History That Doesn't Suck - 196: An Epilogue to Pearl Harbor with Steve Twomey

Episode Date: January 5, 2026

With the December 1941 surprise attack on the US naval base Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, our story has officially come to the United States’ entry into the Second World War. Professor Jackson told that story in episode 194, and in 193 we covered the long buildup to the war with Japan; yet, the attack on Pearl Harbor is one of those moments of history where the depths of inquiry and knowledge to be gained is almost endless. There is still more to learn.  To that end, Prof. Greg Jackson welcomes Professor Lindsey Cormack, an associate professor of political science at Stevens Institute of Technology, and Steve Twomey, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author of Countdown to Pearl Harbor: The Twelve Days to the Attack.  Also, Prof. Jackson officially announces his new book, Been There Done That: How Our History Shows What We Can Overcome. In the book, Prof. Jackson proves that while today’s political climate may be dark, these aren’t as unprecedented times as we may think. Now available for pre-order. Or get a complimentary signed advance copy during the ultimate book launch party May 18–22, 2026 aboard a Celebrity Cruise to Key West and The Bahamas with Prof. Jackson and other fellow history travelers! Connect with us on HTDSpodcast.com and go deep into episode bibliographies and book recommendations join discussions in our Facebook community get news and discounts from The HTDS Gazette  come see a live show get onboard the VIP Caribbean Cruise get HTDS merch or become an HTDS premium member for bonus episodes and other perks. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Groceries that over-deliver. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Hello, my friends. It's Professor Greg Jackson. Now you can see the live tour by land and by sea because we're planning a four-night VIP cruise aboard the beautiful celebrity reflection. From May 18th to the 22nd, we'll sail from Fort Lauderdale to Key West and the Bahamas. While on board, I'll not only give a special private performance of my live show, The Unlikely Union. We'll also have a night of fun history trivia, a poolside party, nightly group dining together, excursions, and the ultimate book club meeting. Because, if you don't know, I've been working on a book for the past two years, and I can't think of a better way to celebrate its publication this spring than with my family, friends, and the best history fans.

So go to htbspodcast.com and click on live shows for more information or click the link in the show notes. Hope to see you on the road or at sea. Hello, my friends, and welcome to an epilogue episode of History That Doesn't Suck. I'm your professor, Greg Jackson. With the surprise attack on December 7, 1941, at the U.S. Naval Base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, our story has officially come to the United States entry into the Second World War.

I told you that story in episode 194, and in 193, we covered the long buildup to the war with Japan. And yet, the attack on Pearl Harbor is one of those moments of history, where the depth of inquiry and knowledge to be gained is almost endless. There's still more to learn. And so, today, before we head on to Midway and Island Hop through the Pacific Theater, I want to provide you with an outpouring of additional insights into the consequences of Pearl Harbor. Today, you'll hear a conversation between my colleague, Professor Lindsay Cormack, and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and best-selling author, Steve Tooney.

Steve's book, Countdown to Pearl Harbor, The Twelve Days to the Attack, injects suspense into the familiar history by painstakingly reconstructing the days before the first torpedo drops. It begins on November 27, 1941, when the Admiral, in charge of the fleet at Pearl Harbor, received a message that began, this dispatch is to be considered a war warning, and then proceeded to do essentially nothing about it. But before we jump into that fascinating interview, you. I'm excited to share a personal milestone with you. As of today, my first book is now available for pre-sale. It's called Been There, Done That, How Our History Shows What We Can Overcome. I'm announcing this not purely as a pitch for book sales, though I'd be honored if you'd order a copy.

No, I'm announcing this because it's a continuation of what I tried to do with this podcast, which is to write a legit, rigorously researched, hard-hitting history of these American states, told through entertaining stories because learning history is an important lifelong pursuit for all of us. I learn something new every day, trust me.

And though I spend most of my days living in the past, I'm still very much aware of the history that is happening today. I'm certainly aware of the widely held perception that there's a deepening division between us as Americans, that some even question if the American experiment can endure. My response is that,

while social media algorithms and political commentary are often designed, to stoke fear and outrage. And while today's technology and mass communication have many novel aspects, our times aren't as unprecedented as we may think. And in this book, I not only make that argument, but further contend that we can, just like our predecessors, overcome these challenges. I do this in a way that longtime listeners of this podcast will find familiar. In my book, Been There Done That, I take us on a chronological journey. From the very start of the Republic in 1789 through the end of the 19th century, while telling eight stories,

tales that engage such topics as political violence, fake news, and contested elections. I hope you'll find it a candid and earnest history, yet a hopeful one, as we consider how principles that served us in the past can continue to serve us in the future, as we continue to make our nation into a still more perfect union. I've been working on this book for more than two years, writing it in-between writing podcast episodes and teaching. And now, I want to celebrate with a worthy book tour. So come out and celebrate with me. Live tour stops and appearances will be posted on our website, htdspodcast.com, along with a link to pre-order the book. And if you really want to celebrate with me, come check out the Caribbean cruise plan for May 18th through the 22nd, 2026. I'd love to

have you aboard for all the VIP events, including a performance of my live show and the ultimate book launch party. There are only a limited number of cabins available, so don't miss the boat. Find more info at htdspodcast.com or click the link in the episode notes. Okay, thanks for listening, and now on to what this episode is really about, a deeper analysis of the attack on Pearl Harbor. I wasn't able to participate in this interview because, as I mentioned, I've been a little busy writing episodes and a book. But I'm grateful to my colleague, Professor Cormack, whom you've met in past episodes, who was able to conduct this truly exceptional interview. Enjoy.

Thank you for joining us today. We have Steve to me with me. Steve, you have won a Pulitzer Prize for your excellent journalism, specifically for your 1987 feature about life aboard an aircraft carrier. Can you tell me, have you always been interested in the Navy? I guess. I mean, there's no particular naval connection to my family. I didn't serve. My father was in the Army Air Corps. So, No, there's been no particular fascination or personal reason that I would be so enamored of the Navy. For what it's worth, I'm working on a second book now that's all about the Army. So maybe I'm just doing them in sequence. Okay, you're going to hop from armed service to armed service perhaps. Yeah, if I live that long. So when we're thinking about the book that you've written, the book Countdown to Pearl Harbor, the 12 Days to the Attack.

What was it about Pearl Harbor that appealed to you or your sense of story, something that had to be told? Well, you're right. Pearl Harbor does not lack for books. It's one of the most written about events in American history. I think it may be the most investigated events in American history. The only thing that kind of rivals it is the Kennedy assassination. There were nine official government investigations of what happened at Pearl Harbor. So it's been thoroughly examined. And so you might. wonder why write another book about it. But I wanted to write a different kind of book. I wanted to write a thriller, a suspense story. You know, as readers today, we know what's going to happen on December 7th, 1941. The people involved did not. That date wasn't circled on their calendars like, well, war begins today on December 7th. For them, that Sunday was going to be just another day. They knew the situation in the world, and in particular the Pacific, was very tense. But they had had no feeling that the seventh was going to be any different than the sixth. And so I wanted to

sort of get inside their heads and track how they were responding to events in real time. Because I'm a journalist, we have a kind of story called a TikTok. You may be familiar with it. A TikTok is a suspenseful chronological account of something that happened. In the background, the clock is ticking. And I wrote many of those in my long career in daily journalism. And it seemed to me that Pearl Harbor could benefit by having a TikTok. And the time frame was obvious. The first day of the TikTok would be November 27th, 1941. And why that day? Well, that's the day Washington informed all of the naval commands in the Pacific that war was imminent. When I read that, I was stunned. I had never heard that 10 or 12 days in advance of the attack, everyone thought an attack might happen. And the closing date, would obviously be December 7th. So those 12 days seemed to me to bookend a really good story of people coping with something that they did not understand yet. They were only getting fragmentary clues. How are they responding to this? It's a very human story. It's a drama

of people forced to make decisions in the absence of complete facts. That's why I always thought this approach would work. So when you think about this in terms of like going for that TikTok approach, that immediacy, when you were doing that research, was it something where you were looking at the journals of everyone every day? Or how did you go piece back together to try to get in everyone's mind as it's happening 12 days out? That's where the numerous government investigations come in handy. As I said, there were nine. I have all of them in about 50 different volumes. And they were all done as Q&As with the participants. And so you really have this. incredible resource of firsthand accounts of what they were thinking, why they were thinking that, what

they were doing. So that was the foundation of the book. Now, I also ventured into doing research with the papers of various key individuals, but it really was those investigations that were the backbone of the book. That's how I could get inside their heads. Okay, and so when we're talking about those domestications, do those take the form of sort of like interrogatories or something that looks like a deposition where people are being asked questions, they have to answer with whatever it is that they recall at that time? Yeah, think of a congressional hearing where people are sitting at a table and being asked questions. In fact, the most thorough investigation of the attack was a congressional investigation that occurred. I think they began just as the war was ending,

and it comprised volume after volume of testimony. But it was all done in a Q&A format. People weren't submitting deposition. It wasn't a deposition. They may have been submitting formal statements, but then they would be asked questions too. Okay. So I want to talk a little bit about one of the main characters that you profile in the book, which is the man who's in charge of the Pacific Fleet, Admiral Husband Kimmel. It seems like you get to know Kimmel quite well from these post-disaster testimonies. So in your knowing of him, can you tell us what kind of leader do you think he was. He was once described as someone who had the air of his own statue. He was sort of your mind's eye image of the naval admiral. He looked the part. He was confident. He was brusk.

Wasn't a person who entertained fools too often. He was a micromanager. He had to have his fingers in everything. He wanted to know what you were doing. He wanted to know why you were doing it. He was a man of the offense, not defense. You might recall that one of the generals in the civil war on the union side was General McClellan. And he was in charge of the Army of the Potomac. And Abraham Lincoln once said of him that he had a terminal case of the slows, meaning that he never did anything. He never advanced. He just sat there with his army. He didn't do anything. Kimmo was the opposite. Kimmo wanted to go fight somebody. He wanted to. He wanted to. to go hit somebody. And his whole outlook was geared to getting the Pacific Fleet in shape for going after the Japanese, which he and everyone in the Navy assumed would happen at some point. So in a way, he's your ideal manager. If you're the president, you want a guy who's not afraid to go onto the offensive. You want a guy who's going to take the fight to the enemy. And that was Kimmel's M.O. more than anything else. That's what he wanted to do, and he was getting ready to do it.

So Kimmel arrives at Pearl Harbor in a moment of rising global tension. Can you talk a little bit about what his trajectory was prior to this post? Yes, he had held just about every post you can have in the Navy. He'd been in the Navy for four decades. He had commanded every kind of ship, with one big exception that I'll mention. Everyone assumed that at some point in his career, he was going to be either the chief of naval operations, which is the top post in the Navy, or certainly in command of a major fleet. And that had happened when he was elevated to the job of commander of the United States fleet. And he was based in Hawaii, which is where the Pacific Fleet had moved to from California. As a warning to the Japanese, Franklin Roosevelt had ordered the fleet to move closer to Japan so that,

that the Japanese would get a message. And it's from there that Kimmel hoped that if war came, he would be able to strike first, hit them first, or at least hit them hard. So I want to think about him now in comparison to someone else, sort of a counterpart, Admiral Harold or Betty Stark. What would you say were their sorts of differences in leadership styles and sort of understanding that they have different pressures because of the positions that they have? Stark and Kimmel were good friends. They had known each other for decades. Stark was almost the opposite in personality. Stark, I was about to call him Betty. You may wonder why people called him Betty. It's because he had an ancestor in the Revolutionary War who was killed. And someone yelled, well, that makes Betty Stark a widow because the guy was no longer with us. And so for some reason, that became Betty's nickname or Stark's nickname. name, but he was pleasant. He signed every note or letter or memo. He urged people to stay cheerful. If he didn't say cheerful, people would think that something was wrong with him because that's what

he exuded was positivity. He and Kimmel, as I said, were good friends. But Stark was someone whose operative philosophy was, you let your subordinates do their job. You don't micromanage them. again, the opposite of Kimmel, you give them a general direction, a general instruction, and let them figure out how to do it. And that would prove literally fatal in the 12 days that we're talking about. He believed that if you rose to a position of high rank in the Navy, there was a reason for it. And the reason was that you were smart, that you were good, that you knew what to do and the right thing to do in a situation. So his kind of hands-off approach would be a major factor in what was about to happen.

And that's actually a great transition because there's something in your book that comes through, which is someone who hasn't really taken much time with it might say like, well, they're not really communicating that well. Army and Navy are sort of just trusting that the other one is doing what they should do. But in the way that I took your book to give the impression is that both sides really trust each other, D.C., trust the Pacific Fleet, Pacific trust that D.C. is looking out for it. would you say that some of the mishaps are not so much that it's not communication, but it's over like too much trust that's given to each other?

Absolutely. I think another way to look at it is that people assumed too much. They assumed that the guy at the other end was doing the right thing and therefore didn't require a phone call or a cable or a telegram to say, what are you doing? They trusted each other to do the right thing at the right time. and particularly with Stark, when the war warning was sent, and just as an aside, the war warning is one of the most remarkable documents in the history of the United States Navy because it was so stark, no pun intended. It was so abrupt in what it said. I think there were, if I recall,

nine words in the first sentence, and it was, this is to be considered a war warning. And if you're familiar at all with Pearl Harbor, you kind of scratch your head and go, what? They were told that a war was coming. I thought this was a surprise attack. But in that war warning, there was an explicit order given to everyone in the Pacific, and it was execute an appropriate defensive deployment. That wasn't a suggestion. It was a command from Stark to Kimmel and every other fleet commander in the Navy, and Kimmel more or less disobeyed the order. He would never have said he was disobeying it, and others wouldn't call it that. But he didn't do what it just told him to do. And Stark never followed up to ask, are you doing what I suggested you do? Not suggested

what I ordered you to do. You would think in a situation of rising tension, Washington would want to know what is going on out there in the islands. Are they doing what we want them to do? And Stark never did that. In the entire time of these 12 days, he never asked Kimmel to explain what he was doing in response to the various messages and instructions coming from Washington. So, first of all, war warning is not like a term of art that had been used prior. Is that correct? That is correct.

No one had ever seen that before. Kimmel testified, this was a phrase, what does that mean? What are you telling me? And the message was badly written because there were some other components that would cause Kimmel to think it didn't apply to him. It did.

Stark had written it badly. but the order was nonetheless clear, no matter how Kimmel was reading the message. And by the order, you mean assumes some sort of state of readiness or like make sure that you're in a defensive posture, or what sort of thing are you saying that ought to have been taken from it that wasn't? If I can sum it up in two words, it's protect yourself. We think war is coming. You need to protect yourself. Now, what would Kimmel have done to protect himself?

Well, the most obvious thing in which many of the investigations zeroed in on was you search. You search to see if someone is coming for you. And how do you search? Well, you could send out ships, but they're slow. The most obvious way to search is with planes. And there were certain kinds of Navy planes that were made just for this purpose. And Kimmel could have sent them out and should have sent them out to look. to see if someone is approaching whom we mainly have to worry about. Kimmel didn't do that, and there are reasons he didn't. As I said, he was a man of the offense, and he wanted to use his search planes to fly out in front of his fleet, way out in the Pacific, to be searching for the Japanese as he, Kimmel is approaching them. He wants to find out what they're doing as he comes closer. He wanted the planes for that purpose, not to be searching to protect the fleet anchored in Pearl Harbor. And Kimmel often argued he didn't have enough planes to do both. He couldn't protect his fleet when it was sailing out in the Pacific, and he couldn't search for the Japanese

to see if they were coming. It had to be one or the other. And I don't think that's true. I think he had enough planes to do both, but he preferred not to. So if you put yourself sort of in a more understanding or accepting headspace, could the argument be made that he was like, I believe that Japan might be preparing for war, but it's not necessarily going to be in Hawaii. There's targets in Southeast Asia. It could have been British interests or are there other sorts of like justifications that one could internally make that you say, ah, that makes sense or it's reasonable. Absolutely. Everyone knew that the Japanese were on the march and that something was going to happen. Kimmel thought for many reasons that he was not a target. He was kind of

on the periphery. Why would he think that? Several reasons. One is he's just so damn far away from Japan. And to get to him, the Japanese would have to sail thousands of miles risking detection and be far from home. They would also have to do something that's very technical, but was key. And that's, you have to refuel your ships in the open water. It's very hard to do. A tanker pulls up next to your ship and you string lines between them and pump fuel from one ship to another. And their ships did not have enough fuel to sail without being refueled at some point. And Kimmel knew that. He knew that because the U.S. fleet would have to do the same thing going the other direction.

But Kimmel also had, I think, a lot of the assumptions that most American naval officers had. And that was, well, the Japanese are kind of a lesser naval force. They're not a mechanical people. Looking back today and reading some of the things that was said about them is really kind of astonishing at the presumptive inferiority of the Japanese as military tacticians. They couldn't fly planes very well because their eyesight was different. They had to copy Western technology for their planes. And they're really not sailors like we are. So yes, there was a lot of racial. prejudice, I think, toward the Japanese. And even with that, for years, the Navy had speculated that if war was to come, Pearl Harbor would be a target. And it makes sense because that's where the fleet was. And earlier in 1941, in fact, in one of the most remarkable documents of this whole story, a general and an admiral speculated that Japan could attack Hawaii by surprise at the start of a war, using aircraft carriers that would sail all the way to Hawaii and catch the

fleet unaware. This was in March of 1941. In other words, what, eight months prior to the actual event. And everyone sort of acknowledged, yeah, well, that's an interesting thought. And then they just dismissed it. They didn't think it could happen. They thought it would be crazy. This will sound kind of strange, but the moment the first bomb or torpedo exploded in Pearl Harbor was the beginning of a tragedy for Japan because they were going to lose the war. And ironically, it was the commander of the attack force who knew that better than anyone else.

He opposed this venture because he didn't think Japan could beat the United States. Yeah, you know what? I'm actually glad you got there because the point that you brought up about this prejudice is sort of interesting because in the book, there's sort of two competing themes. It's both that like the Japanese aren't going to be good pilots,

They don't have mechanical brains. They're not going to have the capacity to do this. But there's also this sense of, like, the Japanese are too smart to start a war like this because they know that they'll get crushed. So those sorts of tensions seem like something that people would have to sort of weigh individually. And it sounds like Kimmel came down on the side of like the Japanese just wouldn't be capable, not the overestimation that they're like too smart to do this. Does that seem fair? That's a really good analysis. And I agree with it. There are facts in conflict here, and I think the missing ingredient is that we simply did not

understand the Japanese mind very well. We didn't understand the importance of honor in the face of a futile gesture. Yes, it's futile for us to do this, but honor demands that we do it. We expected them to always be rational the way we would be rational, and when we didn't really comprehend that they had another level of another impetus that was driving them to do what they did. And it kind of is outside our realm of understanding as to why they would have done that. But I think a lot of it has to do with a sense of, we're just going to throw a caution to the wind and hope for the best. It was a kind of a collective act of insanity. Well, and when we think about who's on the U.S. side there, there seems to be a variety of experiences in terms of who has fluency with the language, experience in the

culture, or sort of an appreciation for Japanese history. Would you say that we under-indexed on people who had that expertise, or was it just sort of like the way of the world we weren't as connected back then? There were mid-level people who were pretty savvy about the Japanese because they had lived there. And certainly the ambassador in Japan during this time, he knew the Japanese, and he knew what they were. He had an appreciation for their thought process that Washington didn't. The level of familiarity with Japanese culture and language at the highest levels of the American government was not high. Kimmel had been there, but not for long. He had paid a visit with the great white fleet of Teddy Roosevelt back at the turn of the century, but he certainly

had no knowledge of the Japanese. Stark didn't. I would say Franklin Roosevelt didn't. The mid-level intelligence officers did, and they were the ones most worried about what seemed to be unfolding in those last days of November and first days of December. If success depends on knowing your enemy, I don't think we knew our enemy. Who, what a line. He's right, of course, and that fundamental misunderstanding certainly explains why U.S. officials couldn't seem to put all the clues together in time. Steve and Lindsay will list some off right after this break. I want to go back to talk about some of these indications that in hindsight we can see show that there's an indication that war or aggression is coming.

So beyond the November 27th warning, what are some actions taken by the Japanese that looking back we can say, that's a signal that we missed as it was happening? That's a really good question. They kept coming almost on a daily basis. And I'll see if I can give them a couple of them in chronological order. We had broken the Japanese diplomatic code, not their military codes. We hadn't broken the codes of the Japanese, the Imperial Navy or the Army. But we're reading their highest level diplomatic codes. And on November 29th, we read one that said, things are automatically going to happen. This was Tokyo talking to its diplomats in Washington. Now, that's both scary and vague. Well, what things and where? Where are those things going to happen and what are they? But it's clearly an ominous message.

A couple days after that, we detected something by listening to their radio traffic. We couldn't understand what their ships were saying to each other, ship A talking to ship B. we could read who was sending a message and who was receiving a message, but not what the message was. Every six months, the Japanese changed those codes. A ship had a code on Wednesday and then a different one on Thursday. On December 1st, every ship in the Japanese fleet changed its code one month after they had previously changed it. They had never done that. They usually changed their codes every six months. That wasn't happening. They were clearly trying to confuse the listeners in Pearl Harbor by changing the message traffic codes again. The next day, the 2nd of December, Kimmel's intelligence officer tells him, I don't know where four of their aircraft carriers are. The Japanese had 10 aircraft carriers, and we can get to that in a minute. They had more than anyone else. And Kimmel's intelligence officer said to him, I know where this one is and I know where this one is. I don't know where they are. But four of them,

I don't know where they are. I think they're tied up in port. And when they're in port, they don't need to be on the radio. But he said, that said, that's only what I think. I don't know where they are. And Kimmel, at that point, as a joke, he later said to this man, you mean they could be coming around Diamond Head. Now, Diamond Head, as many know, is probably the most prominent landmark in all of the island of Hawahu. So he was speculating that they may be coming after him. The next day, December 3rd, everyone got a notice that the Japanese embassy and then the consulate in Hawahu were burning all of their papers. They were also destroying their code machines. Almost everyone in Washington read that as, uh-oh, they are going to war. Now, not necessarily with us,

but they knew that if war began, we would probably invade their embassies and their consulates and seize all their papers and all their code machines. So destroy them in advance. Kimball interpreted that entirely differently. He interpreted that as, oh, they think we're going to go to war with them. We're going to attack them. So they are. in anticipation of our aggression, they are going to get rid of their papers. That's, of course, the most benevolent interpretation you could put on what he was seeing. So by December 3rd, we had had day after day a mounting list of unusual activity. And no one in the Pacific thought war was not coming. If you read the newspapers in the U.S. on December 5th, they're predicting war

any minute. The surprise was not that there was war. The surprise was where the war started. And Kimball had had all kinds of indications that it was coming almost any minute, but he had no indication that they were actually specifically coming for him. So when we talk about this, we have the sort of like military indications in the sense that they've lost the aircraft carriers and they think they're just going to be bobbing in port. They know that the radio call signs are changed early. But it seems like there's also some diplomatic things that are sort of happening at the 11th hour between Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Nomura Kishiburo. Can you tell us a little bit about what those signals were meaning at the time? Yeah, they had been negotiating for weeks

and why were they negotiating? What were they negotiating? Well, the United States earlier in the year had cut off the supply of oil to Japan. Japan has almost no natural resources of its own that would be valued by a military. It has to import all of its oil, and it was getting most of its oil from the United States. Roosevelt had cut off the supply of oil in reaction to Japan's taking over of French Indo-China. Japan was steadily on the march invading places, had been at war with China for years, and Roosevelt decided to draw a line in the sand by cutting off their oil. And so the negotiations were over the conditions under which oil deliveries would resume. And the negotiations weren't going very well because the position of the United States was simple. We will give

back your oil if you just stop invading people. If you need resources, there's a way to get them short of using violence. And of course, all of the concessions would have to be made on the Japanese side, not the U.S. side. There was nothing the U.S. could concede what it would do. other than give back the oil. So these negotiations were not going well. The U.S. had given Japan a list of 10 points that it wanted Japan to agree to. It became clear that Japan, because we were reading their codes, was not going to agree to those 10 points. And on the evening of December 6th, it became obvious that something was going to happen because suddenly instructions were coming from Tokyo to the embassy in Washington, that a message was to be delivered at a certain time to Cordell

Hull, the Secretary of State, the next day. And it basically was saying, we cannot agree to these 10 points. It didn't declare war. It didn't even indicate military action was coming anywhere. It simply said, we're done talking about these 10 points. And that message, of course, got delayed because of translation difficulties and wasn't delivered. until after the attack had already begun. And when you're talking about how these sorts of things are known, you're speaking about like the purple cipher and how the like intelligence from it is called magic. Or is this a diplomatic cable that just like gets hung up in the sense that it doesn't get through because the tech is slow at the time?

No, it's purple and magic were the in-house names for reading the machines and the results obtained by reading. their diplomatic codes. And when a code was intercepted, you had to put it through the various deciphering machines. There was a physical process that takes a while. In the case of the famous last minute warning, there seemed to have been just a problem on the Japanese end getting that message translated into English to present to Cordell Hall. Things were not functioning well at the Japanese embassy that day. Okay. I want us to move a little bit to the attack now. When we think about what the Japanese did exceptionally well, they did a very good job of being undetected for a number of days as they're coming. A fantastic job. Yeah, exceptional.

You also alluded to the idea that trying to refuel on the open seas is difficult, something that it sounds like the U.S. Navy thought they wouldn't be capable of doing. Correct. They managed that. There also is this question of like, will torpedoes be functional here or is everything too shallow, and so it's not going to work. Can you speak about the innovations that they had on torpedoes that made them workable in shallow waters? That's a fascinating aspect of this that I think is frequently overlooked, and that's the whole issue of whether Pearl Harbor was susceptible to attack from air-launched, air-dropped torpedoes. And this was an issue not only for the United States and Japan, this was an issue with the British and the Italians and the Germans, too. When you

drop a torpedo from an airplane. This is a weapon no longer in use anywhere in the world. Nobody drops torpedo from airplanes anymore. But when you drop a torpedo from a plane into the water, it's sheer weight. It's like 2,000 pounds. Means that it plunges pretty deep before it levels off and its little motor kicks in and it begins its journey to the target. So you see, you need a certain amount of water in order to drop the torpedo. And in 1941, technology was evolving so that the depths to which a torpedo dropped was decreasing. And a message went to Kimmel in the summer of 41 saying, based on things we know from the Italian and British experience with torpedoes, you really can't assume that Pearl Harbor is safe no matter what it's depth because people are getting better at shallowing out torpedoes.

Now, Pearl Harbor's depth was only about 45 feet. That's not much. And so Kimmel concluded on his own, without any real factual basis for it, that he wasn't at risk because you couldn't drop a torpedo into the harbor. It was simply impale itself in the mud at the bottom of the harbor. And a torpedo is probably the greatest threat to a ship, more than shells fired from a gun. Because a torpedo puts a hole in the ship below the water line. and it immediately means you're going to start flooding. And so Kimmel decided he was not at risk from a torpedo, and it turned out that the first planes over Pearl Harbor were, in fact, Japanese torpedo planes, and their torpedoes did by far the most damage to the fleet. It seems like it's something where there was the option of putting torpedo nets out, but because we didn't think it was feasible that torpedoes would work,

they don't get deployed. Is that correct? That's correct. A net is like an underwater. or curtain. It floats on the surface and descends towards the bottom. And in theory, a torpedo is trapped or deflected by a net. And you put it around the outside of a battleship, you know, a few feet, a few yards from the side of the ship. And it theoretically stops the torpedo. The problem is when the ship wants to get underway, you have to remove the net so it can get out. And that was sort of like a cumbersome, time-consuming step that Kimball didn't want to take. He wanted his ships ready to go. And so there were no nets in Pearl Harbor on the 7th, even though a fact that

the attackers knew because the Japanese spy who was working in Huahu, Takeo Yoshikawa, had observed from just an observation, one of the oddities about Pearl Harbor, for anyone who's been there is you can see the whole harbor if you go up a hill or two. And the spy had radioed to Tokyo, there are no nets. He could tell. There are no nets around these ships, which is exactly what Tokyo wanted to hear. And it sounds like when he's doing that reconnaissance, he gets a few things wrong in terms of specific types of ships and numbers of them, but that doesn't much matter by the time the attack is underway. He just got a couple of numbers wrong. He misidentified a couple of ships, but he was pretty accurate in saying that there are no nets. And I believe

he also said there are no balloons floating over the fleet. You put up a large, derogable-like balloon in order to ensnare airplanes and make it difficult for them to fly, and he detected none of that. One of the things that people often forget about Pearl Harbor or no is that the Japanese had no way to know if the fleet was going to be in Pearl Harbor when they set sail from Japan. This was in an age before satellites. You couldn't look down on Pearl Harbor from 100 miles up and know that the fleet was there. So the Japanese simply sailed on the hope that a meaningful portion of the fleet would be in Pearl Harbor. And in one sense, they got lucky because eight of the nine battleships in the Pacific Fleet were there. They got unlucky because

neither of the two aircraft carriers was present. Those aircraft carriers were at sea. And as was evident on the day of the attack, the aircraft carrier was the weapon of the future. So not being there became extremely important for the American Navy's ability to recover from the attack. So when we're talking about attack that's pending, it's incoming, there is this question of radar. And it sounds like there's little radar tech, but some indication that something is happening. And then in your recollection of how Kimball talks about this, he's like, I wish I would have attended to this more, but I didn't. Can you speak to us about the limits of radar or the limits of how it was deployed at that time in Hawaii? Radar was still a major national secret. The army in Hawaii was technically in charge of protecting the fleet. It had mobile radar stations set up around the island where crews were really more or less practicing. They weren't there because there was perceived to be an obvious threat. Radar at the time was much more limited in its ability than it is now. You could tell that someone was out there. You really couldn't tell the speed. or even the altitude at which someone was flying. So Kimball kind of dismissed the whole idea of,

I don't want to say dismissed, he wasn't paying much attention because he considered that an army function. They're supposed to protect my ships while we're here. And the radar crews that were out there on December 7th hadn't been told to be looking for an actual attack. They were more or less running drills. And the most famous, of course,

was on what is today known as Opanah Point. It's on the north shore of Oahu. And there were two guys who had the historic misfortune of, or fortune, I don't know which, of using their radar that morning, doing their drills, and then picking up something. And by two guys, you mean two young privates, like very, yeah. Yes, indeed. Two young privates. One of whom said, eh, it's probably our planes coming in. And the other one, the younger of the two, I think one was 24.

and one was 22, said, no, we should phone this in. And they did. They eventually phoned it in and said, we've picked up something inbound. We don't know who it is. At the other end was a pilot who was in charge that morning of the operations center. He didn't know anything more about radar than the two privates. And he basically said, those are probably our planes coming in. So don't worry about it. And in fact, there were American planes on their way in that morning. morning. They were big bomber B-17s coming from San Francisco. Their misfortune was to arrive over a while at precisely the moment the Japanese did. And they had many harrowing experiences. But the last minute salvation that could have occurred if someone had paid attention to the radar warning

never unfolded because this was dismissed as nothing to worry about. And it sounds like it's sort of the start in a series of different people up the chain believing that these might be false reports or that these look like it's going to just be people that we know friendly planes that are coming through. Does that sound right? Right. If there's a hero in this story, it is a man named William Outerbridge, who was a lieutenant in the Navy and had just taken command for the first time in his entire career of a ship. The ship was the USS Ward, which was a destroyer. And his mission, that Sunday morning, was to patrol the sea just off the entrance to Pearl Harbor, just as a precaution in case submarines tried to sneak past him and into

the harbor. And even though Arterbridge had never commanded anything, that morning he did everything right. And his crew picked up visually what seemed to be a small submarine-like ship approaching the harbor. He didn't hesitate. He ordered the ship to go after it. It's often been said that the first shots of the Second World War were fired by the U.S. Navy because he fired on this ship, which was in fact the small Japanese mini submarine trying to get into Pearl Harbor. He immediately radioed, I have fired upon a submarine in the entrance to the harbor. This message started up the chain of command. Nobody was reacting particularly energetically. If anyone had, there would have been no time to get the fleet out of the harbor, which,

which is the safest solution because it's hard to hit a moving ship on the open sea. But it would have enabled all the ships in the harbor to go to general quarters or battle stations and everyone manned their anti-aircraft guns and at least be able to shoot at what was soon coming at them. But no such message ever reached any ship. And Outerbridge's message was wasted. Well, and this is actually a great way to get us back to talking about. Kimmel because in the book you write that when the Outer Bridge message is relayed to Kimmel, he doesn't issue any orders. And he says, I was not at all certain that this was a real attack. In the minutes after he has that thought, it becomes clear that this is a very real attack. And as you said earlier, this offensive posture does sort of serve the Americans well in the sense that there's a lot of training that they've been doing. Can you speak to us about the training that's happening under Husband Kimmel? He was a fanatic for getting his ships in shape. He wanted to make sure everyone knew where to be, what they were to do, which orders to obey in what order. He practiced and practiced and practiced. And the condition of the fleet, the readiness condition of the fleet, had gone up dramatically. Remember, he wanted to go after the Japanese, so he wanted to have his ships ready to do that. In the event, of course, their first exposure to more was on the receiving end, on the defensive end. But they responded

remarkably, considering it was 7.50 on a Sunday morning, and many of the crew members on these ships were asleep. Many of them had been out the previous night in the bars of Honolulu. And they responded with remarkable quickness and kind of heroic glory, because these were kids in many cases, but they knew what to do. Heroes is the right word. Those brave kids stood their ground and tried to do what they could. Lindsay's conversation with Steve continues after a quick break as they discuss some poignant moments during the attack and the aftermath. I've got to say that reading this, your minute by minute writing on the attack itself, it is spellbinding. I thought it really captured the magnitude of the moment.

Thank you. And something, an image that stuck with me is you have this part where you're talking about Admiral William S. Pye sitting with soot on his face in a daze and he has an oily life jacket on. And just that prior day, he had said something to others about how Japan would never attack the U.S. How did you decide to include that or what was the most difficult part in this? citing which eyewitnesses accounts to include, to make your point. You know, there really was no restriction on who to include. If there's an anecdote, a telling moment, and that is one, I'm going to include it. It's such a good, revealing piece of information, and Admiral Pye had just arrived, covered

with soot and oil from his battleship, California, which had been hit numerous times. I think almost simultaneous is the fact that Kimmel is hit by a bullet. a machine gun, we assume a machine gun bullet, comes through the window of the Pacific Fleet headquarters. By that point, it had lost much of its velocity. It was a spent bullet, and it hits him in the chest. That's almost poetic beyond belief that the man who thought this wouldn't happen ends up being hit by a bullet fired in the midst of it and is reported to have said it would have been better if it had killed me. he knew at that moment, I think, that his career was over. He was presiding over the worst days before or since in the history of the U.S. Navy. And in the Navy, the tradition is those who are in charge are responsible. And he knew his career was going to end. And I think that's why there's some dispute as to whether he actually said it. But to wish that it killed him certainly indicates he had an awareness that this was all going to fall on his shoulders. So let's start to talk about blame. At the end of this, like you said, there's multiple investigations to try to figure out what went wrong, what didn't happen. And you

started by saying that Stark and Kimmel were friends. Does it seem like their friendship persists as this investigation is happening and once blame gets meted out? No, they had a falling out because Kimmel believed that Stark had failed to keep him apprised of what they were learning through the magic and purple intercepts. He felt that Stark had left him out there without sufficient information. There was nothing in the diplomatic intercepts that ever said, we're headed to Pearl Harbor, and the date is December 7th. So Kimball knew that he wasn't in the loop of magic.

Only, I think it was 12 people, were receiving the results of magic. Kimmel wasn't one of them, but he knew they were trying back there to break diplomatic codes. He also knew from messages he was getting that referenced something called Purple. He didn't know what purple was, but he assumed that it had to do with cryptological efforts to break into what the Japanese were reading. But he blamed Stark for what had happened. And I don't think they ever spoke again. Kimmel wrote a really nasty, I will say, a really emotional letter to Stark basically saying you failed me. He never sent it. He was talked out of it, as I think it was one of his sons had

indicated, I may be wrong on that, that you shouldn't send this. It's just too brutal. And he probably was also bothered by the fact that Stark really didn't suffer any punishment publicly in the way that Kimmel and the Army commander did. Stark was the chief of naval operations, and he was moved out within a few months, but not fired. He went to become the chief U.S. naval representative in London for the rest of the war,

or at least for much of the rest of the war. So he wasn't publicly fingered as responsible for what had happened, even though there are things he did, or rather more things he didn't do, that he should have done. He should have taken a more accurate, active role in figuring out or understanding what Kimmel was doing out in Hawaii to protect

himself. So there's been a decades-long campaign to clear husband Kimmel's reputation. His sons and then his grandsons and others have long argued he was made into the fall guy for the entire attack. I think a better way to look at it is that it's not that Kimmel and Stark shouldn't be blamed. I think they should be. It's that other people, weren't blamed, who should have been. I think the problem on the Washington end, no one suffered a tad end for the failure of December 7th. And as I mentioned, I think Stark probably deserved more blame than he got. But I don't think there's any question that Kimmel and George should bear responsibility for what happened because they had a tremendous amount of information that they

didn't act on. And as someone said, you know, you're an outpost out there in Hawaii. At an outpost, you're supposed to be vigilant. You're protecting us back here. That's your job. That's why you're there. And Kimmel didn't do that. So it seems like when we think about blame, we're willing to assign individual blame for leadership failures. What about systemic failures that led to changes in the way that the operations communicated with each other or that things were done in the future? What sort of changes came from that? That's a really good question. Clearly, Pearl Harbor has, I think, lessons that go way beyond warfare. And I'll offer a couple lessons. One of Kimmel's flaws during this was his refusal to change his plans in the face of contrary information. And I think that's

something we're all guilty of. We have a plan. We want to do X. And then information comes in that says, doing X would be a bad idea. But we've worked for months. on this plan. We can't change it. Kimmel resolutely stuck to his ambition to go on a great offensive as soon as the war broke out. And even as day after day information came in that said, no, no, you need to be on the defensive. He didn't change. I mean, the fact that he could look at the warning about torpedoes and say, it doesn't apply to me is, I think, exhibit A of a refusal to say, hmm, I may have to do something that I wish I didn't have to do, but information is telling me I need to do. A second thing I think we can all benefit from is the dangers of

assumption. Stark over and over assumed Kimmel was doing the right thing. He never asked, he never investigated. I think you could have asked in a way that didn't seem like you were micromanaging. To me, the most tragic episode in the entire sequence of days, occurred on the night of December 7th when Stark finally gets on the phone with one of Kimmel's deputies. You know, the Japanese had left. Kimmel was coping with the horrors out in the harbor.

And Stark's first question, he asked him, were the planes out? And the admiral he was talking to at first didn't answer the question. And Stark wouldn't let it go. Can you tell me, did our planes go out and find them? And finally this admiral says, no, they weren't out.

And there was the revelation on Stark's point that he had assumed they were, but he'd never asked. Not until then. So, you know, we could all do well by examining our assumptions. And I think Pearl Harbor is a great example of what happens when you make too many assumptions. And also when you are unable kind of emotionally to change your plans. Steve, I want to thank you for your time. And I have one final question to put to you. Which is, is do you think that there is any sort of detail or success about the U.S. posture in Pearl Harbor that you think should be more emphasized or more widely remembered by people? We tend to focus on the failures, but are there bright spots from how we did this? Not many. I would cite someone I've already mentioned. I think it took tremendous presence and courage for this lowly lieutenant on a destroyer on his first day in command to do everything right. He had been trained. and told, this is what you're going to do, and he did it. And I found that really admirable. Is that a message for us beyond him? I think it's, you know, doing your job is commendable. But December 7th was overall a terrible day for the United States and, as I said, for Japan. I don't know that there

were a whole lot of bright spots. The performances of the crew, the crews in the harbor on that morning was commendable. I don't know that there are larger points that we can point to and say, boy, they did all that right on that day. All right. Thank you so much for your time today. This has been wonderful talking with you, hearing your perspective, understanding your expertise, and learning more about this history. Thank you. Well, my friends, that wraps up this epilogue episode. If you want more, I invite you to join our membership program, where right now you can listen to an extra story narrated by me about the nine, yes, nine official government inquiries into the events of Pearl Harbor. HTS will always be widely available, supported by ads.

However, the HTDS membership program offers ad-free episodes delivered early, plus extra stories and deep dives. You can start a free seven-day trial to access that content at htdspodcast.com. I'll see you back here in two weeks with stories of Japanese aggression in the spring of 1942. History That Doesn't Suck is created and hosted by me, Greg Jackson. Special thanks to episode co-host, Professor Lindsay Cormack, and author Steve Toomey. Produced by Dawson McCraugh, Associate Producer Ella Henrinson. Production by Airship. Sound design by Molly Bach.

Theme music composed by Greg Jackson. Arrangement and additional composition by Lindsay Graham of Ayrshire. For bibliography of all primary and secondary sources consulted in writing this up, visit hddspodcast.com