Day of Infamy

A kind of coda to the beginning of the U.S. in World War II from Roosevelt and Hopkins.  Even in my childhood in the 1950s, the story of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was powerful and unequivocal.  The surprise or "sneak" attack, the destruction and damage to the large battleships and the deaths of some 2,000 sailors could still provoke outrage and anger.  Iconic photographs and Hollywood movies kept the imagery alive.

The series of defeats to Allied forces in the Pacific immediately after the U.S. entry reinforces what seems obvious: in just 90 minutes, the U.S. Pacific Fleet was largely destroyed.

Military historians since then, both American and Japanese, suggest this attack didn't turn out to be as damaging to U.S. capabilities and the early course of the war as it appeared.  It turned out that the three most important ships in the fleet, the aircraft carriers Enterprise, Lexington and Saratoga--the only carriers the US had at the time--weren't in port, but safely out at sea. Though battleships were the "prestige vessels" in public perception, they would turn out to be less important than aircraft carriers.

The Japanese hoped the attack would demoralize Americans but after FDR named December 7 "a day that will live in infamy," the opposite happened.  The attack was used to motivate American resolve for the rest of the war.

What's interesting however is that even at the time, the White House knew that apart from the deaths and injuries, the US military capability had not suffered as badly as it appeared.  The weakness that led to those early defeats had their source in the isolationist votes in Congress. Here are some relevant passages from Roosevelt and Hopkins:

“There was fortunately a minimum of crying over the milk spilled at Pearl Harbor. The swift destruction of the ultramodern Prince of Wales showed that would have happened had the antiquated battleships of the Pacific fleet attempted to operate in the enormous area controlled by Japanese air power west of the international date line and north of the equator, Roosevelt said in February [1942,} “The only way we could use those ships if we had them now would be for convoy duty in case the Japs ever started using capital ships to break the life line to Australia.” 

 This, however, never happened, because American and Australian air power was established and maintained over that life line and the Japanese were reluctant to risk their own battleships within its range. American weakness in those days could not be attributed to what happened at Pearl Harbor, where the enemy could have done far more serious damage had he attacked the vital installations of the base itself rather than the defensively huddled battleships; the weakness was the obvious result of years of puerile self-delusion which had manifested itself in such errors of calculation as the refusal to appropriate funds even for dredging the harbor at Guam.”

Historians also agree with this assessment that destroying the base itself would have hurt more, possibly extending the war by another year.  The Japanese had a plan to do so, but US resistance (including planes from the Enterprise) convinced them to call off the third wave of their attack.