom's theory is that it was a fit of pique by Morison because Fletcher was too busy to meet with him after Midway. Seems a reasonable enough explanation for why Morison wrote about him the way he did. Vr, John

The short story is that Fletcher was exhausted after Midway (remember, he'd just had a second carrier "shot out" from under him) and declined to meet with Morison. Morison, the Harvard Don, was offended and another opportunity never arose because of the planning and execution of Watchtower I and Fletcher's deployment to South Pacific until Saratoga was torpedoed and Fletcher injured

I'm skeptical of that story.  Morison (per Lundstrom himself in Black Shoe Admiral) didn't get out to the Pacific theater until 1943, so I don't think he can have missed a meeting with Fletcher before Guadalcanal.  Also, I can't imagine there weren't other admirals and other meetings that Morison couldn't manage, and he doesn't seem to have reacted vindictively in other cases.  More, it wasn't just Morison putting the knife in Fletcher.  Fletcher Pratt's The Navy War (1944) didn't mention that Fletcher was at Midway (!).  Admiral King was repeatedly critical of him for not being aggressive enough and ultimately put him in a backwater command in Alaska.  Even Nimitz, who was originally laudatory, became highly critical in 1944, well before Morison had written his works.  Finally, the Marines never forgave Fletcher for what they saw as 'abandonments' at Wake Island and Guadalcanal.  Brig General Samuel Griffith of the Marines, who later wrote a history of Guadalcanal, said Fletcher's nickname in the Marines was "Haul-Ass." (Quoted in Lundstrom's Black Shoe Admiral).

I think Morison was reading the room to a large degree, rather than venting personal pique.

Please let me add my name to the list of those that are most impressed with this exchange and who are benefiting from the discussion. I would also suggest adding three books to a growing reading list.
A. December 1941, by Evan Mawdsley (Yale University Press, 2011) which does an excellent job of demonstrating the linkages between what became the two major wars (Pacific and European). Germany may not have told Japan about Barbarossa, Japan didn't tell her ally that the US was about to become an active belligerent.
B. Bankrupting the Enemy, by Edward S. Miller (Naval Institute Press, 2007). Subtitled "The US Financial Siege of Japan before Pearl Harbor", I think it argues that Japan and the US were both actor as well as "acted on". To quote from the inside cover, "...the deprivations facing the Japanese as a result of the (US freeze of Japanese assets) buttressed Japan's choice of war at Pearl Harbor."
C. Every War Must End, by Fred Charles Ikle, (Columbia University Press, 1971). It brings an International Relations viewpoint into the discussion. While examining many choices for war in the 20th Century, and written in the context of the Vietnam War, Professor Ikle was an experienced arms control negotiator and brings a different perspective to the consideration of the questions at hand. "...Statesmen rely on war plans that are confined to the war's beginning -- plans, in fact, without an ending."

V/R,
Stephen Kepher

To David Silbey, It is quite possible I have the timing of the attempted meeting between Morison and Fletcher wrong. And possibly the location too, because in Black Shoe Admiral, if I remember correctly (I am not at my office, still doing telework), Fletcher did return to the states.
BTW, someone (probably Nimitz but perhaps King) attempted to throw Fletcher a bone in the Downfall operation as one of the naval commanders. But Rich Frank is the guy to check with on that score (or, DM Giangreco in Hell to Pay).

BTW, here is a memory of Fletcher someone whose dad served under him in Adak sent me, I think it captures Fletcher as a person--often lost in all the acrimony directed at him-- quite well:

"Two vignettes about Adm. Frank Jack Fletcher

My father, Gabriel Sabat, was one of six Navy personnel in a Communications Security (ComSec) Unit on Adak Island during WW II. He was a radioman who took and sent Morse code and was aware of any number of military secrets at the time.

Adak wasn’t the end of the Earth, but according to a retired USAF Major I knew, “It was pretty darn close to the edge.” Long periods of darkness, howling winds (Williwaws), and isolation left many service people with mental health problems that were recognizable by what came to be called the “Aleutians stare”, a blank look in the eyes of those who were in trouble. My Dad knew one man who committed suicide days before the arrival of his orders to go home.

This island was, therefore, challenging in many ways in addition to the fact that we were at war and that the Japanese were present on Attu and Kiska at one time.

My Dad and his buddies in the ComSec Unit always wore knit hats, wool sweaters, boots, peacoats etc. while on duty. My Dad even smoked his pipe at times. In other words, they dressed informally by Navy standards. Admiral Fletcher set the tone for this, recognizing that there was a time and place for strict military decorum regarding dress and a time and place when there is no point on insisting on that sort of thing. Adak Island was among the latter category because he wanted his men to do their important jobs without his creating what to him were relatively silly demands given the conditions. Morale was key and Adm. Fletcher recognized the big and small pictures of fighting a war and how morale mattered so much to our success.

At some point, a Marine Lieutenant arrived and gave orders that all Navy personnel will heretofore be attired in dress uniforms while on duty. To the guys in the ComSec Unit, this was rather beyond the pale and so they contacted Adm. Fletcher and asked about this new order. In no time at all, the Admiral had the Marine Lieutenant on the “horn” and essentially told the young man, new to Adak Island, that no such orders will be issued to people under his command and that he, Admiral Fletcher, is the person who will make such decisions. There was no screaming or shouting, but just very clear and direct speech that the young Marine seemed to understand immediately.

In this and in other ways, Admiral Fletcher was a sailor’s sailor.

Another story my Dad told me involved a time when he and the Admiral met to discuss something (I don’t recall if Dad told me the subject matter, but I don’t recall what it was in any case). They were walking together outside when another sailor, collecting trash, shouted at the Admiral, “Hey Mac, where do I dump this shit?” Now, Admiral Fletcher was wearing a knit hat and a peacoat with no indication of his rank anywhere in sight. This was rather typical of the way he dressed most of the time on Adak. The Admiral replied, “I don’t know, I’m on a different detail.” My Dad had to choke back his laughter.

Later that day, my Dad ran into that same sailor and said, “Do you know who you were talking to when you had that trash?” Of course, the sailor said, “No, should I have known?” My Dad said, “I guess you didn’t realize that you were talking to Admiral Fletcher.” The guy almost fainted with embarrassment.

Even though Frank Jack Fletcher, was a Vice Admiral in the U.S. Navy, a veteran of the Battle of the Coral Sea, of Midway, a recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor decades earlier, and therefore someone who could easily “pull rank” on someone and be a stickler for every detail no matter how insignificant or arbitrary, demand all sorts of faux expressions of respect from each and every subordinate, he did not do so. Rather, he expected competence, devotion to duty, to the larger goals of the war effort, and engaged the sailors who worked under his command with respect and honored their efforts. In so doing, he earned their undying respect.

I cannot tell you exactly how many times I heard my Dad sing the praises of Adm. Fletcher, but I remember hearing about him when I was a boy, a teenager, a young adult, and a middle aged parent. That kind of respect and admiration is literally priceless because it cannot be bought. It must be earned, and Adm. Fletcher surely earned that and then some.

When I watched your lecture about him, I thought to myself that I needed to tell you about these small, but large, moments that are part of the defining character, the authenticity, the modesty, of Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher."

vr, John

To David Silbey, It is quite possible I have the timing of the attempted meeting between Morison and Fletcher wrong. And possibly the location too, because in Black Shoe Admiral, if I remember correctly (I am not at my office, still doing telework), Fletcher did return to the states.

Fletcher did refuse to sit down with Morison after the war was over, citing the loss of his records, but by that time, there were already a lot of knives out for the Admiral.  Morison wasn't the type to get way out ahead of the consensus of the time, and I don't think he did with Fletcher.  The consensus was unfair, of course, as Lundstrom has shown quite effectively.
 

 

I have a longstanding interest in Pearl Harbor and teach a seminar on it every year, so I’ve been enjoying this thread; given that I’m a historian of Japan during this period, I thought I might be able to say something worthwhile regarding Japanese perspectives on the decision to go to war (or, more accurately, expand the war from China to Southeast Asia and the Pacific).

As one might expect, this is a subject of enduring interest in Japan and there is quite a bit of good scholarship on the topic although, as is true in general of Japanese historical scholarship, very little of it is ever translated into English. The image of irrational army officers ignoring unpleasant realities and leading Japan off a cliff has been a potent one inside and outside of Japan, but it’s not one that holds up well to close scrutiny. The more accurate—and far more interesting—picture is one of rational elite staff officers (and other government officials) who understood perfectly well the gravity of the decision they were facing, but nevertheless convinced themselves they had no real choice but to follow through on the decisions that had brought them to this precipice (i.e., the decision to construct a “new order” in Asia) and that there was at least some possibility of success if events progressed in their favor (e.g., continued German success being a key factor). One of the more interesting recent contributions to this understanding comes from an economic historian, Makino Kuniaki, who located portions of a report prepared by leading economists and bureaucrats at the request of the army, a document that was long thought to have been destroyed. Here’s the reference for interested parties who read Japanese:

牧野邦昭(Makino Kuniaki)『経済学者たちの日米開戦―秋丸機関「幻の報告書」の謎を解く』(The Economists' Outbreak of the Japan-US War: Solving the Mystery of the Akimaru Organization’s “Phantom Report”)新潮選書2018.
(Akimaru refers to Lt. Colonel Akimaru Jirō, who oversaw the research project; Akimaru studied in the economics department at Tokyo Imperial University and was close to many reformist bureaucrats and intellectuals, including some of the country’s leading economists)

Those involved in the report, such as the lead economist Arisawa Hiromi, long claimed their conclusions regarding the vast gap in economic power between Japan and the US had been not only ignored but also destroyed by army officers (specifically, Arisawa blamed chief of staff General Sugiyama Hajime), because it ran counter to the agreed upon national policy to construct the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and adhere to the Tripartite Alliance, even if that led to war with the US and Great Britain. However, Makino makes a compelling case that the army in fact requested and accepted a frank, honest assessment of the economic situation, and that the reason they paid little attention to the part about the differential in economic power is because it reconfirmed (with more number crunching) what they already understood to be true. What they found more interesting was the report’s argument that further successful prosecution of submarine warfare in the Atlantic could contribute significantly to the Axis objective of forcing Britain's surrender, which would place the US in a difficult position from which to prosecute the war. This, too, was not new, since relying on continued German success was already a key, and very risky, part of war planning, but it was welcome reinforcement of their inclination to take that risk. (Incidentally, it’s also interesting how much of this was commonly understood not only in government circles, but also publicly discussed at the time in mass magazine and newspaper articles, including by some of the men involved in these reports.) There’s more to Makino’s account than that, but these are the major points that I recall off hand (hopefully with accuracy). Ultimately, I think one can say that by the fall of 1941 many Japanese leaders, in uniform and out, had convinced themselves that giving in to American demands to back away from the New Order in East Asia (and thus give up on Japanese autarky over the region), was synonymous with a humiliating reduction of the Japanese Empire to second or third-rate status. There are other important factors, and not everyone felt this way, but I think it is an important part of Japanese perceptions of the crisis they faced.

Makino’s also book reminds me of a much earlier account of the thinking of army staff officers and the question of rationality by the historian Hatano Sumio; early in his career, Hatano knew and worked with some former staff officers in the war research office of the old Self-Defense Forces institute and couldn’t reconcile what he knew of them personally with the widely held image of irrational army officers who recklessly dragged the nation into a hopeless war. It’s been quite a while since I read his account, but again, if I recall correctly, the upshot is that they understood the gravity of what they were proposing, but nevertheless convinced themselves that this was necessary or unavoidable, and that some sort of victory was not impossible. A key component of this process was an underestimation of American ability to mobilize for and prosecute total war for the amount of time it would take to achieve victory. The reference for Hatano’s book is as follows:

波多野澄雄(Hatano Sumio)『幕僚たちの真珠湾』(The Staff Officers’ Pearl Harbor) 朝日選書1991.

Finally, regarding Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku and the “Treaty Faction”: After the war, Yamamoto was often portrayed as part of the Treaty Faction, perhaps largely because of some of his personal associations (e.g., Vice-Admiral Hori Teikichi) and his later opposition to the Tripartite Alliance and desire to avoid war with the US and Great Britain. However, the best recent research on Yamamoto makes it clear that, in the early 1930s, at least, he was actually closer to the “Fleet Faction” in his stance on the London Naval Treaty. A member of Japan’s delegation, Yamamoto was strongly opposed to the prospective agreement and, in one famous incident, physically threatened Finance Ministry official Kaya Okinori for insistently emphasizing the fiscal consequences of trying to build too many warships (specifically, he told Kaya to shut up or he was going to smack him). However, once the cabinet of Hamaguchi Osachi made its decision to sign the treaty, Yamamoto enforced discipline within the delegation and, after returning home, he did not speak out publicly against the treaty or participate in criticism of the government for supposedly infringing on “the right of supreme command.” He thus rejected the politicization of the treaty characteristic of those who led the Fleet Faction (e.g., Admiral Katō Hiroharu [Kanji]). He also appears to have been unhappy with the subsequent retiring of Treaty Faction officers, including men to whom he was close, such as Hori. If Yamamoto had actually been aligned with the Treaty Faction he, too, would likely have been forced into retirement. Ultimately, it seems best to say that he wasn’t aligned with either faction, which helps explain why he was still around to command the Combined Fleet when it attacked Pearl Harbor. For discussions of Yamamoto and these divisions within the navy over the London Naval Treaty, see 田中宏巳(Tanaka Hiromi)『山本五十六(Yamamoto Isoroku)』人物叢書、吉川弘文館2010, pp. 52-64, and 相澤淳(Aizawa Kiyoshi)『海軍の選択―再考 真珠湾への道(The Navy’s Choice: A Reconsideration of the Road to Pearl Harbor)』中公叢書2002, pp. 18-45.

Roger Brown
Professor of Modern Japanese History
Saitama University, Japan

Many thanks to Prof. Roger Brown for this very valuable contribution.

Arisawa Hiromi (1896-1988) was a very interesting and influential figure in Japanese economics. He was what might be called a pragmatic Marxist who taught a number later-prominent economists at Tokyo U. until purged by the Home Office for his communist connections in 1938 — which did nothing to prevent him being called upon by both Prime Minister Konoe and the Army to aid in planning for the coming war. And after the war he played a central role in working out the problems of economic recovery and then of Japan's industrial takeoff.

There is quite an interesting article on his economic involvement:

Gao, Bai. “Arisawa Hiromi and His Theory for a Managed Economy.” Journal of Japanese Studies 20, no. 1 (1994): 115–53. doi:10.2307/132786.

Regarding the study for the Army, Gao reports (citing sources by and about Arisawa):

On the eve of the Pacific War, Arisawa learned about Wassily W. Leontieff’s input-output analysis in the course of an investigation on national economic power organized by the Japanese Army. ... The inves­tigation aimed at providing an objective foundation for the Army to make a judgment about whether Japan’s economic power could afford another war in addition to the one with China. The more than 20 economists involved in this investigation were divided into four groups, focusing re­spectively on Japan, Britain and the United States, Germany, and the So­viet Union. Arisawa Hiromi was head of the Britain-U.S. group. The con­clusion drawn by Arisawa and his colleagues in this investigation was negative, namely, that Japan could not afford to wage a second war. Even if it might be successful at the initial stage, it would be impossible to win the war in the long run. Nevertheless, the high-ranking officials of the army refused to accept this conclusion and they burned all the relevant materials together with the report itself. [pp. 131-32.]

It's good news that at least some of the materials from this study have survived.

During the course of my four decades of service in and with the U.S. government on military and related matters I dealt frequently with policy-level officers and officials in a number of foreign governments (including Japan), both friendly and otherwise. This led me to conclude that the most useful perspectives for understanding the thinking and action choices of people in ministries, general staffs, etc., are those of social psychology and sociology. That is to say that such people indeed are "much more simply human than otherwise," as Harry Stack Sullivan long ago insisted, with their outlooks and actions influenced far more by institutional imperatives than by cultural traits. Isolated individuals may follow courses that are truly irrational but institutional leaders scarcely ever do.

The organizational imperatives that they pursue, however rationally, may themselves depart quite strongly from economic or political "rationality." That has been true of almost all decisions to initiate wars for many centuries, and it was true of Japan's decision to make war on essentially the entire world (as it turned out). It would not be difficult, I believe, to prove this formally in terms of mathematical game theory.

It is also true, of course, that bad information may lead rational policymakers to pick poor choices even in pursuit of objectives that are on their face quite rational. There was unquestionably some element of this on both sides in 1941.

Given the enduring interest in the subject of how and why the United States and Japan came to armed conflict in the Pacific War I have repackaged a set of brief essays I wrote a few years ago under the the title of "Steady on Course for Pearl Harbor 1851-1941," posted at

http://analysis.williamdoneil.com/Steady%20on%20Course%20for%20Pearl%20Harbor%201851-1941%20-%20WDO.pdf

My thanks to William O’Neill for his post which, like always, is informative and worthwhile. I agree about the overlap of the rational and irrational in policy making (if that’s the right way to put it), both in Japan in this period and many other places and times.

But a bit more about the report in question: One of the arguments Makino is making is that, contrary to Arisawa’s postwar recollections (that were echoed by others), the report was not burned in 1941 by irritated, bullheaded army officers. To begin with, a copy of one portion (that regarding US economic power) was found in his own personal papers after he died in the late 1980s. That discovery became the basis for an NHK program on the topic a few years later (for those who are unaware, NHK is something like the BBC here). Within the past decade Makino has found several more volumes of the report (e.g., the one on Germany), and these sources spurred him to write his book. Then there are problems with Arisawa’s testimony regarding, for instance, who supposedly ordered it destroyed (e.g., in one recollection, instead of Sugiyama, he said it was General Umezu Yoshijirō, even though Umezu was in Manchuria in 1941) and, moreover, according to Makino, to date there is no other corroborating evidence of such an order or act from surviving primary sources or in other postwar memoirs, despite the fact that destruction of such a major report would have surely made waves in both the Army Ministry (to which Akirmaru’s group was attached) and the General Staff. And again, as stated in my earlier post, Makino makes a good case that the economic content of the report wouldn’t have been remarkable or sensitive enough for the army to want to destroy it in the first place. But more damning for Arisawa’s account is the existence of references to the report being utilized in other army documents produced in 1942. Ultimately, the most likely reason there are few extant copies of the report is that most of them were burned together with mountains of other material in August 1945 (this is me speculating—I don’t remember if Makino says this).

Roger Brown

John Kuehn has an interesting comment pertinent to this thread:

https://networks.h-net.org/node/12840/discussions/6241093/pearl-harbor-…

Generally, folks, let's comment in this thread about anything inspired by the conversation. That way someone reading the thread will see all the comments. With spinoff posts, readers won't necessarily see them, especially if they're coming to to thread later or via the web.

Thanks!
David Silbey
H-War Network Editor

Responding to the sensible suggestion made by David Silbey, I propose to respond in this thread to a proposal made by John Kuehn under the heading of Pearl Harbor as History.

He proposes, in part:

Based on some of things written by Will ONeil, Roger Brown, Tom Wildenberg, et al. it seems there is a need to update the original classic on this sort of thing re: Pearl Harbor and Japan's widening of the Greater East Asian War.  This classic was: 

Dorothy Borg and Sumpei Okamoto, editors.,  Pearl Harbor as History:  Japanese-American Relations, 1931 – 1941.  New York: Columbia University Press, 1973.

Perhaps a new Pearl Harbor as History edition is in order?  At the time the scholarship was cutting edge, but no longer, e.g. Sadao Asada revised his conclusions in his original essay for this set and how even those revisions (in From Mahan to Pearl Harbor) are themselves in need of furthe revision if Roger Brown et al are correct (and I think they are).

Finally, there was something along these lines recently that came out of University of Kansas, an anthology entitled Beyond Pearl Harbor, editors Beth Brown and David Farber (U. Kansas Press, 1919).

It's a very interesting proposal. Published nearly half a century ago, the 743-page Borg/Okamoto volume remains the towering monument of the field. For me it was the introduction to serious thinking about how the tragedy of the Pacific War came to be, and I expect it was for many other members too, or at least the older ones. Many collections have followed, including the one edited by Beth Bailey (not Brown) and David Farber that John refers to, but none even approach the stature of that first one. 

In the meantime, a group of Japanese scholars under the leadership of Tsunoda Jun had assembled the massive Taiheiyō Sensō e no michi, kaisen gaikō shi which formed the basis for five large volumes published under the leadership of James William Morley as Japan's Road to the Pacific War, comprising translations of the bulk of the Japanese text together with excellent summaries and commentaries by the volume editors, altogether running to about 2,000 pages.

Both of these efforts were on a massive scale. In the days when I was in a position to dispense government money for research efforts I spent a pleasant few hours with one of those who had participated in the Borg/Okamoto effort and among other things heard some of the details. They had obtained foundation funding which among other things had paid for a conference bringing virtually all of the participants together in a Japanese resort, where many matters were worked out. Moreover, there was a staff of administrative people who coordinated all the myriad details. Even with all this there were some gaps that could not be filled, but overall the book is far better integrated than most of scholarly collections I have occasion to review. It is unrealistic, it seems to me, to contemplate an updating of Borg/Okamoto without considering where the resources will come from. And of course there is no realistic possiblity of bringing out a new edition of a work whose authors have almost all passed from the scene.

It is also important to consider what the focus is to be. The implicit assumption of Pearl Harbor as History is that the war was at its root a clash between Japan and the United States, with the actions of other powers playing only subsidiary roles in bringing it about. So two questions arise: Is the thesis of a predominately bilateral conflict as compelling now as it was then? If so, have the discoveries made in the interm provided a basis for a wholesale revision of our views within this frame? I would submit that the answer is negative to both questions.

Now as I have said repeatedly over at least the past three decades, I see it as much more productive to break out of the bilateral frame and look at the Pacific War not as a separate conflict but rather as an integral aspect of a global one. As has often been observed the conflicts at the two ends of the Eurasian Continent were indeed almost wholly independent of one another in military terms. But if we are to follow in the path of Borg and Okamoto (and Tsunoda and Morley) to discern how it all came about we cannot well escape, in my view, the recognition that it all was part of one fabric on the level of politics and grand strategy. At very least, anyone wishing to reject this perspective owes an explanation of why.

The record to support study along these lines is not fully in view. There is much we do not yet know about how the Chaing Kai-sheck government conducted its affairs, for instance, and even more lacunae in the Soviet record. But we do have a very great deal more than was known fifty years ago. (I will remark that as a student of the First World War I am very well aware that quite important material regarding its origins is still coming slowly into the light — and of course that there are mysteries that may never be resolved.)

Finally, I have to question how far this all belongs to the field of military history, properly speaking.

With that I shall rest oars and await the wisdom of others.

All: Apologies to Beth Bailey. I wrote a review of Beyond Pearl Harbor so am at a loss as to why I transcribed someone else's last name into my post. Oh well.

Best, John T. Kuehn

Regarding historiography and the global context: The importance of the international context and developments in Europe to the origins of the war in Asia and the Pacific is a central theme in the work of Akira Iriye (e.g., The Origins of the Second World War in Asia & the Pacific, Longman, 1987). This perspective has certainly shaped my understanding of the subject and how I teach it. European affairs had a major impact on decisions being made in Japan on what foreign policy was in the empire’s best interests and, relatedly, affected the balance of political power inside Japan. For instance, the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939 took the wind from the sails of pro-Axis “reformist” (kakushin) forces, whereas German successes in the spring of 1940 energized them and helped bring down the cabinet of Admiral Yonai Mitsumasa, which was not enthusiastic about an alliance with the Axis powers. The new (second) cabinet of Prince Konoe Fumimaro made that a priority again and concluded the Tripartite Alliance in September of 1940. Meanwhile, Konoe’s government initiated the movement to create a new political order that would transform the nation into a one-party state similar to those of Japan’s new allies (the reformists failed in this endeavor, despite managing to create the Imperial Rule Assistance Association, or IRAA).

A bit more on Yamamoto and the Fleet Faction/Treaty Faction issue: I cited recent research, but I should note that the observation regarding Yamamoto’s hardline in the early 1930s was also made decades ago by Hata Ikuhiko, one of the doyens of Japanese military history (Ref: 秦郁彦『昭和史の軍人たち(Military Men of Showa History)』文藝春秋1983).

And since I mentioned Yonai (Yamamoto’s close associate in the final years before the Pearl Harbor): Yonai also was not clearly aligned with either side in the naval treaty dispute and seems to have been held in high regard by both camps. Incidentally, it also appears that there were rough seas ahead for some members of the Fleet Faction after the 2.26 Incident of 1936, when Admiral Nagano Osami assigned Yonai and Yamamoto to important posts and anti-treaty Admirals Katō Hiroharu and Suetsugu Nobumasa were placed on the retired roster (Katō died in 1939, while the politically ambitious Suetsugu served in Konoe’s second and third cabinets in civilian posts and in the IRAA before dying in 1944).

One quick note on factions and labels: These were often provided by journalists covering political and military affairs and thus shouldn’t be taken as gospel. They can be helpful, but can also oversimplify and perhaps mislead. I’m still trying to bring myself up to speed on the navy, but I have done some research on the bureaucracy in this period of time, and specifically those in the Home Ministry who were labelled then—and ever since—as “new bureaucrats”; yet they didn’t call themselves that and don’t appear to have thought of themselves in this manner.

Roger Brown
Saitama University

Following up on my earlier post on this subject I would like to quote a short passage from Denis & Peggy Warner's book on the Japanese Russian war of 1904-5 (Page 20) " "Surprise had played the greatest part in the Japanese triumph.  Togo also had used shock tactics at the beginning of the war against China in 1894.  And 37 years later Japan launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor; this time the shock came from from the air. Commander Fuchida Matsuo, who led the Japanese attack on the unready American fleet, was amazed to see the perfect target waiting below. " Had these Americans never heard of Port Arthur?, he asked. " I do recommend this book to those interested in the subject.

Walter McIntosh Bluff, New Zealand.

This is certainly (and deservedly) a long-lived thread! Walt MacIntosh has it right -- the US Navy had no apparent recollection of the first glaring precedent, the surprise attack on the enemy's fleet base that initiated the Russo-Japanese War. They also apparently had no institutional memory. In one of their late 1930s "Fleet Problems" a carrier force had attacked Pearl Harbor after approaching via the North Pacific, normally devoid of maritime traffic that might have given them away.

During my time in the US intelligence community I had an opportunity to hear a talk by Peter Schwartz, the renowned "futurist" who evangelized scenario-based forecasting. This approach, along with rolling back the pernicious "need to know" mentality gripping the IC, might have spared us 9/11.

I knew a number of USN officers from the pre-war period; some I served with in the 1950s - 1960s period while a few others were old family friends. I have no hesitation in saying that they all were well familiar with the RJW and the Port Harbor attack. I feel confident that Messrs. McIntosh and Hitchens are looking at this through the wrong end of the telescope.
 

After he had published his book, Alan Zimm organized a lecture series at his institution, Johns Hopkins, on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the attack, inviting me as one of the lecturers. I spoke on Undefending Pearl Harbor: How America's Strongest Bastion Became its Most Weakly Defended. The lecture has been printed in book form with extensive source notes and supporting material. As I showed, it was scarcely a secret that the Japanese were going to attack, and it was universally assumed that they would try to gain tactical surprise. This, as anyone who has really studied it understands, was very much like the situation in 1904. The question was not whether there would be an attack but exactly where and when. The Japanese unfortunately were not very cooperative on that, but their massive preparations over the four months before Pearl Harbor were impossible to hide. In November, Washington sent several urgent warnings to all of the major commanders in the Pacific and specifically refused to rule out the possibility of surprise attacks at any point, even in far-distant Panama.

 

ADM Kimmel and LTG Short each assumed command in Oahu early in 1941 and in his first few weeks in command each wrote to his chief in Washington, specifically expressing concern about the threat of surprise air attack and requesting specific help in preparing against such possiblities. In the lecture/book I discuss at some length how they came to lose their focus on the air threat. The fundamental problem, however, was that each was concentrating very strongly on his own preparations for offensive action. 

Well, if this is a dead horse, we certainly do seem to keep beating it! This reply is for William O'Neill. I'm happy to accept criticism but in this instance I'm honestly confused by what you mean when you say I'm "looking through the wrong end of the telescope." I've downloaded _Undefended_ to my Kindle and am reading it with interest. To paraphrase Bogart, "We'll always have Pearl Harbor."

My perspective is linked to the methodology of "scenario-based forecasting." Not something we saw a lot of during my 20-year career in the US Intelligence Community, early 80s to the "early oughts." It involves looking a plausible future events and asking, "if they're going to do it, how would they do it?" and deriving indicators from answering that question. Re. 9/11, for example, if the IC suspected that al-Qaeda might hijack airplanes and attack buildings (see the declassified 6 August 2001 PDB) we might have derived useful warning indicators by posing the question of how they might do it. The famous FBI "Phoenix Memo" got the methodology right but the target set wrong, and in any case never got the high-level attention necessary to figure out how al-Q would carry out such attacks. The IC was enslaved by inductive reasoning, and "need to know" was the final nail in the coffin.

So let it be with Pearl Harbor. If, as you suggest, everyone knew that Japan would probably carry out a surprise attack, the Navy certainly knew Pearl Harbor was a plausible target (recall Admiral Richardson's ill-timed warning) and it should not have been impossible figure out how they would do it. It would obviously involve aircraft carriers, of which the IJN had plenty, and the North Pacific was the most likely avenue of attack. We'd already demonstrated that in one of the Navy's "Fleet Problems." So . . . focus air search to the northwest of Hawaii, do a rush job to get radar up & running on a 24/7 basis, and maintain readiness to go to General Quarters on a short-notice basis. Examining why this wasn't done leads me to conclude that Admiral Kimmel and General Short headed the list of those responsible for the Pearl Harbor disaster.

We're all "second guessers" at this stage. So, how should I turn the telescope around?

Here I plan to stick with 12/7, rather than 9/11.

Peter Swartz and I had several exchanges while we were both in naval uniform, served together for some years at the Center for Naval Analyses, and have long been friends. Possibly Ralph Hitchens got some secret sauce, but I believe I understand Peter's points reasonably well, as well as the related ones of my recently-deceased friend Ed Smith. While their notions, amounting generally to Bayesian analysis, can indeed be very useful in identifying critical indicators, one must be wary of the wrong end of the telescope.

Looking through the wrong end of the telescope (a phrase I believe I recall hearing Peter Swartz use in such matters) involves a priori narrowing your list of threats and then simply looking for critical indicators relating to them. Thus in 1941, CDR Hitchens, as Kimmel's Fleet Intelligence Officer, might have counseled Fleet commander that the threat was that the Japanese would mass 6 carriers in a single great task force, sortie them from the Kuriles and steam eastward in radio silence to a point 250 nmi or so north of Pearl Harbor, launching a maximum-effort strike at about dawn. He would then have derived the critical indicators for such a strike and advised the admiral of the need to keep watch on them. But what if CDR Hitchens' foresight was not as certain in 1941 as his hindsight in 2020? Looking through the other end of the telescope he might have seen a number of other threat options, multiplying the potential indicators and the resources needed to watch them.

In fact, the record suggests that Kimmel and his staff did follow a broadly similar procedure. But motivated reasoning crept in unobserved, as it very, very frequently does in such situations. Kimmel was responsible for defending the fleet and was mindful of this, but he was much more focused on preparing the fleet for offensive operations. And while he surely understood, in the abstract, that failing to defend the fleet in the face of a Japanese attack could vitiate its offensive potential, in fact he focused on training and readiness to the virtual exclusion of defense.

Pace Ralph Hitchens' assertion that the North Pacific route was the only option that need be considered, there were strong arguments as seen at that time for a sortie from the fleet anchorage at Truk, which would have presented many advantages (and which the IJN planners did indeed consider carefully). The First Air Fleet (Kido Butai) could all have sailed by that route, or could have divided hits forces between the two axes. Clearly, this would have presented further difficulties for surveillance.

In practice, Kimmel  and RADM Patrick Bellinger, commanding his patrol wings, were reluctant to mount standing long-distance patrols for fear of the effects on the matériel and personnel readiness of forces that would play a critical part in the fleet's offensive operations.

Starting 8 December and for four years thereafter it was the rule throughout PacFlt that ships in harbor set Condition I(AA) at the beginning of civil twilight and continuing for half an hour after dawn (and similarly at dusk). If this had been started a few days earlier the attacking raids would have been met with a great volume of AA fire which at very least would have seriously degraded their bombing accuracy. But again Kimmel was concerned about the effects on readiness for offensive operations.

I go on in this vein at some length in Undefending Pearl Harbor. And yes, I do conclude that Kimmel and Short were the goats-in-chief. (This has earned me a very sharp and even abusive rebuke from one of Kimmel's grandsons, who maintains that the admiral should not only have his name cleared and rank restored but be honored for his unblemished service.)

Again for William O'Neil -- No secret sauce, but during my time in the IC I did have an opportunity to hear Peter Schwartz speak, to a roomful of mostly CIA analysts. (I was the odd man out, on loan from DOE. Among other things, Peter stated that almost everyone in the room -- mostly 30-somethings -- would live to be 100 years old.) Early in my career I read his book and saw how his famous case study -- "The Greening of Russia" -- was definitely relevant to the Politburo leadership succession in the early 1980s. In addition to saving Royal Dutch Shell a whole lot of money!

All I'm saying is, was a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor within the realm of plausibility? I'll stipulate that many in the Navy thought so, hence Admiral Richardson falling on his sword in an effort to keep the US Pacific Fleet based on the west coast. And the Navy had tested the concept in at least one of its late 1930s "Fleet Problems." Applying scenario-based forecasting and deductive reasoning, it should have been simple enough to justify putting adequate warning resources in place.

I would have liked to see Schwartz's methodology used more widely in the intelligence community. Instead, inductive reasoning prevailed. Accumulate facts, leaving no stone unturned, until a coherent picture emerges. We can see where that sort of thinking got us.