Kermt Tyler Passes Away. How Would You Like To Be Remembered.

[twyacht]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/26/us/26tyler.html


Kermit Tyler, Player of a Fateful, if Minor, Role in Pearl Harbor Attack, Dies at 96
By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN
Published: February 25, 2010

They were only four words, but they made him a footnote figure in a catastrophic day for America and shadowed him the rest of his long life: “Don’t worry about it.”
Associated Press

It was a few minutes after 7 o’clock in the morning, Dec. 7, 1941. Lt. Kermit Tyler, an Army fighter pilot, was manning the aircraft tracking center at Fort Shafter in Hawaii, near the vast Pearl Harbor naval base, when he received a phone call from a nearby radar station. Two Army privates watching the screen reported picking up a large group of approaching planes.

It was only Lieutenant Tyler’s second day at the tracking center; he had no understanding of radar, had been given no specific orders on what he was supposed to do and was accompanied by a lone Army private serving as a telephone operator. A group of servicemen assigned to plot the locations of unidentified planes had finished their night’s work and gone back to their barracks.

Lieutenant Tyler would recall how a friend once told him that a Honolulu radio station normally off the air at night would be broadcasting around the clock if American bombers were flying in from the mainland, enabling them to beam in on the signal. He had heard music on his car radio when he drove to his post hours earlier from his beach house on Oahu’s north shore. And he was aware that B-17 Flying Fortress bombers were scheduled to arrive that day.

“I knew the equipment was pretty new,” Mr. Tyler said of the radar scope in an interview with The San Diego Union-Tribune long afterward. “In fact, the guy who was on the scope, who first detected the planes, it was the first time he’d ever sat at the scope. So I figured they were pretty green and had not had any opportunity to view a flight of B-17s coming in. Common sense said, Well, these are the B-17s. So I told them, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ ”

The radar had picked up the first wave of the Japanese bombers and fighters that began arriving over Pearl Harbor at 7:55 a.m. and devastated Battleship Row, plunging the United States into World War II.

Lieutenant Tyler was not disciplined for failing to follow up on the report and went on to command fighter units in the Pacific during the war, receiving the Legion of Merit. A career Air Force officer, he was assigned in the mid-1950s to the Air Defense Command at Colorado Springs. He had the rank of lieutenant colonel when he retired in 1961.

On Jan. 23, his family announced, he died at his home in San Diego. He was 96.

Mr. Tyler had been reluctant to speak about Pearl Harbor Sunday, but he did grant interviews on occasion.

Kermit Arthur Tyler was born on April 21, 1913, in Oelwein, Iowa. He grew up in Southern California and became an Army flying cadet in 1936. After leaving military service, he obtained a business degree and worked as real estate broker.

He is survived by his son, Terry, of Temecula, Calif.; his daughters, Carol Daniels of Morro Bay, Calif., and Julie Jones of La Mesa, Calif.; three grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter. His wife, Marian, died in 2005.

Gordon W. Prange, a historian who spent nearly four decades researching the Pearl Harbor events, wrote that the Army private who phoned the radar report to Lieutenant Tyler had “made one big mistake” by not stating that the screen showed more than 50 approaching planes.

Had he been given that information, “Tyler could scarcely have mistaken it for a flight of B-17s,” Mr. Prange concluded in his book “At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor” (McGraw-Hill, 1981), written with Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon. “Such a number would represent a good slice of the entire American inventory of this type of bomber.”

Mr. Prange wrote that even if Lieutenant Tyler had notified a superior of the radar report, little could have been done immediately beyond dispersing planes parked closely together, easy targets for Japanese bombers.

More serious, Mr. Prange maintained, was the failure that day by anyone in the Army to tell the Navy of the radar sighting. Revelation of the clear track of the approaching planes could have helped the Navy find the Japanese carriers that had conveyed them within striking distance, he wrote.

Daniel Martinez, the National Park Service historian at the Pearl Harbor memorial, persuaded Mr. Tyler to attend ceremonies there marking the 50th and 58th anniversaries of the attack and to speak of his decision to say “Don’t worry about it.”

“The words have their own infamy that has surrounded this story,” Mr. Martinez told The Honolulu Advertiser in 1999. “It’s so unfair.”

But he added: “History doesn’t allow you to escape an event as large as Pearl Harbor. He was haunted by this.”

***

What could/would have been different? Could those precious moments have scrambled aircraft, woke up crews in their bunks sooner?

Who knows.  He lived with this the rest of his life.

RIP Kermit Tyler.

[tombogan03884]

 Taking an action with out full information and then accepting the responsibility for the consequences is why Officers get the big bucks.
He made a decision based on the information HE had at that moment . The fact that it bit him on the azz is not relevant.
Even had he known there were more than 50 aircraft in bound he still would have had to convince skeptical superiors up his chain of command and down the Navies.
It MIGHT have made some difference in the severity of the damage, (though I doubt it ) but it would not have prevented the attack from achieving it's objectives.
As for "Oh sh!t" moments, far worse mistakes were made by people with a LOT more rank than he had.

[Solus]

It was only 55 mins from the first sighting on radar to the arrival and attack at Pearl.

Even if he had responded, notifying the air fields and they scrambled without question, I doubt they would have had many planes ready to take off.  I don't know what it took for run up of the planes back then, or how "combat ready" they were maintained and what crew was on hand to man the planes...but the traffic limitations of an airfield would limit how many could be in the sky in time to make a difference.

I doubt any thing meaningful might have been done to for the ships in the harbor in that short of a time.

I doubt the whole base would have sprung into action on his warning on that Sunday morning.

Let the rest of  his service record speak of how  he should be remembered. 

[PegLeg45]

I agree that it more than likely would have made no big difference in the grand scheme of things....but, you know there had to always be a haunting, nagging thought in the back of his mind of "what if?" for the rest of his life......

Maybe now he can rest in peace.