Research Project Plan
“December 7, 1941-a date which will live in infamy- the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.” President Roosevelt said to Congress on 8 Dec 1941. http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/7-2-188/188-31.html
This sudden and deliberate attack is construed as very clear for many, but there are still those which choose to believe that it was a government conspiracy to pull the United States into the war. The United States did every action possible considering that they believed the Japanese were too weak for such a devastation attack. The American Government and the Armed Forces, had no clear definable information that would have given Pearl Harbor any warning for the attack that would have prepared the defenses with enough time to save the countless lives lost on 7 December 1941. The United States Government hid nothing from the congressional panels and are harboring nothing but regret about the incident on Oahu. The Government received plenty of warning, but conditions and chance provided a perfect environment for a sudden and deliberate surprise attack which left the United States Military completely exposed and vulnerable.
US did not know the attacks would happen before 7 December 1941.
– The US warned other nations of emanate attack and deployed aerial survalence of Hawaii. “Consider this dispatch a war warning. The negotiations with Japan in an effort to stabilize conditions in the Pacific have ended. Japan is expected to make an aggressive move within the next few days. An amphibious expedition against either the Philippines, Thai, or Kra Peninsula or possibly Borneo is indicated by the number and equipment of Japanese troops and the organization of their naval task forces.” However they did not expect Pearl Harbor. http://ibiblio.org/pha/pha/army/chap_3c.html#138
– Although the attack has shocked the American people there is little doubt that it had been brewing for some years. Japan’s fury over the embargoes and allied support for China prompted a declaration of war. http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/december/7/newsid_3494000/3494108.stm
– The secretary of war stated, “”Negotiations with Japan appear to be terminated to all practical purpose with only the barest possibilities that the Japanese Government might come back and offer to continue. Japanese future action is unpredictable but hostile action possible at any moment.” Stark to Kimmel, November 27, 1941, Pearl Harbor Attack, 2301. Smith, Jean Edward, FDR, Random House, (New York, 2007). http://books.google.com/books?id=cC4Akk8UKNoC&pg=PA529&lpg=PA529&dq=Negotiations+with+Japan+appear+to+be+terminated+to+all+practical+purpose+with+only+the+barest+possibilities+that+the+Japanese+Government+might+come+back+and+offer+to+continue&source=bl&ots=soOopjjuUD&sig=jt69rSMHx9NMEM2_90mxIeid0h8&hl=en&sa=X&ei=jahwULCoCMa02AXaloGABg&ved=0CDkQ6AEwBTgK#v=onepage&q&f=false
– However, when Secretary of the Navy arrived in Hawaii a few days after December 7, following the Japanese attack, Admiral Pye testified his (Secretary Knox) first remark was: “No one in Washington expected an Attack [on Pearl Harbor] even Kelly Turner.” Admiral Kelly Turner was in the War Plans Division of the Navy and was the most aggressive-minded of all. http://ibiblio.org/pha/pha/army/chap_3c.html#138
– “To be sure it is observed that the “hope * * * to preserve and promote the peace of the Pacific through cooperation with the American Government has finally been lost” and “in view of the attitude of the American Government it cannot but consider that it is impossible to reach an agreement through further negotiations.” But these facts had already been known for several days and the only paramount considerations at this time were *when* and *where* Japan would strike. A thorough consideration of the fourteen-part message, when viewed in the light of all other intelligence already available in Washington, reflects no added information, particularly of a military character, which would serve further to alert outpost commanders who had already been supplied a “war warning” and informed that “hostile action possible at any moment.” This conclusion is partially modified to the extent that actual delivery of the fourteen part message to the American Government might be construed as removing the last
diplomatic obstacle, in the minds of the Japanese, to launching an attack.” http://ibiblio.org/pha/pha/congress/part_4.html#222
– On Dec 6 1941, the president sent a message to the Japanese Emperor
The Southeastern and Allied Nations cannot “sit either indefinitely or permanently on a keg of dynamite.” http://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/p2.asp
– “The Government of the United States most earnestly desires to contribute to the promotion and maintenance of peace and stability in the Pacific area” http://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/p1.asp
– Naval dispatch from the Commander in Chief Pacific (CINCPAC) announcing the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, 7 December 1941. http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=mcc&fileName=002/page.db&recNum=0&itemLink=D?mcc:1:./temp/~ammem_zlmN::@@@mdb=manz,mharendt,rbpebib,cwband,cwnyhs,gmd,mreynoldsbib,mtaft,cwar,fsaall,mfdipbib,mff,scsmbib,mal,mcc,ncpm,pan,afcpearl,lhbprbib,afc911bib,papr,runyon,detr,mgw,nfor,sgp,sgproto,ww2map
The Carrier fleet which was the intended target for the Japanese was not at Pearl Harbor
– Admiral Kimmel states that “the arrangements I had made for handling material for planes and ground crews at Wake and Midway and of the fact that I was sending the Enterprise and the Lexington to Midway. http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/myths/Missing_Carriers.html
– “Admiral Halsey: A great deal depends, sir. We might have had a very much worse catastrophe here if these vessels had been in the process of sortieing when this happened. For instance, my ship, my task force had planned to be off Pearl Harbor about seven o’clock in the morning, and by the grace of God we had bad weather out there that held us up and I could not have gotten in until about four o’clock in the afternoon.” http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/myths/Missing_Carriers.html
– Carrier Locations http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq66-9.htm
– The Fleet at Pearl Harbor was not prepared for attack, and the ship present were prepared for quick action in the Philippines. http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq66-2.htm
– The total destruction of the fleet by the numbers. http://www.nationalww2museum.org/learn/education/for-students/ww2-history/ww2-by-the-numbers/pearl-harbor.html
– Oral History“So we cruised around out there and I had the watch at about four or four-thirty in the morning, five o’clock just as dawn was breaking, and all of a sudden I see a big shape of a carrier through my goggles, sort of off Barbers Point, and I immediately go to general quarters, man the guns, man the torpedo tubes, get ready to fire torpedoes, and about that time the carrier puts a searchlight up and shows the American flag flying. That was the Enterprise just as I was about to launch torpedoes. It had been delivering planes to Wake Island and on its way home the cruiser with it had had propeller problems. They had to send a diving team down to sort of fix the propeller; otherwise the Enterprise would have been at its dock there and would have been sunk by the Japanese. Because they came in and I think they had, was it the [USS] Utah [AG-16] or some training ship was there and they splintered it to smithereens, just because they were diving at a target location without wondering just what it was. And then, of course, the Enterprise launched her planes and about a third of them got shot down, because by then our gunners were shooting at anything that moved in the air without identifying it. Nobody knew how to identify airplanes, especially not people who just were bombed unexpectedly. I think, you know it was strange, for a couple of days before Pearl Harbor we’d been getting submarine contacts out there when we were out there cruising around. Reported them, but nobody paid much attention.”
http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq66-3d.htm
The radar picked up the aircraft for nearly 1 hour, but they ignored the warning purposefully.
– Among the records are a 31 ½” by 21 ¾” radar plotting chart on which Privates Joseph L. Lockard and George E. Elliot recorded some unusual activity. http://congressarchives.tumblr.com/post/13870528815/on-the-morning-of-december-7-1941-japanese
– Lockard and Elliot were on duty for training at the recently opened Opana Mobile Radar Station located on the northern tip of Oahu. At 7:02 a.m., they noticed radar signals that indicated a large number of aircraft approaching the island from the north at a distance of 132 miles. They continued to track the approach of the aircraft until 7:39 when the radar signals were disrupted by back waves bouncing off nearby mountains. Their last sighting placed the approaching airplanes at 20 miles distance. Lockard and Elliot phoned the Information Center at Fort Shafter, located several miles east of Pearl Harbor, to report “a flight of some sort.” The control officer on duty concluded that the signals they reported were either a naval patrol flight or American B-17s from California that were scheduled to arrive on the same day. Within minutes, they would all learn that the Japanese had mounted a surprise attack. http://www.archives.gov/press/press-releases/2001/nr01-68.html
– It could be clearly stated that America was brought into WWII on 7 December 1941, when the Japanese deliberately bombed Pearl Harbor. Two signalmen, Pvt. Joseph L. Lockhart and Pvt. George A. Elliott, were stationed at the north shore of Oahu, operating their radio aircraft-detection device, called RADAR, (Radio Direction and Ranging). They were operating a SCR-170, which was very new and very secret. At 0702, Lockard and Elliott spotted an echo on the oscilloscope such as neither of them had ever seen before. By their calculations, a large flight of airplanes was 132 miles off Kahuku Point and approaching at a speed of three miles a minute. At 0720, Lockard and Elliott made a call to the information center at Fort Shafter where Lieutenant Kermit Tyler took the call. Lieutenant Tyler told the signalmen to “forget it”. The Japanese air attack on Pearl Harbor began at 0755. http://www.signal.army.mil/ocos/museum/msgctr.asp
The solutions did not only answer questions, they also created more questions. The American Government and the Armed Forces, had no clear definable information that would have given Pearl Harbor any warning for the attack. They knew that Japan was preparing for war and made many actions to deter them from provocation. Circumstances and coincidence provided that the carriers were out to sea, and the Army personnel ignored the incoming radar signals of the Japanese airplanes. The event was indeed a complete and utter surprise which in turn left the United States Army and Navy completely exposed and vulnerable.
Annotated bibliography of secondary sources
Borg, Dorothy, and Shumpei Okamoto. 1973. Pearl Harbor as history: Japanese-American relations, 1931-1941. New York: Columbia University Press.
Feis, Herbert. 1950. The road to Pearl Harbor; the coming of the war between the United States and Japan. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Goldstein, Donald M., Katherine V. Dillon, and J. Michael Wenger. 1991. The way it was: Pearl Harbor, the original photographs. Washington: Brassey’s (US).
Keegan, John. 1996. The battle for history: re-fighting World War II. New York: Vintage Books.
Prange, Gordon W., Donald M. Goldstein, and Katherine V. Dillon. 1981. At dawn we slept: the untold story of Pearl Harbor. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Wagner, Margaret E., David M. Kennedy, Linda Barrett Osborne, and Susan Reyburn. 2007. The Library of Congress World War II companion. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Wohlstetter, Roberta. 1962. Pearl Harbor; warning and decision. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press.
Reflections
The great thing about digital media is how easily searchable and readable most of it is. I was able to search general terms such as Pearl Harbor, World War II, and Japan Attacks. I found a plethora of primary sources from Congressional documents, newspapers, Navy and Army records, to oral histories online. The vast amount of information lead me to adapt from a general idea to a thesis rather quickly after reading resources from non-scholarly sites and comparing them to what the primary sources actually say. The planted myths in our culture changed the story. I uncovered investigative hearings and primary documents which allowed me to create my own hypothesis as if I was around in 1941.
However, there were several issues with online media. Validation of documents, of website official capacity, verification of sources, and historical contradiction were some of the issues that plague my research. The primary problem I had was validating the documents as transcribed as truth. The author of the webpage could easily miscalculate or misrepresent the original document in his rendering to digital from the source. There are few ways to verify quality, most which include visiting Washington or other cities to physically view original documents. The other issue, I had been to ensure the documents were in a source that had official or scholarly representation that operated to preserve history. The site http://congressarchives.tumblr.com/ was difficult to review because it is formulated on a tumblr site, but after reviewing multiple pages on this site and comparing to official sites, the photographs matched the data. I used a primary source from this page, because it was a picture of the original document which is held in the National Archives.
Lastly, I had problems with contradictions of sources. I did not include the Japanese miniature submarine that was reported sank off the coast of Oahu an hour before the Pearl Harbor attack because the official records contradicted each other. The Navy claims they sunk it, while the army claims the Navy only attacked it, and the Congressional hearings spoke little about it or the transmission they claimed to have sent. I was confused with all of the contradictions and discrepancies. I chose to leave it out because I could not confirm which website is more official as they were all published by their departments within the same entity, the Department of Defense. However whether or not the submarine was sunk, the message sent to the Deptarment of the Navy was encrypted and took over an hour to decode and would not have helped in the defense of Oahu anyway.
Overall, this exercise helped me research sites not only for my paper but also for myself. I had to search on each site for the authenticity and scholarly representation. The efforts to investigate each source were timely and effective. Using the majority of sources was simple and easy, however had to be thoroughly examined for historical accuracy.