by Attack on Pearl Harbor: Strategy, Combat, Myths, Deceptions
The consequences of General Short’s decision to declare a holiday and park his aircraft wingtip to wingtip can be quantified: it cost between 215 and 252 aircraft damaged and destroyed over and above what would normally be expected to fall victim to that level of effort.
As to the employment of the fighters: with target aircraft parked wingtip-to-wingtip, the rate of kill for the strafing fighters would likely be on the order of 1 to 2 kills per sortie, with the A6M Zero’s small ammunition supply the dominant constraint. This would give 43 to 86 destroyed or damaged aircraft due to the efforts of the strafing A6M Zeros in the first wave. Assuming that the 43 fighters would have been able to stop the 14 Army fighter sorties from shooting down any bombers, this means that 43 to 86 ground kills were achieved at a cost of 8 to 11 Japanese aircraft shot down, a loss ratio of between 4 and 8 to 1.
As it was, the Japanese estimate of damage was inflated. They estimated that approximately 500 American planes were “wiped out.”52
Was it worth it? On a macro scale, during 1943 the United States produced 85,433 planes compared to 16,693 by the Japanese, a ratio of 5.1 to 1. If you consider that at least two-thirds of American aircraft were earmarked for the European war, then the production ratio would be 1.7 to 1. Thus, the 4 or 8 to 1 loss ratio could be considered an excellent return for the Japanese.
However, the importance of destroying American aircraft had to be balanced by the potential losses of Japanese pilots and aircrew. At the beginning of the war, the Japanese Navy had about 3,500 pilots, with about 600 assigned to the carrier groups and the majority of the remaining assigned to land-based squadrons. In 1943, the US trained 89,714 pilots compared to 5,400 Japanese pilots, a 16.6 to 1 ratio.53 Japan’s core of trained air crew at the beginning of the war represented Japan’s best chance for victory. Losing 8–11 aircrew that could have been prevented by better discipline by the fighters would not contribute favorably to the 16.6:1 ratio they would need in pilot losses just to break even, particularly considering that destruction of an American aircraft on the ground did not imply loss of its aircrew. The Japanese could not afford to trade their aviators for unmanned American aircraft. Japan’s initial cadre was precious—the decimation of these trained aviators during 1942 and 1943 was one of the primary reasons why Japan lost the war.
Doctrinal Shortfalls
The Japanese eventually recognized the need for top cover. Lessons recorded:
It is quite necessary to retain elements of the forces as guards in the air even if there is no enemy interceptor in the air, while ground strafing. Fighters which, after strafing Bellows Field, were about to strike Kaneohe airfield, circling at an altitude of 2,000 meters, were surprised by nine enemy interceptors. This was attributed to the lack of attention to the air. In any case, close attention to the air is unavoidable.54
Missing also was coordination of the efforts of the bombers and the fighters. The plan did not provide for what is identified today as SEAD, or Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses. SEAD is generally provided when the level of enemy air defenses could potentially interfere with the bombers’ delivery of their payloads, or even to shoot down the attacking bombers. SEAD was a recognized mission for fighters at sea in 1941, although it was not called by that name. It consisted of either strafing air defense positions or bombing them. Fighters were provided with hard points to carry a number of light bombs for this purpose. The AA positions to be suppressed could be ashore, on the decks of the target ship(s), or their escorts.
Employment of this kind of SEAD in support of torpedo attacks was known and practiced by the Japanese. In such a coordinated attack, fighters would strafe the decks of target ships, killing the crews of light AA guns or forcing their crews to take cover and otherwise drawing AA fire away from the torpedo bombers. This form of support was suggested from previous experience against the Chinese since the inception of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937,55 and against the Russians during the Nomonhan incident in 1939.
Fighter Performance
Overall, there were elements of the Japanese fighters’ actions that were questionable. They attacked private planes on recreational trips, shooting down two. They strafed civilian automobiles as far as three miles from the bases56 on the roads outside Wheeler and Pearl Harbor. Pictures of machine-gunned private automobiles appeared in the Honolulu news papers, triggering outrage in the population. At Wahiawa, a small town next to Wheeler and Schofield Barracks, aircraft strafed the residential area. A plane flying up the road from Pearl Harbor gunned down an old Chinese hired man.57 A telephone lineman along a civilian road was chased off his pole by machine gun bullets. Chartered fishing boats were strafed outside the harbor. A non-commissioned officers’ housing area was strafed.58 For some reason the fighters put concentrations of fire into private cars in an outlying parking lot at Ewa Field. All that ammunition could have been better employed against targets more relevant to the objectives of the attack.59
Their aggressiveness was not matched with good judgment. A single aircraft at 0830 strafed Bellows Field, which was not scheduled for attention until the second wave. “That lone strafer did Bellows a favor, for the warning gave… about an hour’s grace to disperse the planes.”60
A similar lack of discipline was noted later in the war.
Observers on the ground testified to the fighters’ aggressiveness. One fighter strafed so low that its propeller struck sparks off the runway, another scraped its belly tank—aggressive strafing runs, or alternately, inexperienced pilots, target fixation, and a too-low pullout.
The lack of forethought in planning, integrated training and rehearsal was evident. Lessons assessed that:
At Wheeler and Barbers Point airfields, ground strafings were made from the beginning without any control, so that flames and smoke arose elsewhere prevented continued attacks on undamaged planes. When many planes attempted to make simultaneous strafing attacks from other directions through poor visibility, there was much danger of colliding with each other. Therefore, a plan should be made to control strafing attacks in such cases.
Probably their most portentous event was the failure to shoot down 13 B-17s that appeared over the island after a trans-oceanic flight from California. These aircraft were important targets, especially considering that they had the range and speed to be an immediate threat to the Japanese carriers. The bombers were flying without ammunition and with their defensive armament in cosmoline, so there was no opposing fire. Yet, none of the B-17s were shot down. They all made safe landings at various places throughout the islands, one on a golf course. Only one was destroyed, burned in half on a runway when Japanese bullets ignited flares stored in the aircraft. The B-17 was a tough plane, as the Japanese would learn again in the Philippines. The fact that these huge bombers escaped has to be scored as a black mark against the fighters.
Some of the A6M Zero pilots displayed poor skills. An American noted that one Japanese strafer
…pulled awful hard on the stick, not as any regular pilot would do, and I might say he was an awful poor pilot, because the way he was following in on his gunnery line, why, he tried to fire—to follow me straight in, and to correct fire, why, he gave it too much rudder from one side and then too much rudder on the other side, and he completely missed his target.61
Overall, the fighters that took advantage of the concentration of closely parked aircraft did their job effectively. Theirs was the best performance of the raid, delivered by the aviators that the Japanese believed to be the least skilled.
One shadow of the future can be illustrated by the actions of one fighter pilot, although it applies to all Japanese aviators. A rescue submarine was stationed off a small island to the west of Oahu to provide a haven for damaged aircraft. An A6M Zero fighter sustained damage while strafing and was leaking fuel. It would not be able to return to the carrier. Rather than heading to the rescue submarine, the pilot chose to intentionally crash himself and his aircraft into the enemy, ending his service as an Imperial Japanese Navy fighter p
ilot rather than attempting to go for the rescue submarine. There were other cases where damaged aircraft might have taken similar action—two dive-bombers crashed into tenders, and at least one other dove into a hangar.
This was very much in line with Japanese fighting spirit and their ethos of self-sacrifice. However, in the long run, the losses of trained aircrew in these incidents and in the hundreds of more to come would be one of the most significant factors in Japan’s defeat.
The greatest aspect of the fighters’ performance that has been unrecognized over the years is their failure to execute their primary mission. They did not sweep the sky of American fighters and maintain air superiority for the duration of the attack. Where American fighters could get aloft they scored over a four to one kill ratio, and suffered only 14% attrition in an environment where they were outnumbered by about four to one by the higher-performance Japanese fighters.
In China the A6M Zero dominated the skies and destroyed the Chinese Air Force. Over Pearl Harbor, the few American fighters that got aloft more than held their own.
Assessment: Command and Control
Japanese command and control during the attack was nearly nonexistent and totally unsatisfactory.
First there was the fumble with the flares.
Then the commanders lost control of the torpedo attack. Torpedo bombers went crisscrossing hither and yon, runs were aborted, torpedoes wasted on unsuitable targets, planes nearly collided, and ordnance was poorly distributed over the targets.
The second wave dive-bombers command and control was also poor. First, they had their instructions changed at the last minute while they were on the carriers’ decks, something inexcusable for an attack following ten months of planning. Their weapons could not achieve the desired effects on their new targets. The last-minute change was triggered by a reconnaissance report that there were no carriers in the harbor. This contingency ought to have been anticipated, and planned for accordingly. This was the first of a series of command gaffes that contributed to making the dive-bombers’ attack ineffective.
Over the targets the dive-bombers’ leadership made a number of questionable decisions. They tried to sink Nevada in the channel with unsuitable weapons and an inadequate level of effort. Attacks were delivered against destroyers in the channel misidentified as cruisers. Attacks were wasted on tenders misidentified as battleships. Attacks were wasted on destroyers outside the harbor, and an auxiliary several miles from Battleship Row.
As for the commanders of the fighters, there was no evidence of positive control at greater than the shotai level. Rather, it looked like a bunch of teenage samurais on a bust-‘em-up spree. Pilots went swanning off independently looking for what they could find, wasting ammunition and fuel on many inappropriate targets. After carting ammunition 3,000 miles from Japan to Pearl Harbor, it is easy to imagine admirals grinding their teeth to have it wasted on pot shots at telephone linemen and pleasure aircraft and yachts. Had it not been for the fact that the aircraft on the airfields were lined up like clay pigeons on a firing range, in bunches hard for even the most inept pilot to miss, the results of the fighters’ efforts could have been greatly reduced. The fighters showed little discipline and their commanders little inclination to enforce any.
Much of this absence of control stemmed from Japanese doctrine. The commander of the strike was really not expected to exert control once the battle was joined. The strike commander, Fuchida, was in a level bomber at 10,000 feet trying to deliver his own attack at the same time the torpedo bombers were trying to complete theirs. Fuchida’s attack was one of the last; he dropped after the torpedo bombers had all completed their runs. The strike commander was not in a position to sort out the confused torpedo attack.
Neither was he in a position to observe and count the torpedo hits, a critical bit of information needed if he were to be able to direct the second-wave bombers to the most effective distribution of their attacks, since underwater damage might not be observable from 10,000 feet an hour after the torpedoes hit. Instead, Fuchida passively looked on as the dive-bombers wasted most of their bombs.
The Japanese command and control failed. The commanders had little control and did little to contribute to the success of the attack beyond the ordnance that they personally delivered. Some of their decisions reduced the effectiveness of the attack.
Target Vulnerability
The Japanese had the advantage of delivering the first attack in the Pacific War. They were inflicting damage on a fleet still largely in a peacetime configuration. During peacetime, habitability and maintenance and “spit and polish” take precedence over combat considerations. Ships had layers of flammable oil-based paint on their bulkheads, sometimes an inch thick. Attractive linoleum was on the decks, which burned and released toxic gasses. Flammable materials were everywhere, paint, oils, fuel for the ships’ boats. The living spaces had everything from wooden furniture to pianos. Stuffing tubes for wire and pipe runs had their sealant material dried and cracked, so boundaries thought to be watertight were not. Gaskets around relatively inaccessible closures, such as those in ventilation ducts, leaked copiously, contributing to problems with progressive flooding.
Many of the ships in the fleet had yet to recover from a decade of depression-era underfunded maintenance and repair. For ships constantly hogging and sagging and working in the seas, the stresses caused metal embrittlement, loose rivets, watertight doors with dried and cracked gaskets that would not seal and were warped beyond a tight fit, decks that leaked and machinery foundations brittle and vulnerable to shock damage.
Vestal was hit by an AP bomb that passed through her stern and exploded beneath the ship. The flooding forced her commanding officer to put her aground.
The lesson to be learned from Vestal’s experience is that watertight integrity cannot be counted on in the case of older vessels. This ship was about thirty-three years old at the time, and it was found that flooding was progressive through the bulkhead and deck boundaries which supposedly were watertight.62
At Pearl Harbor, the entire battle line consisted of “older vessels”—the oldest was 27 years old and the youngest 20, in an age when the Washington Naval Treaty specified that a battleship’s life was 20 years with replacement construction beginning after the ship’s 17th year.63 Little money was allocated to maintain the older battleships in anticipation of their retirement, and some ships had seriously deteriorated. Even the youngest of the Treaty battleships, better maintained, had their problems. Ensign Victor Delano in West Virginia’s Central Station related how he saw water that “spouted through the cracks around the edges [of a watertight door] and shooting like a hose through an air-test opening.” This was a telling statement on the ship’s material condition, considering that Central Station was the ship’s damage control center, responsible for maintaining the ship’s watertight integrity.
After the attack, US ships would be stripped of linoleum, bulkheads chipped to bare metal to remove flammable paint, wooden furniture was offloaded, paints, oils, and fuels better stored and better controlled, watertight integrity corrected and verified, and other measures taken—damage control quickly took precedence over habitability, comfort, or convenience. The susceptibility of ships to bombs and torpedoes would be greatly reduced as the war progressed.
Assessment: The Japanese Fleet Submarine Effort
Twenty three large fleet submarines were sent to Hawaiian waters. On 7 December they were deployed in three layers around the harbor, at choke points, and along expected shipping lines of approach.
Five were “special attack force” submarines carrying midget submarines. They departed the area on 12 December 1941, leaving 18 submarines to blockade the islands.
(14) Submarine Patrol Areas
Yamamoto expected the air attack to flush the fleet out of the harbor. Damaged ships would be sent to the mainland for repairs. Those ships underway at the time of the attack would need to return to Pearl Harbor for fuel. The submarines were to sink thes
e ships. At one time Yamamoto mentioned that he expected better results from the submarines than from the aerial assault.
In fact, both US carriers were out on missions, and there were a large number of cruisers, destroyers, and minesweepers in the exercise areas—44 Pacific Fleet combatants were out of the harbor at the time of the attack.
Merchant shipping was also a target. The Hawaiian Islands themselves were not self-sufficient: in 1941 imports required approximately 25 shiploads per month to bring in food and manufactured goods and take away export products (mostly sugar and pineapple).64 This traffic was also to be sunk.
There was every indication that the Hawaiian area would provide ample targets, fully justifying the deployment of almost half the available Japanese submarine force.
The submarines’ performance was disappointing. Warships moved with little interference. Merchant traffic was not interrupted. About the only accomplishments from this massive submarine deployment was a single torpedo hit on the Saratoga on 11 January 1942, putting her out of action for three months. The oiler Neches was sunk on 23 January 1942. This represented a slim return for the deployment of 23 submarines over several months.
Very few attacks were executed. Upon their return, Admiral Ueda accused the Japanese submariners of cowardice.65
CHAPTER EIGHT
BATTLE DAMAGE ASSESSMENT
The initial damage assessment was reported to Admiral Nagumo by Commander Fuchida. He had lingered over the harbor until after the departure of the second wave to evaluate the results. He returned to Akagi and made a quick round of the other aviators, comparing observations prior to going to the flag bridge. His initial estimate was two battleships sunk, four battleships with severe damage, and four cruisers greatly damaged.
A Japanese submarine reported a tremendous explosion in the harbor after dark. Later the Naval General Staff received a report through diplomatic channels that a battleship had been sunk by midget submarines after the air attack, a report that was accepted happily and uncritically.