Reviews I've written of a pair books about Pearl Harbour:
'Attack on Pearl Harbor: Strategy, Combat, Myth & Deceptions' by Alan D Zimm (2011).
Written by a former officer in the US Navy and a gaming designer, this recent book takes a critical new look at the attack on US Naval base at Pearl Harbor on 7th December 1941. With an estimated 3,000+ books already written on the subject, one could be forgiven for thinking that we need another book on Pearl Harbor about as much as we need another hole in the head. But Zimm takes a highly critical look at the planning, conduct and achievements of the Japanese attack.
Many previous historians on the subject have tended to laud the attack as a masterwork of planning and execution. However Zimm is much more critical of the attack. In his view, the planning was haphazard and confused with conflicting objectives. Indeed Zimm asserts that some of the planning was quite careless. One incidence was Strike Leader Mitsuo Fuchida's decision to signal the mode of the opening of the attack by firing one or two coloured flares. (One flare was to signal 'Surprise Achieved', two flares would signal 'Surprise Lost'). Fuchida, seeing that they had achieved total surprise over the defenders, fired one flare. But then, seeing that the fighter leader had apparently not seen the signal, fired a second. However the dive-bomber leader, seeing two flares fired, assumed the signal was 'Surprise Lost' and reacted accordingly.
The result of the blunder was that both the torpedo and bombing groups attacked simultaneously, creating unnecessary haste and confusion. Instead of climbing to a higher altitude from where they could perform steeper dives, the dive-bombers attacked using shallower dives, reducing the accuracy of the bombing. And the torpedo attack, originally planned to take a smooth, efficient 90 seconds before the Americans even had time to fire a shot, was dragged out to a confused, untidy 11 minutes, with the result that five of the B5Ns were shot down by anti-aircraft fire, two more nearly collided and a quarter of the torpedoes were wasted on a retired battleship used for target practice and an elderly minelayer.
In Zimm's view, the actual damage inflicted by the attack was not only less than the raid could have potentially done, but some of the losses were due more to errors committed by the Americans. The water-tight doors being left open for inspection on board the battleship USS California was primarily responsible for its sinking in Zimm's opinion. And the decision to deliberately flood the dry-dock as an attempt to douse the flames unintentionally led to the destruction of the two destroyers USS Downes and USS Cassin by carrying the layer of burning fuel up to the ship's magazines.
Fuchida himself is not spared from Zimm's critical autopsy, the writer deriding the strike-leader for being a passive observer, not trying to intervene when aspects of the attack went wrong. Even the fighter component is not spared criticism as Zimm accuses most of them of failing in their primary duty of escorting the bombers as most of the handful of US fighters that managed to get airborne were untroubled by their Japanese counterparts.
Personally, I regard Zimm as belonging to what I like to call the new 'Occupational Health & Safety' School of military historians. Other examples of this 'school' are the books 'Omaha: A Flawed Victory' by Adrian Lewis and 'Somme' by Trevor Wilson and Robin Prior. This style of military history tends to follow the 21st-century ideology of OH&S, namely that it is possible to have a system of planning and organisation that can be totally flawless, free of error and every eventuality can be anticipated and every possible adverse outcome can be avoided. These books seem to think that a totally fool-proof battle plan can be formulated where nothing can possible go wrong. The writers analyze the events with a kind of smug, bureaucratic hindsight.
What Zimm does not seem to understand, in my opinion, is that nothing like the Pearl Harbor attack had ever been attempted before. True, there had been the aerial attack on the Italian Navy battlefleet at Taranto by the Royal Navy in 1940 but that had been on a much smaller scale and in very different circumstances. For six fleet carriers to voyage 11 days across a vast stretch of ocean and then launch a massive surprise attack on a large and complex enemy target was an audacious plan with much potential for disaster. Considering the scale of the operation, the limitations of the technology of the time and how much more could have gone wrong, it was impressive for the operation to achieved what it did. What Zimm also seems to forget is that the whole operation was very controversial even up until the very last minute among the Japanese high command. The decision to go to war was far from unanimous and the Japanese had very limited resources, preventing the lengthy and thorough planning and preparation that Zimm feels they should have undertaken. Most battle-plans do not survive contact with oxygen and the Pearl Harbor operation was no different. Things usually go wrong, unexpected things happen and success often depends on how well soldiers adapt to new and unplanned for situations.
As one well-known commander famously remarked 'historians are always the greatest generals, the rest of us are just blundering around in the dark'.
'Pearl Harbor' (2001) by H P Willmott.
Published to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, this book by British historian & journalist Willmott presents a fresh perspective on the famous event on 7th December 1941.
Unlike most other books on Pearl Harbor, Willmott tells the story from the Japanese side, outlining the political and cultural background which led to the decision to go to war, the planning and execution of the mission and its subsequent impact & legacy. Willmott, with a journalistic background, analyses the statistics and figures behind the event.
In Willmott's view, the greatest folly of the attack was not the failure to destroy the US carriers or the oil tanks or harbor facilities at Pearl, rather it was the decision to go to war against the United States in the first place. In his stern, hard analysis, Willmott proves how Japan was utterly doomed from the start as she had no hope against the industrial, technological and logistical strengths of the Americans. As Willmott argues, the Japanese military's resources were dangerously stretched thin even before the first shots of the Pacific War were fired. With the greater part of her army committed in China since 1937, Japan was ill-equipped for conducting a campaign over a vast sector of the globe as such she embarked on in December 1941.
The very finite resources the Japanese navy had at her disposal in 1941 can be borne out by the fact that the last of the torpedoes needed for the assault were not finally delivered to the IJN carriers until the very last night before the fleet set sail from Kure. And that the fleet possessed only 60 of the type-5 armor-piercing 800kg bombs, meaning that most of the bombers had to use the smaller 250kg bombs which would be shown to be far less effective against armoured warships. Another problem was shortage of aircraft and in order for the six IJN carriers to have full complements, planes and airmen had to be re-allocated from the smaller carriers.
As complex as the planning was, Willmott argues that in order for the fleet to reach Hawaii, a certain amount of good luck was relied upon. The Imperial Navy was short of oil and fuel tankers and only seven oilers could accompany the Kido Butai on the Pearl Harbor strike. Of the six carriers, only three had the capacity to reach the target without refuelling- the remaining three, flagship Akagi and the smaller Hiryu and Soryu- had to have refueling stops en route. If the weather had been too bad and the sea too heavy at the refuelling point, the plan called for the latter three carriers to abort and return to Japan, leaving only the Kaga, Shokaku and Zuikaku to carry out the attack! There had been proposals by some of the IJN high command that the problems of refueling were too great and that the Second Carrier Division (Soryu & Hiryu) should stay home. When he heard about this, the division's commander Admiral Yamaguchi physically seized his superior Admiral Nagumo and, in full view of all the assembled officers at the meeting (none of whom intervened), beat the latter until Nagumo agreed the 2nd division could participate! Such an incident would be unthinkable in any Western armies and it reveals much about the curious mix of ironclad discipline of the lower ranks and the heated debates, backstabbing and insubordination that was rife among the senior officer hierarchy of the IJN.
Regarding the attack itself, Willmott analyzes the losses caused to the US Pacific Fleet and puts them into perspective. Willmott's approach to history-writing tends to be dry and he avoids hyperbole or getting sentimental. Even so, he is somewhat cold-blooded when he dares to refer to US losses at Pearl Harbor as 'slight'. But in a strategic and material sense, he is correct. Of the 21 US ships that sustained damage on 7 December, only three were ultimately total losses and they were the Utah, a retired battleship used for target practice and the Arizona and Oklahoma, both ageing, obsolete battleships overdue for major refits. The remaining ships were all repaired, upgraded and back in operational service by mid-1944. One ship damaged at Pearl, the cruiser Honolulu, was back in business within a few weeks. Of the approximately 100 US navy ships at Pearl that day, 79 were still intact after the attack and added to that are the 44 other US warships, including 3 carriers, that were either in harbor on the US West Coast or at sea at various locations around the Pacific on 7 Dec. Any claim that the US Pacific Fleet was 'destroyed' or even 'crippled' by the attack on 7 Dec becomes ludicrous when faced with such figures.
Willmott also studies one of the great controversies of the attack, namely whether the Japanese could, or should, have launched a third strike. As Willmott argues, there was sound military sense in Admiral Nagumo's refusal to authorize a third attack when considering the strike force's remaining fuel and oil, numbers of available aircraft, the number of aircraft already lost or damaged in the first two strikes, the amount of daylight left, and the risks to the carrier fleet, protected by a minimum screen of escorts, lingering so deep in enemy waters.
This book is a coffee-table release with many photographs and digital illustrations of the attack. Willmott's dry and sometimes stern style may not appeal to those who prefer a more humanistic, narrative style in war histories but there is no denying he presents a fresh new perspective on a topic that has had many other books already devoted to it.
