Strategic mistakes at Pearl Harbor

[tombogan03884]

Interesting e mail I received.

 Sunday, December 7th, 1941--Admiral Chester Nimitz was attending a concert in Washington D.C.    He was paged and told there was a phone call for him.  When he answered the phone, it was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the phone.  He told Admiral Nimitz that he (Nimitz) would now be the Commander of the Pacific Fleet.

 

 Admiral Nimitz flew to Hawaii to assume command of the Pacific Fleet.  He landed at Pearl Harbor on Christmas Eve, 1941.  There was such a spirit of despair, dejection and defeat--you would have thought the Japanese had already won the war.  On Christmas Day, 1941, Adm. Nimitz was given a boat tour of the destruction wrought on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese.. Big sunken battleships and navy vessels cluttered the waters every where you looked.

 

 As the tour boat returned to dock, the young helmsman of the boat asked, "Well Admiral, what do you think after seeing all this destruction?"  Admiral Nimitz's reply shocked everyone within the sound of his voice. Admiral Nimitz said, "The Japanese made three of the biggest mistakes an attack force could ever make, or God was taking care of America . Which do you think it was?"

 

 Shocked and surprised, the young helmsman asked, "What do mean by saying the Japanese made the three biggest mistakes an attack force ever made?" Nimitz explained:

 

 Mistake number one: the Japanese attacked on Sunday morning.  Nine out of every ten crewmen of those ships were ashore on leave.  If those same ships had been lured to sea and been sunk--we would have lost 38,000 men instead of 3,800.

 

 Mistake number two: when the Japanese saw all those battleships lined in a row, they got so carried away sinking those battleships, they never once bombed our dry docks opposite those ships.  If they had destroyed our dry docks, we would have had to tow every one of those ships to America to be repaired.  As it is now, the ships are in shallow water and can be raised.  One tug can pull them over to the dry docks, and we can have them repaired and at sea by the time we could have towed them to America .  And I already have crews ashore anxious to man those ships.

 

 Mistake number three: every drop of fuel in the Pacific theater of war is in top of the ground storage tanks five miles away over that hill. One attack plane could have strafed those tanks and destroyed our fuel supply.  That's why I say the Japanese made three of the biggest mistakes an attack force could make or God was taking care of America .

[fightingquaker13]

Nice post. And it is kind of odd. Yamamoto was no one's fool. He must have understood the importance of logistics (its why he argued against war with us in the first place), and clearly you'd think he would have thought that even if the fuel wasn't worth it, that destroying repair facilities would have been worth a bomb or two. I would say that attacking on Sunday was a smart move. No planes in the air, no gunners on the decks and ships in the harbor rather than out to sea. Who cares about killing sailors? They're a dime a dozen, ships are expensive and take time to build. We didn't win the war because we had more sailors, we won because we had more ships. But the destruction of the dry docks would have set us back months.
FQ13

[MikeBjerum]

Interesting!

It would be interesting to check if Admiral Nimitz actually said that, but even if he didn't it is true.

FQ,  The Japanese understand the numbers game.  This was an empire that would sacrifice one pilot or foot soldier in a suicide mission to kill several.  They perfected victory by attrition, and they understand the limited population of the United States in comparison to Asian nations.  Sailors may be a dime a dozen, but we only had a buck fifty worth.

Admiral Yamamoto knew exactly what the Japanese faced by going into this.  He did not want to attack Pearl Harbor, and he stopped the plan to go on to the United States.  This is purely my thought, but I think the Japanese were caught off guard by how easy they attacked Pearl Harbor.  I believe they expected a bigger fight, and that is why they had such a narrow focus of attack.  Had they known they would rout us so easily they may have very well continued the attack on the infrastructure of the base.

[tombogan03884]

Nice post. And it is kind of odd. Yamamoto was no one's fool. He must have understood the importance of logistics (its why he argued against war with us in the first place), and clearly you'd think he would have thought that even if the fuel wasn't worth it, that destroying repair facilities would have been worth a bomb or two. I would say that attacking on Sunday was a smart move. No planes in the air, no gunners on the decks and ships in the harbor rather than out to sea. Who cares about killing sailors? They're a dime a dozen, ships are expensive and take time to build. We didn't win the war because we had more sailors, we won because we had more ships. But the destruction of the dry docks would have set us back months.
FQ13

A sword that cuts both ways.
Because of selling to England we were already gearing up large scale production, Kaiser was able to build an Escort carrier in a week, a Fleet carrier took a month.
It takes 2 or 3 months to give a sailor the most basic skills and the men at Pearl were career sailors, each of them had years of experience.
Their loss would have been as bad for us as Japans later losses of skilled pilots were for them.
I think the 2 sides weigh out on the side of saving the sailors.
You can build new ships, you can stuff them with patriotic farmers, but if you don't have a cadre of experienced NCO's and Officers you are just giving the enemy target practice.
Another HUGE mistake the Japanese made was missing the Carriers.
This left the dominant "Battleship faction" with no option but to accept the combat role for carriers they had been fighting to relegate to a strictly supporting role.
It was a "no choice" that lead to modern warfare.

[fightingquaker13]

You're incorrect about populations M58. Asia had larger populations, Japan didn't. The biggest screw up the japs made (other than attacking us), was that they behaved like azzholes in each conquered nation, China and Korea as exhibits A and B.  Had they been smart they would have realized that the average peasant hated their government. Had they won the war and then been sweetness and light, except to rebels, they might have pursued the Roman/British model. They could have gotten hundreds of thousands of auxiliaries. But they were too obsessed with Japanese racial superiority to do that.
FQ13

[Sponsor]

[tombogan03884]

Interesting!

It would be interesting to check if Admiral Nimitz actually said that, but even if he didn't it is true.

FQ,  The Japanese understand the numbers game.  This was an empire that would sacrifice one pilot or foot soldier in a suicide mission to kill several.  They perfected victory by attrition, and they understand the limited population of the United States in comparison to Asian nations.  Sailors may be a dime a dozen, but we only had a buck fifty worth.

Admiral Yamamoto knew exactly what the Japanese faced by going into this.  He did not want to attack Pearl Harbor, and he stopped the plan to go on to the United States.  This is purely my thought, but I think the Japanese were caught off guard by how easy they attacked Pearl Harbor.  I believe they expected a bigger fight, and that is why they had such a narrow focus of attack.  Had they known they would rout us so easily they may have very well continued the attack on the infrastructure of the base.

Apparently he did, in a booklet entitled "Reflections on Pearl harbor"
I have not been able to find any direct links to it, but several references to the book.

http://www.politicalpolicy.net/2011/12/admiral-chester-nimitzs-christmas-day.html

[Timothy]

Another HUGE mistake the Japanese made was missing the Carriers.

And along with those two carriers, another 30-40 additional ships assigned to those Carrier Task Forces!  

[tombogan03884]

You're incorrect about populations M58. Asia had larger populations, Japan didn't. The biggest screw up the japs made (other than attacking us), was that they behaved like azzholes in each conquered nation, China and Korea as exhibits A and B.  Had they been smart they would have realized that the average peasant hated their government. Had they won the war and then been sweetness and light, except to rebels, they might have pursued the Roman/British model. They could have gotten hundreds of thousands of auxiliaries. But they were too obsessed with Japanese racial superiority to do that.
FQ13

The inherent racism of Japanese culture blinded them to those possibilities, although they did make some attempts in that direction in India with limited success.
In tat respect they were just as blind as the Nazi's who converted happily liberated Ukrainians into dedicated Stalinist partisans.

[Pathfinder]

Remember, the Japanese were trying to knock us out of the Pacific war quickly and drive us to the negotiation table when we realized the awesomeness of the Japanese military. Remember, Pearl was not the only attack - I just read a story in Military Heritage about the details of the battle for Wake Island, which came shortly after the attacks at Pearl and the Philippines in December.  They hit us hard and they did hurt us.

However, Yamamoto knew and told the Emperor that Japan could not count on the US being out for more than year, and even there he was wrong - Doolittle's raid put the lie to the statement that the Japanese military heads had made that Japan would never be bombed, and Midway which turned the tide 6 months into the conflict. Nimitz was right, these were 3 huge mistakes on the part of the Japanese, but hindsight is 20-20. The Japanese objective was the biggest mistake of of all - they underestimated, perhaps complete mis-estimated their enemy and their enemy's resolve to win.

The Battle of the Pacific took as long as it did because the Allies chose to focus on destroying Germany first.

[les snyder]

Roberta Wohlstetter's book, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decisions is one of the books any military intelligence analyst should read...I reread it several times during my brief career as a USAFSS radio traffic analyst  in the early 70s...add to the list.. Sun Tzu's, Art of War... Niccolo Machiavelli's, The Prince... and T.E. Lawrence's, Seven Pillars of Wisdom and you should have the summer reading list for the Command and General Staff College at Ft Leavenworth