32 ms·

We only talk about the third attack on Pearl Harbor

177 points by stanrivers 5y ago

david_acm 5y ago
If you want to visualize how the attack at Peal Harbor happened and have about 20 minutes to spare, consider watching the Montemayor video that explains how the attacks occurred, in the order they occurred, along with historical photographs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6cz9gtMTeI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6cz9gtMTeI
cushychicken 5y ago
Been listening to Dan Carlin's podcast series on the Imperial Japanese military in WWII. (It's six parts, and about 20 hours long at this point.) Coincidentally, I just listened to the part about the attack on Pearl Harbor yesterday. He didn't mention any of these failed wargames in the podcast. Reading about it now gives a lot more context on why the commander in chief of the US Navy at Pearl Harbor knew his head was going to roll following the Japanese attack.
- ranger207 5y ago
  Supernova in the East was a great series. I read one of his major sources, Ian Toll's Pacific War trilogy, immediately after finishing the series, which gave a great strategic and political view to complement Carlin's emotional view
  - cushychicken 5y ago
    I'll look that up. Thanks for the recommendation.
  - cushychicken 5y ago
    Hey - I'm a few days late here but I got Pacific Crucible on Kindle and I'm really liking it. About a quarter of the way through. OMG, did I never realize how terrifying war in the Pacific was.
- darkerside 5y ago
  Keep listening! Some of his best since Blueprint for Armageddon
  - zwirbl 5y ago
    Which is likely his best series yet
- thesuperbigfrog 5y ago
  Here is a link to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/dancarlin/history?format=xml http://feeds.feedburner.com/dancarlin/history?format=xml "Supernova in the East" is his latest series.
- kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
  What an epic podcast. And rather than being a straightforward recitation of events, it cleverly focuses on everything else: politics, the brutality of combat, personalities, why soldiers and commanders act as they do, and so on. It really drives home the feeling of the war as a slow-motion car accident, long in the making, impossible to stop, and horrific in its human impact. I’ve read a lot of military history, and this still felt so fresh, original, and dramatic.
- emptyfile 5y ago
  Just keep in mind to take everything he says with a big grain of salt. Quite a few times I've been mesmerized by his podcasts only to find out later its either mostly made up or a "classic" but totally discredited version of the story. He really doesn't bother reading up on the latest and most accurate material for his topics. It's the main reason why I stopped listening to him (the smaller one is that I will never get used to his grating accent).
  - stanrivers 5y ago
    Oh - interesting, I never knew that was a claimed levied against him - that his history wasn't necessarily accurate. That is a bummer. Still like what he is doing for getting the concept out there that history is worth studying and should be "cool," and you can't blame a generalist for not being 100% up-to-date on the latest findings / understandings by experts... so if its just that, I get it - if its more storytelling and embellishment - that is unfortunate.
    - muro 5y ago
      I was disappointed when listening about WWI how wrong the numbers were and gave up.
  - etc-hosts 5y ago
    do you have some examples? I read https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ppmsm/thoughts_on_dan_carlin/cd4qedu/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ppmsm/thoug...
  - pomian 5y ago
    To be fair, he always states: "I am not a historian". So if you listen to him as a storyteller, you will have a great time, and you might learn something along the way.
    - emptyfile 5y ago
      Absolutely, he's the kind of guy that should fire up your interest and make you buy a real book to learn more. However, never take the book he's actually using...most of the time it's plain outdated. As you say, you can't really blame a guy who says 5 times per episode that he's "not a historian", but plenty of times I just can't help and wonder why didn't he spend 30 minutes extra researching a topic and choosing better material and sources. The only answer I got is that bad material makes for better stories.
- AniseAbyss 5y ago
  The Japanese embarrassed a lot of Allied commanders in WW2. White superiority complex was the first casualty of the war.
  - splitstud 5y ago
    And yet the US went from not being on a war footing to rolling up the Japanese forces across a huge war zone in 4 years. And this was the side hustle to the main job. But go ahead and misunderstand what happened while throwing racist comments around.
  - cushychicken 5y ago
    I agree, the dismissive racism of the American military command was paid for heavily.
    - splitstud 5y ago
      The Japanese military was not one that their contemporaries dismissed lightly. Casually assuming racism as well?
nicoburns 5y ago
One has to wonder whether the Japanese would have thought up this strategy (or considered it feasible) had the Americans not practiced it and proved it for them. It seems worryingly common for this kind of simulation to ironically lead to disaster. Chernobyl would be another example (the explosion happened during a safety test). And it's possible that the coronavirus pandemic is another (the virus may have accidentally leaked from "gain of function" experiments designed to give us insight into how to respond should such a virus evolve naturally).
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  Alternatively, the weakness was obvious to anyone with a brain, noone fixed it, so the enemy exploited it. UK government issued a pandemic readyness report. Report said the country has no protective equipment and will get rekt. This is exactly what happened. Blaming the messenger is very misguided. Negligence is endemic and always comes back to haunt you
- lucas_membrane 5y ago
  From some time around that first simulation (early 1930's), the "plan an attack on Pearl Harbor" problem was in the curriculum of the Japanese naval academy. Hawaii was known to be teeming with Japanese intelligence assets at least since the time of WW1, and its strategic importance had been well known at least since the US had made a point of acquiring the place.
- short_sells_poo 5y ago
  I'm not sure you can assign blame to the safety test in precipitating the disaster (perhaps this wasn't even your intention). The overarching theme in the examples you mention is that the weakness was always there, safety test or not. I'd posit that Chernobyl would've happened eventually for example. It was a design with unstable boundary conditions operated in an environment of secrecy and disregard for safety. That's basically a situation where disasters are guarantee to happen. Nobody knows anything, the default operating procedure is to withhold crucial information and everyone is working under a "don't question your orders" mindset.
xenocratus 5y ago
Previous conversation on the same article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27345075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27345075
wayoutthere 5y ago
There’s a school of thought that Pearl Harbor was intentionally left vulnerable in order to provide public justification for entering a war that it was pretty obvious we were getting drawn into anyway. The Nazis were vehemently anti-communist which means they had a significant amount of support within the US government, and overcoming that required an egregiously offensive violation of our national sovereignty (which Pearl Harbor provided).
- missedthecue 5y ago
  Communism wasn't a threat to the USA in the 1930s. Have you heard of the lend-lease program? Billions of dollars in military hardware sent to the USSR to fight the Nazis. US anti-communism was a Cold War thing. You're getting your timelines messed up here.
  - wayoutthere 5y ago
    It most certainly was not just a Cold War thing [1]; anti-communism was a coherent and vocal point of view even in the late 1920s. The big industrialists (e.g. Henry Ford, a known nazi sympathizer) at the time saw it was an existential threat and were determined to stop it at all costs. [1] https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/1730 https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/1730
    - missedthecue 5y ago
      Yes there was a non-zero number of anti-communists in the United States at any given time. That wasn't what I was saying. What I'm saying is that anti-communism to the point of orchestrating quasi-false flags to get drawn into another World War was not a focus of FDR's administration. As I pointed out, FDR's admin fully and materially supported foreign communist governments.
- ZanyProgrammer 5y ago
  The problem (well, many problems) with that particular conspiracy theory (which is what it is) is that going to war with Japan doesn't mean that the US will enter the war against Germany.
deleted 5y ago
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- bopbeepboop 5y ago
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coldcode 5y ago
A good book (very long and highly detailed) is: The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945. You can really see how each side wound up where it did. Neither side wanted war, the Japanese all assumed they would lose, but because of the immediate successes thought maybe they were wrong. Even terrible translations and a lack of understand of different cultures had a large role.
- netcan 5y ago
  Also, the Japanese didn't really know they were attacking the US soil, so to speak. Hawaii was, ATT, legally similar to the Philippines. Considering Hawaii american soil and the Philippines something else was a retcon.
  - NikolaeVarius 5y ago
    What. Such weird re-writing of history. The IJN wanted to destroy as many US Carriers and Battleships as possible. What difference does it make if they thought Hawaii was a territory vs state.
    - netcan 5y ago
      The difference is the expected reaction, probabilities, etc. An attack on US forces in Saudi Arabia today would still be treated severely, but not the same as an attack on Virginia. FDR had to decide how to characterize it. He decided to treat Hawaii as US soil, The Philippines and other territories as less.
      - NikolaeVarius 5y ago
        That doesn't answer the question? The attack was supposed to destroy as many carriers, battleships, fuel depots as possible. Who the hell cares about territory status versus actual military capability?
        rhino369 5y ago
jleyank 5y ago
The uk also did it for real at Taranto in 1940. So there were lots of examples to draw from. Perhaps the magnitude of success stemmed from the insight by genda and onishi to put the carriers together and train for mass attacks.
- simonebrunozzi 5y ago
  > So there were lots of examples to draw from Pretty much confirmed by my memory (my father-in-law was a retired Italian Navy Admiral, and knew war history very well), as well as by Wikipedia [0]: "It is likely the Imperial Japanese Navy's staff carefully studied the Taranto raid during planning for the attack on Pearl Harbor, as both attacks faced similar issues attacking a shallow harbour" [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Taranto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Taranto
- stanrivers 5y ago
  Oh, interesting - from wiki - "The Royal Navy launched the first all-aircraft ship-to-ship naval attack in history, employing 21 Fairey Swordfish biplane torpedo bombers from the aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious in the Mediterranean Sea. The attack struck the battle fleet of the Regia Marina at anchor in the harbour of Taranto, using aerial torpedoes despite the shallowness of the water. The success of this attack augured the ascendancy of naval aviation over the big guns of battleships. According to Admiral Cunningham, "Taranto, and the night of 11–12 November 1940, should be remembered forever as having shown once and for all that in the Fleet Air Arm the Navy has its most devastating weapon."" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Taranto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Taranto
ceejayoz 5y ago
> However, once again, politics and dismissal of “unfair” tactics led to a lack of bolstered defense at Pearl Habor and an unwillingness to restructure the U.S. Navy. We still haven't learned from this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002 "After the war game was restarted, its participants were forced to follow a script drafted to ensure a Blue Force victory. Among other rules imposed by this script, Red Force was ordered to turn on their anti-aircraft radar in order for them to be destroyed, and during a combined parachute assault by the 82nd Airborne Division and Marines air assaulting on the then new and still controversial CV-22, Van Riper's forces were ordered not to shoot down any of the approaching aircraft. Van Riper also claimed that exercise officials denied him the opportunity to use his own tactics and ideas against Blue Force, and that they also ordered Red Force not to use certain weapons systems against Blue Force and even ordered the location of Red Force units to be revealed."
- quantified 5y ago
  And yet the only way we fought for independence against the British back in the day was by doing it “unfairly”. We’ve so lost touch with our mojo.
- dTal 5y ago
  It is frightening that the world's largest arsenal is under the control of such an irrational institution. Here's a favorite HN comment of mine, about the US Navy - "zero capability to accurately assess risk or fix problems beyond punishing people when things inevitably go wrong". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15120369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15120369
  - kingcharles 5y ago
    > Here's a favorite HN comment of mine, about the US Navy - "zero capability to accurately assess risk or fix problems beyond punishing people when things inevitably go wrong". This sums up the whole US justice system too.
- Steltek 5y ago
echopurity 5y ago
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InTheArena 5y ago
its important to note that the Fleet Problems (of which this was one, and there were many) also simulated sneak and non-sneak attacks against the Panama Canal, and there were multiple simulated attacks against Pearl Harbor. There were also tests of carriers acting alone, carriers acting as scouting forces, carriers acting as the head of a strike force. For anyone interested in this - I highly recommend "All the Factors of Victory" about Admiral Reeves. During this time period there was a deliberate and systematic effort to develop carrier aviation and tactics. Far from being some rogue effort that was suppressed for political reasons, it transformed the navy and put in place the foundations for eventually winning the war - even with a rough start. The Essex carriers (for example) where specified and laid down according to what the USA had learned from the fleet problems. Why the rough start? I would point at Admiral Kimmel. Kimmel's predecessors (Reeves and Richardson) understood that American Bases (Subic Bay, Panama Canal San Diego, Pearl Harbor - in that order) were at risk from a Japanese surprise attack. Reeves was obsessed by it - which is partially why this Fleet Problem occurred. When Reeves retired, Richardson took his place. While story goes that Richardson was fired for making the point that Pearl was vulnerable, that doesn't appear to be the whole story. Richardson's main complaint was not sneak attack, but rather that Pearl Harbor didn't have the facilities to adequately service and train the fleet, and his solders would be bored during peacetime. Regardless, he was also concerned about a sneak attack against American assets. Richardson was insubordinate - at one time questioning the role of congress and the president in dictating military policy - FDR fired him, and replaced him with Kimmel. Kimmel on the other hand was obsessed with the Japanese population of Hawaii, particularly the risk of sabotage. Rather then focus on radar, or keeping the Fleet at Lahaina roads - where they could move freely in case of a sneak attack - he kept the fleet bottled up (save the aircraft carriers) and the planes lined up in roads. Even then - the USA had put in place things like Radar and built up Pearl Harbor rapid ally enough that they could have responded if everything was perfect. But you had one force that had been at war for 8 years before the USA entered, and the other at peace time. The focus on sabotage instead of fleet defense doomed them. While the Niihau incident occurred, it was obviously a far smaller problem the the Fleet burning in Honolulu. Finally it needs to be noted that a ton of people expected a surprise attack. They just expected it against the forward US base (the Philippines) or Singapore Ironically, the one area task force wise that that the Japanese were inspired by the USA was based on not by Fleet Problems, but instead propaganda. The story goes that the Japanese commander in charge of Planning - Minoru Genda - was watching American news reels, which showed American carriers acting in formation, in the same frame of film. While this was done for filming, Genda applied it to actual battle formations. That gave Japan enough firepower to target the entire Pacific Island, not just a single ship or even a single base. The Japanese were also far more inspired by the attack on Taranto by a set of obsolete biplanes that basically wiped out Italian sea power (not that there was a ton of that) in Europe.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
Didn't this get posted here, not long ago?
- baud147258 5y ago
  yes, 6 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27345075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27345075
KineticLensman 5y ago
For me one of the best things about the article is the link to the awesome 32-page WWII OSS sabotage manual [0]. Section 11 (General Interference with Organisations and Production) is a great list of behaviours and anti-patterns that seem to exist in dysfunctional organisations and individuals. E.g. If possible, join or help organize a group for presenting employee problems to the management. See that the procedures adopted are as inconvenient as possible for the management, involving the presence of a large number of employees at each presentation, entailing more than one meeting for each grievance, bringing up problems which are largely imaginary, and so on. and Insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products; send back for refinishing those which have the least flaw. Approve other defective parts whose flaws are not visible to the naked eye. [0] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/26184/page-images/26184-images.pdf https://www.gutenberg.org/files/26184/page-images/26184-imag...
- hef19898 5y ago
  That aounds so freaking familiar... Pretty sure I don't work with OSS saboteurs, so. I will read the doc so, it sounds pretty useful!
billfruit 5y ago
Also on the same morning as Pearl Harbour, Hong Kong was also attacked by the Japanese. Allies never took it back during the war, till the Japanese surrendered in 1945.
rkk3 5y ago
Surprised there is no mention that during this period 1932 and 1938 the US was de-militarized! In 1939 the The US had the 17th largest Army in the world by size, and half of it was the national guard. https://web.archive.org/web/20180124005751/http://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pubs/summary.cfm?q=358 https://web.archive.org/web/20180124005751/http://ssi.armywa...
choeger 5y ago
What's striking here is the Japanese trust into their own intel. If someone came up to me with a plan for a "surprise" attack that the defender had wargamed not once but twice and wouldn't know about any countermeasures I would be highly suspicious of a trap. For instance, how did Japan not consider that the US Navy deployed top secret radar after the first wargame that then perfectly warned about the second attack? You can easily stack multiple wargames in one. Another option could have been a submarine screen that "intercepted" the attacking force.
JoeAltmaier 5y ago
Unfair tactics! It's endemic in military exercises that anything that doesn't follow the script is suppressed. My son was 'insurgent leader' for an Army exercise in Korea. His team of 6 used various tactics (inside information between exercises gained from friends in the camp; feints; bribing their way in through the back gate) and ultimately got a 'suicide bomber' into the command tent. After that they went round behind the defenders and only stopped when they ran out of simulated ammo. 6 guys defeated a company. There was curiously no 'after action review', and further exercises were scripted if I remember right. Anyway yeah, nobody wants that kind of result on the record.
- jfk13 5y ago
  "But... War starts at midnight!" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_and_Death_of_Colonel_Blimp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_and_Death_of_Colonel_...)
- AniseAbyss 5y ago
  You'd think the US would have learned from the Korean war. When the PLA entered the fight they used human wave attacks that tore right through the UN lines.
retrac 5y ago
This is perhaps tangential, but since it was all part of the same operation, maybe it is fitting. We also tend to only talk about Pearl Harbor. It was but one piece of a much larger strategy for the Japanese. On Dec 7 or 8th over a roughly 12 hour period, Imperial Japan launched simultaneous invasions of Thailand, the Philippines, Hong Kong, what are now Indonesia and Malaysia, and a half-dozen small islands including Guam and Wake, with about a million soldiers across a theatre spanning some 8000 miles. Allied control in Asia was essentially eliminated within two months. A systematic, wilful, underestimation of the Japanese potential before their flood outwards is a theme throughout, from Pearl Harbor to "Fortress Singapore".
tacon 5y ago
In 1979 I got a small VIP tour of Pearl Harbor from the Navy. They made sure we understood that the Japanese attack was effective, but far from perfect. I remember they mentioned three strategic mistakes by the Japanese: 1. They did not hit any submarine facilities, so the US submarines continued to operate normally. 2. They did not hit any of the dry dock facilities, so almost all the damaged ships were repaired in place without having to be towed back to the west coast. 3. They did not hit the fuel depots, so the remaining fleet had plenty of fuel ready to go. And, of course, the carriers were out on operations, which was a critical miss, as it turned out.
- Arrath 5y ago
  > 1. They did not hit any submarine facilities, so the US submarines continued to operate normally. Japanese submarine doctrine (attached to fleet elements in support of seeking battle/harassing the enemy fleet) may have influenced their target selection in going after larger surface combatants in preference to submarines. And yes, that was a huge strategic mistake. U.S. submarines inflicted grievous damage to Japanese merchant shipping throughout the war.
  - jcranmer 5y ago
    US submarine effectiveness in the early part of the war was largely nil because the US torpedoes failed to work properly. This wasn't fixed until 1943, so there's a decent chance that even if the submarine facilities had been damaged, they would have been repaired before the US submarines got effective torpedoes anyways.
    - Arrath 5y ago
      This is a good point. Some of the stories around the early war torpedos almost belie belief. "On 24 December 1941, during a war patrol, Commander Tyrell D. Jacobs in Sargo fired eight torpedoes at two different ships with no results. When two additional merchantmen came in view, Jacobs took extra care to set up his torpedo shots. He pursued the targets for fifty-seven minutes and made certain the TDC bearings matched perfectly before firing two torpedoes at each ship from an average range of 1,000 yd (910 m). The shots should have hit, but all failed to explode. A few days after he discovered the torpedoes were running too deep, and corrected the problem, Jacobs detected a big, slow tanker. Again, his approach was meticulous, firing one torpedo at a close range of 1,200 yd (1,100 m). It missed. Exasperated, Jacobs broke radio silence to question the Mark 14's reliability." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_14_torpedo#Problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_14_torpedo#Problems

177 points by stanrivers 5y ago

If you want to visualize how the attack at Peal Harbor happened and have about 20 minutes to spare, consider watching the Montemayor video that explains how the attacks occurred, in the order they occurred, along with historical photographs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6cz9gtMTeI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6cz9gtMTeI

cushychicken 5y ago

Been listening to Dan Carlin's podcast series on the Imperial Japanese military in WWII. (It's six parts, and about 20 hours long at this point.) Coincidentally, I just listened to the part about the attack on Pearl Harbor yesterday. He didn't mention any of these failed wargames in the podcast. Reading about it now gives a lot more context on why the commander in chief of the US Navy at Pearl Harbor knew his head was going to roll following the Japanese attack.

ranger207 5y ago
Supernova in the East was a great series. I read one of his major sources, Ian Toll's Pacific War trilogy, immediately after finishing the series, which gave a great strategic and political view to complement Carlin's emotional view
- cushychicken 5y ago
  I'll look that up. Thanks for the recommendation.
- cushychicken 5y ago
  Hey - I'm a few days late here but I got Pacific Crucible on Kindle and I'm really liking it. About a quarter of the way through. OMG, did I never realize how terrifying war in the Pacific was.
darkerside 5y ago
Keep listening! Some of his best since Blueprint for Armageddon
- zwirbl 5y ago
  Which is likely his best series yet
thesuperbigfrog 5y ago
Here is a link to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/dancarlin/history?format=xml http://feeds.feedburner.com/dancarlin/history?format=xml "Supernova in the East" is his latest series.
kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
What an epic podcast. And rather than being a straightforward recitation of events, it cleverly focuses on everything else: politics, the brutality of combat, personalities, why soldiers and commanders act as they do, and so on. It really drives home the feeling of the war as a slow-motion car accident, long in the making, impossible to stop, and horrific in its human impact. I’ve read a lot of military history, and this still felt so fresh, original, and dramatic.
emptyfile 5y ago
Just keep in mind to take everything he says with a big grain of salt. Quite a few times I've been mesmerized by his podcasts only to find out later its either mostly made up or a "classic" but totally discredited version of the story. He really doesn't bother reading up on the latest and most accurate material for his topics. It's the main reason why I stopped listening to him (the smaller one is that I will never get used to his grating accent).
- stanrivers 5y ago
  Oh - interesting, I never knew that was a claimed levied against him - that his history wasn't necessarily accurate. That is a bummer. Still like what he is doing for getting the concept out there that history is worth studying and should be "cool," and you can't blame a generalist for not being 100% up-to-date on the latest findings / understandings by experts... so if its just that, I get it - if its more storytelling and embellishment - that is unfortunate.
  - muro 5y ago
    I was disappointed when listening about WWI how wrong the numbers were and gave up.
- etc-hosts 5y ago
  do you have some examples? I read https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ppmsm/thoughts_on_dan_carlin/cd4qedu/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ppmsm/thoug...
- pomian 5y ago
  To be fair, he always states: "I am not a historian". So if you listen to him as a storyteller, you will have a great time, and you might learn something along the way.
  - emptyfile 5y ago
    Absolutely, he's the kind of guy that should fire up your interest and make you buy a real book to learn more. However, never take the book he's actually using...most of the time it's plain outdated. As you say, you can't really blame a guy who says 5 times per episode that he's "not a historian", but plenty of times I just can't help and wonder why didn't he spend 30 minutes extra researching a topic and choosing better material and sources. The only answer I got is that bad material makes for better stories.
AniseAbyss 5y ago
The Japanese embarrassed a lot of Allied commanders in WW2. White superiority complex was the first casualty of the war.
- splitstud 5y ago
  And yet the US went from not being on a war footing to rolling up the Japanese forces across a huge war zone in 4 years. And this was the side hustle to the main job. But go ahead and misunderstand what happened while throwing racist comments around.
- cushychicken 5y ago
  I agree, the dismissive racism of the American military command was paid for heavily.
  - splitstud 5y ago
    The Japanese military was not one that their contemporaries dismissed lightly. Casually assuming racism as well?

nicoburns 5y ago

One has to wonder whether the Japanese would have thought up this strategy (or considered it feasible) had the Americans not practiced it and proved it for them. It seems worryingly common for this kind of simulation to ironically lead to disaster. Chernobyl would be another example (the explosion happened during a safety test). And it's possible that the coronavirus pandemic is another (the virus may have accidentally leaked from "gain of function" experiments designed to give us insight into how to respond should such a virus evolve naturally).

ClumsyPilot 5y ago
Alternatively, the weakness was obvious to anyone with a brain, noone fixed it, so the enemy exploited it. UK government issued a pandemic readyness report. Report said the country has no protective equipment and will get rekt. This is exactly what happened. Blaming the messenger is very misguided. Negligence is endemic and always comes back to haunt you
lucas_membrane 5y ago
From some time around that first simulation (early 1930's), the "plan an attack on Pearl Harbor" problem was in the curriculum of the Japanese naval academy. Hawaii was known to be teeming with Japanese intelligence assets at least since the time of WW1, and its strategic importance had been well known at least since the US had made a point of acquiring the place.
short_sells_poo 5y ago
I'm not sure you can assign blame to the safety test in precipitating the disaster (perhaps this wasn't even your intention). The overarching theme in the examples you mention is that the weakness was always there, safety test or not. I'd posit that Chernobyl would've happened eventually for example. It was a design with unstable boundary conditions operated in an environment of secrecy and disregard for safety. That's basically a situation where disasters are guarantee to happen. Nobody knows anything, the default operating procedure is to withhold crucial information and everyone is working under a "don't question your orders" mindset.

xenocratus 5y ago

Previous conversation on the same article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27345075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27345075

wayoutthere 5y ago

There’s a school of thought that Pearl Harbor was intentionally left vulnerable in order to provide public justification for entering a war that it was pretty obvious we were getting drawn into anyway. The Nazis were vehemently anti-communist which means they had a significant amount of support within the US government, and overcoming that required an egregiously offensive violation of our national sovereignty (which Pearl Harbor provided).

missedthecue 5y ago
Communism wasn't a threat to the USA in the 1930s. Have you heard of the lend-lease program? Billions of dollars in military hardware sent to the USSR to fight the Nazis. US anti-communism was a Cold War thing. You're getting your timelines messed up here.
- wayoutthere 5y ago
  It most certainly was not just a Cold War thing [1]; anti-communism was a coherent and vocal point of view even in the late 1920s. The big industrialists (e.g. Henry Ford, a known nazi sympathizer) at the time saw it was an existential threat and were determined to stop it at all costs. [1] https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/1730 https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/1730
  - missedthecue 5y ago
    Yes there was a non-zero number of anti-communists in the United States at any given time. That wasn't what I was saying. What I'm saying is that anti-communism to the point of orchestrating quasi-false flags to get drawn into another World War was not a focus of FDR's administration. As I pointed out, FDR's admin fully and materially supported foreign communist governments.
ZanyProgrammer 5y ago
The problem (well, many problems) with that particular conspiracy theory (which is what it is) is that going to war with Japan doesn't mean that the US will enter the war against Germany.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

bopbeepboop 5y ago
[dead]

coldcode 5y ago

A good book (very long and highly detailed) is: The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945. You can really see how each side wound up where it did. Neither side wanted war, the Japanese all assumed they would lose, but because of the immediate successes thought maybe they were wrong. Even terrible translations and a lack of understand of different cultures had a large role.

netcan 5y ago
Also, the Japanese didn't really know they were attacking the US soil, so to speak. Hawaii was, ATT, legally similar to the Philippines. Considering Hawaii american soil and the Philippines something else was a retcon.
- NikolaeVarius 5y ago
  What. Such weird re-writing of history. The IJN wanted to destroy as many US Carriers and Battleships as possible. What difference does it make if they thought Hawaii was a territory vs state.
  - netcan 5y ago
    The difference is the expected reaction, probabilities, etc. An attack on US forces in Saudi Arabia today would still be treated severely, but not the same as an attack on Virginia. FDR had to decide how to characterize it. He decided to treat Hawaii as US soil, The Philippines and other territories as less.
    - NikolaeVarius 5y ago
      That doesn't answer the question? The attack was supposed to destroy as many carriers, battleships, fuel depots as possible. Who the hell cares about territory status versus actual military capability?
      - rhino369 5y ago

jleyank 5y ago

The uk also did it for real at Taranto in 1940. So there were lots of examples to draw from. Perhaps the magnitude of success stemmed from the insight by genda and onishi to put the carriers together and train for mass attacks.

simonebrunozzi 5y ago
> So there were lots of examples to draw from Pretty much confirmed by my memory (my father-in-law was a retired Italian Navy Admiral, and knew war history very well), as well as by Wikipedia [0]: "It is likely the Imperial Japanese Navy's staff carefully studied the Taranto raid during planning for the attack on Pearl Harbor, as both attacks faced similar issues attacking a shallow harbour" [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Taranto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Taranto
stanrivers 5y ago
Oh, interesting - from wiki - "The Royal Navy launched the first all-aircraft ship-to-ship naval attack in history, employing 21 Fairey Swordfish biplane torpedo bombers from the aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious in the Mediterranean Sea. The attack struck the battle fleet of the Regia Marina at anchor in the harbour of Taranto, using aerial torpedoes despite the shallowness of the water. The success of this attack augured the ascendancy of naval aviation over the big guns of battleships. According to Admiral Cunningham, "Taranto, and the night of 11–12 November 1940, should be remembered forever as having shown once and for all that in the Fleet Air Arm the Navy has its most devastating weapon."" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Taranto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Taranto

ceejayoz 5y ago

> However, once again, politics and dismissal of “unfair” tactics led to a lack of bolstered defense at Pearl Habor and an unwillingness to restructure the U.S. Navy. We still haven't learned from this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002 "After the war game was restarted, its participants were forced to follow a script drafted to ensure a Blue Force victory. Among other rules imposed by this script, Red Force was ordered to turn on their anti-aircraft radar in order for them to be destroyed, and during a combined parachute assault by the 82nd Airborne Division and Marines air assaulting on the then new and still controversial CV-22, Van Riper's forces were ordered not to shoot down any of the approaching aircraft. Van Riper also claimed that exercise officials denied him the opportunity to use his own tactics and ideas against Blue Force, and that they also ordered Red Force not to use certain weapons systems against Blue Force and even ordered the location of Red Force units to be revealed."

quantified 5y ago
And yet the only way we fought for independence against the British back in the day was by doing it “unfairly”. We’ve so lost touch with our mojo.
dTal 5y ago
It is frightening that the world's largest arsenal is under the control of such an irrational institution. Here's a favorite HN comment of mine, about the US Navy - "zero capability to accurately assess risk or fix problems beyond punishing people when things inevitably go wrong". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15120369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15120369
- kingcharles 5y ago
  > Here's a favorite HN comment of mine, about the US Navy - "zero capability to accurately assess risk or fix problems beyond punishing people when things inevitably go wrong". This sums up the whole US justice system too.
Steltek 5y ago

echopurity 5y ago

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InTheArena 5y ago

its important to note that the Fleet Problems (of which this was one, and there were many) also simulated sneak and non-sneak attacks against the Panama Canal, and there were multiple simulated attacks against Pearl Harbor. There were also tests of carriers acting alone, carriers acting as scouting forces, carriers acting as the head of a strike force. For anyone interested in this - I highly recommend "All the Factors of Victory" about Admiral Reeves. During this time period there was a deliberate and systematic effort to develop carrier aviation and tactics. Far from being some rogue effort that was suppressed for political reasons, it transformed the navy and put in place the foundations for eventually winning the war - even with a rough start. The Essex carriers (for example) where specified and laid down according to what the USA had learned from the fleet problems. Why the rough start? I would point at Admiral Kimmel. Kimmel's predecessors (Reeves and Richardson) understood that American Bases (Subic Bay, Panama Canal San Diego, Pearl Harbor - in that order) were at risk from a Japanese surprise attack. Reeves was obsessed by it - which is partially why this Fleet Problem occurred. When Reeves retired, Richardson took his place. While story goes that Richardson was fired for making the point that Pearl was vulnerable, that doesn't appear to be the whole story. Richardson's main complaint was not sneak attack, but rather that Pearl Harbor didn't have the facilities to adequately service and train the fleet, and his solders would be bored during peacetime. Regardless, he was also concerned about a sneak attack against American assets. Richardson was insubordinate - at one time questioning the role of congress and the president in dictating military policy - FDR fired him, and replaced him with Kimmel. Kimmel on the other hand was obsessed with the Japanese population of Hawaii, particularly the risk of sabotage. Rather then focus on radar, or keeping the Fleet at Lahaina roads - where they could move freely in case of a sneak attack - he kept the fleet bottled up (save the aircraft carriers) and the planes lined up in roads. Even then - the USA had put in place things like Radar and built up Pearl Harbor rapid ally enough that they could have responded if everything was perfect. But you had one force that had been at war for 8 years before the USA entered, and the other at peace time. The focus on sabotage instead of fleet defense doomed them. While the Niihau incident occurred, it was obviously a far smaller problem the the Fleet burning in Honolulu. Finally it needs to be noted that a ton of people expected a surprise attack. They just expected it against the forward US base (the Philippines) or Singapore Ironically, the one area task force wise that that the Japanese were inspired by the USA was based on not by Fleet Problems, but instead propaganda. The story goes that the Japanese commander in charge of Planning - Minoru Genda - was watching American news reels, which showed American carriers acting in formation, in the same frame of film. While this was done for filming, Genda applied it to actual battle formations. That gave Japan enough firepower to target the entire Pacific Island, not just a single ship or even a single base. The Japanese were also far more inspired by the attack on Taranto by a set of obsolete biplanes that basically wiped out Italian sea power (not that there was a ton of that) in Europe.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

Didn't this get posted here, not long ago?

baud147258 5y ago
yes, 6 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27345075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27345075

KineticLensman 5y ago

For me one of the best things about the article is the link to the awesome 32-page WWII OSS sabotage manual [0]. Section 11 (General Interference with Organisations and Production) is a great list of behaviours and anti-patterns that seem to exist in dysfunctional organisations and individuals. E.g. If possible, join or help organize a group for presenting employee problems to the management. See that the procedures adopted are as inconvenient as possible for the management, involving the presence of a large number of employees at each presentation, entailing more than one meeting for each grievance, bringing up problems which are largely imaginary, and so on. and Insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products; send back for refinishing those which have the least flaw. Approve other defective parts whose flaws are not visible to the naked eye. [0] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/26184/page-images/26184-images.pdf https://www.gutenberg.org/files/26184/page-images/26184-imag...

hef19898 5y ago
That aounds so freaking familiar... Pretty sure I don't work with OSS saboteurs, so. I will read the doc so, it sounds pretty useful!

billfruit 5y ago

Also on the same morning as Pearl Harbour, Hong Kong was also attacked by the Japanese. Allies never took it back during the war, till the Japanese surrendered in 1945.

rkk3 5y ago

Surprised there is no mention that during this period 1932 and 1938 the US was de-militarized! In 1939 the The US had the 17th largest Army in the world by size, and half of it was the national guard. https://web.archive.org/web/20180124005751/http://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pubs/summary.cfm?q=358 https://web.archive.org/web/20180124005751/http://ssi.armywa...

choeger 5y ago

What's striking here is the Japanese trust into their own intel. If someone came up to me with a plan for a "surprise" attack that the defender had wargamed not once but twice and wouldn't know about any countermeasures I would be highly suspicious of a trap. For instance, how did Japan not consider that the US Navy deployed top secret radar after the first wargame that then perfectly warned about the second attack? You can easily stack multiple wargames in one. Another option could have been a submarine screen that "intercepted" the attacking force.

JoeAltmaier 5y ago

Unfair tactics! It's endemic in military exercises that anything that doesn't follow the script is suppressed. My son was 'insurgent leader' for an Army exercise in Korea. His team of 6 used various tactics (inside information between exercises gained from friends in the camp; feints; bribing their way in through the back gate) and ultimately got a 'suicide bomber' into the command tent. After that they went round behind the defenders and only stopped when they ran out of simulated ammo. 6 guys defeated a company. There was curiously no 'after action review', and further exercises were scripted if I remember right. Anyway yeah, nobody wants that kind of result on the record.

jfk13 5y ago
"But... War starts at midnight!" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_and_Death_of_Colonel_Blimp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_and_Death_of_Colonel_...)
AniseAbyss 5y ago
You'd think the US would have learned from the Korean war. When the PLA entered the fight they used human wave attacks that tore right through the UN lines.

retrac 5y ago

This is perhaps tangential, but since it was all part of the same operation, maybe it is fitting. We also tend to only talk about Pearl Harbor. It was but one piece of a much larger strategy for the Japanese. On Dec 7 or 8th over a roughly 12 hour period, Imperial Japan launched simultaneous invasions of Thailand, the Philippines, Hong Kong, what are now Indonesia and Malaysia, and a half-dozen small islands including Guam and Wake, with about a million soldiers across a theatre spanning some 8000 miles. Allied control in Asia was essentially eliminated within two months. A systematic, wilful, underestimation of the Japanese potential before their flood outwards is a theme throughout, from Pearl Harbor to "Fortress Singapore".

tacon 5y ago

In 1979 I got a small VIP tour of Pearl Harbor from the Navy. They made sure we understood that the Japanese attack was effective, but far from perfect. I remember they mentioned three strategic mistakes by the Japanese: 1. They did not hit any submarine facilities, so the US submarines continued to operate normally. 2. They did not hit any of the dry dock facilities, so almost all the damaged ships were repaired in place without having to be towed back to the west coast. 3. They did not hit the fuel depots, so the remaining fleet had plenty of fuel ready to go. And, of course, the carriers were out on operations, which was a critical miss, as it turned out.

Arrath 5y ago
> 1. They did not hit any submarine facilities, so the US submarines continued to operate normally. Japanese submarine doctrine (attached to fleet elements in support of seeking battle/harassing the enemy fleet) may have influenced their target selection in going after larger surface combatants in preference to submarines. And yes, that was a huge strategic mistake. U.S. submarines inflicted grievous damage to Japanese merchant shipping throughout the war.
- jcranmer 5y ago
  US submarine effectiveness in the early part of the war was largely nil because the US torpedoes failed to work properly. This wasn't fixed until 1943, so there's a decent chance that even if the submarine facilities had been damaged, they would have been repaired before the US submarines got effective torpedoes anyways.
  - Arrath 5y ago
    This is a good point. Some of the stories around the early war torpedos almost belie belief. "On 24 December 1941, during a war patrol, Commander Tyrell D. Jacobs in Sargo fired eight torpedoes at two different ships with no results. When two additional merchantmen came in view, Jacobs took extra care to set up his torpedo shots. He pursued the targets for fifty-seven minutes and made certain the TDC bearings matched perfectly before firing two torpedoes at each ship from an average range of 1,000 yd (910 m). The shots should have hit, but all failed to explode. A few days after he discovered the torpedoes were running too deep, and corrected the problem, Jacobs detected a big, slow tanker. Again, his approach was meticulous, firing one torpedo at a close range of 1,200 yd (1,100 m). It missed. Exasperated, Jacobs broke radio silence to question the Mark 14's reliability." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_14_torpedo#Problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_14_torpedo#Problems