The Day Japan Lost the War

By Mayo Mohs

Pearl Harbor was a smashing victory--and a ghastly mistake

The Japanese who were there, 40 years ago next Monday, Dec. 7, remember it as a day of breathtaking accomplishment and extraordinary luck. Lieut. Heijiro Abe was navigating the lead plane in a formation of Nakajima bombers over Pearl Harbor's "battleship row" when his chance came; a bomb from his plane soon tore into the bowels of the West Virginia. On the eastern edge of Oahu, at Bellows Field, Sub-Lieut. Iyozoh Fujita, flying a Zero fighter from the Japanese carrier Soryu on his first combat mission, saw his flight commander shot down by an enraged soldier furiously firing a Browning automatic rifle. Both Fujita and Abe survived the war. Abe, now 69, became a rear admiral in Japan's postwar Maritime Self-Defense Force; Fujita, now 64, was a pilot for Japan Air Lines until his retirement in 1977, making regular runs in Boeing 747 jumbo jets to the mainland U.S.--and Hawaii.

At the end of that Sunday's carnage, the U.S. toll was 2,403 dead, all eight battleships in the harbor crippled or destroyed, 188 planes demolished and another 159 damaged. When Pearl Harbor survivors and military brass gather next Monday for an anniversary ceremony at the Arizona memorial, the mood will still be somber: 1,102 of the dead were entombed in the sunken hulk of the battleship over which the memorial stands.

Yet, in the hindsight of history, Pearl Harbor was a disaster for Japan's imperial ambitions. The attack was both the beginning of World War II in the Pacific and the beginning of its end. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the commander in chief of the combined Japanese fleet, who planned the Pearl Harbor operation, warned of that possibility as late as September 1941, when battle practice had already begun. "Japan cannot vanquish the United States," he told a gathering of old schoolmates. "Therefore we should not fight the United States." As Yamamoto saw it, there was only one slim chance for victory if war with the U.S. were to be pursued. A massive surprise Midway on Pearl Harbor might inflict enough damage on the U.S. Pacific Fleet based there to win an early truce from Washington.

Japan's preparations for that attack are recorded in an exhaustive new history timed to coincide with the anniversary, At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor (McGraw-Hill; $22.95). Author Gordon W. Prange, who died in 1980, began interviewing many of the Japanese principals while serving as a historian on General Douglas Mac Arthur's staff in Tokyo after Japan's surrender. He learned of the daunting tactical problems that faced the planners: how to find precisely the right bombing altitude and bombs to pierce armor-plated decks, how to perfect both torpedoes and torpedo-plane tactics for Pearl Harbor's shallow waters.

Not until late in Prange's U.S. researches, however, did a mass of newly declassified material surface in archives. Thus his book reflects the view of the many official investigations that it was principally the negligence of the American military commanders in Hawaii, especially after a Nov. 26 "war warning" message from Washington, that led to the disastrous unreadiness at Pearl Harbor.

As it happens, the old argument about how much Washington knew of the Japanese attack plans in advance is opening up again. British Author John Costello, in his just published The Pacific War (Rawson, Wade; $24), contends that the U.S. and Britain had agreed in November to join forces in case of a Japanese attack--although the offensive was expected in the Philippines or Malaya. In Infamy, to be published by Doubleday next March, Historian John Toland argues that Washington for decades covered up its failure to warn Pearl Harbor of the imminent danger.

However these arguments may sort out in light of the new discoveries, the most serious error was committed by the Japanese. Prange points out that Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, commander of the Pearl Harbor strike force, had many misgivings about the attack and ultimately failed to exploit its success after carrying out his original orders. When the initial two waves of planes returned to their carriers, Nagumo ordered the task force home. Because the U.S. carriers Lexington and Enterprise were still somewhere at sea, the admiral was concerned about protecting his fleet. Had he sent in another wave of attackers, however, he could easily have destroyed a huge supply of fuel in aboveground tanks. Deprived of that fuel, what was left of the U.S. Pacific Fleet would have had to pull back to West Coast ports, leaving the Pacific to the Japanese.

As it was, Pearl Harbor was soon resurrected and the fleet rebuilt. Japan's shaky chance to keep the U.S. out of the war in the Pacific was irretrievably lost and Americans' will to win unquenchably ignited.

--By Mayo Mohs

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