Why did Japan bomb Pearl Harbor?

Some say that some say it was the most pragmatic, the failure to hit those facilities proved costly to them in the end.

 

This success was actually part of the downfall of the Luftwaffe in the long term.

After seeing how effective dive bombers were in the Spanish Civil War, Hitler and the Luftwaffe mandated that all bombers have the capability to operate as dive bombers. This effectively destroyed any attempt by Ernst Heinkel, Clauduis Dornier, and killed the hopes of the late Walther Wever of building true "Heavy Bombers".

Dive bombers were much more accurate, but their smaller bomb load made them less effective in a strategic role.

The problem with German R&D is that they often went for glorious vanity projects instead of actual weapons that would win the war. This can be seen in Wunderwaffe projects like the Me-264 Amerika Bomber, the H-class battleships (with a total of 36 cannons, from 8 16" to 16 4"), the Ba-349 VTOL fighter, the Schwerer Gustav (800mm cannon), A9 (upgraded V2 to strike the United States), and finally the tanks from the Panzer VII and VIII all the way to the Landkreuzer P1000 and Landkreuzer P1500.



Towards the end of the war, the German R&D got more and more bizarre, it was almost like the entire nation was showing signs of Hitler's insanity. And I do not think more then a fraction of their R&D attempts would have ever been possible even without the war.

Hitler's biggest problem is that he was nothing but a corporal who thought he was a field marshal. His attempts to manage the German war industry and military ultimately destroyed it. He had a lot of very talented experts, but would ignore them if he thought something should be done another way.

Hitler's repeated ignoring of Heinz Guderian's recommendations ensured that the Germans were wrecked in the Soviet Union.

The biggest mistake Japan made was in going to war with the United States in the first place, especially with an attack that was intended to start right after the declaration of war was given. They totally misunderstood the American character, and that is really what doomed them. Tactically they were very sound, and their equipment was among the finest. But they had no hope of winning a war of attrition against the United States.

Especially since Pearl Harbor and the Philippines were seen as a "sneak attack", which so enraged the American people that nothing would have been accepted short of unconditional surrender. If they had delivered the announcement 24 hours prior to the attack, odds are that some kind of settled peace might have been accepted.

 

Well the funny thing, at its earliest stages of planning the attack on Pearl was to destroy infra structure, make it impossible for extended fleet actions in the Pacific. The Japanese planners had identified the dry dock and expanded fuel storage as prime targets. His own intelligence from over the target show the carriers are not in the area. Even if they were at sea waiting to ambush him they can't have escorts because they're largely flaming wrecks at Ford Island.

I guess it is the old saying fortune favors the bold.

 

Why did Japan attack Pearl Harbor? (They launched torpedoes & sent mini-subs, as well.)
1. Because it was the most grandiose thing they could think to do. Ambushes & sudden attacks were a Japanese specialty, plus they had lots & lots of photos, agents in place, detailed maps & harbor soundings, etc., etc., gathered over years, if not decades. IJN invested a lot of time, research (developing shallow-run air-launched torpedoes, constructing models, proving grounds, mock-ups of harbors, running full-scale pilot attack scenarios), money, personnel & fleet aviation attention to the subject. (A similar intel & military effort was made against the Philippines, Singapore, Hong Kong & so on, I assume.) In short, brilliant tactics, dismal strategy.
2. The stealth approach plan to HI - sortieing the blue-water fleet, total radio silence, simulating fleet radio traffic by decoy boats, etc. all fit into Japanese military doctrine.
3. The Japanese military hadn't faced an enemy like the US before - big population, big industrial capacity, big natural resource base.
4. The Japanese military trained their officers to a peak probably unmatched by other militaries at the time. But they never made plans to rotate their best officers home to train the next generation. Thus the Japanese lost their best officers - naval, army, pilots @ the beginning of the war. If they didn't win in the first year, they were never going to - against the US.
5. The Japanese navy was excellent @ night fighting, gunnery & their Long Tom torpedoes were unrivalled.
6. Japanese logistics, troop, tanker & ore ships were never equal to the task of supplying their military across the distances of the Pacific plus importing the natural resources to keep the military/industrial machine humming, let alone feed & supply the civilian population. This situation became critical once the US began unlimited submarine warfare (& we got the bugs out of our torpedo warheads).

 

The final criticism of Japan's attacks on Pearl Harbor & related was how ineffective they were:

See - http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/events/wwii-pac/pearlhbr/ph-salv.htm

Sinking ships @ their harbor, in shallow water, with full equipment, cranes, divers, etc. close to hand, & a burning motivation in the survivors was suicidal. As soon as Pearl was secured, the Navy began salvage operations. All the ships were either stripped of usable equipment & ammo, or refloated & repaired onsite. The worse cases were refloated, cleaned up, & sailed to the West Coast for extensive refitting & return to service. Only 3 ships were not refloated, but all salvageable equipment was recovered. Two remain in Pearl, one was towed away.

All the other ships were able to rejoin the fleet, & participated in the defeat of the IJN.

 

As stated earlier had the Japanese sent the third wave to attack the drydock and repair facilities and fuel storage the attack would have been even more devastating and perhaps forced the US to sue for peace.

 

Why didn't he take the battleships out too?

 

Can they ferry planes?

 

Exactly. Japan's intent was to create an Asian emplre with itself as the imperial master. It proved that with its aggressions against Korea, Manchuria and China. The major obstacle to that goal was the US Navy.

 

The was the reason they decided to take Midway island, which would have served as a staging base of an invasion of Hawaii.

But it didn't quite work out as they planned.

 

Nope. So what? Your point is that FDR thought they were useless and so intentionally left them at Pearl to be destroyed?

 

Actually, Midway was in most ways a rather insignificant piece of rock that the Japanese largely could not have cared less about.

The Battle of Midway was an attempt by the Japanese to trick the American fleet (especially the Carriers) into a trap. But with a little MAGIC the Americans were able to reverse that trap and soundly thrash the Japanese.

And "AF is short on water".

 

A little bit of both:


The Japanese plan was to lure the United States' aircraft carriers into a trap.[12] The Japanese also intended to occupy Midway as part of an overall plan to extend their defensive perimeter in response to the Doolittle Raid. This operation was also considered preparatory for further attacks against Fiji, Samoa, and Hawaii itself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Midway

 

No wasn't my point at all. Why should they have been out of port, they were not on maneuvers. The US believed that Pearl was a safe place to keep them as they believed they could not be successfully attacked there or that Japan would try.

 

(My bold)

IJN was already overextended, & their logistics were always far too optimistic. (The IJN, in their large-scale war games, would HALT the games so that capital ships could refuel & replenish. A v. bad habit, which would cost them dearly when it came time to implement the real thing in real time, with no friendly game officials to rig the game for them.)

The distances of the Pacific war were beyond Japan's rational planning - their plan, essentially, was that they needed the POL & ores, rubber, etc. from throughout their region of the Pacific, & so they would take them & hold the ground against all comers. See http://www.combinedfleet.com/pearlops.htm for a detailed examination of the logistics of the Japanese threat to Hawaii & their strategic limitations in fighting the WWII Pacific war.

Japan simply didn't have enough troops/navy to hold everything they wanted, & they never had the logistics to support the military conquest aims of the Japanese military & the ruling military bureaucrats.

 

Sheesh, how many times do we have to go over this?

The USS Enterprise was due back in Hawaii that day, she had been delivering fighters to Wake Island
The USS Lexington was enroute to Midway Island to deliver fighters.
The USS Saratoga had just finished a 6 month overhaul, and was in San Diego picking up her fighters.

They were out of port as we have been saying over and over for very good reasons. Technically, Sara had been in port for over 6 months in Washington getting an overhaul. Lexington and Enterprise were doing one of their primary duties, transporting aircraft to more distant bases. And all were returning to base to prepare for the holidays, because traditionally other then in times of war the Navy tries to allow as many Sailors and Marines to spend the holidays in port, even if not in their home port.

If the Japanese had attacked 1 day later, the Enterprise would have been sunk. If they had done it 1 week later, the Lexington would have been sunk as well. And if they had waited until January, the Saratoga would have completed her sea trials and likely sunk as well.

 

I recall one reason it was cancelled was that the SHIPS were low on fuel. The smaller ships in the screen (DD's, CL's) and smaller carriers Hiryu and Soryu were operating right at the limit of their range. A third strike might have ended with a carrier running out of fuel!

The second strike should have totally ignored all the ships except Pennsylvania...should have gone for repair shops, tank farms, drydocks (which Pennsylvania was in), and other harbor installations.

 

We were talking the battleships not the carriers.

 

That fact became obvious with time but doesn't mean their intent was something different.

Still, had a couple US carriers been destroyed at Pearl, Midway very well may have been taken, and with Midway as a base, Hawaii within reach.

 

At Savo, the Japanese force (though a makeshift, thrown-together group) had all the advantages: experience, training, torpedoes, and night optics. At Samar, a very-shaken Nagumo thought the carriers of Taffy 3 were Halsey's fleet carriers, escorted by a dozen fast battleships! (Note: the Japanese lost three cruisers in that fight!)

 

If FDR knew that Japanese were going to attack Pearl, why would he move the carriers out and not the battleships? If they believed that Pearl was secure there was no reason for him to move out the carriers because of the pending attack.

 

There were only three CV's in the pacific at the time. Two were ferrying planes, Saratoga was on the West Coast for a much-needed refit...a fact that the Japanese certainly knew.

 

We were already arming and training the Nationalist Chinese against the Japanese at the time of Pearl Harbor. Information is kinda sketchy about whether we were actually in a shooting war with the Japanese on 12/7/41, but I'd bet we were.

 

(My bold)

If you read through the combinedfleet site I noted, you'll see that Midway was useless as a base. @ 1300 air miles from Hawaii, it was simply too far to serve as a base for aircraft attacking Hawaii. Midway is tiny, too small to hold the POL, supply/maintenance depots, ammo bunkers, airfields, troops, bases, & had a poor & limited harbor. Even @ its height, the IJN only had the strength to raid Hawaii, not sufficient to transport troops & keep air ops running over Hawaii. Their logistics were severely strained just to get the carrier raiding force to Hawaii.

Japan had 11 divisions of troops available, & they were all fully occupied striking @ the resources that Japan started the war to occupy in the first place. There were no troops to spare for senseless operations against Hawaii, much less the western seaboard of the US.

 

The Battleships had mostly just returned after a training exercise. The USS Arizona, Nevada, California, Tennessee, West Virginia, Maryland and Oklahoma had all returned on 4 December after 3 weeks at sea conducting gunnery training. They had been in port for less then 3 days prior to the attack starting.

It is really not hard for people to look and see what the ships were doing prior to the attack. It is not like they had been sitting there for weeks waiting for the attack.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Maryland_(BB-46)