What follows is my transcription of Hanson W. Baldwin’s four-part series of columns on the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack. I found it interesting to learn what questions were being asked and assumptions made about the disaster within two weeks of December 7, 1941. I decided to present the series in this way to make it more accessible and also in case our discussion of the on-going investigation needs a continuing venue – Homer.
The Events at Hawaii
By Hanson W. Baldwin
Part I, December 18, 1941
The shake-up last night in military and naval high commands in the Pacific, following hard upon the tragedy at Pearl Harbor, should do much to ease the public doubts that the attack on Pearl Harbor engendered.
The relief of Admiral Husband E. Kimmel as Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet, and of Lieut. Gen. Walter C. Short, commanding the Hawaiian Department, is undoubtedly preliminary to a more complete investigation of the circumstances of the attack upon Pearl Harbor, which is to be made by a board of inquiry appointed by the President.
The findings of the is board cannot be pre-determined, nor should individuals be prejudiced. Yet it is clear that the effect of giving fleet command to a new admiral and of placing an Army Air Corps officer – Lieut. Gen. Delos C. Emmons - in command of both ground and air forces in the Army’s Hawaiian Department, an unprecedented move, should be extremely beneficial. The new fleet commander, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, is young for such senior flag rank – 58; and General Emmons’s appointment plainly shows that Washington understands the importance of air power in Pacific strategy.
Reassurance in Board The shake-up will undoubtedly be quickly followed by a thorough inquiry, conducted by the President’s board, of the entire disaster. The board, headed by Owen J. Roberts, associate justice of the Supreme Court, could scarcely have been better picked. The prominence, knowledge and judicial fair-mindedness of its members should insure a thorough and speedy investigation, and , above all, its finding should prevent any repetition of the Pearl Harbor tragedy.
It is this phase of the investigation that is important. Recrimination and the search for a “goat” should and will play no part in it. The first and primary job now is to repair the damages of the surprise attack; reinforce and strengthen our forces and pay back the score to the Japanese with interest. Yet if more men or methods need to be changed to insure the success of our counter-strokes they must be changed, and it is this aspect of the investigation that is of such mounting importance to the future course of this war.
For upon no one except fleet commanders at sea does there rest the same awful burden of responsibility. Planes can be wiped out – by ones, twos, scores or even hundreds – and replaced; divisions can be decimated and reorganized, but wars are usually fought largely with the fleets with which they were started, for fighting ships – particularly the great ships of the line – cannot be quickly built. Winston Churchill, writing of an earlier war and of another commander (in his book, “The World Crisis”), epitomized this frightening burden when he commented:
His [Jellicoe’s] responsibilities were on a different scale from all others. It might fall to him as to no other man – sovereign , statesman, admiral or general – to issue orders which in the space of two or three hours might nakedly decide who won the war. * * * Jellicoe was the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon.
The Japanese recognized the terrific implications that destruction of the Pacific Fleet would have upon the entire course of the war; that explains the determined ferocity of their surprise assault upon Hawaii. Tactically, the enemy succeeded; they smashed many of our ships and planes, but strategically they failed, for the bulk of the Pacific Feet is still in being, still a potential menace to Japan and her hopes of empire.
The fleet commander’s present job is difficult; he must try to counter the Japanese operations, without, however, unduly risking his fleet against superior forces until such time as it has been reinforced or has received the heavy support of powerful land-based aviation.
Not Insuperable Problem
This is a considerable, though by no means an insuperable, problem – one that is probably eased by two factors: the certainty that damaged ships will soon be repaired and that reinforcements are on the way; the likelihood that only Japanese light forces and raiders – not the main Japanese fleet – are operating in mid-Pacific.
But the responsibilities for national safety imposed upon our fleet commanders and military leaders in the Pacific and our island outposts are so heavy that the shake-up of last night and an investigation such as that now started of the Pearl Harbor attack are essential to our future success. The trip of Secretary of the Navy Knox to Hawaii, his candid report, his statement that “the United States services were not on the alert against the surprise air attack on Hawaii,” and the immediate appointment by the President of the five-man board of inquiry are all reassuring evidences of the government’s determination that the same factors that contributed to the Japanese success at Hawaii – surprise, over-confidence amounting to a complacent sense of security and a lack of military alertness – will not again operate against us.
Part II, December 19, 1941
As the war in the Pacific spreads across the vast leagues of the world’s greatest ocean, the board appointed by the President to investigate the Pearl Harbor tragedy will soon commence its sittings at the scene where so many Americans died in the first act of a war for survival.
In answering the question, “What happened at Hawaii?” the investigating board will undoubtedly find that there are many aspects of the Hawaiian attack that require clearing up.
First and most obvious is an inquiry as to whether or not the War and Navy Departments in Washington and the military and naval leaders in Hawaii were kept properly informed of the serious nature of the negotiations with Japan and, if they were, whether or not the warning was properly evaluated. The fact that a large part of the fleet – an unusually large part considering the routine that the fleet had been following prior to hostilities – happened to be in Pearl Harbor on the fatal Sunday, Dec. 7, may also require some explanation, because it is apparent that if international tension is serious, the place for the fleet is at sea.
Failure to Get Data
Second, the intelligence services of the Army and Navy and counter-espionage services of the government seem to have failed to collate and correctly evaluate the Japanese military strength; to obtain any warning of the impending Japanese attack, preparations for which must have been started weeks before Dec. 7, “a date that will live in infamy,” or to counter Japanese fifth columnist and espionage activities in Hawaii.
Third, there is considerable mystery as to how the Japanese carriers and planes reached the Island of Oahu undetected until the bombs started to fall. There are many aspects to this phase of the problem and some possible explanations, but, to understand the relationship of the army and Navy in Hawaii and their joint responsibilities, it is essential that the function of Pearl Harbor be understood.
Pearl Harbor is the raison d’etre of all other military installations in the Hawaiian Islands. It was supposed to provide a secure base for the fleet, with repair and docking facilities, oil tanks, a naval air base, a submarine base and all the other appurtenances common to a great fleet base. The Army airfields, land garrisons, coast defense, anti-aircraft guns, etc., were there primarily for one purpose – and one alone – to protect the Navy’s base at Pearl Harbor, to make it secure against attack. A later and increasingly important function of the Army land garrisons is to protect the bases of air power at Hawaii with ground anti-aircraft defenses and against landing attacks.
The primary responsibility for defending a fleet base like Pearl Harbor, therefore, rests with the Army, not the Navy. The very essence of a naval base is security; it exists, not to be defended by the fleet, but to service the fleet, to provide it a safe haven when ships and men return from the sea weary from the vigil never-ending.
There has been too much public criticism of gallant and able officers and men of the Navy because many of them were sleeping late on the fatal Sunday, or were ashore playing golf or enjoying rest and recreation from the grind at sea; there has been too much criticism because ships were dismantled and being repaired beside docks, unable to get up steam. Yet this is what men and ships were in Pearl Harbor for; this is what a naval base means; if the ships and men cannot rest in a reasonable degree of security in a naval base, than the base is not worth having.
Responsibilities Shared
The primary job of the Pacific Fleet is not, therefore, the defense of Pearl Harbor; its job is to use Pearl Harbor as a mid-ocean point d’appui from which to manoeuvre against the enemy navy. Nevertheless, the Navy shared with the Army certain responsibilities for the safety of the fleet in Pearl Harbor; indeed, the primary responsibility for the safety of a fleet (as distinct from the security of a naval base) can never be delegated to any other than its commander.
The Navy’s responsibilities in this regard consisted chiefly of distant scouting duties, in the air and on the sea, of anti-submarine patrol and of close-in defense by patrol craft, nets, mines, etc., of the immediate sea entrances to Pearl Harbor.
The Army was charged with close-in air reconnaissance in which it cooperated with the Navy’s inshore patrol; it was responsible for coast defense and manned all the land batteries, fixed and mobile, on Oahu; it was primarily responsible for anti-aircraft guns, etc.; it manned and operated all the fighter planes intended for the defense of Oahu against air attack; it manned the land-based bombers intended to assist the Fleet in repelling surface attack.
In other words, distant sea and air scouting far from Hawaii was primarily the responsibility of the Navy; the close-in immediate defense of Pearl Harbor and Oahu was primarily the responsibility of the Army.
Part III, December 20, 1941
As the Japanese continued their desperate bid for empire yesterday the pertinence of the inquiry into what happened at Hawaii was again emphasized.
For Japanese air power, operated from carriers and from land bases, again played major roles in yesterday’s actions, and it was Japanese air and sea power, nicely synchronized, that achieved tragically large results at Pearl Harbor.
One of the questions that the board investigating the Pearl Harbor tragedy must determine is how Japanese aircraft carriers, presumably accompanied by protective cruisers and destroyers and by a mother ship for Japan’s two-man submarines approached to within a few hundred miles of the island of Oahu unobserved.
Many Observation Posts
Normally in times of tension both the Army and the Navy, who were jointly responsible for the safety of the fleet while in Pearl Harbor, maintained far-flung and close-in scouting and reconnaissance lines, and the tasks of both services were lightened by the string of island outposts – 100 to 1000 miles distant, many of them with airfields or patrol plane anchorages – which almost surround Pearl Harbor. Only to the north of Oahu, the island on which Pearl Harbor is located is there open water, but our Aleutian bases and our base on Midway (it is 1,613 nautical miles from Midway to Dutch Harbor) permitted overlapping aerial patrol of this area.
The Navy’s “screen” of air and surface ships – all intended to get information of enemy movements – should have started hundreds, indeed thousands, of miles from Oahu. Ordinarily in time of war or tension submarines maintain a “periscope watch” outside the principal naval ports of the enemy or potential enemy in order to radio back warnings of enemy ship movements.
Hundreds of miles eastward of the submarines there should have been – and probably were – aerial patrols maintained from outlying islands like Midway and Wake by our Navy’s long-range flying boats. Supplemented by patrol planes based on Midway and flying almost continuously from dawn to dusk, covering sectors around Hawaii in a 360-degree circle, these planes – if they were operating as they normally are – might have been expected to pick up some trace of the enemy approach the day before – or even several days before – the attack occurred.
The same thing might normally be expected of the surface scouts, which usually operate in long patrol lines at approximately twice-visibility distance away from each other. It should be impossible for an enemy to pass this surface scouting line at night, for the line moves ahead at moderate speed during the daytime, but at night – to prevent any enemy from slipping between its ships – the entire line reverses its course and during the hours of darkness steam back toward its base at a the maximum speed of the enemy, resuming the search the next morning.
Some Answers Suggested
How, then did the enemy elude these far-flung scouting lines if the Navy was operating as it had done month after month in the past? Two possible explanations have been advanced. A “cold front” was approaching the Hawaiian Islands from the open ocean to the north and northwest on the fatal Sunday The Japanese carriers may have had the luck to fall in with the cold front’s fog and rain and low visibility and “ride” it in to within striking distance of the islands.
The carriers may then have used their high speed to seek temporary clear weather in which to launch their planes and may then have steamed back into the moving area of storm until the raid was finished. This trick has been successfully employed in manoeuvres; it might have been used by the Japanese.
Another suggested explanation might lie in the Japanese carriers themselves. The Japanese are known to have converted a number of merchantmen into auxiliary carriers; it is conceivable that some of these carriers might have been disguised with removable superstructures to look like merchantmen.
But even if the Japanese eluded the far-flung scouts of the Navy in some such manner, there is still no easy explanation of how they eluded the Army’s close-in aerial reconnaissance patrol or the Navy’s inshore surface patrol.
Part IV, December 21, 1941
As operations in the Western Pacific continued yesterday over widespread areas, the importance to our war effort of determining and analyzing what happened at Hawaii was again underscored.
The Presidential board that is now investigating the tragedy must attempt to determine how and why Japanese forces were able to make a surprise attack upon the fortress island of Oahu after apparently penetrating far-flung naval scouting lines and close-in reconnaissance by Army planes.
One would have anticipated that, even if all other informational methods had failed, the Army’s infallible radio detectors on the fortress island of Oahu would have picked up the Japanese planes soon after they took off from the decks of the carriers and long before they reached the island. Here, there is one coincidence which is perhaps to striking to be accidental and which may illustrate the effective nature of that Fifth Column work in Hawaii that Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox mentioned.
Some of our own bombers – Boeing Flying Fortresses – flying from the West Coast to Hawaii, were scheduled to come into Oahu for a landing at just about the time the Japanese raiders attacked. The radio detector operators may well have been warned of the impending approach of our planes and may have mistaken the Japanese bombers for our own.
But the most inexplicable part of the Hawaiian attack is not that it was made, for bombing raids cannot be stopped altogether and some bombers will always get through, but that it accomplished what it did. The great loss of ships, planes and lives was largely due not to the fact that the surprise attack was accomplished but that we were not prepared for attack at all. The following mistakes seem to have been made:
1. Our fighting services, particularly the Navy, definitely under-estimated Japan and were over-confident to the point of complacency, an attitude that was only a reflection of the national psychology. In manoeuvres and war studies we had frequently reckoned with the possibility of a Japanese attack upon Midway and had deemed as quite practical carrier-based air attacks upon Japan – similar to the one launched by the Japanese upon Pearl Harbor. We had always contemplated the possibility, indeed the probability, that war with Japan would start by a surprise attack without benefit of declaration, and we had Port Arthur, in the Russo-Japanese war, as a foreboding precedent. Yet we apparently felt so secure behind the barriers of distance that such an attack upon Oahu was scarcely considered
2. There was no unity of command in Hawaii. The admiral commanding the Pacific Fleet had headquarters both afloat and ashore, but his responsibility was the fleet. The admiral commanding the Fourteenth Naval District (Hawaii) had headquarters at Pearl Harbor, but his responsibility was Pearl Harbor and naval installations ashore in the Hawaiian Islands. The Army’s air field and fortifications were under command of the general commanding the Hawaiian Department. The board investigating the Pearl Harbor tragedy will undoubtedly endeavor to ascertain whether there was adequate coordination or liaison between these commanders.
3. The Navy concentrated too many ships in Pearl Harbor at a time of tension.
4. Apparently the ships in port were not protected by torpedo nets.
5. Apparently much of our gasoline and oil storage in the islands was not underground, or at least was not sufficiently protected.
6. Our Army and Navy planes on Oahu were jammed together in small areas – the Army’s principally at Hickam and Wheeler fields; the Navy’s principally at Ford Island in the middle of Pearl Harbor.
But full study of these and many other factors will undoubtedly be made by the competent investigating board headed by Associate Justice Owen J. Roberts.
What is most important is to assimilate the major lessons of Hawaii.
First, we made the same mistake that Britain and France made at the start of this war: we thought we could maintain the political status quo in the Far East (one of the objectives of our foreign policy) against an aggressive nation with what was essentially a defensive strategical concept and with inadequate force.
Second, nationally and militarily, we were overconfident to the point of complacency.
Third, there were probably too many different independent, or semi-autonomous, commanders with divided and overlapping responsibilities at Hawaii. The major lesson in modern war is the absolute necessity for complete coordination of all effort.
We must not make the same mistakes again.
