Historically High - The Pearl Harbor Attack

Episode Date: December 7, 2022

December 7th, 1941. There are certain moments in time, lynchpin moments I call them. Where an event causes the course of human history to change. There aren't a lot but this one I firmly believe qualifies. We're covering this thing from top to. bottom. What caused Japan to plan the attack? How did we get caught so off guard despite Pearl Harbor being the headquarters of the Navy's Pacific Fleet? How did Japan appear to know so much to be so successful? We're answering them all. Join us to find out how the beginning of the end started for the axis in WW2. Support the show Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Yeah. You missed out on a lot of the fun times is like a, I guess we had our like cheap pot smoking moves that you pulled, but there were all these urban legends back about like if you didn't pull your stems out of your weed, your stems had something in it that if you smoked it, it would give you a headache later on. Oh, I always thought it like it would make you sterile or something. There was that too. If you smoked seeds, you would be sterile.

Just all these goofy little things. the only thing that I ever found that rang true, and I don't know, have you ever done a resin hit? So resin is literally just, you scrape down all the smoke spent weed that's in your pipe, and it's just that little black, it's almost like tar. Yeah. And then you load a bowl of that up, and you hit it. That shit, when you didn't have a lot of money. I had a pipe that got smoked out of so much that I didn't even do the scraping. I literally just heated, like superheated it to where all the resin was just like, you know, expelling smoke.

But yes, and those are like, not only, that's like a desperation thing. It's like drinking the bong water. It's going to make you feel dumb. You're going to feel just dirty high and then you're going to get a headache 20 minutes later. Does that work? Resin?

I don't plan on doing, no, drinking the bong water. No. Okay. It's disgusting. Okay. It is res. I don't, I've never drank enough. I've drank some by dare,

but I've never like drunk enough to, try to see if it works. I don't think it would. I don't know how much of that water is catching any of the... Isn't it supposed to catch the bad shit? All the good shit gets to you. Yeah, it's supposed to, I guess.

It's just supposed to purify the smoke. Yeah. You know what smoke? Wasn't purified? I think you're going to tell me. The disgusting smoke that rose above Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1841.

So 81, 81 years? 81 years. 81 years since. So yeah, if you're listening today or, I mean, at any point afterward, this is actually coming out on December 7th. And I know this topic has been covered a lot. I mean, you can go just when I was doing my research, just searching through and seeing what other podcasts covered Pearl Harbor. And I think you get a lot of like, you get some conspiracy. conspiracy stuff about Pearl Harbor, which a lot of it doesn't make sense.

We can go through a few of them kind of toward the end. Stupid things don't make sense. And I think we're in like more of a stupid thing's dilemma here. Yeah. And also I think the farther removed you get from a situation, the further removed from reality, it seems from you. Like if you really think about it right now and you were to talk about Pearl Harbor, someone is going to flash in their mind back to the fucking Ben Affleck, Cape Beck and Sale, Josh Hartnett movie. That's going to be what pops up in their head. I wasn't a big fan of like looking

for documentaries and everything was popping up with just that movie first. It's like no, this was a major event that happened in U.S. history. I'd like to know that comes up first. That's been kind of upsetting to me is that these major events, I have a new rule that I provided myself. If it's not made by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, I don't watch anything World War II related. Because everyone else seems to just fuck it up. Like the Pearl Harbor movie completely fucked it up. Like you, This is a very serious thing. And so you tried to like spin it like, oh, well, we're making it no, but let's make it a love. And they did the same thing with Midway is they ended up turning midway and trying to have it be a fucking love story and all this stuff.

Like these are world changing events. And this one in particular, I mean, this wasn't just, I think what happened as a result of Pearl Harbor was going to be inevitable, that the United States was going to be in. World War II. We didn't get into it the way that we thought we were going to. We had suspicions that there were going to be hostilities with Japan, but we thought if there was going to be an initial attack, it was going to be somewhere a little closer, probably like the Philippines. The Philippines, and sort of in my research, it seems like Southeast Asia.

That was sort of, like, we were going to have to go meet them there. Correct. We were going to, well, the thing is, okay, so kind of starting with, the lead-up. We'll go through the lead-up. So if you have any questions, jump in and let me go. This information that you're about to get into is all new information that I learned. And it only makes this like 55 times more interesting as to... Good, this is going to be like the serial killer thing where I just get to sit here and you can talk to me. I almost focused more on the precursor shit than the actual battle. I did too. Because it's, what happened was 90 minutes that

all through the course of human history. That's all it took, 90 minutes. It wasn't, you know, it wasn't a huge, like daily battle instead. Like 90 minutes, surprise attack, they were almost gone as quick as they fucking arrived, and it was just destruction. But anyway, the lead up. So the big thing for Japan in World War II, Japan's not big compared to pretty much any other country that was going to be a power in World War II.

And when you're an island, you're makes you really good for defense. You know, you've got natural defenses on all sides of you. When you're a small island, where that's going to hurt you is when it comes down to natural resources and gathering supplies. And like raw materials to go ahead and kind of fuel your war industry. And the big thing with Japan, kind of leading up even as early as 1931, I think Japan kind of saw some writing. on the wall of what was happening in Europe at the time, kind of the buildup of the Nazi party and everything. And they invaded Manchuria in 1931. And over the next 10 years, Japan had expanded into China for resources.

So they attacked their neighbor closest to them. Like, imagine that. We're like, we're going to fucking attack China. Do you know, have you seen what Japan and China look like next to each other size-wise? the tensions between them almost when you start to learn a little bit of the history it seems natural but like you're talking about the size comparison there's no fucking way that the little island Japan is just

basically on like an annual occasion kicked the shit out of China no I mean but they did yeah but like going back to our samurai episode and talking about when the Chinese would send people over that are to try to conquer that area and Japan's like no not having it Japan is very defensible

It is, but the fact that, like, they were able to essentially, like, expand into just China. And I think there's this weird thing when you think about, like, World War II specifically. Like, it was literally, like, one country in Europe. I know it was both Japan or Italy and Germany, but when you think about it, like, Germany is, like, a country going to war with, like, three or four other countries. Large. Like, where the fuck are all these people coming from? Dude, you just were involved in literally the World War a generation ago or less than a

generation ago. And you have all these fucking people. Like, that's almost what's, I know it was a combination of the Blitzkrieg, so the mechanized army and everything, but fuck, that's weird to think about. So I think that's kind of the situation Japan is in is there's a lot more people there than I think you would suspect for the air. They jam a lot of people into a little bit of space. Like you were talking about the defenses, I was thinking about this because obviously in America, we had the Atlantic fleet of the Navy and then we had the Pacific Fleet.

I thought how weird that was that we basically had like two navies or we had navies and two oceans. Japan only needed one because they're surrounded by ocean. And you're not looking at a very long time to travel in order to defense in the north, the east. filled in the Panama Canal, man. Yeah, and that all makes total sense. And because we're going to happen to move ships and everything, they had naval shipyards on both sides of the country. But I think certain, the East Coast, I think,

is who specialized in most of the actual battleship building. There were ships, ship yards. There were some in California, too. Yeah, there were shipyards, like in San Francisco. There were shipyards up at the Puget Sound. And that's where if, like, your ships got extensive battle damage that couldn't be repaired at like Hawaii, you would have to send them back to the West Coast to be repaired.

And again, that's going to come into play huge when we actually get into the attack. Well, and the easy way to think about that too is I think Japan did not have any sort of good plan after this. Like, their idea was to catch us with our pants down and hopefully get into it. Yeah, there's... But in the end, it seems like America was just always poised to do it, because FDR just started pouring so much money into building ships, whereas coming from Japan, you only have certain areas to build ships over there

because the land is only so big. So you're not going to ever be able to keep up with production. And in the end, we see that by the end of the war, America had like tripled or quadrupled the amount of ships that were out there. Yeah. And Japan couldn't have done that. Well, there's a lot of factors playing into that. And most of it is like as a result of what actually happens during the war.

Kind of going going through the lead up with like between even Japan and China. So basically for like the next 10 years, they're expanding into China and just pulling resources out for building ships, for building tanks. Like anything they can for basically making like weapons of conquest. And it leads to the second Sino-Japanese, is it Sino-Sino-Japanese War in 1937. In December of that year, the USS Pinae, which was like a river gunboat, like almost like a steamboat it kind of looked like, river gunboat. The picture of it made it kind of look like that, but it may have just had like river paddle wheels on it.

Kind of like that shit that Matthew Perry rolled over in and the Samarise. On what? It was like that steamship that came over that had the two wheels on the side. Yeah. But I think probably a little bit more advanced than that because it was. Maybe. I think so. It's over, it had to get across the ocean apparently.

Yeah. But anyway, so it's actually bombed while trying to rescue Chinese civilians fleeing from the attack in Nanking. And the excuse was Japan was like, oh, sorry, we didn't see your flag on it. And Tokyo apologized. And they paid some money. And apparently that made it all okay. Then there was the Allison incident. And all this stuff kind of happens pretty close together.

They called the Allison incident, a U.S. diplomat. in Nan King, which after apparently... Didn't Nam King get raped? Nan King also is known as Nanjing. It's weird to kind of say. The spelling on it differs, so it was originally Nan King. And then I think it got changed to Nanjing prior to the massacre, which I'm just going to get to. But this U.S. diplomat, last name was Allison, was in Nanjing and was struck in the face by a Japanese soldier.

Again, Japan apologized, and this was just like two months after the USS Penet. incident. Then Nanjing Massacre, also known as the Rape of Jan King, or Nanjing, we're going to have to do a whole episode. I didn't provide any other information except for actually, like, the time and the totals, because that really tells you

what turned American sentiment against Japan. Going to war with them, it became more palatable after this. So, December 13, 1937, lasted six weeks, and

200,000 Chinese civilians were murdered, and at least 20,000 cases of rape occurred. At least 20,000 cases of rape. Stackin bodies. It, I want to say it may have been one of the biggest instances of war crime in World War II. 42 days, 200,000 people. Yeah. That's nuts. And this was even before World War II really popped off.

So in 1938, FDR pretty much appeals to U.S. companies and it's like quit providing any materials that can be used of war to Japan. And again, some of these are private companies providing this. They don't have to do that technically, but they actually stop providing more materials. That's nice. In 1940, Japan invades French into China to block the flow essentially of supplies that were providing to China. So we're not technically in the war yet, but we're essentially helping however we can, both with materials and financing. So we're shipping a lot of like tanks, airplanes, all that kind of shit over to Great Britain oil. I don't think we're sending, we're not sending soldiers.

We have soldiers that are able to volunteer to fight for England, but not as like a fit. They're almost like freelance. It's not an official capacity. But in essence, what it was is it was a way for us to get people over there in order to start gaining experience. Because then if you were a fighter pilot and you had fought against the Nazis and their aircraft, once we were actually in the war, you could then start instructing other pilots on how, instead of having them be green coming into it, not having any type of knowledge on how to fight dog fight. The European theater at that point, it seemed to me like it was almost like a half proxy war.

It was still hot. I mean, you still had. When did Germany invade France? Because that's going to have an impact in here, too. It seems like it was, but it was more of us sending our resources over there before we made a commitment. Because we didn't want to enter the war yet. We were, public opinion was totally against. We had just been in a war that didn't affect our country like 20 years before that.

No one wanted to fight this war. Okay, so mid-1940, FDR relocates the Pacific Fleet from San Diego to Pearl Harbor. And that was in response essentially to, in earlier 1940, Japan invading French into China to block our flow of supplies or any other flow of supplies into China to help them out. The other thing, too, is what they're doing is everywhere they take over, they're able to export those raw materials back. The biggest thing that Japan needs from the United States, apparently the United States at this point, we were like the Middle East as far as oil goes.

We were sending oil fucking everywhere. And Japan was really actually dependent on our oil. Probably our refining capabilities. That may have been it, because I'm sure that they had oil in the Middle East and all that. No, no, no. But the whole thing is that they're cut off. Yeah, but that's what I'm talking about. Like, they had to come to us because we had the best refineries

and able to enable them to get what they wanted. That's just the trade agreements we had, so they didn't have trade agreements with anyone else. if they were going to try to get any type of oil from, you know, imagine if they were trying to get oil from like their allies with Germany and Italy. There'd be no way for them to get all the way across Russia and, you know, Asia come through China to try. It just wouldn't work. So they were really dependent on us for the longest time. Well, in response to the oil embargo that FDR put on them, didn't they invade or invade like the Dutch East Indies or something like that? Yeah.

So they were able to basically invade French Indo-Denade. China because they didn't have to worry about a French response. The Nazis had gone in and conquered France. They had already signed up kind of in the axis with Italy and Germany. Yeah, I'm trying to look for the date when they signed that tripart act or whatever it was. The guy that signed it was the Japanese ambassador's assistant. Yeah, so on September 27th, 1940, Japan signed the charpa. God, I don't know. I feel like the pronunciation of this word is so simple. It's tripartite pact between Germany, Italy, and Japan. Nothing about that sense.

Okay. So they have that signed. FDR basically says we need to move the Pacific Fleet from San Diego to Pearl. There was this big uproar about it like you're just going to provoke Japan. Like you're moving our entire, like what's the reason other than we're finding them to be a threat? So public sentiment was against that. But FDR is like, listen, like they're already fighting and killing people in China. they're taking over this territory.

I, we're getting in at some point. Right now, we're already, we're already dipping our toes in by providing support for these countries that they're already fighting against. Our toes are getting wet. We're testing the waters. He knows we're having to dive in at some point.

This is where conspiracy that had never really entered my mind after learning this part, conspiracy really starts to creep in because you start wondering to yourself, or at least I did, did FDR move that fleet to Hawaii in order to provoke away into World War II? Or was it truly a defense strategy?

Because if he's looking... We already have. We already... Here's the thing. It's not just moving the Pacific Fleet to Hawaii. There was a buildup that FDR ordered for a military buildup in the Philippines. And by 1941, the planet. as to, you know, I think he had that plan in like 3940.

And he's like, I want, you know, an elite group of 40,000 people. I can hold the Philippines. His guy in the Philippines, which I actually think was, it's not Nimitz. Who was the guy that was like, I shall return? That, it might have been Nimitz. I don't know. He was the guy that had to leave the Philippines when the Japanese attacked. And his big thing was, I shall return.

We did something on him. I can't remember what his name was. He was part of the Midway one. I can't. Okay, anyway. There's a lot of crossover here. I know. Well, this is literally within six, like, within a year of Midway, the attack within six months of Midway.

Learning these names again, it's like, oh, yeah, I remember Yamamoto or I remember Fujita. Yeah. The U.S. names change a lot. It's weird, but, like, apparently, like, the Japanese have a fucking figure out their structure. It's that strict tradition of culture. Well, it's not just that. It's because they win all the early engagements. And so all of the people that were in charge of these situations, the top brass

the military is like, get the fuck out. Like, you're incompetent. How did this happen? And that's exactly what occurs here with Pearl Harbor. Well, and on the other side of that, Yamamoto sounds like he was a bit of a diva. And when they wouldn't go along, I believe it might have been with the Pearl Harbor plan. He just tells him a couple weeks before. He's like, well, if you're not going to go off my plan, then I quit.

It wasn't a couple weeks before the plan was supposed to occur. Start. It was, they were supposed to have these plans because essentially they knew. that they were only gonna, it's like, they would like test a little bit. You know, we're gonna go and bait this place to do it. And then you just wait for the United States response. Like, nothing?

Okay, go a little further. And then they'd just wait there. And be like, still nothing from them. And then they move a little further. And we'd be like, hey, what are you doing? And they're like, oh. Towards us. We needed something from these guys.

They're fighting us. We're fighting them. It's cool. And we're like, okay. I guess, and then they'd fucking go a little bit more. You cut our flow of oil off, so we needed to take this place over.

That didn't happen yet, though. But they know it's going to happen. They know their dependency. Because, like, if you really think about that, imagine you're Japan. And you're like, what's the first thing these guys are going to do to us and what's the one thing that we're most dependent on them for?

The first thing they're going to do strategically is stop the oil, and that's the one thing that we need, literally to make this whole fucking thing, So we need to find another source that's close to home and that we can control. And so in 41, or, yeah, we're still in 41, July 1941, sorry, the U.S. ceases oil exports to Japan when they seize French into China after the fall of France. So that's when we were like, no, no more oil. And part of that isn't just cutting them off. At this point, we're starting to war ration as well.

because we know that if we are having to go to war, everything's pointing that way. Public opinion is against war, but everybody essentially in the government is like, we're going to avoid it if we can, but we need to prepare for this shit. It's going to go down. And to mention we're just coming out of the Depression,

this could be a moneymaker. That too. You already have to look at what we have as far as like what war production happened even after World War I. A lot of these, you know, not just the ships, the battleships at play here, aircraft carriers, all of this stuff was built after World War I. So everyone was just fucking gearing up to have another go at it.

They knew eventually someone was going to fuck around again. They didn't really look at them. They weren't really thinking like it was going to be the same country and been like, goddamn Germany. You didn't learn the first time. Like twice in a row. Fuck. So.

And this whole time, so kind of going back to earlier in 1941, this is when they start to actually create their plan. And Yamamoto, who's essentially the head honcho, the marshal, the admiral of all admirals for the Japanese Navy, his plan is they need to... He played a big role in fucking up the Chinese, didn't he? Isn't that where he got his fame? No, his fame came from when I think he was the... the guy that defeated the Russian fleet. Oh, is that it? I think that was it.

And then he was also the man who came over and studied in America? Yeah, that happened a lot. We had people over there. Until Pearl Harbor happened, we still, until the surprise, that's why it's a surprise attack. Because at the time, we were engaged in peace negotiations.

Even during, like, the time when we cut off oil and stuff like that, there was still people from, you know, delegates of Japan in Washington, D.C., from the Japanese embassy or whatever, constantly negotiating, at the same time communicating back to Japan what the terms for this would be. And I'll kind to get into the terms that end up leading to why they decided to attack when they did and how they decided to do it. We have Japanese ambassadors in Hawaii. And I want to say that the population of Hawaii was fairly Japanese. 120 to 150,000, I think. That's a lot. So that also plays into a lot of the fuck up of this.

So you have Isoroku Yamamoto. He comes up with the plan and he says, the only way that we're going to have a chance at this. And even then he knew it was a gamble, he was opposed to going to war. But he was basically in a position where, you know when you have that feeling, it's like if I don't want to do this,

but it's like doing a project for like your wife or your girlfriend. She's like, I want to do this project and you're like, have fun. And then you realize it's going to be in your house and you hear her banging around and everything like if I don't step in and do this this is going to get fucked up and I'm going to be looking at something that I didn't do and I'm just,

it's going to irritate me. Doors are going to be glued together. So he doesn't want to go to war because he knows, I think, unless everything were to go exactly as they planned, just perfectly, and had some luck that they were eventually in the long run going to lose. He had studied in America.

In Washington, he had been, I think at like our naval school and everything. He was at the Navy Academy. He was at the Naval Academy. He knew. It wasn't, what our strength was wasn't in the strength of the standing Navy at the time. The strength isn't what we could do once we kicked everything into production. The exponential value of the Navy.

Correct. And we, he knew that the industrial might of the United States building ships on both coasts, all of those resources that we had access to, all of that, there was no way that we had. once that machine got running, that Japan was going to be able to stop it. So what his idea was is he needed time. He needed to basically knock out the Pacific Fleet and the United States' ability to make war in the Pacific or respond to their actions until they could create essentially all of the areas and take over all the areas they needed to be self-sufficient or what they felt were sufficient. So they had, I want to say what their name for was the like greater Asian co-prosperity,

sphere. It was supposed to make all the Asian cultures feel included. Like they were doing this for everyone. It was some bullshit about that. We're going to take you over, but we're still going to let it's going to be good. It's going to be good for everyone. Yeah. Basically what they needed to do is they needed to take over any areas that

could be used essentially by their enemies to attack them. So they had to create a ring of defense and basically prevent themselves from having any land within aircraft striking distance and everything fall into enemy hands. So Yama Tomoto is basically like, we need the time to do this.

So we need to hit them in one swift motion and just take out their Pacific fleet. And then as their Atlantic fleet comes back around, we're catching them in all these little strongholds that we now have, Hawaii, the Philippines, Thailand. At that point, man, I don't know what they would have done with the Atlantic Fleet because the war. Oh, they were probably pretty committed over into convoys, shipping convoys, man. Because you would have, that's the big thing. these these military ships are so take a long time to to build it's because there's so much you know there's so much to them they're just they're floating tanks and mounts for giant guns is all there they have to be able to dole out punishment and it takes a lot longer to build these ships with all of their capabilities than it does to build these merchant ships so you would have like these huge convoys of merchant ships guarded by like five destroyers or like battleships and stuff I mean you're not gonna and those merchant ships are constantly feeding the entire flow of supplies to to your allies in Europe at that point since we are an active war or we're helping with an active war in Europe against Germany I still think

the Atlantic fleet or most of it would have had to stay there and we would have just had to somehow make sure that Hawaii was defended and couldn't get invaded I wonder what the range would have been from the West Coast to get out to Hawaii and some of those fireplaces 2,000 miles from West Coast to Hawaii and then And I think 4,000 miles from Hawaii to Japan. That's a long-ass ways. Yeah, it is. The entire country just to get out to Hawaii.

Yeah. West Coast. There's no way without a fleet we would have been able to get planes even close, right? A 2,000 mile range for a plane? There's no way. Hawaii is about 2,500 miles from California. So that's where a lot of the naval bases were Sandy going everything. Cadillian all that.

And there were some, nope, there were some planes that could make that flight because that is also going to come into play here of one of the fuckups that led to Pearl Harbor occurring. Oh, yeah. And then Hawaii and Japan are, I don't, oh, air travel is 4,000. So it's about 2,500 from U.S. to Hawaii, 4,000 from Hawaii. That's why also it was so important for the Pacific Fleet to be at Hawaii, they could respond a lot faster. If anything happens, go support our troops in the Philippines if they needed to. So in order to actually catch the Pacific Fleet off guard, they felt safest at Pearl Harbor due to both the range. You know, we didn't have planes that can make it from Hawaii to Japan, but the good thing about that is is Japan didn't have planes that can make it from Japan to Hawaii.

And the harbor itself was, it was a naturally defensible harbor. They had subnets like at the entry to the harbor. And it was basically the reason they felt so safe is it was the range that made this place feel so safe. Yeah. I mean, obviously it wasn't because the plan that they crafted caught everyone with their pants down. This is where I have a tough time with it, though, because it seems like the guy in charge over there was Kimmel, right? Yeah. He had a very laissez-faire attitude, it seems like, when it comes to defense over offense, or defense over offense.

I don't know if it was laissez-faire. I think he was just solely focused on one and not the other. He didn't think that they needed defense. Well, yeah, I'm sure you'll get to it, but like when you're talking about the torpedo nets, that they had at the entry points, those can be raised and lowered, and you have to lower those whenever you're on the offensive

leaving harbor, but if you're in a defensive position, those are going to have to be up at all times. And that's where I kind of think that he was a little bit like, eh, not that big of a deal. We have them, but we shouldn't have them up all the time,

because what if we get called into action? We can't just leave with them. It was a total underrest, both sides in regards to, I'll say this, we underestimated Japan's capability of this attack against us.

Greatly. Japan miskind of understood what the response to this was going to be. So they had a couple of different goals here and there's a little bit more

backstory I wanted to hit just kind of leading in to know actually how all of this happened before we get into like the order of the actual attack. So Japan actually proceeds at this point to take the Dutchy Sindis. They're not going to be able to defend it.

They're obviously embroiled in the European War, so there's not a huge defense there. That's where they're getting a majority of their oil from. Sorry, I got the burbs. August 17th, the FDR basically is like, knock that shit off.

Quit attacking your neighboring countries or we're going to step in. And Japan basically has a choice to withdraw everywhere, lose all of their spoils, give up the occupied territories, or just keep fucking around and then find out what happens. And at this point, they already have the plan

for Pearl, which they've been training since early 1941. Now, part of how they knew what was going on at Pearl was there was a gentleman there that worked for the Japanese consulate. His name was Tadashi Morimura. Mori Murah. Sorry, I'm just going to say Tadashi. His real name actually was Takeda Yoshikawa. and he was previously, I want to say, in the Navy and got out of the Navy somehow,

but then got interested in kind of working for like naval intelligence, I think. And they sent him to Hawaii to work for the consulate, but what his real job was is to feed information about Pearl Harbor. See, and what I took from that, and maybe, excuse me, you'll get to it. But it seems like he was over there more on consulate duty to report back.

No. Because from what I heard and from what I'd seen in a couple documentaries, his reporting back to them were being intercepted by the Japanese Navy. So he was a full player for him? Yes. He was the consulate job was his cover. He still had to do that. but basically the things that he did around Pearl Harbor,

he would take civilian air tours. I think he actually might have been able to pilot as well. I think he might have, so he would actually go ahead and just fly up in small, single engine, and just, you know, you can't fly right over the fucking harbor because it's a military installation, but he would observe everything. And he would do this different days of the week.

He would find out what type of movements look like. He was taking fucking notes on everything. He drove around the base a few times just to kind of, again, just doing research, what ships are there? How are they lined up? What day are there most often? When do I see the most amount of sailors around? When do I see planes in the air?

When do the planes take off? When do they land? How many of them are in the air? I mean, he was gathering everything. He rented an apartment that actually was a second floor apartment that looked over the harbor. He had made friends with, you know, because there was such a large Japanese population on Pearl, there were a lot of, like, you know, tea houses and, you know,

Japanese like restaurants and things like that. He made friends with these people that were owned a tea house and would sometimes, like, you know, he'd like to drink and woman ice and stuff like that. Sometimes when he got a little too wasted, the owner would have him actually like to sleep kind of on the porch, like the balcony. The balcony had a telescope and overlooked Pearl Harbor.

So he would almost use that as a cover to be able to do it, like nighttime reconnaissance on it. Or date, depending on, you know, when he was able to use that. he took a taxi and was actually able to gain access through something that happened to Hickham Field. And was able to, so Hickham Field. The airfield? Yeah.

So you have how Pearl Harbor is kind of shaped is the easiest way to think about it is the usable portion of the harbor. Just imagine it is kind of a circle. A circle and then imagine like a little like a mouth or like a river coming out and then into the ocean. So it narrows down and then comes out into kind of a circle. In the middle of this circle is an island. pretty large. It's called Fort Island. On Fort Island, that's where there's an air base, and then on the mainland, there's another air base called Hickham Field. Very close proximity. So you have two commands here at Pearl. You have the Army and the Navy. Army's job is to protect

the Navy while they're at the base. Navy's job is to go out and protect the island, and the military base going out to the ocean. So he got on to Hickhamfield, which wasn't the island in the middle of the harbor, but he went out and he was counting aircraft. And of course, he's not just walking out onto the tarmac and the air strut me like one, two. Like he's doing this all very like stealthy. He's also able to do this if he's flying around. He's trying to spot things. What he's also trying to do is kind of spot where things are parked in what formation, how many people, just pretty much reports on the capabilities and defensive capabilities of Pearl Harbor.

He actually claimed he swam into the harbor and around the ships at night using a reed to breathe out of. I believe it. Like you see in a fucking movie. Provided sketches of the harbor and ship locations. And he was able to determine that Sunday actually ended up being the days when the most ships were in harbor. Because that would be the day that you're going to have church services. That was the day that officers for their ships were going to actually be on leave or on the island. enjoying their time off. And all of this information that he gathered was just encrypted and sent in code back to Japan from the consulate.

Now, Tadeshi has no idea of any of the plans even related to Pearl Harbor. He just knows what he's supposed to do. He's not privy to anything. For all he knows, he could just be, there could be 50,000 other guys that are at different areas around the world just providing the same information as he is. so he doesn't he's just continuing to get this information for japan so that's how they have such a good idea of when they're going to attack they plan it for a sunday they realize that on these days the ships you know if we're thinking of fort island the ships were actually kind of parked up next to the side of the island in what's called battleship row So you would have them lined up two by two. So I think when the attack happened,

there are eight battleships at Anchor in Pearl Harbor. Countless other, you know, destroyers. Go ahead. Were you going to get to shorts fuck up and the best offense that it seems like? Yeah, I keep kind of, I keep getting ahead with just like ship information without talking about the battle just because I feel like the conversation is going that way.

but yes, I need to talk about that. That and then the other part about the harbor that we would be remiss to mention is where the ships were actually parked in the harbor was in a deeper channel than the rest of the bay was. And one of the things about the way torpedo bombers would work would be when they would drop a torpedo, it would hit the water at like 200 miles per hour or something like that. and when it would hit the water because it had the tail fins on the back of it it would be buoyant in the back but it would sink in the front. Yeah, I mean,

well, it's going in at that angle anyway. Yeah. It's going in with the warhead being the heaviest part. So you're already hitting the water at, what would that be like a 45 degree angle? Probably. If you hit that at 200 miles an hour, it's going to,

before those fins are able to correct it and bring it up shallow, it's going to dive deep. And what they found is if the harbor isn't fully deep enough, your torpedoes are going to hit. the bottom and explode. You're not going to have an effective torpedo use. You're not going to be able

to hit the deeper channel that the boats are in. You're going to need to hit out further and then it's going to have to travel into the side of the boat. If at all. Where the harbor was shallowest, they found that the torpedoes that they were using were going to be dropped and when they're dropped, they're just going to sink to the bottom of the shallow

end and hit instead of continuing on to their target. Yeah, so they developed essentially like a system of I want to say it was like a wooden fin or something that went on the back of it. On the front and the back. And the front and the back. And basically what it would allow it to do.

Have you ever dove in a pool and like if you dive in and then you kind of arc your back? It's almost like you can pop up to the surface really quickly. That's exactly kind of what the plan was for the fins is the torpedo would hit. And it would almost force the nose to change direction to come up a little shallower. And then the fin on the back would then kind of force the back down to kind of write the torpedo. As soon as those front fins hit and there was pressure against the water, It would pop that side up and then it would continue on a plane. I didn't know what these were called, but the American translation of the type 91 torpedoes that the Japanese used were called Thunderfish.

And then Thunderfish of the sky were the ones that were dropped from the bombers. Yeah, the actual like armor-piercing, like ship the bombs. That's pretty cool. I like that name, Thunderfish. I think that's actually what the Japanese called it. That's not what the Americans called it. I don't think we gave their ship. I don't think we...

A name for it in their language, though. It just translated to Thunderfish. fish in English. So, sorry, I keep going ahead to the, kind of getting closer to the attack. Again, we're still at peace with Japan technically. Basically, they're taking place all throughout 1941. Japan comes with a final proposal on November 20th. They basically say, oh, sorry, hold on a second.

Oh, okay, sorry, yeah, I wrote it down to weird. So their final proposal is that Japan is like, we'll leave Indochina, we'll refrain from attacking Southeast Asia, as long as the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands supply us 1 million U.S. gallons of aviation fuel, lift any current sanctions against us, and cease all aid to China. Bad deal. Well... Bad deal for the American side.

Correct. So here's what they're doing. They already have this plan in place to attack Pearl Harbor. They already know that they're getting ready to go to war. So what they're basically doing is they're like, we're going to ask for the house. They're bargaining with house money. Exactly. We're asking for the house.

If they turn us down, we're going to go ahead with the plan that we feel like we're going to have to go ahead with. If they give it to us, then fuck yeah. Then maybe we don't have to. Or maybe they give it to us and we run this plan at a later point or something. Or it buys us some time. So anyway, the U.S. is like, no, fuck that. Our FDR said he wouldn't stand for that.

Yeah. He wouldn't stand for anything, but especially that. That makes you want to pull my blinky over my legs. So the U.S. counteroffer, it's called The Whole Note. On November 27th, Japan, get the fuck out of China without any conditions, cease aggression with any other Pacific powers. That was our final offer. We're like, that was your offer.

Don't get cute. Get the fuck out and go back to your, pull all your people back in. Well, here's the thing. That was delivered to, that was generated in the U.S. on the 26th, but not able to be transmitted and read in Japan to their, whatever their command structure was until the 27th. It was held away from Hirohito by the Japanese. Yeah, yeah. They had received the transmission, but they wanted to run the plan because on the 26th. Yeah, but here's the thing.

Even if they would have told Hirohito the note, because I think he eventually does see it, it still tells them that they're, going to lose everything. So I feel like he still is going to be like, okay, I mean, guess go forward with it. You think? You think he was like in a shit or get off the pot situation? He did have to end up, honestly, he didn't have to give authorization. He had to do it while they were actually at sea. Because on the 26th, the day that we actually sent the whole note, that's when the Kita Bhutai actually leaves. Because of course it's going to take time. You can't just, you know, it's not a day trip to fucking Hawaii. It's 4,000 miles. Well, and they're not aiming for Hawaii. they're aiming for off, was it the northwest coast?

Of, no, no, they come into the north of Hawaii. So if you look at, this is one of those weird things where certain countries are higher than other countries. And when you look at a globe, you're like, oh, that makes sense. Everything's not on the same plane. Yeah, so Japan almost feels like it's more level with, like, straight across from, like, Washington almost. So Hawaii sits down a little bit between that straight line. So they were coming in and they were going to stop. I think they said about 250 miles almost due north of Pearl.

So they were actually flying over the entire island, and then coming in, part of the planes were coming in over the island, and some came around the island to come in from the harbor entrance, getting back to the actual, like, end of the negotiations. So what ends up happening is during this time when, during the buildup, before they actually set sail on the 26th, they've been having to secretly pull carriers and send them to this island in the north of Japan. It's its own separate island, too, to hide them there.

And, of course, naval intelligence has been trying to keep, you know, you're trying to keep track of your enemy troop movements before you're even at war. Oh, yeah. So even leading up to this, there were reports that they were like, you know, we don't know where their carriers are. We haven't had reports on their carriers. and they were just, and they were being very like, you know, clandestine about it,

about like sending resources up to this. They weren't just like, all the carriers go up north one time in one big, you know, flotilla. They were secretly assembling this. No one in Japan even knew about this.

The secrecy of this was insane. They had to keep it completely below radar because we were already hacking into their shit and we had a, it wasn't the Enigma machine, but it was kind of like a Japanese. They called it like the NJ25. That was their,

name for the naval code. We hadn't cracked it to the degree we did for Midway, but we could read certain stuff. There were also different levels of code. One was called purple, one was called something else. Some of the stuff that came out of like the consulate

or embassy, that was on like a lower decryption because that was like personal information. They weren't going to be transmitting military information. It was the dipshit information. The stuff that's easy to crack because it's low value. But also the stuff that you're like, okay, well, we can get to that later. because there's probably nothing in there.

Let's try to get to the big stuff first. Not an imminent threat. Correct. So they end up losing track of these carriers, so they can't find out where the Japanese surface fleet is. And this is a small collection of ships. This is literally the six most advanced aircraft carriers in the world. Until we started building aircraft carriers a little bit later,

once they were in development at this point, just being built, those were going to be more advanced. but in and what I mean as far as more advanced the technology of U.S. aircraft carriers was superior in that we had radar our fire suppression systems

were better the survivability of our ships were better advanced in the sense of they had a lot more experience because at this point these sixth aircraft carriers have engaged in attacks

you know when they're taking over into China, Dutch East Indies. They're using these to practice when they were attacking China. So you have all these air crews that have trained together on all these ships. You got six aircraft carriers, which are the Akagi, Akaga, Sawyou, Hear You. All four of those, by the way, are the ones that get sunk at Midway. And then the Shokaku and the Zuikaku, with a total of 408 aircraft to attack in two waves. And that was just the carriers. That wasn't the battle. ships, the cruisers, any of the destroyers, the tankers, the subs, the midget subs. That was kind of nice to see.

They had, it was a whole fleet. And I would say at that point, I don't think this is controversial. I'm pretty sure I heard it somewhere else first. But they were the most Ab Navy in the world. The most what? App Navy. Like, they were the best naval fleet in the world. Yes.

They had had the most experience. Aside from maybe the British, but when it came to this, here's the thing. Like, from a technological perspective in their warships and everything, their battleships were, I think were probably the most powerful battleships of all of World War II. Germany built a couple that might have kind of been on the same level. But the whole doctrine, I think we talked about this during the Midway one was the whole prestige class of ship, the ones that they thought would say. settle the war, would engage in the big engagements were battleships. So while you did have them building these aircraft carriers, they're not only just building these strictly to be aircraft carriers. There were, at this time throughout the world after World War I, there were certain treaties

made that they dictated what a country's naval superiority or naval power was able to be. Depended on the size of your country, I think population, and if you're on the winning side, of the World War I, you could have more ships. You could have a certain number of battleships. You could have a certain number of destroyers. You wrote the rules. Exactly. Well, what it ended up happening was as soon as, of course,

Japan figures out they're going to end up going to war with us, how they start trying to skirt these things is they start building these like heavy cruisers and the big holes for them. Well, what they end up doing is they end up converting them into aircraft carriers before they put the guns on and everything like that, they put a flat top on them. They term in an aircraft carriers.

They retrofit the ships. Yeah. And they're very good at it too. What they're also very good at is carrying a shit ton of planes and launching successful air attacks. The thing that's kind of the downfall and why they are able to kind of get these ships cranked down and get them ready for this battle is because also the Japanese Navy has what's called kind of a glass jaw.

It can throw a huge punch, but it's not able to really take one. and that's going to also kind of come into play a little bit later after the attack. So we are up to... Short first. Huh? The Army guy? Oh, yeah. His major malfunctions.

Yes. So prior to the attack, we're up to the seventh. So that's where we're at. Now let's talk about what the kind of the situation at Perl is at this point. So you have on the American side, the commanders at Pearl Harbor, first one is Admiral James O. Richardson. Now, this is prior to Pearl. Or sorry, prior to the attack.

So he was relieved of command in February 1941 for basically stating that the Pacific Fleet was moved to Pearl. It would be attacked. So when FDR made that move to move it, he was like, you're moving it here. it's going to get attacked here. He saw the writing on the wall. Yeah, it's too juicy a target. Someone will find a way to try to attack it.

So he's relieved of command, and in his place, gets brought in husband E. Kimmel. The fuck first name is husband. I don't know. Hello, husband. I didn't even put it on the board because I didn't think,

I didn't know that was his actual first name. Yeah. I just figured Edward Kimmel was his first name. It's so weird. His wife would be like, husband. It'd be like, doesn't fucking Mike Pence call his wife mother? He seems like a guy that would. I think he calls his wife, mother.

That was a fucking creepy thing about that. Just every time she introduces him. It's not creepy for him, I guess, but this is mother. Every time she introduces him, she'd be like, this is my husband, husband. It's like, bitch, do you have a stutter? What is this? Right. What are you doing?

She would be like Admiral Kimmel. Admiral Husband. Mm-hmm. So he's given command. And kind of like I was saying earlier, how the army and the Navy were separate. The army is actually there at Pearl is commanded by, Lieutenant General Walter Short. And he gets assigned there literally like right with Kimmel.

So Kimmel comes in, I think, in February as well. Walter Short comes in February as well. They were golf buddies. They were. And their strategy was to essentially defend, because they knew that there was going to be imminent attack. All stations around the Pacific, especially when they lost track of the ship,

they were notifying these commands of like, hey, we can't find these ships. Maybe be on the lookout for them. So the biggest thing that Short thought was going to be the downfall at Pearl was going to be internal sabotage. Just the dumbest idea. So he thought that essentially the local Japanese population would be able to either be an insurgency, all of them, or they would be able to hide spies in them. He didn't want sabotage to essentially take down Pearl. So what he did was he made things real hard for people to sabotage.

What he did was he took all of the planes. planes that he had. And you know how you make sure your planes don't get sabotaged, you put them all in a spot where you can keep an eye on them at the same time. So you park them wing tip to wing tip and you don't put them in your hangers where they might be protected.

You park them on the runway where someone can keep their eyes on them. Someone can't sneak in and do something. Kimmel's strategy was like, fuck the difference. They're going to attack somewhere else and I'm going to want to get there as soon as possible.

so he kept his situation or he kept the harbor in a situation where they were more primed to be able to get underway and get the ships out of the harbor. There were torpedo nets at the mouth of the harbor, but like you said, like you could set up torpedo nets around ships to protect them. And the way that these things are parked is along one side, I think I kind of mentioned to this before, there were eight battleships there. And that was the prime target. First wave, their goal was to take down the battle on capital ships. So all you have to do when those things are parked side by side to each other, fucking put a subnet around the outside one. Easy peasy.

Or take one big fucking subnet and stretch it all the way to because they were literally, I can't stress this. Someone just pulled the picture. Oh, wait. I'll hum for a second. And just do Pearl Harbor battleship row. And look at these things. are fucking six of them are parked right next to each other two by two like the goddamn animals

on the ark one of them i think is behind the row there's another one i think like across the the channel and that one is in dry dock with uh next to like two destroyers so i don't know if that's just how they were always parked or if that was part of kimmel was like oh i'm going to keep all my shit all so tight together to try to prevent against sabotage, but your fear coming from within makes you completely susceptible in this situation from outside attack.

And that's exactly, everything pretty much falls in line for the Japanese on this, and everything couldn't be set up more incorrect for America. They serve two big bonuses with, short putting out all of the airplanes

tip to tip out on the runways as easy targets and then Kimmel just basically lined everything up and didn't protect it and that's I think there's a story I don't know if you'll get into it about Kimmel but he has a moment during this whole thing where he wishes that he was just dead because he didn't think with any foresight of defense and really ignored I don't know if he's he ignored them or they just as a collective ignored them. But there was a lot of big things that they just kind of brushed off as far as like,

oh shit, this should be something that we might be needing to look at. Again, they thought they, all, most of the conventional wisdom on this was that the first place that was going to be attacked was the Philippines. And all I think Kimmel could look at was getting to the Philippines. The attack's going to be there and I need to be able to get to the Philippines as quickly as possible. Whether that was for like personal glory, I don't think it, you know, I want to believe it wasn't. I think he just was very short. He was very, he had tunnel vision.

He was just like, it's not going to happen here. We're, this is Hawaii. We're 4,000 miles away. All these other places are closer. Plus, our entire fleets here. Like, all of our ships. He was thinking of it in a sense like, oh shit, all of our ships are here. More of like, no, we've got all of our ships here.

Why would they attack us? Where we're the strongest? So, I got to pee before we get into the, morning of the attack. Okay. Okay. All right, while we take a break from class and take care of some business, you can also take care of some business. If you don't follow us on Instagram or Twitter already, our Instagram handle is historically high pod. That's historically high POD. And our Twitter is historically high. That's historically H.I. All right. And back to our show. All right, and we're back. All right, day of the attack. Now, got to mention this. It doesn't really.

matter, but so apparently the attack itself took place before any formal declaration of war was made by Japan, hence it being the surprise attack. However, there was like a 5,000 word notification called the 14-part message that's what it's commonly called that was

sent to the embassy in Washington had to be decoded and deciphered and then delivered. They didn't get it to us until like five hours, like the afternoon after the attack. And it wasn't even an actual declaration of war. It was this vague, hey, we're cutting off negotiations.

Negotiations have stalled. We don't see them going anywhere. So it's not like it was an actual, like, they actively tried to be like, hey, by the way, in case you haven't already heard, we're at war, because we already bombed you. We said no. It was just you didn't hear us say no.

Yeah, pretty much. So early, about 250 miles north of, is the island of Wahoo? I think it was. Oahu. Okay. So Japanese fleets parked up six aircraft carriers, about 250 miles north of Oahu. They launched their planes, I want to say some point around, they couldn't launch them and have them flying for the most part when it was dark just because of the danger of possibly

some planes crashing into each other, staying in formation, staying together. They wanted to leave before Sunday. Right. They, yeah, they did, but they wanted to, because the whole point was, is they wanted to almost arrive over the island at sunrise and catch everyone completely off guard. I think, I don't know if it was, uh, Mitsu Fashita. So he was essentially the leader of the initial attack wave. He was a bomber pilot. And I don't know if he was the one that said something or like the air command said something, but he was like, hey, there's a risk because if we, the whole point is, is you can't launch all the planes at the same. time because although yeah they launch one at a time off six different carriers so you're getting six into the air you want your planes to be in large swarm formations so basically as you launch those first planes they get to an altitude and then just cruise and as you're constantly launching more planes they're joining that formation and then you launch in one big wave at the same time so the first plane that gets off the aircraft carrier could technically be and the japanese are good at this could technically

be in the air for like 20 minutes before they're even pointed and heading the direction direction they need to go. It would almost be like your second to last plane is the one that's in the back and then your last plane is the one that's in the front because they're probably filtering back around. Yeah, that or as soon as they see the last plane getting ready to take off, they're like, start heading that direction and then they catch up as they get into, I don't know how they did, they were good at it. So anyway, they launch sometime, I've, I don't know what time is like in Hawaii in December. I don't know when it starts getting light, but I want to say they launched sometime around like 530 or something.

They start arriving over Honolulu like at 7.40 in the morning. And as the first attack, they have this basically set out to where the first attack is going to be composed of torpedo bombers being the most. And the reason for that is you're going to expect some resistance to kick up a little bit once they figure out what's going on, it's not going to be a ton. But your torpedo bombers, as we discussed in Midway, are slow as fuck, and they're the most vulnerable. Because they have to get in low, they've got to line it up, they have to get over the water, they've got to drop it, and they've got to peel off. And they're carrying the heaviest payloads.

They're the slowest. So it's made up of torpedo bombers. And I want to say, let's see, first group, 49, K-Pat, bomber, the, I'm going to name the nicknames for him. Kate bombers are essentially a high-level bombers, and they were all armed with almost a 2,000-pound armor-piercing bomb. It's a big bomb. That's a big-ass bomb.

Then they had bombers, 40 of them armed with the type of 91 torpedoes, the thundafish. And that was just one group. They had three groups that were launched with that first wave. They had dive bombers armed with, the dive bombers essentially their bombs were weighed less. They were only like 550 pound bombs. The reason being is because you're diving down. You're gaining that speed and then launching the bomb into the ship. Whereas the bombs that weighed almost 2,000 pounds, those are from level bombers flying over. You're letting gravity and inertia do the work on those. And then they also had a bunch of their zero fighters. And their job was to

basically maintain an air patrol around the harbor and any planes that the Americans tried to get off the ground, they were to shoot them down. They were also there to strape aircraft, which if you got aircraft parked fucking wingtip to wingtip, you get one plane coming in can just strafe them by the row. Just clean everybody out immediately.

So this first attack wave comes in and about... Before we get there, we're going to talk about the first two major fuck-ups that they had. That's what I was getting out.

Which one do you want? the midget sub. You take that one. So before all this happens, before the takeoff, all that kind of stuff, 3.42 in the morning, so still dark outside. There's a minesweeper outside of Pearl Harbor. The minesweeper notices that it sees a periscope come up from a submarine. And it is very close to Pearl Harbor, and it's not one of ours,

because they wouldn't be out there running sub duties. That sub ends up sneaking into Pearl Harbor and is sitting in the harbor. during that point there was a destroyer named it was the ward and it sunk a second midget sub that it had run onto those were the

first shots that were fired in the Pacific Theater for World War II. So before this attack even happens, we're spotting these subs and as they spotted the first one as a minesweeper spotted the first one they radioed back and told them and it was just kind of like

not that big of a deal they could just be doing reconnaissance or something like that, like not thinking that this would have been a lead-up into this big attack. Yeah, no kidding. And did you look up what the midget subs look like? No, I imagine it looked like a little oompa-lupa underwater. No, so it was basically the midget subs would be, because they had regular submarines. The midget subs would either be towed or like attached. The midget submarines would be attached. All they were, dude, was literally just like a small version of a submarine that was meant for a one-way trip to launch some, sometimes. torpedoes. That's it. It was loaded with like, I think, I want to say, like, six guys on the crew.

That's it? Yeah. And they all fucking died. In like all, I think they lost almost all the midget subs in this. Like an underground kamikaze mission? Kind of. That's pretty much exactly. I mean, they would try to get out. They could launch the, but I mean, these things were not good. Like, if you didn't get in, launch them, get out undetected, these things also like, you drop a depth charge even close to one of them, they break apart. They're not big. You would have to get back out to essentially your larger sub to get home. You weren't making the voyage back to the carriers.

Honestly, it was Kamikaze before they started having to do Kamikaze. They knew what it was. The second one was about 156 miles out. The Japanese fleet gets picked up by the U.S. Army radar station. The aircraft fleet coming in. to Oahu. Now, at this point, it's like two newer guys, because this is kind of a newer system

that they've kind of been testing. It's very new as what it sounded like. Radar was, like, cutting edge. Well, that's the biggest disadvantage that the Japanese had was they didn't have radar. So, all of a sudden, one of the guys manning this station is like, holy shit, look at this, the size of this group of planes coming in.

Look what's shown up on my screen. I haven't seen something this big before. His supervisor comes over and is looking at it and is like, um, all right, let me check something. And radio's into command. And command radios back and says, we're expecting a flight of, what's B-17s? I think it was.

B-17s from the mainland. I understand, um, this is kind of confusing for me. They're coming from the north. Why would, I mean, you understand like when you're flying in a commercial flight, you're not taking the most direct route to your, destination. No. You got to fly on a bearing for a certain degree and your turn has to take place. It's like a four point turn. You got to fly straight for this direction, then you go this direction, then you turn. That's not, if you line up the United States and Hawaii, you're going way out

of your way to come in from the north if you're a flight of B-17s. I would say it may be depending on what way your airstrip is positioned. But why would you, that's a lot of island to fly over. Yeah. Why wouldn't you just fluk coming over the ocean side and then make a shorter turn? It obviously, there had to have been a reason behind it because, guess what? They radio the radar station. They're like, hey, don't worry, we are expecting a flight of B-17s from the mainland. They're like, cool.

We're not going to worry about it. Yeah, that's us. We're seeing on the radar. That couldn't be an incoming barrage of Japanese fighters. So basically the goal of the attack is to destroy the American surface fleet. basically prevents the U.S. having any capabilities to respond to the expansion of Japan, allows time for Japan to take over and fortify the fences of its areas, allows them to also use all of those resources.

They were going to, after this, use it to build up their naval strength, start building more aircraft carriers, more battleships, all that shit. And then also, they were going to try to demoralize the U.S. to basically drop all of its demands after this and to seek a peace compromise, basically just allowing them free reign to do whatever they wanted in that part of the Pacific. If you blow up half of the Navy and the other half is already engaged in prior arrangements, that's going to scare a lot of other countries off and be like, okay, we'll drop our demands. Yeah.

Not us, but other countries would have. A couple things ended up kind of at least going somewhat in the United States way in this. One of them was one of the big targets. again, first way was to handle the battleships and the capital ships. By capital ships, they also referred to aircraft carriers. I think Yamato, Yamamoto, he knew that naval aircraft were going to be kind of the future, I think. I think he knew that, but he also was like, I'm not going to shy away from battleships, so I'll just make aircraft carriers and battleships,

when technically you just want a butt ton of aircraft carriers. So we lucked out in that the two aircraft carriers that were part of that Pacific Fleet were actually not in port at the time. It was aircraft carriers that were at a port and then it was destroyers, wasn't it? Yeah, because they don't go out by themselves because it would have been destroyers going with the aircraft carriers. The other thing too, for disadvantages for the Japanese and some unforeseen, for America, the harbor, it was what you would consider shallow for a harbor like that, which basically means that the ships could come in, they would stay in a channel, they could, you know, butt up to the island and park and everything like that, but the ships could

actually be recovered if they were sunk. That sounds crazy to me, but if you're caught out in open water anywhere on the ocean, and that ship drops down, you know, 50 feet, 100 feet, I think they said the shallowest point in the harbor was 42 feet. Yeah, I mean, depending on and also, but where those ships were a hit, they weren't out in the channel. No. They were closer to being, they were where they were being docked, essentially. But if you're out of the water 60 feet and it's 42 feet at its deepest and you sink down to it, you're still going to be sticking up.

You're not going to turtle. You can get divers down there, pump water out and everything. You have an area to where you can also stand on deck to possibly work. if you're sunk in deep water like the majority of ships that were sunk, you know, during the Pacific campaign, you're sinking thousands of feet. The ship's gone. There's no way to get to it. Yeah, it's the Titanic. And also, because it was going to be a Sunday, the ship crews were likely to actually be on shore leave. Here's kind of one of the shitty things that I realized about this listening to a podcast on it too, and I didn't realize it.

A lot of the like officers that were stationed here at Pearl, they would all have places. like either on base or they would have houses around Honolulu. With families, yeah. With families and everything. All of the enlisted guys, if you're not of a certain rank and everything, you're sleeping on these ships, which means that when this attack comes, the majority of these lives, you know, the American lives lost. I think they were saying the average age was like between like 18 and 20 or 18 and 21.

Because they were these enlisted guys that were either trapped in the ships or fighting from the ships or couldn't get off the ships. newly enlisted guys guys straight out of high school or at least this was their first time being you know to Hawaii or anything because the fleet just got sent here a few months ago I don't know a wild time back then

I think I was being a sailor on oh my god yeah can you imagine that being your fucking station being like what did you get what did you get I got fucking Pearl Harbor I'm going to fucking paradise man I don't know if it was I think it was

officers maybe. It was either officers or people that were enlisted, but after the fighting popped off, there were people that were coming back that were still in like suits from going to casinos and gambling and partying. That didn't even change back into uniform and rush these ships to man these anti-aircraft guns. Yeah. So I mean, the attack commences the, what was the guy's name? The, oh, come on. Do you have the Foshita? Yeah. Smoke bombs? Huh? Yeah, the Fashita, or Jesus Christ. The Flares?

Yes. Fashita Flares is a very hard double FF to get out. So Fichita is the leader essentially of the first wave. They're coming in over the island. They actually, weirdly enough, they're not the entire, you know, the entire first wave, which I want to say, how many planes were in the first wave? The first wave may have been like... 183.

Oh, was it? Yeah. So it's not 183 planes all flying group together and everything. No. So they basically kind of, once they get over the north of the island, they kind of separate. So you basically have some that are looping around the north side of the island, or sorry, the west side of the island, some that are looping around the east, some that are coming right in over the island and are basically going to be hitting the harbor from different angles of attack. It's also going to be predicated on what they're holding. Of course, the torpedo bombers are going to want to attack where it's the longest stretch of water in the harbor to hit the ship's broad side.

so they can only attack from one direction. You're going to have your dive bombers, one direction. Is that what you're laughing? You think that's where they got the name for the group? No, I don't. You have your dive bombers. Your dive bombers are going to be either coming from where the direction the ship is pointing or the direction the back of the ship is pointing

to be able to hit the longest section of the ship. They want to go lengthwise. And then level bombers would be high altitude, but they would also, I think, want to be lengthwise down either the front to back of the ship. So they're coming in at different angles. People are getting ready for church services. Fucking short is, was he going to play?

So I know Kimmel was at home reading the paper, getting ready to go play golf. They were going to go golf together, I think. Were they going to go golf together? Sunday, December, Paradise, you're going to be able to get a nice tea time. The front of his house, I think, faces the harbor or he can see it. And he doesn't, he's inside when the attack first kind of starts. And he said that he saw a swarm, I think was his wording, was he saw a swarm coming towards it, coming towards the harbor and then realize that it wasn't like a swarm of anything besides like aircraft. So 748, early morning Sunday, planes come in.

I think the first sweep of planes was led by. by. Fashita. He ends up hitting, I don't know exactly what ship he hits, but he drops his torpedo and he ends up getting a hit.

He fires the first flare. Oh, that's right. Right when they're getting, they're not quite two, I think the harbor yet, but he fires a blue flare or something.

And that, what does that mean? The blue flare meant to get into position to start their bombing raids. Then he thought one of his guys didn't see the flare because nobody was moving behind.

Because no one was moving. So then he pulls it out without things. thinking fires another flare, he's like, you fucker see this. But two flares mean attack. So, and I mean, they were already positioned. Yeah. So everyone sees that.

The entire first wave comes in. It's fucking anarchy, man. It's catching everyone off guard. So, you know, when the ships are here at harbor, it's not like ammo is fucking available on deck next to the fucking A-guns or anything. Everything is locked up tight to prevent sabotage. all of your ammunition is down in magazines protected um half these guys were asleep when this happened and all of a sudden all these you know shits exploding around you shit's on fire um

i'm just trying i'm just trying to think like if you were let's say you got up a little early and you're out sitting on deck and you're just kind of looking on you just hear just that low wine that you're probably used to. And you're like, oh, it's our Navy Fly Boys or Army Fly Boys or something like that. And all of a sudden you see the planes are a little lower. There's a lot of them. And then, I mean, do you think you're looking at that? And until that torpedo drops from underneath that, do you realize what the fuck is going on?

You're just seeing there like, do we have Japanese planes that they're testing out or something? You start to see the red circles for the suns on the wings And then you realize that's not your shit Plains don't sound different So if you're thinking You know these are our guys I'm sure there's a degree of difference in pitch of the motor But probably not something that you're going to pick up on at 748 in the morning

No But just to I mean all of these It's basically just the Japanese get to do whatever they want During this 90 minute period Um Sort of there's not a lot of resistance, man.

I mean, there are stories and instances of, I think, more individual heroic acts during this. You're not only getting these ships attacked, but so kind of getting back to what the base looks like. The base itself is all pretty self-contained. So you have the island in the middle that's got a bunch of aircraft on it, and bombers are hitting that to crater the runway and to blow up hangers and stuff like that. you have the other airfield which is just basically, you know, maybe a half mile on the mainland, but visible. You have that one being attacked.

But you also have these areas around the harbor too where like you have fuel storage, these giant oil tanks, dry docks, dry docks, submarine pens. And what's kind of crazy is throughout this whole thing, because the battleships and other ships take so much focus that, they kind of leave us in not a good position, but after the attack, we're left in a much better position than we could have been. Well, they fucked up, and we brought this up in the Midway episode. They didn't attack the fuel reserves that we had, and they didn't attack the dry dock area. They partially attacked the dry dock area, but not enough. There was one, the ship that you were

talking about that was in dry dock. Yeah, that was the Pennsylvania. That was the flagship of the Pacific fleet. The one that was already in dry dock being worked on? Because there was one that was up there, I have it written down, where the fuck is it? Uh, the USS Shaw was in dry dock and it actually exploded, but it wasn't completely sunk. What it was is the Pennsylvania was a battleship. I want to say the Shaw, so you can tell with names of ships. So if it's named after a state, it's a battleship. Really? I didn't know that. Yeah. So Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, West Virginia, California, California, Nevada, Tennessee, Maryland. Those are the ones. That were here at Pearl.

Then you have your aircraft carriers, which are named after cities. I think that famous battles took in because you have aircraft carriers that are like Lexington, Concord, Bunker Hill was a small carrier. But then you get stuff like, oh, Saratoga. I'm not sure what Hornet, because then you have the Hornet, you have the Enterprise. So there might be, and then you start getting them named after presidents now. I don't like any of this. Our naming system is very bad.

If you don't know about these wars from American history and you're over in Japan and you hear the names of these ships, what the fuck does that mean? Like if we had a ship that was called like the SS kickass or something like that or like the SS, we're going to fuck you up, they're going to take these ships, I think, a little bit more serious. But we have a Pennsylvania. They don't know what the fuck of Pennsylvania is.

Well, the Japanese, what they did is they named their carriers after mountains. in their country. So you had like the Akaga and the Kagi. I think it was like famous mountains in the country. So it all gets named after, you know, other shit. So when it, when it's 90 minutes within the time frame of this, I think we end up getting six planes off the ground to the pilots that ended up getting off the ground were guys that were still wearing tuxedos like you were talking about.

They were out at a poker game. Oh, that's what it was. They were airmen. Yep. And they fell asleep. I think they were doing a poker game like one of the hangers. the officers club or something and they woke up and they fucking jumped in and i think they ended each shooting one maybe two planes down another guy that was with them ended up getting

shot down i believe and then three other total planes ended up getting up and i don't know how many actually ended up surviving you have um guys that are coming out on deck and manning and a aircraft guns and trying to shoot down just the the fact that the fact that they're there's not a lot of, you're a sitting target, man, the entire time all of these ships are. The Arizona, that's the one that the, if you guys are, look at the Pearl Harbor Memorial, it's that white kind of thing that kind of looks like it's floating in the water. It actually straddles the remains of the battleship Arizona. So battleship Arizona, and again, these battleships are meant to take punishment.

So when I tell you how many hits, some of these end up taking. it's kind of astounding. The Arizona, however, ends up just kind of getting hit in an Achilles heel. A high-level bomber dropping one of these, you know, 2,500 pound bombs or however much they weigh, ends up catching it in a spot

where it's able to penetrate the deck and actually gets into the magazine in the front of the... For everyone, the magazine is essentially the armory for a ship. It's where all of these battleships, because they're huge guns, worked off of... like gunpowder, black powder. Their ammo storage.

Yes, their ammo storage. So pretty much anything in the magazine goes boom. When you throw a bomb in there, it explodes, they said it was such force that it basically raised the ship out of the air as it snapped the front of the ship off. And the thing was, yeah, it went down so quickly and the explosion was so severe. That's essentially where the bulk of loss of life from Pearl Harbor comes. because 1,177 sailors died in that by itself. Some of the other ships along there, too, getting back to the hubris or just offensive mind that Kimmel had

was none of these torpedo nets were up. So without the, the torpedo nets only would have been so effective. But even if those torpedo nets knock out maybe like 10% of the torpedoes. You tell me if they wouldn't have been effective. So you have the Arizona, it gets hit by bomb. That's Oklahoma takes five torpedo hits and capsizes. It's a total loss, 429 men die. That's the only hits it took was five torpedo hits.

And it was taking torpedo hits all from one side. Yeah, all from the only side, facing away from the harbor. Yeah. Or facing towards the water. Toward the water. And then you also have a battleship to the inside of it, too. So what's also happening is if you're getting a battleship getting hit, there's a chance that if it starts capsizing or rolling over,

it's going to hit the one next to it, and it's going to be damaged. The West Virginia took two bomb hits, seven torpedoes. It was sunk. Now, when I say sunk in these scenarios, sunk just means sunk on the bottom. Sunk to the floor, not all the way. So she ends up getting refloated,

and I don't know where each one get sent, but they end up getting patched up and then sent for like further repairs at like shipyards along the west coast. So the West Virginia is actually back in service in July, 1994. Even thinking about that, that's almost three years it took to get that thing back into service. And I'm sure they also probably did improvements to it at that point. But damn, like, that first one took three years. Then you have the California to take. Before we get to the California, there's one guy on the West Virginia that I want to talk about. And this guy is absolutely awesome to me and just learning about him.

So back during this time when you would take on African-American soldiers that would enlist, they would never be given high-profile training jobs. Like, they weren't even trained to fire guns. Yeah, I don't think they were allowed to be servicemen. You could be, I don't know, support. You would call them support staff. Probably. Yeah.

This guy. Cooks. Yeah. This guy, Doris Miller. He was a cook on the West Virginia. If anyone, it's familiar with the movie we don't talk about regarding Pearl Harbor, he is played by Cuba Gooding Jr. Really?

Oh, so he, okay. Yeah, probably honestly the only decent part of the movie because that did happen. I haven't ever seen the movie because I heard that it was just kind of trash. But that's cool that he's actually in it. I'm glad that he got some shine. So Doris Miller was a cook on the West Virginia, in that morning he had cooked breakfast. he was going around, he was collecting laundry

kind of when everything happened, when everything started to pop off in the Japanese started bombing. He runs onto deck, and it was the general of the ship, I believe. The captain? The captain? Yeah. Captain of the ship, he comes up, sees that the captain is wounded, ends up dragging him to safety,

then jumps back on board, jumps out there, and jumps on an anti-aircraft gun. Now, this guy's never been trained on this ship. He's never spent a day, he's never fired a shell. He's never done fucking anything with these guns. This one happens to be actually loaded. And he ends up taking down one, at least one of the Japanese. It's so cool to think that this guy who is treated like shit,

disrespected, not giving the proper... That's pretty much the scene in the movie is. He's with it. But the captain dies in the movie, so I'm not sure if historically the captain dies. I don't think he did. But basically he looks at the gun. He's like, okay. And of course, you've been around that kind of stuff. You know... I'm not the saying you're stupid. I'm just saying like firing the gun isn't like the hard part.

Like you can fire it. It's it's aiming a gun if you've never fired a gun that's against a moving target. So the fact that he of course knew how to use it because he'd probably watched people use it before. But the fact that he, you know, without having ever fired a service rifle or anything like that, he's able to take down a

plane. And those shots, you have to lead that plane. You're not just firing directly at the plane. And not only that, but even if a plane is coming right at you, The plane's going to be firing at you too to have the fucking balls to stay in there and just keep returning fire at it. And that's basically what he said

when they interviewed about it. He just said that he just got to be on the gun and start a firing. Yeah. And that's all he needed to do. He was awarded an iron cross after. Not an iron cross.

Navy cross. Navy Cross. Oh, that's the bad one. That's the bad one. Okay. So, no, he disavowed the Iron Cross and then he took a Navy Cross. That the Navy Cross, I think. Which is a very, I don't know if it's like the highest Navy achievement, but it's a very high.

It's one of them. Yeah. Okay. So California ends up taking two bombs, two torpedoes, sinks back in service in January of 44. So that one only took a little over two years. The Nevada takes six bombs, one torpedo. Thing is, is the Nevada actually gets underway. The captain or whoever was in charge at that point was like,

we're fucking sitting here, get the engines going, cut our fucking mooring lines. He limped it out of the channel too because it had already taken damage. Yeah, I mean, it had taken damage initially when it was hit, but as they were getting it out of the channel,

he was like, fuck, I don't think, I think they started taking water through one of the hits. And so he beached the ship as so not to block the channel as well. Because had he got hit and sunk and blocked the channel? Fucked.

Not only that, but then anybody that's trying to come into the channel to try to help can't get in there to assist with any of the rescue efforts or anything so he had the wherewithal and apparently like that was a huge thing when they saw the ship pulling out and everything it like raised like morale like even the guys trapped on the ships were like yeah oh fuck yeah because you're seeing you're taking an offensive yeah and so then he had the pennsylvania which was in dry dock the pennsylvania's in dry dock i think there's like two other smaller ships in front of it in dry dock they were able to work on them

And those were, I think, two destroyers or something. Both of those got hit. And then that's how the Pennsylvania got a little bit damaged was from, like, blast damage from that. But she actually remained in service. The Tennessee took two bombs, returned to service in February of 42, so a month, two months later. And then the Maryland took two bombs and returned to service February 42 as well. So torpedo nets could have been pretty important here. I'm telling you right now, torpedo nets wouldn't have prevented the Arizona.

Oklahoma takes five torpedo hits, and I'm guessing all on one side. I'm guessing that's the reason she capsizes. Yeah. Doesn't take any bomb hits. Probably a pretty good guess. West Virginia takes seven torpedoes and still is able to be, of course, it takes two enough years more than that to repair it, but still. So that one will only hit by two bombs.

California only gets hit by two. Like, yeah, if you're able to prevent, and of course the torpedo nets probably hit, get hit, and then start breaking apart. Because of the detonation. But if it's able to even stop some of them, man. If you're stopping 20% of those, 30% of those, yeah, you're good to go. So, I wonder if that's what Kimmel was thinking when,

like, you think that all the shit that Kimmel just brushed aside and didn't prepare for? Like, you think all that shit was flashing through his mind as he was watching all this happen? Well, he gets the phone call with after the attack happens, answers the phone. It's the command center, whatever they want to call it. That makes it, it's the command center. Yeah. And is basically like, hey, fucking Japanese are attacking us. I don't know if he looked at your window, but we got some shit going on.

So he goes to walk outside, and I think his, like, driver was coming to pick him up. Yeah. And he can see what's fucking going on as soon as he walks outside. His driver is, like, get in the car. Like, we're getting down there. They end up getting down to, like, the admin or the base office or whatever. Of course, it's, yeah. And at one point he hears a crack of breaking glass when he's standing up in like the control center.

I think this is what you kind of alluded to earlier. And feels kind of a pain in his chest. Like a dull pain. Yeah. Not a piercing pain. Just like a dull like you got hit with something. And he reaches down and feels his shirt and pulls his hand away as he got like soot or something on it. And then he looks down to the floor and there's a fucking, is it a 50 caliber?

Just laying on the floor. fucking 50 caliber bullet laying on the floor. Did they think was a fire from an American? Like he caught some... They traced it back and it wasn't American made. But it had, yeah, arched up and lost enough of its momentum through its travel through the window. And it didn't even penetrate.

But he said it made the skin tender. But he's like, he looks back on that moment after the course of the events that happened. He's like, I wish that would have killed me. That would have been easier. he's probably not wrong no I mean at the end of the day we got eight battleships

are these the amount of ships that were there got sunk or damaged those were the amount of ships that were there and then I believe it was the Arizona Oklahoma and the Utah vessels were all deemed as a total loss

and then Virginia was damaged and sunk but then it got repaired. California and Nevada. California, Maryland, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and the Tennessee. Yeah. So a lot of ships got hit. This was also part of the Japanese's, Japanese is right, or Japanese.

The Japanese plan. Yeah, it was. One of the things that fell apart, though, was when they were coming back and reporting back once they got to the aircraft carriers, they said that all these ships were just total losses. everyone they thought that they had sunk. Yeah, but I mean, if you look at it, aside from Pennsylvania, and, okay, there's several factors in here. First of all, most of them were, most of them were sunk or total losses.

But as soon as one of these motherfuckers catches on fire and there's just nothing but smoke and shit, you're going to think everything's destroyed. Yeah. That's true. You're going to think that your footprint of damage. you're going to fucking inflate your numbers. Didn't we've talked about that before, about being like, oh yeah, it's, it's totally taken out.

But what was the big dog that came back for the Battle of the Midway that they weren't expecting? Yorktown? It might have been. Yorktown or Interprite? Yorktown. I think it was the Yorktown. That sounds right. But they thought that these were total losses.

So going forward, thinking that you killed off all of these boats that were able to then limp back to dry dog get fixed, then go to the mainland and get fixed. You're coming back with a fleet that's so much bigger than Japan thought that they were going to have to fight. Well, and here's the thing, too, is that, I mean, I guess getting to some of the silver lining that allowed us to kind of respond, the two waves that came in, first one was to go after the battleships, capital ships, second wave that came in, its priority was going to be the, like, runways and airplanes, that kind of stuff. And then any other thing that they didn't see was they were, you know, they had different armaments. Mm-hmm. One thing that they had a third wave prepared.

And the third wave, its job was supposed to essentially go after, I think they called it like the oil farm or something. Think of just basically at a certain point. These bases have just these fields of giant fucking tanks, like storage tanks, big circular ones. And they're all just oil. All of our surplus to feed everything. Yeah, you're having to fucking fuel ships that, burned so much of this shit ships aircrafts literally

everything so there's two of these that are on the base at Pearl Harbor they never get hit also what never gets hit is like the naval command offices the you said the submarine

something the basement of the submariner was where the code breakers were I thought they were off in huts no they were maybe after this, but that's where they were originally was in the basement of like the admin building or like the submarine

commander's building. You then had the sub pens and you had the dry docks for, you know, repairing ships. So I think the third wave was supposed to attack this, but after the second wave had come back

and landed, I think Fichita had mentioned when his wave first came back, he was like, we need a third wave. We're going to need to go in hit these additional areas. And when it came down to it, when the second wave finally got back and there was that determination that needed to be made, the guy that was actually in charge of the operation was, his name was Chuchi Nagumo.

And he actually... He was the admiral of the Kabutasai, right? Ketupita. Ketai. Yeah. So Yamoto is still in Japan at this point. I don't believe he comes with him on this. So Nagumo's in charge and basically he does.

decides that, okay, we've done a lot of damage. I've got six of my aircraft carriers here. And I don't know where the American aircraft carriers are. They weren't in port. They could be coming over the horizon right now. And while all my ships are here, they could launch an attack and sink a bunch of us. We're just open water. Yeah.

And we still have other planes that are out still conducting the second wave. So his determination was basically like, the risk isn't worth the reward if we get caught out in the open. So as fucking quick as they can get the planes, they're fucking turning around and hauling ass. 10 a.m. is when they headed back to the Japanese aircraft carriers. So

we're talking about 748 was the initial attack. So 8 o'clock, about two hours it takes them to get back to these aircraft carriers after the first initial launch. That's a very quick turnaround for as much devastation as they did.

You just kind of this is where I'd like to where I'd like to discuss a fault in these in these times we want to do that

before we talk about FDR's declaration and him oh yeah go ahead so FDR this is where the conspiracy kind of leads into a gray area because

America I think was looking Just so I know, is your conspiracy based on did FDR or his administration or whoever knowingly put ourselves in a position likely to be attacked in order to allow us entrance into the war? Is that way you're getting that? Okay. And I don't know for sure. I have this thing in my mind where you kind of have to have it with a lot of different things about America as our leaders are willing to preserve. life, but once we are attacked, we're willing to fight back, or are they willing to sacrifice life in order to get into a conflict that they need kind of a shoehorn in? And I don't know what

FDR's intentions were. I'd like to think that they were good, and this was just a reaction. I don't like to think that this was just like bait on a hook to get into World War II. But when they first get the initial body counts of who was killed, it was a lot lower than what the second wave that he got of the actual information was. And after he gets a second amount of information, which I think the number was there was 2335 killed and 1143 wounded. So they consider those all casualties, correct? Yeah. Yes, if you're wounded, you're a casualty. I think that the second number kind of shocked him as far as how much it was because up till 9-11 this was like the greatest loss of life in a single attack yeah yeah so hold no hold on in a surprise attack because there

there have been battles or an attack that killed way more like the east like not saying it's not a huge loss of life i'm not saying that in comparison to some of the casualties during days on the Eastern Front against Germany and Russia. That wasn't on US soil though. No, no, I understand that. What I'm saying is that yes, but it was, I think it's, is it on U.S. soil?

Yeah. Because it wasn't Gettysburg even more casualties during that battle? But that wasn't the foreign part. Okay. It was a foreign attack on U.S. soil. Okay, I get what you're saying. I got you now. Okay. So, once he gets these numbers back,

he has to address Congress, and that's when he talks about, he gives a speech, a day that we'll live. December 7th, 1941, a date which will live in infamy. And that's exactly who said it, too. But he knew, he had speechwriters, he was one of the first guys to ever employ speechwriters, but he knew that this one had to be from the heart, and it knew, he knew that he had to implore Congress, like, this was time to start war. This was time to engage, we're getting into World War II. Like I say, I want to believe that he had pure intentions,

but he kind of had a war boner. Like there was sort of a countdown to Fucktown before this. And I don't... He's like, I don't know how long I can keep edging myself. Yeah, that's exactly it. I'm just rubbing the tip of it to keep myself hard. And I need to come. And judging by everything that happened,

as far as what happened over there, in the defenses, like we were talking about, pal, he had more of an offensive mindset. Short was just kind of out in left field trying to figure out how many fingers and toes he had and all that kind of shit. these guys were fairly big warrior they had to be because they were generals

they were admirals they were commanders they were a pretty big deal there were aside from like the guys in Washington like the head of the Navy the head of the army those guys that had the direct like the direct communication like the chiefs of staff these guys that didn't get much bigger than

the roles that these guys were in you're the commander and chief of the Pacific Fleet you are the major general of the army on Hawaii. Like, you are that level. So I think that they were probably in, maybe not in the right position by their faculties and kind of how they took it.

But they were fairly esteemed guys that were up there in a good position of power. I don't think that this was something where FDR installed them because he knew they were going to be idiots. I think that it was just kind of like a... So are you proposing a conspiracy just to take the side that you don't believe the conspiracy?

No, because I don't think that these guys were put in positions that they weren't ready for. I think that they were. I think that this was a failure to fulfill your duties on their level. I don't think this was something that FDR planned out. No, I think FDR knew that we were going to be in this. I think that his actions that he took moving the fleet to Pearl Harbor can be completely justified by either side saying it's going to provoke, but him saying, no, like, we need to be ready to respond.

You don't think it was just him dangling his dangle in the water. No, because like, well, but, okay, think about it this way too. What if there were no ships at Pearl Harbor and somehow Japan launched an invasion of Hawaii? We wouldn't have time to respond until they've taken the mainland, probably. To get enough troops together to defend. No, I don't think we would. So I think his move was, if anything, it was equal parts. FDR.

Here's the thing, though, too. Even if part of his strategy was to try to goad them and to attack, I don't think he thought it was going to be a Pearl Harbor. It was probably going to be Philippines. I think he thought it was going to be the Philippines or someplace like that, where there would be a loss of life, we would be attacked while not at war, so it would be, you could still get into this war.

Because public opinion at this point is turning against the Japanese, even prior to Pearl Harbor with all of the incidents that we talked about previously. After this, like, do you remember, we're both old enough to have been very aware after 9-11, I think. God, do you remember just like that feeling when everybody was just on the war? the same team ready to just go point at one target and just fuck something up it was a good feeling it was a feeling out of almost anger and sadness and i think there were casualties along the way that probably shouldn't have been but we were all pretty much on the same page we didn't know who we wanted to go after but we knew that we wanted to go after someone so think of it like this had to

have been a similar feeling and i think it was because unfortunately we see things like in tournament camps that happened after that were the psyche of America was not in the right place. We fully let paranoia take over. Yeah, because we never thought this was going to happen. I don't think the general public ever thought that Hawaii was going to get hit. No, that was a vacation spot, man. That was, that's U.S. territory. Mm-hmm.

And up till now, our uptell Pearl Harbor, we hadn't ever really had, I guess, the Revolutionary War. was fought on our land. That was far removed from this, though. We hadn't had any fighting on U.S. soil since then. Yeah, it's like we've talked about before. We're very fortunate in our geographical location from a conflict perspective. Here's the other thing, too, is that six months after this

is Midway. Very soon after. And a lot of these same characters, Yamamoto, the whole Kido Butai, all of that's back over there. And all of that's trying to fight for this strategy. And the things that they didn't mop up for that third wave that they were going for is really what kind of bit them in the ass. Yeah, I mean, the infrastructure that was left at Pearl Harbor,

they were able to get those ships, you know, moved out of there pretty quickly. And into Dry Dock, get them patched up, get them sent when they did to or get them repaired. and then start essentially conducting operations with other ships that they brought in. It's not like these were the only battleships that we had. There were battleships that were already under construction, which also may have led to the time frame of these getting repaired. Because if you're in the middle building a new one, you're like, that one's going to have to wait its turn.

I'm not going to back this thing out and fucking pull this one in its place. You're going to build a bright new shiny one with all the bells and whistles before you start repairing the old one. But, I mean, and even in that six-month period after Pearl Harbor, when we are officially in the war in World War II has essentially become a complete global conflict we're you know we have three carriers in the Pacific that's pretty much our power and then support craft

around them of course but our ability to make war hinders on three carriers and they're conducting operations and even in between the six months between Pearl Harbor and Midway and one of them gets fucking sunk and one of them gets damaged it's just like I don't know that it's exactly what Yamamoto and even

Nagumo both of them had advised against attacking America well Yamamoto was the one that wanted to do it but he had also said if we do this we everything like you were talking about all the stories had to line out he didn't want to do it but they were just going to find someone else to do it and then he was going to have to live with that because he would still be living in

Japan it's not like he's like no I'm bound out I think too So I don't know if we talked about it in the midway one He became like an Osama bin Laden type figure Yamamoto did because he was the architect of it The terrorist? Pretty much that's and so We made it a special point that we were able to at one point find out

It was a little bit later in the war We intercepted a communication about his some like travel itinerary or something like that And as soon as he took off and got into his flight, we sent, I think, a couple aircraft after him and shot him down, killed him, and apparently that was a huge thing. Not only just for the architect of Pearl Harbor,

but that was pretty much like their head naval guy, so. I'm not 100% positive on this. I think it's the same guy. The fellow that was sending back the transmissions from Hawaii, the one that was circling the Air Force Base and all that. Takeo Yoshikawa. That guy, yeah. he ends up, it takes a while.

He kind of goes into hiding and they find out that it was him that was, that basically fucked over Japan. Yeah, so this is, this poor was kind of crazy to hear. Yeah, we, we should have just taking this guy out. Well, we, we found out who he was. But the thing was is after, can you, okay, so try to put your mind like, sorry, mind in him for a second. You wake up one morning

and everything that you sent all of the gathering is just, it's happening. It's being used in front of you. So he ends up that day that it happens because of course there's going to be an investigation into everything about this. There's going to be interrogations of everybody on the island. He destroys pretty much anything

and everything that he had even pertaining to this. I think he was arrested, but he was traded in some type of exchange, diplomatic exchange, because they had people from, we weren't at war, we still had people in Japan. So he was part of a package

that we traded to get some of our people back. He gets back to Japan. And... He goes and live in a monastery. He goes and lives in a monastery for a while, but after the war, he ends up, like, moving a way to be like a... He continues being a monk or he tries to move out,

be a farmer to get away from everyone. Apparently he's universally hated in Japan. So many people have brought up the point of saying could they have done this without you? Like if without thinking, well, if it wasn't this guy, there would be another guy in Hawaii

doing this work for the Navy, the Japanese Navy. But apparently people wanted to kill him. They blamed Hiroshima and Nagasaki on him. Well, because that was the response, ultimately. Ultimately. So everybody that lost somebody was like this, you did this.

You may not have agreed to it, but they couldn't have pulled this off without you. Conversely, the pilot, Pachita, he ends up being like a hero during the war. He takes place, he does fight at Midway. He survives. and he has a lot of, he ends up having a lot of remorse after the war. Oh, fuck this. That's the guy.

That's the guy that I was thinking of that turns into an evangelist. Yeah, he turns into an evangelist and travels like the United States like seeing the country. Yeah, he shouldn't have never seen,

he should, we should have locked his ass up. Yeah. That shouldn't have been an option. I don't care about. Because technically, you realize technically Pearl Harbor is a war crime. Oh, yeah.

Yes, the whole entire thing was... Yes. The fact that he was able to go travel the country and do all that shit is just... It's amazing to me that we let that happen. Well, Kimmel gets fired, Short gets fired. Pretty much anybody involved with the running of Pearl Harbor gets fired due to this. For a good reason. Oh, yeah, I'm not saying that in defense of these guys or anything like that.

There's been, like, appeals. Because these guys were, like, discharged or the strip. of their rank or dishonorably discharged. I can't remember exactly what it is. Essentially, their name's mud in the military community, but there's been attempts by like their families to kind of get them exonerated. Some stuff has gone through where it was discovered

that maybe they weren't getting the best information to make defensive strategies. But again, this ultimately does come down the situation to good planning and luck, essentially by the Japanese, and just kind of obliviousness, especially like, you're the close, well, you're not the closest,

but you're one of the closest fucking places to Japan. You're the biggest closest place. You're the biggest closest, you are the honeypot. I know it's risky to stick your dick in the honeypot, but someone might try and you might want to be aware of that. You were too close for comfort, and, yeah, I don't really know what to think of it, because it just, it's obviously now with hindsight, we see it in a completely different light,

but you had to know back then. You had to, whether it's the radar shit showing up, like, hey, maybe we check in. Maybe we make sure that those are our guys. Like, let's not just go on the word of, yeah, these guys are coming in at some point. Let's maybe get some confirmation on that. Or there's a submarine. There's a midget submarine in the harbor. What is that?

Let's maybe go out and check that. Let's see what's going on. Or you just before that, hey, we can't find the aircraft carriers. We can't find the biggest fucking things in the ocean. Yeah, let's put everyone on kind of a higher, you know, stage of alert. And maybe let's start sending out, maybe like, you know, double the planes to do, to do, like, you know, scans. Send out some feelers, send out some ships, just something to protect the whole area. Well, they had those PBY, those Catalina planes that they would send out, I think, every morning.

and I don't know if they did it on Sundays because it was weekend, but maybe those just went in the wrong direction. You know, so many things have to fall in the line of luck for the Japanese here, along with, of course, like, proper planning and tons of information, and then catching fucking husband Kimmel

was a dick in his hand, getting ready to fucking go golfing. And fucking Walter Short, lining up all his little planes being like, like, neon, put them together. You think it ran? I can't feel my legs. You get ran through their heads.

They're like, gosh, shit, I wish I would have been golfing today. Or I wish I'd rather be golfing than dealing with this. Like, it was just a massive fuck-up all the way around. And whether it's preparedness or whether it was just hubris that we would never get attacked, I don't know. I just think that it was an all-around, just a big screw-up. And unfortunately, there were a lot of lives lost, but I guess it, did, in kind of a weird way, it did help that we got that fire lit under us. Like I said, we did a lot of bad things as a country.

There were internment camps that were more inland where we were rounding up Japanese citizens, American citizens that were Japanese because of the distrust that we had and putting them in these. Like families are like people that were like serving in the military. Even them. Yeah. Just anybody that could have been perceived as a threat. We take them to these places There was one in, I think there was one in Nevada.

There was one in this little shit ass called Minidoka County in Idaho. There was one in the Sierra Nevada is just not hospitable places that were taking around in these people. They were called concentration camps. We used the word internment, I think. But yeah, they were concentration camps. The showers didn't have doors on them. The stalls weren't anything good.

It was like prison. There were no partitions. They said that it was just, yeah. So. I've been to one of them. It's an eerie feeling to be in. But one of the things that I regret about losing grandparents is I had one that was in World War II that he didn't storm the beaches on Normandy, but he was involved over there. And then the one on my mom's side was in Pearl Harbor when it was bombed.

And unfortunately, I wasn't old enough. to be able to ask him all the questions that I wanted to. I don't know what he would have answered. He was a very cool guy. Him and I went fishing all the time just a badass dude. But I would have loved to have picked his brain just to see what little tidbits that he would give to me. Because this was, anybody that survived this was probably pretty fucked up by this.

Yeah. And I wish that I could have had the conversations with him about it and see, because he was a great Navy guy. He had the coolest Navy tattoos. just he really lived that life and to have that resource and not be able to ask him those questions because he passed away when I was in like second grade so none of this is on my radar.

You don't have any type of appreciation or interest in the... Oh, that's such a bummer. Yeah, it would have been so cool to find out. And I don't know how much he talked about it because my dad had never really said anything and my mom had never really, besides telling me that he was over there when it happened, there wasn't a whole lot of that information passed. Yeah, the only thing that I got, so my grandpa did serve in World War II as well, he was, he worked on a, I want to say it was a heavy cruiser, but he was in the engine room.

He was like, because they run off steam turbine engines or something. He worked in like the engine room that was like, it had to do with the steam. But the one thing that he was able to tell me essentially about Pearl Harbor, he wasn't there. but I got a sense of like what happened in the country when they found out and he said it was you would have to search far and wide to find somebody that wasn't like completely gung-ho about going to war everyone wanted to sign up and just I mean I don't know it's a I think this I think this is one of those things that the longer we get away from

it, the just, I don't know, it's going to lose its mystique. It's going to lose its meaning. Does that make sense? It kind of bones you had to think about that what you're talking about is kind of what happens with a lot of things, but

as we move forward past them, they kind of get forgotten. I'm sure these things are still taught in grade school, but knowing what I know now after studying up on it and seeing the lead-up and everything. There's so much that's held out of the story. We get kind of the meat and potatoes of the actual war that happened in school.

But not of the lead-up... You get the version that we could have told in five minutes. On December 7, 1941, Japanese launched a bunch of planes from aircraft carriers, bombed Pearl Harbor, destroyed a whole bunch of ships, and then we were in World War II. Okay, I didn't even need five minutes. There you go.

And nothing before that. No provocation, no lead-up, no talks trying to figure out peace or anything like that. It's there's just so, and I get it. It's very hard- Because it doesn't look.

Because honestly, does it look good for us? Yes, we're the victims in this and yes, the loss of life is horrible, but it almost looks like we just kind of

laid in, like we didn't lay and take it after, but we left way too many opportunities for something like this to happen. We gave them way too long of a leash as far as what they were doing, you know, taking over other territory and attacking other people.

And after that, you know, we just kind of left ourselves open. Because we didn't think that they were able to do this. So learning about that aspect of it as a kid in school, you go home thinking, why didn't, how did we get attacked? Like, yeah, they surprised us and everything, but like what the fuck were we doing? Well, and trying to explain the benefits of an oil embargo and sort of those type of things to kids who... Oh, it's very easy. You think it is?

You like batteries for your toy? Well, I'm not going to give you any more batteries. How do you feel about that? Makes me angry, yeah? Well, what are you going to do? I'm going to try to get batteries somewhere else. Yeah? Where from?

I don't know. I'll go still Timmy's batteries. Trying to explain the nuance of how that's a strategic move, though, is there's a a lot to it. There's a lot of layers to an embargo because you look at it from that angle, but then you look at it... I know, but maybe then, and I'm not saying you should limit what people are learning.

Stuff like this, where you should be able to discuss it from all of the sides and kind of find out, I'm not saying who was... It's obviously who's the good guy and who's the bad guy in the situation. We got attacked. We're the good guys. That's as simple as this.

What I'm saying is that we let ourselves. We put ourselves in a position for this to be able to happen. So maybe you don't learn about this stuff until you're able to learn all about this. Until you're able to understand all the intricacies and the ends

and the outs of it. But even then you have to do that on your own. Like even in college history classes, we never got into anything this deep. We may have kind of scratch the surface of it as far as the diplomatic side of it. But there's just not a whole lot of it. And so you're left to your

on devices to learn. And thankfully, the technological boom that we've had has had a lot of downfalls. But I do think in podcasting and being kind of a 70% accurate learning podcast like we are, I think we're closer to 7580. I can take that. Yeah, maybe we're getting better. But these things will live on in stories that are told in mediums that people will use going forward and I just hope that there's enough

where people take the time to actually learn more about it. I would love to see like well I guess when Tom Hanks and them do Henneman Steven Spielberg do like the mini series for like World War II they kind of stretch that over the course

of like following a unit throughout the whole course of it. If you could find like I don't know like the follow the Pennsylvania or something like that where you could actually have something like a John Adam series or Band of Brothers where you get all like the lead up and shit.

So you actually get to like, I feel bad that our representation, our main representation of this is the goddamn Ben Affleck movie. It's got to be digestible for the general public though. It does. But that we can do better. You get you so much of all of it, the important shit gets lost. It's like, oh my God. Whereas like they put Ben Affleck and fucking Josh Harton.

as two of the guys of the planes shooting down Japanese airplanes. Well, they get the eyes. They get the attention. Yeah, but you couldn't name them after the real guys that did that then, or kind of base them on... No, I don't know where that... I'm just saying it's not the... I don't like that being the main representation.

It's not a good portray. Yeah, it's not. This is, though, listen to this. This is where you're getting the real goods. Far more information. Plus, you can't see us yet, so it's not... something you're being distracted by our good looks. That's true.

All right. You got anything else on this? No, I think Pearl Harbor is covered. Thank you to veterans out there. This was a pretty big one. I don't think there's probably too many people that are still alive that would hear this. Yeah, if anyone listen to this knows anybody, man, talk to that person. Get some, see if they'll talk to you about it, just so maybe you can pass those stories along and kind of lives out.

Take that opportunity that I didn't get, figure out a way to help these stories live on, because those are really important parts in history that, unfortunately, one day may be forgotten. All right, guys, thanks again for joining us. Later. Peace. All right, ladies and gentlemen, thanks for joining us for another episode. If you like what you heard, hit that subscribe and like button. Follow us.

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