The Day America Went Global

So Pearl Harbor has, indeed, been remembered. And this is undeniably right and proper and, one would hope, wise. But one does wonder if, perhaps, while the event is remembered and commemorated, we may be on the way to forgetting its lessons. Not so much those about preparedness but those about a dangerous world and America’s place in it.

Seventy-five years ago, much of the world was at war. In the United States, which was not, there were those who believed that America would be fighting, sooner or later, that this was inevitable, and possibly even desirable, when it came to Nazi Germany. Hitler’s objective was world conquest and empire. He had taken out France, which was reputed to have the world’s largest and finest army. He had chased British troops off the continent, forcing them to leave most of their equipment behind as they abandoned the beaches of Dunkirk in anything that could make it across the channel. The Royal Air Force had held its own, barely, during the Battle of Britain, and an invasion of the British Isles seemed, for the moment, unlikely—the Germans were tied up in Russia, where they had advanced to within sight of the spires of Moscow before winter and counterattacks by troops rushed in from Siberia had stopped them. Still, the prospects for defeating Germany were uncertain, bordering on bleak, especially if the United States remained out of the fight. And a world ruled by Germany and Hitler was insupportable.

The United States was assisting the British. “Short of war,” some might insist, but not very short. The U.S. Navy was engaged, clandestinely, in the fight against German U-boats in the Atlantic. And the Roosevelt administration was resupplying the British through the Lend-Lease Act and such measures as the exchange of 50 obsolete destroyers for a lease on bases in Newfoundland and the Caribbean. Still …

In 1939, the United States had fielded only the 17th-largest army in the world. A draft was not instituted till 1940; it was still a controversial issue a year later when a vote on extending the duration of service passed the House of Representatives by a single vote. There was no shame in those days in calling oneself an isolationist. The slogan “America First” was delivered with pride and confidence by, among others, the most celebrated American folk hero of the century: Charles Lindbergh. Among other notables in the America First movement were Walt Disney, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Sinclair Lewis. John F. Kennedy, son of the U.S. ambassador in London and a student at the time, made a $100 contribution by check, with a note that read, “What you are all doing is vital.”

The nation’s identity and fate were in play. Would America be of the world—and at war—or remain somehow apart from it? It was still possible, then, to believe a kind of honorable isolationism could be achieved. No airplane of that era could easily reach the United States from Europe. No invading army could cross the oceans on the nation’s eastern and western flanks. “Fortress America,” as the America Firsters would have it, was a plausible idea. The country had gotten involved in the last great European war and that hadn’t worked out so well. Over 100,000 Americans dead and for what? Twenty years after the “war to end all wars” and they were at it again, across the Atlantic. Better, this time, to stay out and let them fight it out among themselves.

Then, in a few hours on a Sunday morning, Fortress America perished as a plausible idea and in time gave way to Pax Americana. This conception (as Lincoln might have called it) has lasted for 75 years, and yet it seems suddenly tentative and perishable. An age that began with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor appears to be coming to an end.

The Japanese air raid on Pearl Harbor, those 75 years ago, was a military masterpiece and a paradox of history. It was a victory that ruined the nation that won it. The Japanese never recovered from their famous attack. Less than four years later, Japan’s cities had been, most of them, burned out and smashed into rubble, two of them by atomic bombs. In time, Japan rebuilt and became a greater economic power than it had been before the war. But the spirit of empire was gone.

This was the essence of the Pearl Harbor attack: that in launching it, Japan was not merely taking a risk—all military operations involve some risk—but engaging in a gamble with the highest possible stakes and against the longest odds.

No surprise, then, that the man who conceived the operation and planned its execution was a gambler. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto liked to play cards and would stay up all night for the pleasure of taking other men’s money at poker. It was his passion.

He also knew and understood America, having lived there for several years when he served as senior naval attaché at the embassy in Washington. He had studied at Harvard and traveled the country. He had been deeply impressed by the industrial might and dynamism and the vast resources—especially petroleum—of the United States, and he entertained none of the illusions, common among his more provincial contemporaries, that Americans were soft and would be a pushover in a fight—one that Yamamoto’s superiors decided was inevitable.

Japan had designs on empire. It had armies in China, where it was a fearsome invader and occupier and had shocked the world with the brutality and carnage of the Rape of Nanking. With the fall of France, it had moved to occupy that nation’s former colonial holdings in Indochina. The German victories in Europe had also made Dutch and British colonial holdings in that part of the world vulnerable, and a Japanese empire—the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere—seemed within Tokyo’s grasp.

But there was an obstacle. Namely, the United States of America, which was appalled morally by the atrocities of Japanese occupiers and more prosaically and pragmatically by the geopolitical implications of an expanding Japanese empire, by whatever name, in the Pacific.

So the Roosevelt administration took steps short of war. These were of the sort we would now call “economic sanctions” and “military deterrents.” American battleships changed their home ports from the western coast of the United States mainland to Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands, some 2,500 miles closer to Japan. The United States also transferred long-range bombers to the Philippines and, crucially, imposed embargoes on the sale to Japan of steel, scrap iron, and, above all, petroleum—of which the United States was then the world’s major producer. Without these resources, Japan could not achieve its territorial ambitions or even hold on to what it had already seized and occupied. It was an island nation, resource poor and import dependent.

It was also very proud and contemptuous of what it considered the “softness” of the United States. If the Germans believed they were the master race, they hadn’t settled the issue with their Japanese allies, who held similar views and believed themselves warriors in the mold of the samurai: willing—no, eager—to fight to the death and against any odds.

What the Americans saw as deterrents, the Japanese considered ultimatums. And to give in was unthinkable. The sanctions and the deterrents became, in their eyes, provocations. As the British military historian B. H. Liddell Hart wrote, “No Government, least of all the Japanese, could be expected to swallow such humiliating conditions, and utter loss of face.”

The oil and other raw materials the Japanese needed to sustain their empire could be found in the rich European colonies in the southwest Pacific. But the lines of communication between those lands and the home islands would be exposed to the U.S. fleet in Hawaii and other military assets in the Philippines.

Both nations expected that if the Japanese did move, there would be war. There would, most likely, be a great naval battle in the blue water somewhere west of Hawaii. Lines of battleships firing their great guns at each other from ranges of more than 20 miles. Both navies planned accordingly. Until 1941.

That was when the responsibility for victory at sea became Yamamoto’s. His study of the problem yielded several insights, the most important of which was that such a deep water battle would be a distraction from the objective of expanding the empire to the southwest. Another was that it would be possible to remove the American fleet from the equation in one bold stroke, after which Japan would have free rein for as long as it took the Americans to rebuild. By that time, Japan could have established a perimeter defense of fortified island positions from behind which it would defend the empire until the Americans tired and negotiated some kind of settlement.

Yamamoto himself didn’t really believe the Americans would tire of the war. Especially not if their fury had been aroused by a surprise attack and a serious defeat. He argued:

But his superiors were intent on war, and it was his duty to give his country—and his emperor—the best possible chance. That, he believed, would come with a devastating surprise attack on the U.S. fleet in Hawaii, a blow that would free Japan to expand and conquer; then to fortify and hold.

Which all sounds very persuasive in theory, but there were formidable, real-world challenges. There was, of course, only one way to take out the battleships at Pearl Harbor by surprise and that would be by an air attack. And the distances involved meant the planes would need to be flown off aircraft carriers.

Naval aviation was new. The Americans had carriers, as did the British, who had used them to launch a successful surprise attack on the Italian fleet at Taranto. But the Japanese had the better carriers, and more of them—10 in all, to the Americans’ 7, which had to be divided between two oceans. The Japanese carrier-launched planes were also the best, especially the fighter that was called the “Zero” by the Americans. It could outfight anything the Americans could put in the air. Japanese bombers and torpedo planes were also first rate.

Japanese carrier pilots were, if anything, overtrained. They were an elite, and the standards were so demanding that in the early days of the war few men qualified and replacing losses was a long and difficult business.

In both the Japanese and U.S. navies, there was intense debate over the role of carriers. Traditionalists argued that carrier aviation was necessary and useful for scouting and for raids but that mastery of the sea still depended upon the battleship. Things would be decided in actions between “ships of the line,” steaming in column and firing at each other with increasingly large and accurate guns. Senior admirals of both nations believed in this doctrine as fervently as monks believe in the Mass, and they expected that showdown somewhere west of Hawaii to settle things.

Advocates of naval airpower believed the airplane had made the battleship vulnerable and would soon render it obsolete. Carriers could launch their planes against a line of battleships from a distance of 200 miles, 10 times the range of the big guns. And those planes could drop torpedoes that would hit battleships below the waterline, blowing holes in their armor and sinking them where the depth of the water would make salvage impossible.

For Yamamoto, there was no debate at all. If he wanted to attack the U.S. fleet while it was at Pearl Harbor, then it would have to be done from the air, and this meant carriers. Six of them.

It also meant planning and training and solving problems like the one presented by torpedoes that went deeper than 45 feet below the waves when dropped from an airplane. At such a depth, torpedoes would bury themselves in the bottom mud of Pearl Harbor. So the Japanese designed a torpedo that would not dive so deep when launched and then successfully tested it. The pilots trained with those torpedoes and with armor-piercing bombs that were to be used where battleships were moored in pairs and torpedoes could only be used against the outermost ship. They worked on formation flying. On target identification. On all the skills that go with combat aviation. By late November 1941, as negotiations between Japan and the United States were breaking down and war looked increasingly likely, they were ready.

On November 26, 1941, six carriers, accompanied by escorts and tankers, weighed anchor. They had almost 4,000 miles of the Pacific Ocean to cross before they launched, and it was essential that they do this undetected. They refueled underway without incident, even in high seas. The formation broke up and ships dispersed during storms, but they were able to reassemble the formations using only very short-range radio signals. American intelligence, listening to dummy transmissions from the home islands, believed all the Japanese carriers were still in their home ports.

The Americans were not oblivious to the threat of war. Not in Washington and certainly not in Hawaii, where the following message had been received a few days before the attack:

So an attack was expected. But there was no certainty as to when or where. The general sense was that it would fall somewhere in the southwestern Pacific. And perhaps on the Philippines. An attack on Pearl Harbor? Too audacious and too difficult, especially for the Japanese. Americans were, until that Sunday morning, as confident of their superiority as the Japanese were of theirs. It was partly racial, of course. That, mixed with hubris.

So the Japanese fleet reached a point 200 miles north of Hawaii, and at dawn on December 7 the carriers launched their aircraft. There was still time, and there were still opportunities. In the history of war, surprise is never perfect. The Japanese had come up with a plan for attacking the ships in Pearl Harbor with miniature submarines at the same time the carrier planes were dropping their bombs and torpedoes. Compared with the massive and elaborately planned air attack, it was a crackpot scheme. One of the subs was detected and destroyed outside the harbor before the first planes arrived, but this did not set off sufficient alarms.

Then there was the radar station on the north end of Oahu where two young operators detected a large flight of incoming aircraft. They reported this to an officer who wrote it off as the expected arrival of a flight of B-17s from California. This, though the planes were coming from the wrong direction.

The literature of Pearl Harbor—and it is vast—is shot through with a feeling of inevitability. In spite of the warnings, in spite of the sighting and sinking of a hostile submarine, in spite of radar detecting the incoming planes .  .  . in spite of everything, the attack was going to accomplish its objective. Those torpedoes would find the battleships California, Oklahoma, and West Virginia, among others. The battleships had not deployed their torpedo nets, which operated something like chain fences to detonate warheads before they reached the ships’ hulls. The decision not to deploy the nets was made not out of carelessness or laziness but as a small gesture to readiness. In the event of an attack, it would take time to secure the nets, and since the harbor was thought too shallow for aerial torpedoes to deploy, there was no risk in buying those extra few minutes to get the battleships underway and out of the confined waters of the harbor.

The torpedoes did, of course, deploy and the West Virginia sank with men trapped inside the thick hull where it was impossible to get to them. They would live and signal, desperately, for rescue for more than two weeks. Men on duty nearby would cover their ears to shut out the pitiful sounds of their tapping against the thick steel.

An armor-piercing bomb would find the Arizona and detonate the ship’s magazine. The Arizona would blow up. It is still there, in the mud of Pearl Harbor, and when you stand on the memorial that is built over its gutted hull, you can see thin ribbons of fuel oil from its bunkers leaking onto the surface of the water.

The attack lasted for two hours. More than 2,400 Americans were killed. The Japanese lost fewer than 30 of their attacking airplanes. The carriers returned to Japan in glory and then ran wild in the southwestern Pacific for months, even making it into the Indian Ocean where they sank a Royal Navy carrier and several of its escorts. They had accomplished the greatest feat in carrier aviation to that point in history—and a successful surprise attack to rank with Hannibal’s victory at Lake Trasimene or the destruction of the Roman legions in the Teutoburg Forest. Or, in the American experience, Washington’s attack on Trenton or Stonewall Jackson’s flank march at Chancellorsville. The measure of just how surprised the Americans were by the Japanese attack can be found in the famous radio transmission: “Air raid on Pearl Harbor. This is no drill.” The second sentence says it all.

As with most of the other great and victorious surprise attacks, the audacity of the effort was crucial to its success. The thing might not have been done—or even tried—had it seemed likely or plausible. Send a fleet of ships across 4,000 miles of open ocean and have it arrive undetected within range of its objective and then launch hundreds of aircraft—well, what are the odds?

Much study was done to understand and diagnose the “failures” of intelligence that led to the catastrophe at Pearl Harbor. They arrived at many worthwhile conclusions (generally speaking, there is far too much “intelligence” to know what to make of it all). Needless to say, the United States has been surprised again. And again.

General Douglas MacArthur was surprised by Japanese air attacks in the Philippines just hours after Pearl Harbor. Then he was surprised, again, a few years later, in Korea. Then there was Tet, which changed the Vietnam war. And, of course, September 11. Being surprised, you might say, is the human condition.

The success of the Japanese attack was undeniable and ephemeral. A mere six months later, four of the carriers that had participated in the attack were sunk by U.S. Navy dive bombers in the Battle of Midway. From then on, Japan was on the defensive, right up until the surrender in Tokyo Bay. One of the U.S. ships present that day was a resurrected and repaired USS West Virginia.

But the attack changed the world as nothing since the collapse of the Roman Empire. It brought the United States into the war. But only, in the immediate aftermath, against Japan. Then, on December 11, Hitler declared war on the United States. He and Germany, like Japan, were flattened. Then came the Cold War and then, with the fall of the Soviet Union some 50 years later, the Pax Americana, the high point of which might have been the defeat of Iraq in 1991, by the coalition assembled by President George H. W. Bush. This was “the new world order.”

And now, 25 years later—75 years after the Japanese planes hit Pearl Harbor—there is talk once more, by a man about to be inaugurated president of the United States, of “America First.”

The visit, by the prime minister of Japan, to Pearl Harbor will be a nice photo op and an opportunity for “healing,” though one wonders just how many people still feel wounded enough to require it.

But if the old hatreds (and Americans did indeed hate the people that all of them, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt, called the “Japs”) are mostly gone, there won’t be any shortage of new ones. And if Pearl Harbor is studied and remembered, there won’t be any end to nasty surprises. Not in this world.

Geoffrey Norman, a writer in Vermont, is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.