Short History Of... - Pearl Harbor, Part 3 of 3

Episode Date: May 1, 2022

As the smoke clears after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the blame game begins. President Roosevelt knows that military and intelligence heads must roll, but questions remain about who should be held to account. So what were the longer term consequences of the attack? How did life change for Japanese-Americans, and what fates awaited the Japanese servicemen on their return? And as the memory of Pearl Harbor fades, what lessons were learned?  This is the last episode in this special 3-part Short History of Pearl Harbor. Written by Jo Furniss. With thanks to Professor Phillips O’Brien, author of How The War Was Won; Dr Takuma Melber, author of Pearl Harbor; and Steve Twomey, author of Countdown to Pearl Harbor.  For ad-free listening, exclusive content and early access to new episodes, join Noiser+. Now available for Apple and Android users. Click the Noiser+ banner on Apple or go to noiser.com/subscriptions to get started with a 7-day free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's December the 7th, 1941. Around 1.30 in the afternoon, just after Sunday lunch. President Franklin D. Roosevelt is in his favorite chair in his private study. He's made this oval room on the second floor of the White House residence his own. It has a nautical theme. Mahogany shelves display models of ships and the walls are lined with naval prints. He's keen to spend a quiet afternoon with his stamp collection. As a child, postage stamps introduced him to the countries of the world. As an adult, balancing a presidency, a family, and the lasting effects of polio, they help him to relax. But before he can open his stamp books, the phone rings.

It's U.S. Navy Secretary Frank Knox. He tells the president that the U.S. fleet is under attack by the Japanese. But Roosevelt is not surprised. This news has been due for a long time. What is unexpected is the location. Knox reads the dispatch down the line. Air raid. Pearl Harbor.

This is not a drill. Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt thought it would be the Philippines. Within minutes the President's private study fills with people, including his wife, Eleanor. The place is alive with noise and tension, while decisions are made about the immediate response. As the staff are dispatched to carry out tasks, Eleanor slips off to rewrite her address for that evening's edition of her weekly radio broadcast, entitled Over Our Coffee Cups.

She is as resolute as ever, ready to be the first to address the nation. Roosevelt is left to consider how he will respond. In previous conflicts, the president's words were filtered by newsmen onto front pages that would reach people days later. But now, in 1941, 90% of American households own a radio set. For the past several weeks, Eleanor has been speaking directly to the women of the nation every Sunday evening in their own front rooms. Radio offers a powerful form of intimacy that she has made her own. FDR must do the same when he addresses Congress tomorrow. Those American households will tune in to him.

They will take their lead from him. Like it or not, this is his moment. Though he's the first president to employ a speechwriter, this address must be personal. He takes a sheet of paper and starts to make notes. He'll let the facts speak for themselves, but he needs to convey his horror too. December 7th, 1941, he writes. A date which will live in infamy.

The United States of America was simultaneously and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. It's important to emphasize that Japan landed the first blow, that his foreign policy is not to blame. He considers a framed map of the oceans on his wall, then writes, The distance of Hawaii from Japan makes it obvious that the attack was deliberately planned many days or even weeks ago. This detail makes the bile rise. Even while he sat at this very desk and wrote a letter to the Emperor of Japan, father to father, appealing for peace, the military brains in Tokyo were planning a sneak attack. But whatever damage they inflicted at Pearl Harbor, the Japanese will soon come to learn

that Roosevelt has been planning too. This year, he has spent upwards of $39 million every day to arm the US and the British forces. In October, the army received 615 new tanks and almost 1,000 personnel carriers. In November, he achieved his goal of increasing the army boots on the ground almost sixfold. A hundred American shipyards received orders to build over 300 new boats, including destroyers, submarines, and aircraft carriers. His pen lingers over the paper. The speech requires a call to action. So, though it pains him to do it, he asks that America's official involvement in the conflict be declared by Congress. Roosevelt calls his secretary to come in and type it up. And he then gets into his wheelchair and goes to war. One day in December 1941, after ignored warnings and missed messages, the news President Franklin

D. Roosevelt had been dreading reached him from Pearl Harbor. It plunged the United States into a war that came too soon and on two fronts. But how did the Americans react on the home front? Who took responsibility for failing to prepare for the attack? And what lessons were learned from that day in Hawaii that altered the trajectory of the Second World War? I'm Paul McGann, and this is the final episode in this special three-part short history of Pearl Harbor. It's November 2nd, 1920. Election day in the United States. More than two decades before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The Democratic presidential candidate is James M. Cox. His running mate, the candidate for vice president, is a young man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This is the first election since the Great War. The first election in which women are allowed to vote in all 48 states. It's also the first time that results will be broadcast by radio. Tonight, 100 or so households on the East Coast receive the results directly across the airwaves. They have the satisfaction of knowing the identity of the new president a whole evening

before it appears in the morning newspapers Cox, Roosevelt and the rest of the Democrats have campaigned hard across the country Asking Americans to get behind their bid to join the League of Nations They think an internationalist stance will appeal to voters in the aftermath of the Great War The Republicans have taken a different tack an internationalist stance will appeal to voters in the aftermath of the Great War. The Republicans have taken a different tack. Their slogan for this election is America First. They say independence in 1920 means the same as it did in 1776. And as the results come in via telegram, telephone and radio,

it's clear that the American people agree with them. The Democrats' internationalist approach has badly misfired. The Republicans win a landslide victory. The humiliation teaches the young Roosevelt a lesson he will never forget. Professor Phillips O'Brien is the author of several books on World War II, including How the War Was Won. He has a very important political experience early in his career, and it's going back to 1920. As a very young man, Roosevelt believes in internationalism in a way.

So the country votes overwhelmingly for the Republicans in 1920. They're not interested in the internationalist message and the League of Nations message. And at that point, I think Roosevelt takes that lesson almost too much to heart. And from that point on, he becomes actually a very cautious politician when it comes to foreign policy. and he becomes an actually very cautious politician when it comes to foreign policy. Over 20 years later, Franklin D. Roosevelt is president and Europe is at war again. But the lessons of the 1920 election still apply.

The people of the United States don't want to sacrifice American lives for peace in Europe. Nonetheless, by 1941, Roosevelt is spending millions of dollars to support the British and the Russians. He fears that the power-hungry Nazis might not stop at conquering Europe. Germany was terrifying. It looked at some point like Germany was able almost to take on the rest of Europe. So if you're looking at it from Roosevelt's point of view, what did Germany show from 1914 to 1918? Is it can knock Russia out of the war. And certainly it fights the French and the British to a standstill on the Western Front. So the German power is a real scary thing. He always assumes the United States can beat Japan.

Japan is not an existential threat to the United States. Japan is not an existential threat to the United States. On the other hand, if Germany does take over all of Europe, then actually does it become an equal of the United States? Something that the United States can't actually automatically triumph over in a war. And I think that's driving a lot. So yes, he does believe there is a moral difference between the two, but he also believes Nazi Germany is a much greater threat than any other power.

On December the 8th, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt goes to Congress. He takes the stage, as usual keeping his wheelchair out of sight. At the podium he receives a standing ovation, and then delivers the most famous speech of his life. Mr. Vice President, Mr. Speaker, members in infamy. The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. The United States was at peace with that nation and at the solicitation of Japan was still in conversation with its government and its emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific.

Though the isolationists had been growing in strength and numbers these last few years, after the attack, they give up without a fight. The mood of ordinary Americans has changed overnight. They've realized that the war won't allow them to stand on the sidelines, because now the conflict has come to them. The attack on Pearl Harbor is a shock and a tragedy. FDR doesn't welcome losing a significant portion of his fleet and over 2,000 men. But it does give him a way into the war without firing any shots,

except one incendiary speech designed to hammer home the point that America is not too big to be threatened by Japan. Pearl Harbor means that America enters not a European war or a Pacific war, but a global war, the Second World War. Dr. Takuma Melba, a Japanese-German academic, is the author of the book Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor is the starting point of the Second World War. Historians say also 1931 maybe is the starting point of the Second World War in the Asia-Pacific region, and 1939, the invasion of Poland is the starting point of the Second World War in the Asia-Pacific region and 1939 the invasion of Poland is the starting point of the Second World War in Europe.

Yes, but as a global war, Pearl Harbor is the starting point. The decision by Congress to enter the war will affect the entire nation. Not just the politicians and the military men, but the ordinary families of America too. And so on the evening of December 7th in Washington, Eleanor Roosevelt takes her seat at the microphone to address the housewives of the United States. First she paints a picture of the White House in war mode. Her husband, the President, in talks with the military.

She drops in that the Japanese ambassador was with the President earlier in the day, still talking, treacherously, about a possible peace. And then she addresses the mothers of America. Some of them will now have to make an almost unbearable sacrifice in the days ahead. They will send their sons to war. We know what we have to face, and we know that we are ready to face it. I should like to say just a word to the women in the country tonight. I have a boy at sea on a destroyer.

For all I know, he may be on his way to the Pacific. Two of my children are in coast cities on the Pacific. Many of you all over this country have boys in the services who will now be called upon to go into action. You have friends and families in what has suddenly become a danger zone. You cannot escape anxiety. You cannot escape a clutch of fear at your heart. and yet I hope that the certainty of what we have to meet will make you rise above these fears. We are the free and unconquerable people of the United States of America. She's right to prepare the people for losses. When first reports of the attack on Pearl Harbor reach Washington, it appears that casualties are few, about thirty men, but the fleet is destroyed. As the hours tick by and the telegram machines print updates from Hawaii, President Roosevelt

learns that the opposite was true. The number of casualties is appalling, over 2,400 men dead and hundreds injured. But the fleet is not as badly damaged as first thought. The battleship Arizona is blown apart and will forever rest on the seabed of Pearl Harbor. But work gets underway almost immediately to salvage other ships. The Americans have a sliver of hope. Around the same time that news reaches Roosevelt, the Japanese pilots who staged the aerial attack reach their ships.

The leader of the first wave, Commander Mitsuo Fushida, navigates a difficult descent onto the Akagi aircraft carrier. But once he's safely landed, he's welcomed as a hero. The jubilation quickly gives way to the task at hand. This morning, they were the hunters, ambushing their prey like tigers. But now, they're the hunted. Of course, the Americans will retaliate. Exposed in the Pacific, the Japanese have two options. Stay and face a dangerous sea battle or go on the run across the ocean. In front

of the assembled officers, Strike Force Commander Admiral Nagumo asks Fushida for a full report. Fushida, who is a storyteller as well as a pilot, takes the opportunity to enthrall his audience. There were eight battleships moored in Pearl Harbor like ducks on a pond, he says. We hit them hard with torpedoes and bombs. Four battleships are sunk for certain, hundreds of aircraft destroyed. Admiral Nagumo interrupts. of aircraft destroyed. Admiral Nagumo interrupts. The time will come for heroics and medals, but he wants to know if the main aim of the attack was achieved. Is the Pacific Fleet out of action?

Fushida replies that yes, the US Pacific Fleet will not strike back within the next six months. Admiral Nagumo looks pleased. Fushida adds that the Japanese fleet is now at liberty to hit targets in Southeast Asia, where they can find much needed oil for the war effort. There is a round of applause on the bridge, full of pride and relief. Now Nagumo falls into discussion with his officers. The Kido Butai is a huge armada, six aircraft carriers, plus another 24 support ships. Their safety rests on his shoulders. They have the capacity for a third wave of attack. But the Americans will be waiting.

Casualties will be higher. The Japanese have so far escaped relatively unscathed, losing only 29 planes and 64 men, including all the crews of its midget submarines. If Fushida is correct, there's no advantage in going back. A third wave isn't worth the further sacrifice. Admiral Agumo gives the order. If they move fast, they can slip out at the

American's grasp like a tiger into the night. The Japanese decision not to carry out a third wave comes back to haunt them. It's a fulcrum moment that changes the course of the war. The shipyards at Pearl Harbor get to work at once, and many boats live to fight another day. We talk about, you know, the smoking ruins of the American battleships at Pearl Harbor. Well, hold on. Let's all take a deep breath here. So they have eight battleships in Pearl Harbor,

which is, you know, about half, I think, of the battleship fleet at the time or something like that. Might not even be half. And not all the best battleships by a long ways. And the Japanese don't even sink them all. When the Japanese have gone away and the smoke from all the burning fuel and all of that begins to clear, you look on what looks to be the carnage of seven battleships, some of which have turned over, some of which have blown apart, some of which are clearly not salvageable. But a number of them are actually not damaged nearly as much as it seems on the first day. But with the way the war goes on, once you can get them sort of moved up into dry dock, you can fix them. The Japanese mistake plays into Roosevelt's hands. Late into the night on December 7, 1941,

the scene at Pearl Harbor is apocalyptic. It's hard to imagine a phoenix emerging from the flames, but it will in the days and weeks to come. But although the Japanese do not know it yet, Pearl Harbor also marks the beginning of the end for the Imperial Empire. There's a honeymoon period of weeks and months after Pearl Harbor, during which Japan makes steady progress on its aggressive expansion through Asia Pacific. But those victories are played out to an unsettling background noise, the rumble of America's industrial heartlands, its shipyards and factories, which shift into top gear.

The United States enters World War II with a naval fleet of 700 ships. It will end it with more than 6,000. By contrast, once the honeymoon is over, the Imperial Japanese Navy loses ships faster than it can possibly rebuild. Of the six aircraft

carriers that staged the attack on Pearl Harbor, four are lost within six months, including the Akagi. Now, the human stories of Pearl Harbor, you know, on all sides are fascinating and they're worth paying attention to. But the ultimate damage, it's so tiny. You know, what actually comes out of Pearl Harbor? You know, the amount of American soldiers and sailors and civilians killed and wounded total is 3,500.

You know, that by Second World War standards, that's a really small number of people killed and wounded. That's what happens in a small engagement on the Eastern Front in a day. The Americans lose, I think, 300 aircraft. They're building 80,000 aircraft a year by 1944. So Pearl Harbor gets a lot of focus as this quote-unquote great Japanese victory, but it's really hard to see that it's anything more than a small speed bump on the ultimate story

of America crushing Japan in the Second World War. At Pearl Harbor, it's only a matter of weeks before the wreckage is reclaimed from the sea and repairs begin. Only three ships are damaged beyond repair. The USS Arizona is famously blown to pieces when a Japanese bomb ignited its own munitions store. The target ship Utah and the battleship Oklahoma are also lost. But the flagship of the fleet, the USS Pennsylvania, is only lightly damaged after being in dry dock during the attack. She is refloated on December 12, sails to San Francisco for minor repairs, and is back in service a month later.

Crucially, the Japanese failure to destroy fuel tanks on December 7 allows both repairs and transport to continue at full pace. By February 1942, another two battleships and eight vessels are back on the water. Two battleships and eight vessels are back on the water. As the dust settles on Pearl Harbor, many cannot believe that the Japanese were behind the attack. Some even claim that it must have been carried out by German pilots, or at least with German planes, or even Japanese pilots who were trained by Germans. The Japanese and Americans enter a war that is both brutal and racial. The Americans assume that the Japanese are incapable of staging an attack

with the tactical and technical brilliance of Pearl Harbor. The Japanese assume that the Americans lack the willpower to fight back. Steve Toomey is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of the book Countdown to Pearl Harbor. The war in the Pacific was a racial war. The assumption of the other side's inhumanity, of its less-than-human nature, was widespread. I mean, the atrocities committed by both sides,

the sheer horrible viciousness, the fact that prisoners were often not taken, there was such a racial component to the fight. Over the coming months, on the home front, it's fear of what will happen next that throws this racism into sharp relief. In the hours after news of Pearl Harbor reaches mainland America, all along the Pacific coast there is growing paranoia. It verges on hysteria. Frightened residents in Los Angeles fear an air raid and impose a blackout. In Seattle, a mob descends on a busy intersection and destroys the stoplights for the same reason.

A man on a horse rides down the main street, screaming that the enemy is approaching. It starts to feel like the Wild West. Even officials lose the plot. An overzealous radar operator reports an incoming air attack that simply doesn't exist. And a marauder of warships closing in on San Francisco turns out to be fishermen. On the night of December 7th alone, San Francisco endures three separate air raid warnings. The Japanese military in Tokyo has no plans to invade continental United States, but regular Americans don't know that. In their panic, people start to believe in a threat from within, too.

Increasingly the Japanese community come under scrutiny. There are some 120,000 Japanese Americans living in towns along the west coast. No matter that many have lived here for years, or even all their lives, with the same American citizenship as anybody else, it's assumed that they are loyal to Japan first, America second, if at all. There's no evidence of Japanese espionage among this civilian population. No instances of sabotage either. But as fear hardens into anger, many people decide that the community is not to be trusted.

That if they haven't staged an uprising yet, they must be biding their time, waiting for the opportune moment. Rather like the Japanese military at Pearl Harbor. Racist views were very popular at the time in Western countries. So if we think about anti-Japanese laws before World War II as well, I would draw a line of continuity in that sense. The Americans understood themselves as a superior culture, superior power, superior nation.

I mean, you can find in magazines of that time cartoons which show Japanese but also Chinese as yellow monkeys, but quite often also presenting the Japanese as some kind of kids, like children, and they still have to learn a lot, and they have to learn from us. As the days and weeks pass, the public's phantom fears take on a more tangible form. Soon the roundup of so-called Japanese spies begins. You know, they go right for the Japanese, not the Germans and the Italians,

because they feel it would be very difficult to tell the attorney. It's based on racism. It's based on the assumption the Japanese haven't really assimilated, cannot assimilate into the United States the way Germans and Italians can assimilate, that they're not trustworthy, they're all going to be more loyal.

And they take really one of the more shameful decisions in U.S. history to basically lock up an entire population without evidence on the assumption that a small number of them might be spies. If Roosevelt worries that the internment of Japanese Americans might prove to be a stain on his reputation as a war leader, then he doesn't show it. As public outrage grows, he passes a new law, Executive Order 9066. It allows the incarceration of Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom are U.S. citizens. Their crime is simply being of Japanese heritage. Roosevelt remains unmoved as Japanese Americans are locked up.

As a Navy man, perhaps he's swayed by a betrayal that would feel personal to him. The Japanese Admiral Yamamoto, head of the Imperial Fleet, spent many years in America, and is thought to be sympathetic, even an ally. He trained at the Naval Staff College on Rhode Island, and in 1919 attended Harvard University, Roosevelt's own alma mater. In the 1920s he held the post of naval attaché to the Japanese Embassy in Washington. Yamamoto was welcomed to US military sites and shipyards. He befriended American naval officers.

Roosevelt sees that Yamamoto plotted the airstrike on Pearl Harbor, betraying America and the US Navy, the very people who trained him and trusted him. The very people who trained him and trusted him. I think that some considered Yamamoto's actions as a proof, so to speak. As a proof, you can't trust any Japanese person or any person of Japanese origin or with Japanese roots, including Japanese Americans. So I think we can link it with Yamamoto. Pearl Harbor fed into the narrative that the Japanese were untrustworthy. You know, they really are devious, inscrutable. We can't possibly know what they're thinking. They're Asian peoples. But it makes them the enemy far more than, say, the Germans.

You don't see this treatment of German-Americans that you see of Japanese-Americans. So around 120,000 Japanese-Americans are rounded up and taken to concentration camps. One of these is Manzanar, on the remote Sierra Nevada hills of California's Owens Valley. Manzanar means apple orchard, but conditions are less romantic than the name suggests. The camp is surrounded by barbed wire and guard posts. There are searchlights and dogs. Its occupants are assigned to a barracks with basic facilities.

A bathroom shared by many families, straw mattresses, bare light bulbs. The latrines have no partitions, the showers have no screens. It is, essentially, a prison. And in the desert, the summer heat is extreme. In winter there's little protection against the cold. Constant winds fill the hastily built facility with dust and sand. But despite the harsh conditions, detainees establish a church and a school. They tend gardens and hold dance competitions. They even start a newspaper, the Manzanar Free Press.

Originally designed as a temporary staging post, soon the Manzanar concentration camp houses over 10,000 Japanese Americans, mainly from the Los Angeles area. Many, many Japanese American families lost everything. So they lost their houses, they lost their jobs, they lost their own shops, their own restaurants, all these things. And maybe much more important for Japanese Americans as well, as you know, the Japanese are quite proud people, I would say. So this was some kind of very shameful thing, or they consider it as a shameful thing. Pearl Harbor does make that happen. It allows sort of the racial prejudice of the fear of Japanese spies to really rise to the fore.

Had there not been a Pearl Harbor, say the Japanese had declared war and then war had started in a traditional way, they might not have done that. But certainly Pearl Harbor plays into that. There are around 5,000 Japanese Americans serving in the U.S. Army at the time of Pearl Harbor. But after the attack, other Japanese Americans are reclassified

as enemy aliens and prevented from taking the draft. Asia Pacific battlefields for the simple reason that they thought if we sent them to the liberation of the Philippines, for example, who knows, maybe a major part of troops would switch sides because they are Japanese and no real Americans, so to speak. Nonetheless, many Japanese American men go to war and serve with distinction. And their mothers, who are kept behind bars at camps like Manzanar, still receive the dreaded telegrams telling them that their sons have been killed while fighting for the United States. But while the Japanese in the US and also Canada suffer in the months after Pearl Harbor, in its immediate aftermath, the Japanese military fare rather better.

On the day after the attack, December 8, 1941, the mobile strike force known as the Kido Butai retraces its path across the seas. With the American Pacific Fleet disabled, the Kido Butai can get into position to support Japanese ground troops who are cutting a path through Southeast Asia, heading towards the ultimate prize, the oil fields of the Dutch East Indies. Under the command of Admiral Yamamoto, the Japanese Navy has won a famous victory, and there is now little standing in the way of progress. This was, of course, a morale booster, the Pearl Harbor attack. And I mean, the first reaction was, OK, Japan is a super victorious country and nobody can defeat us.

Even the Americans can't defeat us and we'll win the war. We'll win the war. This was the first reaction. As news of the Japanese victory reaches Roosevelt in the US, it also reaches Berlin. The Nazi Joseph Goebbels praises the attack on Pearl Harbor in a newspaper article. It is astonishing, he writes, how the state of the world can change in a short time.

astonishing, he writes, how the state of the world can change in a short time. So Goebbels, the propaganda minister of the German Reich at the time, we have diary entries which show that Hitler was very, very happy that Japan started the war with the United States of America. And now he, Hitler, has a clear scenario. He did obviously overestimate the military power and strength of the Japanese, of the Japanese powers. So he considered Japan as a warrior's culture. He was thinking of the samurai. It looks like he was convinced that thanks to the Japanese cooperation, military cooperation, the Axis will win the war.

Although the United States is now fully immersed in the war, the questions of how the attack came to pass are still being hotly debated. The American public wants someone to blame. Just 11 days after the attack, Roosevelt orders Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts to conduct an investigation. Although there have been calls for the commanders considered responsible to face courts martial, that is not something Roosevelt can risk. Yes, the American public deserved to know how this disaster came

to pass, but he must be careful not to damage the war effort or his presidency. He can't reveal the existence of the American code-breaking operations, which decipher Japanese messages and provide Washington with a steady stream of intelligence from Tokyo. It's vital that the system, known as the Magic, stays secret for the sake of the ongoing war. There's also the issue of where the chain of command leads. The military commanders are accountable to the intelligence chiefs in Washington, and the man they report to is the President himself. So there will be no court-martial. That kind of hearing is too public, too risky. The investigation will be conducted behind closed doors,

and Justice Roberts understands that the buck needs to stop in Pearl Harbor. In December 1941, at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, the Army and Navy are separate executive departments, reporting directly to the President. Admiral Husband E. Kimmel of the Navy and his Army counterpart, Lieutenant General Walter Short, enjoy a friendship. But the culture of the day makes it inappropriate

to inquire into one another's professional business. The two commanders do not compare notes. They liked each other. They played golf with each other all the time, something that it's easy to do even in December in Hawaii. But what Kimmel was doing with his fleet was something Short never really knew. Wow, they go out there into the—I don't know what they do. I can hear their guns, but I don't know what they're doing. And likewise, Kimmel didn't pay a whole lot of attention to what Short was doing.

In a technical sense, Short was responsible for defending the naval base. They did agree the Navy would do long-range reconnaissance, the Army would do short-range reconnaissance, but they really didn't share information. And most particularly after the war warning message, neither side really asked the other what they were doing about it. The war warning message is one of the most infamous dispatches in the history of the U.S. military. Historians and other interested parties, such as the family of the disgraced Kimmel,

have debated the issue of blame over the past 80 years. The war warning informed commanders that peace talks between Washington and Tokyo had reached a stalemate and that an attack by the Japanese was imminent. One of the accusations leveled by the Roberts Commission is that Kimmel was incompetent in his interpretation of this dispatch. Now, Kimmel is supplied the more general intelligence that a Japanese resort to war is a strong possibility and that he should be prepared. So he receives these sort of longer term, more distant warnings about war as a whole. And he does seem to take those on board, but he takes them on board with what I would call a very self-confident and

limited understanding of what that is. He doesn't have the ability, I think, to understand or comprehend that if war breaks out in the Pacific and he's getting these warnings, it could actually start at his command at Pearl Harbor at the time. And I think that in many ways is just, he simply, it's beyond his imagination. So he just discounts the longer term, more general warnings of war by de-emphasizing the attack on Pearl Harbor and thinking the Japanese are going to attack the South. The infamous war warning dispatch seen by Kimmel on November the 27th read, This dispatch is to be considered a war warning.

An aggressive move by Japan is expected within the next few days. Execute an appropriate defensive deployment. It specifies that the Japanese may attack the Philippines, the Thai Peninsula or Borneo, among other places, but there is no mention of an attack on Hawaii. The military leaders in Washington who send this dispatch have access to all available intelligence, even the magic messages intercepted from Tokyo. Yet even they don't specify a risk to Hawaii. So, critics suggest, perhaps it's not fair to expect more of Kimmel.

Kimmel's opposite number in the army, Walter Short, is also accused of dereliction of duty. In response to the November 27th war warning, Short does spring into action. As the person responsible for defending the US Pacific Fleet based in Hawaii, he is vigilant to the risk of attack. But he's looking in the wrong direction. He had a mania about sabotage. The Japanese population on Oahu was huge. And there was a fear that if war came, this population was not loyal. They would rise up and help their brethren in Japan by sabotaging bridges and blowing up electrical grids. Short was obsessed, as obsessed as anyone by this,

and in response to the war warning message, had organized his planes on the various army airfields in a way that was most protective against saboteurs coming onto a base, but was the worst possible decision if the threat was from above because you would have 10 planes sitting together and drop one bomb in the middle of them and you've ruined 10 airplanes. In fact, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor destroys over 300 planes. Putting the aircraft outside the protection of the hangars is the worst possible decision.

But Short's defenders say that his choice is based on the information to hand. Neither Short nor Kimmel have access to all the intelligence known in Washington. Magic transcriptions are not shared with commanders in Pearl Harbor. And even though Washington expects an aggressive move from Japan, it fails to pay close enough attention to Hawaii. Short told Washington before the attack what he was doing. I'm preparing for sabotage. No one in Washington actually read the words and understood the import of what he was saying. He was saying, I'm not preparing for

outside attack. I'm preparing for internal attack, which was not the response to the war warning they were expecting people to have. And no one caught him on it. The chief of staff, General George Marshall, the highest ranking military person in the army, apparently read the message and it didn't register with him, that Short was saying exactly the wrong thing. And so this issue of communication and the failure to be clear and not to assume really pervades almost every American decision that happened in the time right up to and including the attack. History has treated Walter Short more generously than the detractors of his own time. In 2000, the U.S. Senate cleared Short of the charge of dereliction of duty and concluded

that he was competent. Kimmel will argue until the day he dies that Washington should have shared intelligence with Hawaii. But at the time that the Roberts Commission carried out during the dark days of America's entry into the Second World War, the blame is laid squarely on the shoulders of Kimmel and Short. People frequently use the word scapegoat for those two, and scapegoat to me often implies that they are being unjustly punished, that they should not have been punished,

and that the real perpetrators and the real guilty should have managed to escape. I absolutely think Short and Kimmel should have been punished. The issue is not whether they should have been punished. It's why others weren't. And once you get above their rank, you're talking about the chief of naval operations, Harold Stark, the army chief of staff, George Marshall. You're talking about the secretaries of war and Navy, which would have been Frank Knox and Henry Stimson. And you're talking about Franklin Roosevelt. Now, the United States had just entered the war in a shocking way. The United States had just entered the war in a shocking way.

And I don't know that you could have decapitated the government by firing all the top military leaders and all the top civilian leaders at the bravest moment in American history. And so was the public served up someone who was responsible? Yes. Were they served up the only ones responsible? No. responsible? Yes. Were they served up the only ones responsible? No. In the years since 1941, there have been 10 official investigations into the events of December the 7th at Pearl Harbor. Uncomfortable questions have been asked. Why didn't Washington appoint a single joint commander of the combined forces at Hawaii? Why didn't Washington recognize how vulnerable the fleet was at Pearl Harbor? And crucially, why were the messages sent from Washington to Kimmel and Short so open to misinterpretation? They wrote terrible messages. I think their greatest problem was when they sent messages, they never asked for responses to their message. They never came back and said,

okay, we told you to take, to execute appropriate defensive deployments. What did you do? Tell us how you responded to that message. The man in charge in Washington, the man in charge of the Navy, believe that you appoint smart people to big positions and you don't second guess them. You assume they're doing the right thing. The blindness of Washington to the precarious situation in Pearl Harbor is too much for some people to believe. It's led conspiracy theorists to conclude that Washington must have had an ulterior motive. Some believe that Roosevelt wanted to sacrifice the U.S. Pacific fleet in order to get into the conflict at a time when the American people were opposed to war.

Let's face it, if you believe that Franklin Roosevelt knew an attack was coming and did nothing about it, that's the greatest act of treason in American history, that he would jeopardize tens of thousands of lives just to get into a war he was already in. Going to war in the Pacific would actually make things worse in the Atlantic if you're Franklin Roosevelt. It would hamper your ability to help the British. It would force you to reallocate ships back to the Pacific, reducing the protection of

convoys in the Atlantic. Both the recriminations targeted solely at Kimmel and Short, and the conspiracy theory that Roosevelt knew about Pearl Harbor, are born out of shock. While the blame game is playing out in Washington, Tokyo is going through its own period of soul-searching. In the weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese pilots and sailors arrive home to great celebration.

But one man who does not return to Japan as a hero is the spy Takeo Yoshikawa. Although he has no prior knowledge of the attack, when the bombs start falling on December 7th, he understands the significance of his intelligence. All of Tokyo's questions about fleet movements, the existence of barrage balloons, or the depth of the water at Pearl Harbor now make sense. So even while the attack is still underway, Yoshikawa starts destroying his documentation. By the time the FBI come to pick him up later that same day at the Japanese embassy, no incriminating evidence of his espionage work remains.

Though he returns to Tokyo the following year, he remains fearful of recriminations if the Americans should learn about his true purpose on Oahu. He leaves his wife and child, and goes to live in exile, disguised as a Buddhist monk. Just as Kimmel and Short are left to carry the can in the US, after the devastating events of the end of the war, the Japanese people want a scapegoat. Takeo Yoshikawa is that man. Without his actions on Hawaii, the argument goes, the attack on Pearl Harbor would not have been successful. And without Pearl Harbor,

there would have been no atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Ultimately, Yoshikawa even blames himself. He did not feel guilty for the casualties of the Pearl Harbor attack. I mean, he considered this as his job, human intelligence, but it looks like he felt guilty for what happened later. So the consequences on a larger scale of the Pearl Harbor attack and what followed the Pearl Harbor attack, meaning he felt actually guilty for the bombing, not only of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but more or less all big cities, all metropolis in Japan, so including Tokyo, Osaka and other cities. One Japanese hero who made sure his name was not forgotten

is the fighter pilot commander Mitsuo Fushida, who led the first wave of attack on Pearl Harbor. In the early months of the war, when everything seems to go Japan's way, Fushida is often in the vanguard. His luck runs out at the Battle of Midway, when he breaks both his ankles during the sinking of the Akagi. But later he will have an epiphany while talking to Japanese POWs about their time in captivity. Amazed that they were treated respectfully and even forgiven by the Americans, Fushida

seeks to understand and eventually converts to Christianity. Remarkably, the man who led so many air attacks on Allied forces ends up touring the United States as a Christian evangelist. Yeah, he's a super interesting person. And he lived actually in the land which he has attacked years ago. So meaning he lived for quite a long time in the United States of America. Unfortunately, we don't know his most personal thoughts, what he was really thinking. But for me, it looks a little bit like he felt sorry for what he has done earlier in the war.

He became famous actually in the post-war era as an evangelist who tried to convince his audience always to live in peace and harmony. He tried to emphasize, to keep good and friendly U.S.-Japanese relationships. Not everyone is forgiven. Pearl Harbor mastermind Admiral Yamamoto, trained by the American Navy, becomes Washington's poster boy for Japanese treachery. Yamamoto was considered by the United States of America after Washington as enemy of the state number one, enemy of the state number one for very good reason. I think this shows also that the Americans, American politicians and American military

considered him as the brain, the military brain or the brain of the Japanese military and as the strategic mastermind, not only of the Pearl Harbor attack, the brain of the Japanese military and as the strategic mastermind not only of the Pearl Harbor attack but also of the overall attack which was going on in the Asia Pacific region and so when the American magic code breaking team learns that Yamamoto is flying in to inspect troops at bougainville Island near Papua New Guinea. They launch the aptly named Operation Vengeance. A clinical attack shoots down Yamamoto's incoming flight, and the man who double-crossed America is assassinated. Now, Yamamoto is both tragic, but also responsible for his own tragedy.

And so he is the driving force between the overall coordination of the Pearl Harbor attack, even if he knows in the long run it's probably a disaster. He's credited with saying, you know, I can run wild for six months after the war starts, but then all bets are off, and that's exactly what happens. You know, from Pearl Harbor for six months on, the Japanese have mostly victories. And the six months after Pearl Harbor, you have the Battle of Midway with Yamamoto in command, it should be said, where the Japanese navy is devastated. And from that point on, it's just defeat after defeat after defeat. The death of Yamamoto means that the Japanese lost its military brain yeah so we have to

understand it maybe like this and of course yeah the death of Yamamoto was a big shock for the Japanese so I mean the the battle of Midway was already a shock for the Japanese navy but the the biggest shock might have been the death of Admiral Yamamoto. As the smoke clears from Pearl Harbor, the tide of history is already turning. The months, years and even decades ahead will see airstrikes develop and become the dominant military force. It will witness the ascendancy of intelligence gathering during both war and peacetime, and rapid technological advances will continue to give the upper hand to innovative military leaders. It will be acknowledged that no man is an island. Commanders like Admiral Kimmel and General Short are only as successful as their communication and cooperation.

And it will be recognized that the unthinkable can happen. One should never underestimate the enemy, and there is rarely one convenient villain who can take the blame. And it will never be forgotten that these lessons were learned the hard way. On December 7, 1941, at Pearl Harbour. Next time on Short History Of, we'll bring you a short history of Henry VIII. Henry is a man who likes to hunt

and she realizes it's the thrill of the chase for Henry. So she keeps him at arm's length. She refuses to be his mistress and it proves an absolute masterstroke. Henry wants what he can't have. And for seven long years, he tries to get Anne Boleyn for himself to marry her. But to do that,

he has to overturn the entire religious establishment because the Pope isn't going to give him his divorce or annulment from Catherine of Aragon, certainly not without a fight. You definitely get the sense Henry is this great hunter and Anne Boleyn is his prey. That's next time on Short History Of. That's next time on Short History Of.