80 years ago: A brilliant but short-lived victory at Pearl Harbor

Victor Davis Hanson writes,

As far as the December 7 surprise attack itself, it is best seen as the worst of both worlds—conducted expertly enough to ensure damage and thus incur American furor, but not so much as to cripple America’s war-making ability or to frighten the American public into submission.

A powerful Japanese Imperial Navy carrier task force, with an ability to launch some 350-combat aircraft from its six fleet carriers, cruised completely unnoticed some 4,000 miles to Hawaii. That the fleet could steam such a great distance without radio contact, and in rough seas at the near onset of winter, while avoiding all war and merchant ships, revealed real tactical genius.

The operation itself likewise unfolded flawlessly. At sunrise on a Sunday morning two waves of carrier-based torpedo and dive bombers sank five battleships of the U.S. 7th fleet. The attack seriously damaged four others. In a time of peace, the Japanese killed more than 2,300 American sailors and soldiers. Somehow the Japanese fleet safely steamed back to Japan. Losses were minimal: just 29 aircraft, and five small one-man submarines.

Again, if tactically brilliant, the Pearl Harbor attack strategically would prove a colossal disaster for Japan. It failed even to shut down the port at Pearl Harbor, as the Japanese fleet vetoed ideas of critically needed third and fourth air strikes—necessary to destroy U.S. oil storage and repair shops in the Pacific harbor facilities. Within days, Pearl Harbor was receiving 7th Fleet shipping.

So, the Japanese incited—but did not seriously injure—the one global power that had the ability not just to defeat them but also to dismantle their distant empire and destroy the Japanese mainland itself.

In sum, it was largely Yamamoto’s enormous ego, his tactical genius, and his strategic ineptitude, along with Japanese hubris, that explain the strategic idiocy of a brilliant but short-lived victory at Pearl Harbor. But to be fair, no student of military preparedness, economic resources, or social organization could have ever believed that a relatively vulnerable and isolationist United States, still reeling from recurring cycles of depression, in less than four years would have fought simultaneously across the Pacific and Europe with a 12 million person military, the largest economy in history, and the world’s most formidable weapons such Essex class fleet carriers, Balao submarines, B-29 long-range bombers, Hellcat and Mustang fighters and the world’s first atomic bombs. All that was unleashed some 80 years ago this December—once a sophisticated Japanese Empire foolishly attacked the United States at peace.

Read more here: https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/05/misremembering-pearl-harbor/