"Today, there can be no excuse for continued retention of the thousands of pages of FBI documents on the catastrophe that are still withheld."

You have to pay someone to collect, assess and declassify these. What do you want to spend, and what will you gain?

I bet more than 90% of the country doesn't know the Bushes and Clintons are personal friends because of all the mud slung about them. Do we care about this, beyond a look at the History Channel?

On a personal note: I have a newspaper article saved from 1961, in which the Cocoa, FL Tribune interviewed my father on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack. In it, Pop claims it was common knowledge that an attack was coming, and that Japanese-language newspapers posted a warning; his own housekeeper at the Marine barracks in Eva urged him not to go to the base Sunday morning.

How about that?

The 'good 'ole boy' network here and in England had a great number of spies that went to the top so I'm sure that the government simply no longer cares.

(Except for the rank and file, I'm not sure they really care today.)

Terribly easy to read all this with hindsight bias.

You have to pay someone to collect, assess and declassify these.

They're 75 years old. I would be shocked to find that there's any worthy of a classified or even confidential rating in there. Not even methods of collecting intelligence at the time, as that should be spy craft 101 today.

Now, if you want to give them an embarrassing rating, that's probably true.

Conspiracy theories about Pearl Harbor abound.

One says FDR moved the fleet to Hawaii to be a tempting target for the Japanese. This theory ignores the fact that most naval experts of the day didn't believe a carrier attack could be carried out so far from one's home base (9,000 miles). The Royal Navy innovated such attacks with the attack on Taranto, which did not present nearly the logistical challenge that the Imperial Navy's attack on Pearl Harbor did and was ignored by US experts, but not by Japanese experts who came to Italy to study the attack.

Another part of the theory is that FDR prodded the Japanese to take the bait by progressively banning shipments of vital material to Japan, gasoline, steel, etc. under the guise of protesting Japan's invasion of China. Knowing the Germans would have to enter a war with the US if Japan went to war, FDR was back-dooring his way to war with Germany, so the theory goes.

Japan had a history of using surprise attacks to open hostilities, going back to the 1894 Sino-Japanese war and, until then, most famously used in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904.

The famous winds message ("East Winds, Rain") presaging war with the US was sent uncoded and not in Japan's diplomatic code (code named Purple) since many of Japan's smaller diplomatic outposts and consulates did not have the ability to decode messages.

The US had broken the Purple code sometime earlier and was able to listen in on Japan's diplomatic chatter, including requests to the Oahu consulate for the locations of US naval ships in Pearl Harbor (and not the usual confirmation that the ships were in harbor). The Hawaii departments of the Army and Navy were denied the capabilities to decode Purple messages and forced to rely on Washington for information. This feeds the conspiracy theory.

Still, the theory fails to take into account for prevailing naval theory. Despite Billy Mitchell proving otherwise, most naval experts did not believe that aircraft-born bombs could sink a battleship. Mitchell was accused of cheating in the 1921 aircraft vs. battleship test by using bombs larger than the ones allowed and pressing the attack in a non-approved manner. The results were dismissed because the battleship would be maneuvering and shooting back in a real attack.

The HMS Repulse and the HMS Prince of Wales would pay the price for the general battleship supremacy short sightedness three days after Pearl Harbor off the coast of Malaysia.

A 1932 naval exercise proved Pearl Harbor vulnerable to air attack However, those same experts believed that a carrier-born attack could not be carried out at the distances required to attack Hawaii and so the exercise was considered theoretical, but not practical.

Another factor deluding experts into believing Pearl Harbor was safe was the harbor's 40-foot depth. A aerial torpedo in those days when released from a plane dropped to below 50 feet before pulling up to its running depth. Any aerial torpedo dropped into Pearl Harbor would theoretically get stuck in the mud at the harbor's bottom. The experts did not factor in that a belligerent power would invent a shallow-running torpedo, nor that it would fit fins to armor-piercing shells and use those as bombs.

So, despite the 1921 sinking of the Ostfriesland, the 1932 naval exercise, and the 1940 Royal Navy attack on Taranto, the naval experts of the day believed Pearl Harbor was safe from aerial attack, any attack really.

Willful blindness, more than any conspiracy, left Pearl Harbor an open target.

Conan, excellent stuff. One of the things that has always intrigued me about Pearl is the fact that one of Japan's stated goals for the attack was to damage or destroy the U.S. carrier fleet. However, at the time of the attack, the U.S. carriers were not in port, and so they escaped damage. I've always wondered why Japan proceeded with the attack even knowing (from their advance scouts) that the carriers were not there, especially considering that they did not have the capability to actually land troops and invade Oahu. The attack turned out to be a huge mistake: although loss of life was high, they didn't succeed in critically damaging the Navy's capabilities. And the attack inflamed Americans who were still on the fence, as far as supporting the call for war, resulting in the U.S. entering the war almost immediately afterward.

The irony of Pearl Harbor is that Chuichi Nagumo, the admiral in charge of the attack, cancelled a third attack wave for fear that the missing US carriers would catch him refueling and rearming his planes (the most vulnerable time in carrier operations) and destroy his force. The third wave was scheduled to attack the fleet repair facilities.

Those same facilities would later be used to repair the USS Yorktown, damaged in the Battle of Coral Sea. The repaired Yorktown was then able to participate in the Battle of Midway - at which Nagumo's fleet was caught refueling and rearming the carriers' planes for an attack on the US task force sent to stop the invasion of Midway.

Had he launched that third wave at Pearl Harbor, it's possible the entire course of the war in the Pacific would have been different.

I've always wondered why Japan proceeded with the attack even knowing (from their advance scouts) that the carriers were not there.... ~ Cousin Dave at December 20, 2016 8:17 AM

They attacked anyway because they were 9,000 miles from home in hostile waters and couldn't be caught there. Just being there in force was a hostile act.

In addition, Japanese diplomats were scheduled to deliver a declaration of war to US Secretary of State Cordell Hull at 7:00am (Hawaii time) that very morning. Difficulties in transcribing and decoding the message meant the declaration of war did not get delivered until later that evening, well after the attack, making the attack unprovoked and "dastardly."

Japanese doctrine depended upon the surprise attack at the opening of hostilities to bring them superiority. Japan had a limited population and limited resources. As a result, her military planners had formulated a doctrine of war based on being outnumbered by any opponent. The surprise attack doctrine was designed to give Japan an initial edge in any conflict.

The attack was scheduled for Sunday, December 7th, no matter what. All the other parts of the plan were in motion for that morning and Nagumo had no way to stop them.

Agreed. Great stuff, Conan.

Cousin Dave, I've always been very dubious re: the idea that the IJN failed at Pearl because they missed the carriers. In hindsight, they did fail. But at the time, the IJN was after the battle fleet. The carriers would have been a bonus in their eyes. But not the key to success as has been stated.

It takes a LONG TIME for doctrine to change in ossified bureaucracies. In '41 doctrine said that battle fleets decided naval wars. Billy Mitchell and Toranto caused doctrinal changes to begin percolating in the worlds navies but carriers and aircraft were seen as scouting forces and mobile strike units against softer targets. Much like Jackie Fisher's battlecruisers (Beatty badly mishandled them). And that's exactly what the IJN saw their carriers as. A highly mobile, medium strike force. They never grasped carrier doctrine and as late as '44 were still trying to set up the decisive gun battle with Halsey's fleet.

The US, by contrast was forced one morning to completely change the entire doctrine of the USN. Simply because there were no battleships to execute the existing doctrine. Admirals who knew how to implement that new doctrine, Fletcher, Spruance, Halsey, quickly rose to the top, while the Admirals steeped in battle fleet doctrine are names lost to history.

Conan and Kevin, thanks for the discussion. It's interesting to think about how these scenarios would play out today (or not). A big thing is that today, in a war of two or more technologically advanced nations, everyone is going to know where everyone else is. Possibly the last war in which a large force had the advantage of its location being unknown to the enemy was the Gulf War, were the Iraqi Republican Guard had no idea that Schwartzkof's forces were approaching Baghdad over land, and fell for the amphibious-landing feint. A big part of that was the U.S. government being able to twist the French government's arm into twisting SPOT's arm into not supplying any imagery of the region during the war. And that only worked because Russia had very limited imaging capability over that region at the time. Barring a major collapse of civilization, that tactic will never work again.

I had an uncle who was on the Nevada at Pearl Harbor.

I am not much of a Naval historian, or Tactician, but for those who want a good layman's overview of the World War II Navy in the Pacific, I suggest Battle 360. It was on the history channel and can be found on Youtube.

On another note I dont know why anyone is surprised that there were Japanese spies in Hawaii. There were multitudes of Japanese spies in the US, and a lot of them were here as students, particularly on the West coast. so if you are wondering why Roosevelt turned it into an exclusionary zone, it was because of the ship building and repair facilities at both Long Beach CA and Bremerton WA (and the very real possibility of a Japanese attack on the continental US to disable those facilities)

A two thousand mile coast lime is impossible to defend, and you want to deny the enemy the ability to get small mobile units ashore where they then might receive help from Japanese citizens and spies residing in the US.

The big problem with revisionist history, is the same problem with journalism. They dont get published unless they have something new and exciting to say, and a goodly percentage of what they say is poorly researched inflamatory clap trap.

An attack by the Japanese on the US continental coast did happen as well. Fort Stevens. No casualties.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardment_of_Fort_Stevens

Don't forget the Fire Balloons.

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By the way, if you want good books on Pearl Harbor, the following are pretty interesting:

• Day of Infamy by Walter Lord
  
• At Dawn We Slept by Gordon Prange
  
• Infamy by John Toland
  
• Countdown to Pearl Harbor by Steve Twomey
  
• Seven Days of Infamy by Nicholas Best
  

Walter Lord's book has the advantage of giving a minute by minute account as told to him by actual survivors. It doesn't go into who knew what beforehand or who's to blame, avoiding conspiracy theories. It's a source reference for many books that came later.

There was a second attack in 1942; and a third one was planned. The second one, by long-range seaplane bombers, did not go off well.