Six on History: World War II Comes to America, 12/7/1941
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"Seventy-five years ago, at 7:55 a.m. on December 7, 1941, a Japanese strike force unleashed 353 warplanes on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Pacific Fleet’s base on Oahu, Hawaii. Relations between the United States and Japan had been worsening—Japan had invaded China in 1937 and then, in 1940, allied itself with Italy and Germany—but the attack was a shock.
Within minutes, much of the Pacific Fleet had been destroyed, more than 2,000 Americans killed, and the United States dealt a massive psychological blow. “Nothing as catastrophically unexpected, as self-image shattering, had happened to the nation in its 165 years,” writes Steve Twomey in his new book, Countdown to Pearl Harbor: The Twelve Days to the Attack. What's worse, it could easily have been prevented. (Find out how five people survived the atomic blast at Nagasaki at the end of World War II.)
That’s extremely fair. I use the phrase “Assumption fathered defeat,” and it did on many levels, both big and small. All through 1941, there were newspaper articles touting the superiority of the [United States] Navy. There was also an assumption in Washington that the Pacific Fleet had been alerted and was ready, which wasn’t the case. It goes all the way up to the racial assumptions about the potential ability of the adversary. From big things to small things, America was complacent about where things stood on December 7.
But the most important mistake was that the American Pacific Fleet commander, Husband Kimmel, all through these days when he knew things were getting more tense, chose not to begin air reconnaissance, which was the sole means by which he could make sure that he was safe.
The best way to describe it is to talk about Husband Kimmel. It was a Sunday morning and he was about to play golf with the commander of the Army on Oahu. He had a large house that sat on a rise overlooking the harbor, and he was there when he was told in a series of phone calls that an air attack was underway.
He walked out into the yard and looked down on the harbor as Japanese planes swarmed above his ships. It was the most stunning moment of his life. He realized immediately that this was catastrophic.
The aviators were some of Japan’s finest pilots and, in contrast to all the press and publicity of 1941, they were very good. The greatest damage was caused by 40 Japanese torpedo planes. That was shocking because the Americans thought Pearl Harbor was too shallow to drop torpedoes. The Japanese had solved that problem by attaching extra fins to the torpedoes, so they didn’t dive too deeply.
The single most devastating explosion came when a bomb plunged into the forward magazine of the battleship Arizona. The ship all but disappeared in a purple cloud of smoke that rose a thousand feet into the air. Most of the people killed on December 7 were killed in that explosion. In all, there were about 2,400 fatalities, and 17 or 18 ships out of about a hundred warships in the Pacific Fleet were destroyed.
It’s important to note that, militarily, the attack was less horrific than people think. It was more a psychic strike on America. There were no American aircraft carriers in the harbor at that time. One was on the West Coast and two were at sea.
Six months later, one of those two [at sea] was essential to the greatest American victory of the Pacific war when the American fleet surprised and ambushed the Japanese, sinking four of the six aircraft carriers that had participated in Pearl Harbor.
One of the battleships damaged at Pearl Harbor also ended up off the coast of Normandy on June 6, 1944, providing cover for American, British, and Canadian troops on D-Day.
The story of Pearl Harbor is also the story of two naval commanders, Kimmel and Isoroku Yamamoto. Give us a psychological profile—and explain how and why Yamamoto outfoxed his opponent.Yamamoto and Kimmel were extremely different in personality. Yamamoto was a very sentimental guy, a bit of a romanticist. He also was, at heart, a gambler. He liked to tell people that if he had another life, he would live in Monaco and play the gaming tables. He pushed the plan for Pearl Harbor against the objections of many within the Imperial Navy. At one point, he said, “You have told me that this is a great risk, but I like speculative games and I’m going to do this.”
Kimmel did not think a surprise attack was a possibility. The Americans had actually war-gamed the possibility that Japan could do this, but it was like one of those mental exercises you do for the record but don’t take to heart.
Kimmel also didn’t have a sense of the looming power of aircraft carriers. Aircraft carriers were only about 20 years old as a weapon. It was hard to imagine how much damage could be inflicted if 350 planes suddenly arrived from the sea, because that had never happened before. Nobody had put together a fleet with so many aircraft carriers at one time as the Japanese did on December 7.
Satellite technology, massively improved radar, and espionage make it unlikely that such a surprise attack could occur today. Talk about the difference between then and now.We have to remember that in that day and age there were no satellites peering down, revealing all. So when the Japanese set sail on November 26, 1941, we did not know that. In their journey 3,000 miles across the Pacific, they never encountered a commercial ship, a search plane, a warship, and were never seen from above. It was the essential ingredient of their plan. They had to achieve surprise. If they didn’t, everything would have failed.
I don’t think there will be another Pearl Harbor because the ability to detect movement of armed forces is so much better, not just with satellites but also with listening devices and the ability of nations to suck up the radio transmissions of their opponents.
It’s a bit ghoulish to compare tragedies as to which was worse, so I’m not going to do that. But in both cases the sudden arrival of mass destruction and death pulverized America’s sense of itself. I would offer this difference. As soon as the attack became news in 1941, Americans knew they were immediately in the midst of a giant world war and that their sons, brothers, husbands, and fathers were going to be going off to war in faraway places.
It was popular to say that 9/11 changed everything, but it didn’t in the way Americans in 1941 knew it was going to change. America had been sitting out the war while France, Britain, Russia, and others were at war with Germany. Pearl Harbor changed that overnight.
It’s wise, in management, to allow your subordinates to be creative and come up with their own solutions. But it’s not wise to then consciously remain ignorant of the choices they’ve made.
A second thing, which is particularly true of what happened with Admiral Kimmel, is that you shouldn’t let your desires color new facts. Kimmel just wouldn’t switch from what he wanted to do to what he should be doing.
Finally, if you’ve commissioned someone to do a report on something and they come back and forecast the future, don’t forget it! One of the most remarkable things about Pearl Harbor is that the nature and scope of the attack were exactly forecast only a few months before it happened by an admiral and a general.
"When the first two attacks on Pearl Harbor took place, the Imperial Japanese Navy was taking notes. Japanese spies in Oahu watched as American planes hit the island from over the Koolau Range, and they sent the information back to Japan. Nine years later, the attackers came from Japan, and they dropped real bombs.
In February 1932, the debate over the future of air power in modern combat was still in full swing. Rear Adm. Harry Yarnell was a believer in the power of the airplane, and he set out to prove its value to the Navy.
The Navy had three aircraft carriers at the time, but deemed them to have little strategic value. The battleship was still the primary figure for naval war planning, as naval warfare was considered to be a slugfest at sea, while naval aviation was given more of a patrol and reconnaissance mission.
Yarnell devised a plan that would show what aircraft could do to any naval installation anywhere. When Pearl Harbor began its yearly defense exercise, it was Yarnell and his planes who were the aggressors. He chose a Sunday morning in February to launch his surprise and hit the naval base early in the morning to catch its defenders unprepared.
Sailing with just two carriers and a handful of destroyer escorts, Yarnell's task force approached Oahu in thick fog and in the dead of night. His 152 aircraft launched just before dawn in the morning twilight. When day came, the planes appeared over the base from the Koolau Range, striking aircraft on the ground and bombarding the ships in the harbor.
The admiral's plan went off without a hitch or a casualty. The base itself was strewn with dead flares and sacks of flour, the weapon of choice for the attacking aircraft. It was the first time Pearl Harbor had lost this annual war game.
It should have been a wakeup call for the Navy -- and Pearl Harbor in particular. Instead the Navy cried foul and declared the exercise illegal, stating that it would have been on alert if the country were actually at war. It also said that a fleet like Yarnell's would have been exposed and damaged or destroyed in case of such an attack.
So it went until 1938, when the annual exercise was held again that year. This time, Adm. Ernest King was in command of the opposing forces. Yarnell was watching King's movements closely this second time around.
King took one aircraft carrier and its escort destroyers on a similar route and time. Just like the first exercise, the attacking aircraft came from the Koolau Range and completely decimated the fleet at Pearl Harbor. And just like the first attack, the Navy claimed the tactic was unfair and vetoed the results. Nothing changed.
Unlike the U.S. Navy, the Imperial Japanese Navy took notice of the first exercise. It watched the1932 attack and studied it closely. Japanese Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto was also a believer in naval air power and structured the Japanese Navy to focus on aircraft carriers.
When it came time for Japan to attack the United States, it knew that a long-term war with a potential industrial powerhouse was not one it could win. The Japanese hoped that by knocking out the U.S. Pacific Fleet, it could keep the Americans out of the war permanently.
Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, using much the same plans Yarnell used just nine years prior, only he used six aircraft carriers and 353 aircraft, many of which hit the harbor from the Koolau Range. It came as Japan launched simultaneous attacks on the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, Malaya, Singapore and Hong Kong.
Yamamoto's attack was far from perfect, losing 29 planes and 64 troops, but Japan had succeeded in at least delaying or hampering an immediate American response to Japanese military action in the Pacific."
December 5, 2021
After that, I kept hearing the word “war” on the radio, but I didn’t pay much attention to it. By the fall of 1941, I was intent on learning to read. It came very easily to me, since it was what I most longed to do. My mother, in her misguided attempts to raise a prodigy, kept me away from other kids and didn’t like me to have playmates, but soon I’d be able to lose myself in a storybook whenever I needed to, without waiting for a grown-up to read to me. I gobbled up each new word I was taught and made it mine, and could easily reel off all the various members of what my first-grade teacher called “word families,” with their endings of “ing” and “at.” I loved the calm, predictable routines of school and the prizes I was awarded for my progress—little squares of yellow paper with gold stars or stamped-on pictures of rabbits or baby chicks, which I kept at home in a special box. But one day, my reading lesson was interrupted.
It was Monday, December 8. No one had told me about the bombing of Pearl Harbor, which had happened just the day before.
When my mother took me to school that morning, parents and teachers were talking tensely to one another in the hallways. Only a little while after I sat down at my desk and the reading lesson started, a bell rang, and our teacher told us we were going to have an air raid drill. In case we had to suddenly run from the building, she told us to gather up our coats and galoshes, books, and pencil cases before we followed her downstairs to the basement. There, we first graders stood waiting with all the older kids for an endless stretch of time, until we heard another bell and were allowed back in our classroom.
Air raid drills became a feature of every school day. You never knew when the bell would ring, and you’d have to drop everything and take shelter. I hated this new, disrupting feature of school. The basement of the building was enormous and confusing. If you got separated from your class as everyone hurried down the stairs, you would have to wander around forlornly carrying all your stuff until, at last, you found the sign with your group’s special color and number. I didn’t really grasp that we might all be in danger.
Our teacher handed out elastic bracelets with little dangling celluloid discs on which each child’s name and birth date were neatly printed. She told us we had to wear these on our wrists at all times, so that we could be “identified” if necessary. She didn’t explain what “identified” meant. Very soon, my bracelet fell off somewhere. This presented me with one of the first serious dilemmas of my life. Which would be worse, I wondered: not being identified or telling our teacher I’d lost my bracelet? Telling her would be worse, I decided.
For the next four years of my childhood, The War—which I thought of respectfully in capital letters—was the offstage accompaniment to my largely peaceful daily life. Although the air raid drills continued, and blackout blinds were lowered in windows each night, and radio announcers said London was being bombed, and little boys ran around the schoolyard with outspread arms tilting from side to side and yelling ack-ack-ack at one another, enemy planes never flew over Bay Ridge—or over Manhattan, where we moved by the time I was nine—or anywhere else in the country. Since neither my father nor my uncles had been drafted, and I had been assured that President Roosevelt would take good care of us and keep The War from coming to America, I felt no real fear of it, although I knew that Hitler hated Jews like me and my family.
What do I actually remember about The War? The blue stamps in ration books, shortages of sugar and butter, my mother stitching up the runs in her pink rayon stockings, the indignant reminder “It’s a free country” (now no longer in currency) that kids resorted to when other kids tried to boss them around. I remember a darkened Times Square thrillingly crowded with soldiers and sailors on leave, neighborhood drives to collect big patriotic balls of saved-up tinfoil and rubber bands, and the grave, pervasive drone of the radio that I heard at home morning and evening. But I hardly listened, burying myself in the books I’d brought home from the library until I was sent to bed and my mother turned off the light.
At ten, the haze of childhood lifted, and I became more conscious of the world at large. That April, there was the shock of President Roosevelt’s death, followed by his black-draped portraits that immediately appeared everywhere, even in our corner grocery store. Then came August with the news of America’s great atomic secret weapon and the two huge bombs President Truman had dropped to end the fighting. Not long afterward, I saw disturbing footage of what remained of Hiroshima—a flat plain of rubble with one scorched, standing tree—in a newsreel that preceded the main feature at the Nemo Theater, a few blocks from our new Upper West Side apartment. On the same screen, I also saw twisted, naked skeletal corpses piled up in the yard of a concentration camp. “Cover your eyes,” my mother whispered, too late. Four years later, I would sign the Stockholm petition against nuclear weapons that someone was circulating in Washington Square.
At Hunter, my high school, the drills I’d grown accustomed to continued long past the end of The War. All four hundred girls would file into the auditorium and get down on the floor in front of the folded-up seats that were supposed to protect us from the new types of bomb that could obliterate everything in a second. Mrs. Root, the music teacher, would wait for us to settle down before stepping onto the stage to lead us in “Jingle Bells” or “My Old Kentucky Home” or blithe rounds of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” We all knew how ridiculous this was. “Life is but a dream,” we’d sing in bored voices, rolling our eyes at one another.
In 1950, during my last year at Hunter, there was one glorious outbreak of resistance. A small group of students, who had arranged to crouch in the same row, overwhelmed Mrs. Root the moment she appeared before us by bursting into “Orange Colored Sky,” a song I heard that day for the first time. Ostensibly about the explosive impact of love, its intent may have been subversive, for in its lyrics glass shattered and the ceiling fell, even the ground caved in. We Hunter girls were well-behaved—in training to become mature adult members of the Silent Generation—but who could resist the liberating opportunity to sing “I’ve been hit! I’ve been hit!!” or to belt out the onomatopoeic refrain “Flash, Bang, Alakazam!” Within moments, the song ignited the voices of even the timid girls, as our teachers ran around frantically trying to quell our temporary seizure of the truth. “AlakaZAM!” I sang, with a giddy joy I was amazed to feel all over again, seventy years later, when I heard the song for only the second time on an old recording by Nat King Cole that I found online.
He was a man accustomed to taking risks—with the bold, wet strokes of each big new abstract painting he worked on (“This will either end up upon the wall or the floor,” he used to say), and with his life. He’d ride home to me on his red Harley-Davidson after a much too long afternoon at McSorley’s, the East 7th Street bar a little further uptown where women were not allowed inside to extract their men. The bike had a good deal of mileage. Jim had bought it from a painter who had given up on the art scene in New York and was returning to Texas. The engine had a rhythmic elderly cough that I learned to listen for on the nights I came home from work and didn’t find him there. If I kept a window open in our loft on Christie Street, I could hear It once Jim had rounded the corner of Grand Street and the Bowery. “Made it one more time,” he’d announce as he opened the door and swayed in.
I loved him more than I’d ever loved anyone before, and I tried to keep believing love would heal him. But with the arrival of the bike, I began to live in a growing state of dread.
More by Joyce Johnson
June 8, 2020
October 25, 2019
June 6, 2013 issue
Joyce Johnson’s Minor Characters, a memoir about coming of age in the 1950s and the Beats, won a 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award. The most recent of her eight books is The Voice Is All, a biography of Jack Kerouac.
Eighty years ago Tuesday, when Japanese bombers appeared in the skies over Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941, the U.S. military was completely unprepared for the devastating surprise attack, which killed more than 2,400 Americans and dramatically altered the course of World War II, especially in the Pacific theater. But there were several key reasons for the bombing that, in hindsight, make it seem almost inevitable.
Read More
8 Tales of Pearl Harbor Heroics
From the man who led the evacuation of USS Arizona to the fighter pilot who took to the skies in his pajamas, learn the stories of eight of the many servicemen who distinguished themselves on one of the darkest days in American military history.
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In Washington, President Franklin D. Roosevelt learned of the attack during lunch, when he received a phone call from Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox. The next day, Roosevelt requested—and received—a declaration of war against Japan. Find out more.
Returning to Pearl Harbor
Pearl Harbor: Survivors Remember
Explore the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor through the eyes of the men and women who were there on the "date which will live in infamy."
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"On Tuesday, December 7, the United States will commemorate the eightieth anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History invites you to explore essays, primary source documents, interactive maps, and videos about the 1941 attack and its aftermath.
History Now: "World War II" (Issue No. 14, Winter 2007)
Historian Carol Berkin Editor's Note for the issue:
On December 7, 1941 the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into the global conflict known as World War II. The impact of this war was felt by civilians as well as soldiers, as the nation transformed itself from a peacetime to a wartime economy. For some, the war brought opportunity; for others, it brought a challenge to their patriotism and a curtailment of their rights as citizens. And, when the war ended, the map of the world had been redrawn, both physically and diplomatically. In this issue, leading scholars explore the war years and their aftermath.
World War II: A Self-Paced Course
Michael Neiberg, Professor of History at the US Army War College, presents a serious, scholarly, and objective analysis of the interplay between American, world, and military history during the most destructive war ever. Learn more.
Inside the Vault: Pearl Harbor
In this video, originally aired on December 3, 2020, the curators of the Gilder Lehrman Collection explore documents relating to the attack on Pearl Harbor:
HERE ARE MY PICKS, NOT IN ORDER OF PREFERENCE, OF THE BEST SITES FOR LEARNING ABOUT PEARL HARBOR (AND THAT ARE ACCESSIBLE TO ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNERS):
EL CIVICS HAS A PEARL HARBOR DAY LESSON, INCLUDING ONLINE RESOURCES AND REPRODUCIBLE HAND-OUTS.
THE ATTACK ON PEARL HARBOR: A MAP-BASED EXHIBITION
SCHOLASTIC HAS ANOTHER INTERACTIVE ON THE PEARL HARBOR ATTACK.
THE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE HAS MANY GOOD PHOTOS OF THE ARIZONA MEMORIAL AND ONES THAT WERE TAKEN ON THE DAY OF THE ATTACK.
YOU CAN FIND THE TRANSCRIPT AND AUDIO, ALONG WITH IMAGES, OF PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT’S “INFAMY” SPEECH AT THE HISTORY PLACE.
HERE’S AN INTERACTIVE TOUR OF THE U.S.S. ARIZONA MEMORIAL.
PEARL HARBOR, 69 YEARS AGO TODAY IS A SERIES OF PHOTOS FROM THE BOSTON GLOBE’S BIG PICTURE.
WORLD WAR II: PEARL HARBOR IS A PHOTO GALLERY FROM THE ATLANTIC.
HERE’S A SHORT VIDEO FROM THE HISTORY CHANNEL.
THE NEW YORK TIMES LEARNING NETWORK HAS A USEFUL LESSON PLAN.
PEARL HARBOR 70TH ANNIVERSARY IS A PHOTO GALLERY FROM THE BOSTON GLOBE.
PEARL HARBOR COMMEMORATIONS – IN PICTURES IS FROM THE GUARDIAN.
AMAZING IMAGES THAT SHOW AMERICA’S STEELY RESOLVE IN BITTER AFTERMATH OF PEARL HARBOR IS FROM THE MAIL ONLINE.
PEARL HARBOR’S CHILDREN IS FROM THE ASSOCIATED PRESS.
HERE’S A MAP WITH LINKS TO STORIES FROM PEARL HARBOR SURVIVORS.
PEARL HARBOR 75TH ANNIVERSARY IS A PHOTO GALLERY FROM THE BOSTON GLOBE.
US AND JAPAN REINFORCE ‘ALLIANCE OF HOPE’ AS LEADERS MEET AT PEARL HARBOR IS FROM THE GUARDIAN.
