Maggie's Farm

Pearl Harbor is a difficult topic to discuss rationally, with the layers of conspiracy nonsense that have grown over seven decades. This was caused, in party by the slow release of facts and documents due to wartime necessity and the Navy's understandable desire to cover up the, negligence and poor judgment of senior officers; intelligence dissemination bottlenecks; rivalry with the Army and State Department; etc. And this has been aggravated by the public love of conspiracy theories combined with the fallacy where argument is confused with evidence.

Still, the lessons are there and still applicable: the Vietnam War I mean Pearl Harbor is what happens when an aggressive foreign policy writes checks that the military cannot honor. 911, sorry, Pearl Harbor, happens when intelligence groups do not talk to each other because of turf wars and underestimate the intent and reach of the enemy.

Still, I'm curious about what is in the British Foreign Office archives still classified dating from late November, early December 1941 (the noted historian John Costello referred to them in the 1995 Senate hearings to clear the record of the Hawaii commanders, speculation abounds as to their nature and content). my guess is that the British or Dutch had made an accurate estimation (albeit without the cachet of having broken the IJN naval code) about the raid and a warning -- possibly only hours before the raid -- given FDR, much too late to evaluate and take effective measures. just another embarrassment for the government.

Those were the "Grand Joint Army Navy Exercises" of that year. its easy to draw wrong conclusions looking backwards in time, although the proponents of air power were ultimately proved correct. the carriers' role in the then-prevailing notion of a big-gun battle line was as a scouting force, very different from the role they would have ten years later. the decisive naval battle was expected to be fought between battleships. the aircraft of the day were still biplanes, and very poor performers compared to wartime models. direct comparisons are difficult: by 1942 a deckload of attack aircraft could "kill" one enemy carrier; this is important: in '32, the actual ratio would have been far lower. its also important to note that results of exercises like that were often "adjusted" in favor of whatever faction was running the navy, and in '32, that would have been the gun club.

interestingly, it was the temporary loss of the second generation battleships (total for Arizona and Oklahoma) that freed the carriers from being tied to the slower battleships and allowed an evolution in tactics where the faster battleships then being built operated in support of the carriers.