https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DusaP4gRaUA

and


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ko0QBUqs1BE

'Home is the sailor, home from the sea, and the hunter home from the hill'.

RIP.

God bless them all .

Had not seen that, thanks very much for sharing.

I've reviewed a number of resources about the attack planning recently. Yamamoto was well known to be opposed to attacking the USA. He had first hand experience, from time at Harvard and in DC. He, privately, estimated the chances of success at 50-50 - if they got into position without being detected, which was far from certain.

He established his plan was set from the outset to have limited success, attacking, as one author said, "The American battleships at Pearl Harbor were slow-moving antiques from the World War I era. As we know, the U.S. Navy already had two brand new battleships in its Atlantic Fleet that could run rings around them. And eight new ones the navy was building were even better."

I do NOT say this to denigrate the brave men who should never have lost their lives on that day. There were plenty of opportunities to prevent the catastrophic failure of Pearl Harbor, they were all missed, through the fog of war, the almost willful discounting of data as it came in, and other failures that have been well documented. I have ties to the loss of the HMS Hood, so I well know the feeling and implication of the devastating loss of a WWI designed ship of the line. None of these comments are meant in any other way than to build the following points...

The "happy coincidence" that the 3 Pacific carriers were not present was pivotal, and unpredictable. That does not mean that the US Navy didn't realize the importance of carriers when the wily Japanese did. From the same author "American shipyards were already building 10 modern carriers whose planes would later devastate Imperial Navy forces in the air/sea battles of the Philippine Sea and Leyte Gulf.

Most importantly, as the sun set on Dec. 7 and the U.S. Navy gathered the bodies of its 2,117 sailors and Marines killed that day, all-important fuel storage and ship repair facilities remained untouched by Japanese bombs, allowing Pearl Harbor to continue as a forward base for American naval power in the Pacific.

So in reality, Dec. 7 marked the sunset of Japan’s extravagant ambitions to dominate Asia. Admiral Yamamoto and the Imperial Navy’s other tradition-bound leaders chose the wrong targets at Pearl Harbor." LINK

Yamamoto also sent a rigidly thinking subordinate (Nagumo) in command of the attack, someone he personally, intensely disliked. That same commander was in charge of the attack on Midway, and it was his errors and indecision that contributed greatly to the massive defeat that was Midway.

I'm almost left with the conclusion that Yamamoto wanted Pearl Harbor to fail. Not that he wanted Japan to lose the war, but that he wanted events to unfold that made a subsequent attempt to start a war with the US to be a much more difficult argument in the Japanese government after the approach had failed.

A. Send a massive fleet on a long voyage to stage the attack, requiring multiple, difficult at sea refuelings, for a country deprived of resources, with a significant chance of detection at many points in the preparatory mission. Detection would've scrubbed the mission.
B. Attack the ships, but not the facilities required to maintain the forward operating capabilities of the still relatively new base. As great a tactician as he was this seems something like building a shaft in the Death Star with a chance for a direct shot to blow up the whole base. The omission wasn't obvious, but in retrospect, for an experienced officer, was glaring.
C. Sending your immediate subordinate on a mission that you expect him to fail and, hence, be dishonored accomplishes not only the attack being foiled but your chief rival that you cannot stand losing face. Sounds like a ploy that has been often repeated in military and business operations.

So, IDK, of course, what was in Yamamoto's mind, but adding up the chances of either the attack being called off before it happened, or failing and removing Nagumo as a threat to himself seem to be the much greater odds than the odds of the significant and horrible results that did transpire.

None of this detracts from the heroism and debt we owe each of those who did their best on that fateful day. God bless them. Fair winds and following seas.

Interesting analysis Chuck, Never heard that angle before about Yamamoto. I only knew the famous “ wake a sleeping giant” comment.

I’ve noted before my grandpa was on the USS Portland heavy cruiser that conveniently left on December 5 from Pearl with the Lexington carrier group for training. They returned on December 12. My family history may be very different if that group hasn’t set out to sea 2 days prior.

Chuck Finley may be on to something. I have read somewhere, perhaps in one of Toland’s books, that Yamamoto felt that the US would defeat Japan within two years of an attack. In addition to his schooling in the US, he had traveled across the country as a young man and was amazed by the size, natural resources, production capacity and capabilities of the average American. He was wrong about the timeframe, it took us 3+ years to prevail.

He was very much against going to war with the US but Japan’s leaders wouldn’t listen. He was retired and quite content to pursue his hobby of photographing flowers.

The strategy was to hit the US at Pearl, fight in the islands and hope that a peace could be negotiated by inflicting heavy losses during the battles in the Pacific. The US avoided some of the heavy losses by simply bypassing many fortified islands.

All in all, the impression I got was that Yamamoto felt that engaging the US in war was a suicide mission for Japan. He was called out of retirement to lead and did so reluctantly.

There was a third and final wave planned against Pearl Harbor's dry docks and fuel facilities. Those target were not overlooked. Admiral Nagumo called that third wave off. It's said that finding no aircraft carriers in port, Nagumo feared a counter attack from the carriers and chose to beat it for home instead of launch that third wave.

Yamamoto felt that with a decisive victory at Pearl, he could "run wild" in the Pacific for six months to a year but had no confidence for the second and third years. During his time in the U.S., Yamamoto saw his conunterparts in the U.S. Navy as soft and far too invested in leisure pursuits but was awestruck by the U.S. military industry potential.

The "awaken a sleeping giant" attributed to Yamamoto is Hollywood fiction. Although Yamamoto harbored such sentiments, no record has ever been unearthed of him saying or writing such a thing.

quote:

Originally posted by maxdog:

He was wrong about the timeframe, it took us 3+ years to prevail.

The strategy was to hit the US at Pearl, fight in the islands and hope that a peace could be negotiated by inflicting heavy losses during the battles in the Pacific. The US avoided some of the heavy losses by simply bypassing many fortified islands.

It's important to keep in mind that our war wasn't just with Japan. We declared war on all the Axis powers, and directed most of our resources towards fighting Germany and Italy first. Once they'd been defeated (as a priority), our total resources could be leveled against Japan and were.