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In Rememberance of Dec 7th Pearl Harbor
The oil of Borneo and Sumatra 5,000 miles away, brought about the attack on Pearl Harbor. In July 1940, the United States placed an embargo on the export of oil and scrap metal without a special license and of all aviation gasoline to Japan. When Japanese forces moved into northern French Indochina in September, the United States reacted with an embargo on scrap iron and steel, and when they also moved into southern Indochina, in July 1941, all Japanese assets in the United States were frozen. Similar action by Great Britain and the Netherlands affected shipments of oil from the East Indies. This created such a critical situation for Japan that its cabinet decided that, unless the United States made concessions, the oilfields to the south would be seized by military operations. The plan of the Japanese Navy's General Staff was to employ the navy's entire air and surface strength in a direct thrust southward, quickly secure its objectives, and then turn its attention to the Western Pacific, where an advancing United States Fleet would be dealt with as the Russians had been at Tsushima in 1905. Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, commanding the Japanese Combined Fleet, had a different plan. He believed that the United States Pacific Fleet would have to be destroyed in the first year of the war before it could be strengthened by the building program then in progress. His plan called for a carrier air attack on this fleet at its base in Pearl Harbor as the opening act of the war, while the advance to the south would be supported primarily by land-based aircraft. When a test of the plan on a game board predicted heavy losses, the Navy General Staff opposed it, but the popular Yamamoto forced its acquiescence by a threat of resignation. A force composed of Japan's 6 largest carriers, 2 fast battleships, 2 cruisers, and a number of destroyers and tankers, commanded by Vice Adm. Chuichi Nagumo, was assigned this task. The carriers' air groups received special training. Aircraft torpedoes were equipped with ailerons to enable them to be used in the shallow depth of Pearl Harbor, and fins were fitted to armor-piercing shells to convert them to bombs. The task force assembled in secrecy at Tankan (now Hitokappu) Bay on Etorofu-to (now Iturup Island) in the Kurils and departed for its mission on November 26 (Dates in all cases are those of the area in which events occurred.), proceeding eastward in northern latitudes. It observed radio silence, and no shipping was encountered. The passage was rough, and destroyers had to be sent back, but carriers, battleships, and cruisers reached the launching point about 200 miles north of the Hawaiian Islands at 6 am on December 7. Earlier a force of 16 fleet-type submarines had been deployed off Pearl Harbor, where 5 of them launched midget submarines. Two of the midgets succeeded in getting inside Pearl Harbor on December 7, but were sunk. One grounded on the north coast of Oahu, and its two-man crew was captured; the others did not return to the recovery area. This entire submarine effort accomplished nothing. The warships of the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7 included 8 battleships, 9 cruisers, 29 destroyers, 5 submarines, and a number of auxiliaries. One fourth of their antiaircraft batteries were manned. Fortunately for the United States, no carriers were present. The Saratoga was still being overhauled on the west coast, while the Lexington and the Enterprise with their task forces were at sea ferrying aircraft to Wake and Midway Islands. The first wave of attacking Japanese aircraft, launched at 6 am, was composed of 183 dive bombers, level bombers, torpedo planes, and fighters. This group encountered no search aircraft in its two-hour approach and was barely sighted before the first bombs were dropped. It was detected by a United States Army radar operator, but the officer whom he informed decided that the aircraft were friendly. The attack began at 7:59 am with dive bombing on the airfields. Torpedo planes then attacked the 7 battleships moored to concrete quays on the northwest side of Fords Island in Pearl Harbor. Heavy bombers followed. Only 4 United States aircraft got off the ground, and these were soon shot down. Japanese fighters, having no opposition, strafed the closely packed Army Air Forces (AAF) planes, which had been lined up for easier protection against sabotage, the supposedly major threat. The second wave of 180 aircraft struck at 8:40 am Its pattern of attack was similar to that of the first wave, except that it launched no torpedoes. By this time the ships' antiaircraft batteries were firing, and these brought down the only Japanese aircraft lost by gunfire. The attack was over by 9:15 am, and before 1 pm all surviving Japanese aircraft had returned to their carriers. Only 29 planes, with their crews of 55 officers and men, were missing. Of the American battleships, the Arizona was completely destroyed, the California and West Virginia were sunk, the Oklahoma capsized, the Nevada was heavily damaged, and the Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Maryland were damaged but able to proceed under their own power to the west coast. In addition, 3 cruisers were damaged, 2 destroyers burned and heavily damaged, and 2 auxiliaries sunk and 2 damaged. Personnel casualties were heavy, 2,403 men losing their lives in the first hour of the war. More words have been written about the Pearl Harbor disaster than perhaps about any other single event in United States history. The official investigations alone fill 39 volumes. Nevertheless, Americans continue to ask "Why? An answer is found in Roberta Wohlstetter's Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (Stanford, Calif., 1962). Contributing causes were invalid assumptions, faulty appraisal and dissemination of intelligence, and inadequate security measures. Behind these was a lack of war-mindedness at this Pacific base halfway around the world from areas where momentous events were happening. Adm. Husband E. Kimmel, the Pacific Fleet commander, admits to it: "We did not know that in the Atlantic a state of undeclared war existed (Admiral Kimmel's Story, p. 2, New York 1955). The War and Navy departments also shared in responsibility for the disaster, not only by withholding intelligence but by assigning low priorities to critical equipment for ships and units in the Hawaiian area. For Americans, Pearl Harbor was a disgraceful tragedy. For Japan it was a brilliant tactical victory, a temporary strategic success, a lost opportunity, and, in the end, a colossal political mistake. By sinking the battleships but not the carriers, the Japanese Navy resolved a long-standing argument among United States naval officers as to which type would comprise their capital ships. The American people were aroused as they would not have been had the plan of the Japanese Navy's General Staff been adopted. The lost opportunity was Nagumo's failure to destroy with a second strike the Pearl Harbor base facilities, especially the exposed and fragile tanks that contained 4,500,000 barrels of precious oil. The destruction of these tanks would have sent the Pacific Fleet back to the west coast, might have starved Hawaii, and would certainly have broken the line of sea communications to Australia. Instead a prostrate United States Navy was allowed to recover at Pearl Harbor. Credit more info.. GI -- World War II Commemoration Research Links
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