ROBERTS BOARD BLAMES KIMMEL AND SHORT; WARNINGS TO DEFEND HAWAII NOT HEEDED (1/25/42)

Microfilm-New York Times archives, Monterey Public Library | 1/25/42 | James B. Reston, C.P. Trussell, Joseph M. Levy, Daniel T. Brigham

[Chainmail]

All good points Gentlemen - and yes, the Commander-in-chief bears the ultimate responsibility.

Here's what I'm trying to say: Admiral Kimmel and General Short were the overall commanders of their respective forces on Hawaii. They may not have had the most up-to-date information on the latest moves by the Japanese but they were the men on whose shoulders rode the responsibility for the preparedness of our forces under them to conduct offensive or defensive operations. Given what was known at that time, reasonable officers had to have seen the possibility if not probability of an attack by the Japanese. Even slightly well-informed naval officers at that point in history knew that the Japanese had at least 8 operational aircraft carriers (I have an issue of Life magazine from early 1941 listing the major Japanese capital ships fairly accurately)and plenty of experience in China with naval aircraft operations.

Now given that set of circumstances, what should a reasonably intelligent officer have done? How about establishing a system of daily air patrols on likely sectors of approach? Good training for the pilots and good sense anyway if war may be possible. How about raising an alert level a bit to require 50% duty sections available and maybe ship's steam able to be raised at a 10 minute notice? While we are establishing a duty schedule, why not ensure that the ship's magazines are open and ready ammunition available on short notice? Or antitorpedo netting in place? Or a duty section of fighter pilots designated for CAP with aircraft ready?

As it was, Kimmel and Short treated the whole thing as a peacetime situation with very little if any readiness for war. Everybody was on liberty as usual, the ammunition was all locked up, and the powerplants cold. Even when the USS Shaw opened fire on a submarine entering Pearl Harbor and sank it, one hour before the air battle began, nobody thought a thing of it in the environment they had established.

FDR has his share of responsibility but he wasn't the two officers designated to prepare our forces for war - they were.

[Chainmail]

"If the fleet had been at sea in the vicinity of Pearl, ALL the battleships would have been sunk, and the loss of life would have been enormous"

I don't believe that's true; Ships at sea can maneuver very well and they would also have had ammunition issued and available. Chances are also strong that the Enterprise and Saratoga would have been with them and the Japanese would have lost a lot more aircraft even before they reached the ships.

Last but not least, I would certainly prefer to fight someone on close to even terms at sea then get shot sitting still like most of crews had to face at Pearl Harbor.

No matter what happened, even if we won the fight, we still would have been at war with Japan.

[PzLdr]

What close to even terms? The Kido Butai was at least 100 miles away. The U.S fleet would have faced a string of subs and planes with the best torpedo in the world and 16” shells with fins as bombs. The best fighter in the Pacific, the Zero, escorting the bomber forces, would have kept any U.S fighters from interfering in any meaningful way. The Japanese dive bombers, horizontal bombers and torpedo planes, numbering close to 300 would have annihilated them. Don’t believe me? Ask Admiral Phillips.

[fso301]

If the fleet had been at sea in the vicinity of Pearl, ALL the battleships would have been sunk, and the loss of life would have been enormous.

All else being the same, if the attack took place at dawn Monday Dec 8, the loss of life would have been far greater because the sailors would have returned to their ships from shore leave and would be preparing to take to sea for the "work week".

[fso301]

Last but not least, I would certainly prefer to fight someone on close to even terms at sea then get shot sitting still like most of crews had to face at Pearl Harbor.

If you are on alert, when in port, your ships can't maneuver evasively but you benefit from the concentrated firepower from not only the ships AA but the more widely dispersed shore based AAA. You also have the shore based fighter protection, large enemy sub's are not a threat and should the enemy fleet get too close, you have shore based artillery to provide additional protection.

[Logic n' Reason]

ping to read later!!

[Chainmail]

A well-considered answer - I certainly agree that the Japanese had the best carrier fighter, carrier bombers, and certainly the best torpedoes, and greatly outnumbered our forces...But..

If our forces had sea room to maneuver and guns manned, the Japanese would have a much harder time inflicting as grievous losses as we faced in reality. As we proved at the Coral Sea and Midway and the battles around the Solomons, even with less-capable aircraft and less trained pilots, we were able to inflict serious damage on the enemy with what we had. As the Japanese were to learn soon after Pearl Harbor, their highly experienced and skilled pilots were a finite and not easily replaced asset. Had we faced the Kido Butai at sea December 7th, they would have lost many more of those aviators earlier in the war. Would we have suffered losses? Certainly. Would we have done better that what really ocurred at Pearl Harbor? Certainly.

By the way, 100 miles was considered easy range for the aircraft of that period - even for F4Fs scrambling for altitude.

[PAR35]

I have read more than a few rationales by current historians that pronounce that Kimmel and Short were "just scapegoats" and railroaded into oblivion after the debacle at Pearl Harbor.

I know I believe the official story that folks could hear airplanes 200 miles away and recognize them as Japanese by that sound.

[CougarGA7]

Wednesdays are wickedly busy for me now so I haven’t had time to read much today. That said, I don’t think I need to go over just how bad Stinnett’s work is on Pearl Harbor. There are two and a half years of posts by me that you can look up on these threads with example after example of Stinnett’s poor scholarship, factual errors, and intentional misleading statements with me even going as far as contacting the author only to get misleading answers, and an offer to purchase a portion of his notes for an exorbanent price (an estimated 25 dollars per page).

[af_vet_rr]

Don’t forget that the US was still trying to abide by treaties that the Japanese had discarded, treaties that left a lot of US ships vulnerable due to manufacturing restrictions. The USS Wasp was probably the most famous, but there were others that were crippled by those treaties.

[CougarGA7]

As far as responsibility goes, it is also important to note that the Army was responsible for protecting the fleet while it was at anchor. This places more culpability on General Short than Admiral Kimmel but it doesn’t exhonorate anyone really. I’m of the opinion that there were mistakes made completely up and down the chain of command, some of the mistakes were created by the procedures in place at the time making some of the errors systemic in nature. However, from what I’ve seen, both Kimmel and Short had sufficient information to make the correct decisions and did not.

[BroJoeK]

Venturer: "Read the book “Day of Deceit” by Robert Stinnett."

You may know that we have gone at this debate hammer-and-tong here for some years, and FReepers like CougarGA7 are serious experts, who can make detailed informed arguments on virtually any point you wish to raise.

So anyone who wants to gain an education at Free Republic University, just step up to the pitchers' mound and throw your best strike balls.
If you can get posters like CougarGA7 interested, you'll learn more than you ever imagined... ;-)

In addition to Stinnett's book, there are several others -- by Victor, Toland, Greaves & Claussen to mention a few -- all attempting to go beyond the nine official investigation reports and tease out of previously hidden data evidence on what "Washington knew" but kept secret from Hawaii's commanders.

The bottom lines are these:

1. Of course "Washington knew" a lot, and had it all been communicated to Hawaii's commanders, they could have figured out a Japanese air attack was likely, and so been better prepared.
   But much of what "Washington knew" was kept from the commanders, and as a result, they did not consider an imminent attack on Hawaii as likely, and therefore were not prepared.

2. As CougarGA7 points out, there is no proof that "Washington knew" of, or even suspected an air attack on Hawaii.
   What Washington certainly did expect, and fully warned commanders about, was a Japanese attack on the Philippines and other Southeast Asia locations.
   Curiously, even these explicit warnings did not seem to help commanders like General MacArthur, whose air forces were almost as destroyed as those of General Short in Hawaii.

My personal opinion is that President Roosevelt's inner circle probably well understood the attack was coming on Hawaii, though without any appreciation for the levels of death and destruction it would produce.
And they wanted it to happen -- for political reasons, explicitly stated in various "war warnings": that Japan must be allowed to commit the first overt act of war.

But there is no "proof", no "smoking gun", and experts like CougarGA7 can reduce to rubble most any "conspiracy nut" author or evidence presented.

In the end, it comes down to these questions:

1. Do you believe that Kimmel, Short and other Hawaii commanders were idiots?
   I don't, not for a minute, not even the much maligned General Short.

2. Do you think President Roosevelt was an unscuplulus political genius, capable of deceiving some of his own military commanders for the "higher purpose" of leading an aroused democracy to victory in the greatest war the world has ever seen -- or hopefully will ever see.

   I do, in a heartbeat.

[Venturer]

I am not an educated man who can argue the finer points of the attack with scholars,I do know that Billy Mitchell was fired because he laid out the attack for Japan Years before it happened.

I watch TV and learn a lot from Gibbs on NCIS (LOL)
Gibbs says there are no coincidences. Therefore I kind of wonder how come the Carriers just happened to be delivering planes that week, and were away from Pearl.You wonder why no one knew where the Japanese Navy had dissappeared to, a lot of wondering.

Anyway I suppose no one will really know for sure, but in my mind I am more than a little suspect.

[af_vet_rr]

Here's what I'm trying to say: Admiral Kimmel and General Short were the overall commanders of their respective forces on Hawaii. They may not have had the most up-to-date information on the latest moves by the Japanese but they were the men on whose shoulders rode the responsibility for the preparedness of our forces under them to conduct offensive or defensive operations. Given what was known at that time, reasonable officers had to have seen the possibility if not probability of an attack by the Japanese.

...FDR has his share of responsibility but he wasn't the two officers designated to prepare our forces for war - they were.

I agree with BroJoeK - I don't think they were idiots, nor do I think they should bear the full responsibility. I also think FDR had the potential to be that cold-blooded as to leave them out there to hang for political purposes, although I lean more towards the folks making the decisions about what information from the Japanese communications intercepts. I fully understand making Kimmel and Short the scapegoats until after the war in order to protect the US Navy codebreaking efforts, but after the war Kimmel and Short should have been fully cleared and the Navy should have come clean and said that they withheld information from Kimmel and Short.

After all, nobody held General Douglas MacArthur for the nearly complete destruction of the air assets under his command in the Philippines and he had 8-10 hours notice that Pearl Harbor had been attacked and his stafff had explicit instructions from General Hap Arnold after Pearl Harbor was attacked not to let American aircraft be caught on the ground.

MacArthur not only had 8-10 hours warning after Pearl Harbor had been attacked, MacArthur had been on a war footing for a few months.

Think about that for a moment: MacArthur had his folks on a war footing since September/October, knew the Philippines was a prime Japanese target, and then had 8-10 hours notice after Pearl Harbor was attacked, and MacArthur still had all but a handful of his aircraft destroyed by the Japanese. Those aircraft could have been immensely helpful in the following months.

If you're going to hold Kimmel and Short accountable, then hold MacArthur accountable. In fact, hold MacArthur accountable before you hold Kimmel and Short accountable because not only was MacArthur supposedly on a war footing, he had 8-10 hours notice after Pearl Harbor was attacked, and he still lost almost everything that had wings.

Everybody always wants to jump on Kimmel and Short and conveniently leave out MacArthur.

[af_vet_rr]

What Washington certainly did expect, and fully warned commanders about, was a Japanese attack on the Philippines and other Southeast Asia locations. Curiously, even these explicit warnings did not seem to help commanders like General MacArthur, whose air forces were almost as destroyed as those of General Short in Hawaii.

My apologies to BroJoeK, he did in fact mention MacArthur losing his air forces after Pearl Harbor had been attacked and he had been warned. I skipped right over it.

[Colonel_Flagg]

Not so much blame, but rather a simple acceptance of responsibility. That is the duty of a commander — to accept responsibility for what happens on his watch.

This is what enrages me so much about the usurper currently living in The People’s House. Nothing EVER happened that was his fault.

I’m not interested in conspiracy theories about Pearl Harbor. The buck should have stopped with the Commander-in-Chief. That’s what a leader DOES.

[Chainmail]

Oh, I completely agree that MacArthur was to blame for the debacle in the Philippines - there was no excuse at all for what happened at Clark Field and elsewhere. FDR certainly was an untrustworthy schemer and knew more than he told his subordinates.

That doesn't change anything about Kimmel and Short: they were in the full "peacetime in paradise" mode with liberty schedules and minimal preparations. Do you suppose that they didn't know that moving the Pacific Fleet to Hawaii was provocative? Do you further suppose that they didn't know that they could be a prime target? Does anyone suspect that they never heard of the Brit attack at Taranto a year before?

I'm sorry, but if you think commanding officers can be that lax and not punished, you've been watching McHale's Navy reruns, not serving in a real armed force. Professional officers prepare their forces for all potential eventualities. If they don't, they waste the lives of the officers and men they were entrusted with. I seriously doubt that men like Patton or Puller or Nimitz would have been caught with their trousers at half mast.

[Colonel_Flagg]

Please reread my #11. I never tried to exonerate either commander. It’s just that in our system of government the civilian is supposed to be responsible for the military. We live in a society today that blames what has gone before instead of accepting responsibility.

The parallels between that philosophy and this report are both fair and striking.

[Chainmail]

Two different issues really: FDR and his administration's culpability are obvious for the most part but like every other political institution in our history, they had sufficient grip on power and the opinion shapers to avoid blame.

Kimmel and Short were directly responsible for the defence of the Hawaiian Islands and all of our military facilities. They failed.

[BroJoeK]

Chainmail: "Kimmel and Short were directly responsible for the defence of the Hawaiian Islands and all of our military facilities. They failed."

There are a number of key points to remember:

1. The commanders in Hawaii did not have -- indeed, some would say they were deliberately kept from having -- resources, especially repair and maintenance, necessary to keep a 24/7 360 degree air-patrol around Oahu.
   To have attempted such would have quickly reduced their equipment to junk-in-the-hanger.

2. What they had, at best, was enough for a short-term "surge" in air patrols -- assets they held in reserve for the time when a Japanese attack seemed likely.

3. None, not one, of the "war warnings" from Washington mention Hawaii as a potential Japanese target.

4. None, not one, of the surviving intelligence reports to Admiral Kimmel regarding the location of those missing Japanese aircraft carriers, showed them as possibly heading toward Hawaii.

5. And all those alleged Washington "war warnings" were in fact just the opposite -- they warned Kimmel and Short not of a Japanese air attack, but of possible sabotage by Japanese civilians in Hawaii.
   So ironically, by ordering Kimmel and Short to prepare for a fantasy of sabotage, Washington made Hawaii even more vulnerable to actual air attacks.

6. Finally Kimmel and Short both said after-wards that had they been fully informed of what Washington knew about Japanese activities, they would have realized Hawaii was a target, and would have been better prepared.
   This does not necessarily imply a "conspiracy" -- no need to believe in "conspiracy" when simple stupidity adequately explains it -- but once we begin to ask, "what did Washington know?" and "why was so much data destroyed or still kept secret"? then "conspiracy" has to be one of the working hypotheses.

And, it turns out, both "conspiracy" and "stupidity" fit the data pretty well, except for the fact that "stupidity" does not in any way accurately describe President Roosevelt or his inner circle.

As Sherlock Holmes says in the novel “The Sign of the Four,”

"when you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, is the truth."