Today is the 71st anniversary of the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. It was a date that would live in infamy, President Franklin D. Roosevelt told us, but there are some interesting, little-known aspects of the attack that most of us don’t know.
The first is that the attack was modeled after a battle that occurred a year earlier in Taranto, Italy. It took place on Nov. 11, 1940, and was called Operation Judgement.
In the sneak attack, the British launched 21 obsolete biplane torpedo bombers from the aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious. It was the first time that planes alone carried out a naval attack.
The Italians were unprepared and half their fleet was lost. The remaining Italian ships retreated to bases farther north, in Naples.
It was a significant loss because it shifted the balance of power in the Mediterranean and allowed the Brits to more easily supply their soldiers in North Africa.
A Japanese naval delegation visited Italy to study the Battle of Taranto. They concluded that a similar attack could force the U.S. Pacific Fleet in Hawaii to retreat to bases in California. Both Taranto and Pearl Harbor were shallow, and the torpedoes had to be modified to not hit bottom.
The attack on Pearl Harbor was not unique, as it was based on the Battle of Taranto. And it probably failed because it was too much like that Italian battle, which leads us to the second, little-known fact about Pearl Harbor.
Japan made a strategic error that allowed the U.S. to quickly recover and eventually defeat the attackers. What was that error? They failed to hurt our repair facilities.
The Japanese attack destroyed or severely damaged 188 aircraft, five battleships and three destroyers. Like the Battle of Taranto, they targeted ships.
We lost 2,403 lives. However, Pearl Harbor’s dry docks were relatively unscathed by the first two waves of Japanese planes. The plan for a third wave was called off.
The Japanese pilots expected they would refuel and rearm after the initial two waves at Pearl Harbor and return to attack dockyards and ship repair facilities in a third wave. Without this infrastructure, rebuilding the U.S. Pacific Fleet quickly would have been more difficult.
“The Japanese concentrated on sinking our battleships in the shallow waters of Pearl Harbor and left our drydocks and repair shops relatively undamaged,” says historian Alan Lloyd. “As a result, we were able to refloat and repair many ships relatively quickly.”
The Pearl Harbor fuel reserves were also largely untouched by the initial attack. The Japanese did this to prevent smoke from obscuring our ships. A planned third wave had targeted them.
“U.S. fuel reserves turned out to be essential to our success in the next year. Some historians believe the elimination of those fuel tanks and repair facilities would have hurt the Pacific Fleet more than the loss of battleships,” Lloyd says.
Additionally, the submarine base at Pearl Harbor had only minimal damage. The U.S. submarine fleet went on to sink more than 50 percent of Japanese ships in the next three years.
Japan estimated the U.S. Pacific Fleet would be put out of action for six months, but instead our carriers and submarines were engaging them in a matter of weeks. “Six months after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Navy defeated the Japanese Carrier Fleet at Midway, marking the turning point of the war.”
“Vice Adm. Nagumo believed that most of their Pearl Harbor objectives had been met. Commander-in-Chief Adm. Yamamoto’s main intent was to keep the U.S. from interfering with Japan’s Southeast Asian invasion. The main objective was securing oil and other natural resources from the Dutch East Indies,” Lloyd says.
Nagumo believed his main task at that point was to return his six undamaged aircraft carriers, the only large fleet carriers Japan possessed, for use in the attacks on Port Darwin, Australia, and Colombo, Ceylon.
By coincidence, in December 1941 the carriers Enterprise, Saratoga and Lexington were hundreds of miles west of Kauai at the time of the attack. However, it was the survival of our shipyard repair facilities that allowed us to quickly get back in the game.
Six months later we engaged them at Midway and sunk four of Nagumo’s large fleet carriers. Their miscalculation at Pearl Harbor allowed us to turn the tide of war by June 1942, and they were on the defensive after that. It also allowed us to concentrate our forces in Europe and, many feel, shortened the war there.
Without victory at Midway, former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger stated that “there would have been no D-day on June 6, 1944 … and President Truman might have felt it necessary to authorize the use of additional atomic bombs to bring the war to a timely close in 1946.”
Truman estimated the war cost the United States $5.4 trillion in 2012 dollars. The cost to all countries was about $20 trillion.
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Bob Sigall, author of the “Companies We Keep” books, looks through his collection of old photos to tell stories each Friday of Hawaii people, places and companies. Email him at Sigall@Yahoo.com.
