by James Johns
A number of experimental drills using this concept were conducted, and surprisingly, they all worked, possibly because there was prior notice of the exercises, and there was so little to work with. But what would happen with no advance notice, which was the purpose of the whole plan to handle an actual attack?
With such a shortage of planes, General Martin made another plea to Washington on August 20, 1941. This highly detailed report to support his request included an analysis of a potential Japanese attack. His analysis, reiterating an early-morning attack, pointed out: “Our most likely enemy, ORANGE, can probably employ a maximum of 6 carriers against Oahu … it will be necessary for the carrier to approach within 233 nautical miles of Oahu before it can launch its aircraft.”13 Martin also communicated that Japan’s approach would probably come from the north, possibly from the west or south, and most unlikely from the east. What could have been more precise?
The bright spot of the Joint Coastal Frontier Defense Plan was that it would or could work with advance warning. So everything depended upon Kimmel’s being fed the latest intelligence from Admiral Stark, which would allow Kimmel to make any changes necessary to meet the changing situation.
There had also been a plan suggested to create a joint services center, similar to what the British had created, in a huge cave near Fort Shafter, but Bloch recommended against it because of dissimilarity of missions. But within two weeks after December 7, 1941, there would be one.
With both the army and navy being so inadequately equipped, the thought of having to go to war in the next year or so was certainly a sobering one. Most sobering was the line-up of the world armies.
By the end of 1940, Germany had eighty-nine infantry divisions, plus nine armored divisions with twenty-five hundred tanks, including satellite armies. Troops totaled about 2.5 million men, armies that had been combat tested in Poland and Western Europe.14 Italy’s army had seventy-three divisions, which included fifty-nine infantry and three armored divisions, combat tested in North Africa.15 Japan had forty-one divisions and growing, combat tested in China, with about 1.7 million troops in uniform.16 The Axis then totaled, conservatively, over two hundred combat-tested divisions, against which the United States on paper could muster only thirty-some divisions that were neither operational nor fully equipped. Training was insufficient, and there had been no combined maneuvers.
Also by 1940, Germany’s Luftwaffe was the most powerful air force in the world with thirty-eight hundred modern combat aircraft.17 Japan’s army and naval planes totaled about four thousand each.18 Italy’s Regia Aeronautic rounded out at twenty-five hundred combat planes,19 giving the Axis over fourteen thousand combat aircraft. The United States had some catching up to do.
Most of the aircraft that the United States would fight World War II with were still on the drawing boards, which was of little consolation to those pilots who would meanwhile have to engage America’s enemies on one-way trips. Standardization was still in the future, as was mass production. But thanks to a superb advertising campaign, the American public was convinced that the United States had the best air force in the world. For all the publicity given at the time to the Boeing B-17, a four-engine strategic bomber known as the Flying Fortress, there were no more than fifty-six of these in service as of June 1940. And defensively, these were helpless when compared with much later variants.
The man who would get the Army Air Corps off the ground would be General Henry “Hap” Arnold. A true aviation pioneer, Arnold was taught to fly by the Wright Brothers and was among the first thirteen aviators to fly for the U.S. Army. After graduating from West Point in 1907, Arnold rose through the ranks, and by 1935 had attained the rank of brigadier general. In 1936, he was appointed Assistant to the Chief of Air Corps, and only two years later, was appointed Chief of Air Corps with the rank of major general.
Known for his impatience, Arnold struggled to convince Roosevelt of the dire state of the Air Corps, and once that was accomplished, getting the needed funding was the next step. Determined to make the United States the number one air force in the world, Arnold was not at all hesitant to directly lobby members of Congress on his own, and he often used Charles Lindbergh’s celebrity to help get the job done. Working with Hap Arnold, Lindbergh had become the point person for the Air Corps, “involving himself in countless discussions with members of Congress, bureaucrats, diplomats, business executives, scientists, and engineers about what needed to be done—and spent—to make America No. 1 in airpower.”20
Britain’s success at Taranto the previous fall had raised the eyebrows of the United States Navy, and it provided the inspiration both in Washington and Hawaii to re-think Pearl Harbor’s defenses. The concerns were in the form of attack that Japan might employ: bombing, torpedo attack by air, submarine mining of waters, or off-shore naval bombardment, with any of these accompanied by sabotage. These concerns were all embodied in a communication from Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox to his counterpart on the army side, Secretary of War Henry Stimson. The emphasis was that these possibilities could become realities. In Knox’s opinion, fighters, a radar warning system, antiaircraft guns, and joint army-navy exercises were of the highest priorities with which to defend Oahu.
Stimson was in total agreement. An air attack without warning would put the burden of repelling it in the army’s lap, which was totally incapable of meeting it. Fighter strength on Oahu was a joke. There were a few Boeing P-12 biplanes with a top speed of less than 200 miles per hour. An improvement on those was the fourteen Boeing P-26s which, designed in 1933, had open cockpits and fixed landing gear. Known as Peashooters, these only had a top speed of 230 miles per hour. The modern fighters consisted of thirty-nine Curtiss P-36 Hawks, which, with a top speed of 290 miles per hour, were considered state of the art, but only until the shooting actually started.
The only warning systems on Oahu were the sound detectors, whose maximum range of five miles made them useless. And if the detectors did warn in time, there was a shortage of antiaircraft artillery and ammunition, so proper or adequate defense was virtually impossible. There wasn’t even one barrage balloon on the entire island. And at this point in 1941, proper radar for the ships was still in the future.
Fifty P-40B fighters had been promised the army. By March of 1941, General Marshall had finally accepted the fact that the only way to get the fighters that Short needed for the defense of Oahu was to not wait for assembly-line production but to strip existing fighter squadrons in the States. A number of units were thinned out of their modern P-40B aircraft so that Marshall could muster fifty of the fighters for Hawaii. These were transported from the west coast aboard the Lexington, along with other vitally needed supplies.21
Both the barrage balloons and radar were assured by summer. It was the radar that had saved England in the Battle of Britain the previous summer, but the system had been in place years before the shooting started.
The only bright spot in Short’s defenses was the manpower of his two infantry divisions, the Twenty-Fourth and the Twenty-Fifth. The former was considered trained, but the newly formed Twenty-Fifth was created by robbing a regiment of the Twenty-Fourth, adding a regiment of reservists, and creating a regiment of draftees. But the mentality of prewar concepts considered the two sufficient to defend the island against invasion.
The increased tensions in the Pacific did, however, bring a greater number of B-17s to Hawaii than to any other garrison. The first flight of twenty-one B-17Ds departed Hamilton Field in San Francisco on May 13 for the thirteen-hour flight. The Hawaiian air force would now transition into the heavy bombers. But by late summer, the focus shifted to sending reinforcements to the Philippines, which changed the picture somewhat at Hickam Field in Hawaii.
The B-17s from the States destined for the Philippines had to be stripped of full crews, weapons, and ammunition for the two-thousand-mile leg to Hawaii. And with more B17s to come, new crew members had to be trained to fill the vacancies. In addition, the aircraft had to be se
rviced or repaired to continue on to the Philippines. This meant stripping General Short’s B-17s of parts. Soon he would be reduced to just six flyable aircraft to provide the crew training.
The navy was experiencing the same supply problems. The lessons of Taranto had provided the impetus for Washington to lean on the Bureau of Ordnance to develop additional torpedo nets to place within Pearl Harbor, which would have provided additional protection for the ships in harbor. Almost a year of prioritizing would fail to produce one net, and on December 7, none had materialized. Admiral Stark, in a letter written shortly before Kimmel assumed command in early 1941, said it all: “In my humble opinion we may wake up any day … and find ourselves in another undeclared war…. I have told the gang here for months past that in my opinion we are heading straight for this war, that we could not assume anything else and personally I do not see how we can avoid [it] … many months longer. And of course it may be a matter of weeks or days…. I have been moving Heaven and Earth trying to meet such a situation, and am terribly impatient at the slowness with which things move here.”22
B-18s, P-26s, and P-12s at Hickam Field, 1940.
Of historical significance was a communication in February 1941 from General Marshall to General Short in Hawaii, wherein he stated, “The real perils of the situation lay in sabotage,”23 as well as in an attack by air or sea. He even admitted that it would be difficult to protect the fleet with the current shortage of both fighter planes and antiaircraft guns. It was Marshall’s opinion that if the Hawaiian forces could survive the first six hours of an enemy attack without suffering serious damage, then the armaments they currently had on hand should be sufficient to ward off further aggression. To explain the shortage of planes and artillery, he went on to say:
What Kimmel does not realize is that we are tragically lacking in this materiel throughout the Army and that Hawaii is on a far better basis than any other command in the Army.
The fullest protection for the Fleet is a major consideration for us, there can be little question about that; but the Navy itself makes demands on us for commands other than Hawaii, which make it difficult for us to meet the requirements of Hawaii…. You should make clear to Admiral Kimmel that we are doing everything that is humanly possible to build up the Army defenses of the Naval overseas installations, but we cannot perform a miracle.24
And amidst the discussions of armament shortfalls and potential threats to Hawaii, the U.S. ambassador in Japan, Joseph Grew, would confirm for them what was to come.
Peru’s ambassador to Japan, Ricardo Rivera-Schreiber, had passed the information on to Max Bishop, the American embassy’s third secretary, indicating that the information had come from a conversation overheard by a cook. And on January 27, 1941, Ambassador Grew sent a coded message to Washington which included, “A member of the Embassy was told by my … colleague that from many quarters, including a Japanese one, he had heard that a surprise mass attack on Pearl Harbor was planned by the Japanese military forces, in case of ‘trouble’ between Japan and the United States; that the attack would involve the use of all the Japanese military facilities. My colleague said that he was prompted to pass this on because it had come to him from many sources, although the plan seemed fantastic.”25
Grew was the relay to Japan of Americans’ concern with Japan’s war in China, and now there was a new twist: a hint of war with the United States. The message was passed from naval intelligence to CNO Admiral Stark, and then onto Admiral Kimmel in Hawaii, who was just starting to settle into his new command. But Washington had put little military value into the message, and diplomatically speaking, who would give the Peruvian Embassy privileged information that the Americans couldn’t get themselves? As a result, it was soon forgotten. When the information was passed on to Kimmel, a note was added to it emphasizing that naval intelligence only considered the information a rumor. “Furthermore, based on known data regarding the present disposition and employment of Japanese naval and army forces, no move against Pearl Harbor appears imminent or planned in the foreseeable future.”26 Not in the foreseeable future.
But the message did have what should have been an alarm because it was at this precise time in late January that Admiral Yamamoto was ordered to make a plan for the Pearl Harbor attack. In retrospect, U.S. naval intelligence had been trying to figure out how to launch a successful attack on Pearl Harbor for twenty years, and it just seemed too far from home and too big a risk for what Japan would have to employ to chance it. Yamamoto was convinced, however, that Japan would have no hope of winning a war with the United States unless the American fleet at Pearl Harbor was destroyed.
In responding to another reminder from Marshall for an “early review”27 of Hawaii’s defenses, General Short replied that he was cognizant of the entire situation and reiterated the most pressing need for an aircraft warning service, a radar system that would detect an enemy farther than the five-mile sound detectors. Protection of the island was “so dependent upon the early completion of this Aircraft Warning Service that I believe all quibbling over details should be stopped at once.”28 Marshall concurred and wrote back on March 15:
It will be necessary to comply with certain fixed regulations in those cases where [radar] facilities are to be established on lands pertaining to the Secretary of the Interior. The National Park Service officials are willing to give us the temporary use of their lands when other lands are not suitable for the purpose, but they will not waive the requirements as to submission of preliminary building plans showing the architecture and general appearance. They are also very definitely opposed to permitting structures of any type to be erected at such places as will be open to view and materially alter the natural appearance of the reservation.29
Secretary of War Stimson had promised the radar by June. The radar sets were of two varieties, fixed and mobile. Then there was the issue of the trained personnel necessary to install, operate, and maintain them. By December 7, the fixed sets had still not been installed, but a few of the shorter-range mobile sets were operative, and crew training had begun. Short’s further concerns emanated from the fact that U.S. airfields offered perfect targets. Where aircraft were parked in precision rows, they were invitations to disaster. In no case had any funds been allocated for dispersion or bunkers to offer the survival of some.
Because of the United States’ precarious position in the Pacific, the major question was still: when do the Americans fight, short of being attacked themselves, or if the British and the Dutch are attacked? Assuming an affirmative decision was made, what would they do, and what would they fight with? They would have a difficult time to just defend what they currently had.
One of the obstacles in fortifying the Pacific commands was inefficient and poorly managed wartime production. The business of transitioning the American economy into a military-oriented economy was exacting a toll because no one knew with absolute certainty how to achieve it in the best business sense. The country wasn’t really at war, yet it was.
Management of the new wartime economy justified the creation of the National Defense Advisory Commission (NDAC) which surrendered to the Office of Production Management, and finally the War Production Board (WPB). In 1941, Donald M. Nelson, executive vice-president of merchandising at Sears and Roebuck, was appointed director of the Office of Production Management, and in 1942, he became the chairman of the War Production Board. Known to some for his inability to make decisions, he was highly criticized by Secretary Stimson, who tried to have him replaced. For whatever reason, Harry Hopkins, who was by then Roosevelt’s most trusted adviser, talked Roosevelt out of it, and Nelson remained in the role for the duration of the war.
Millions were being spent, but the finished wartime products were slow in coming off the assembly lines, which hit a low of production during the summer of 1941. But the corporations were booming, manufacturing for the civilian economy while building plant additions to produce for the military economy. New car sales were reportedly at record leve
ls. The military demands for raw materials were such that they were starting to crimp the civilian market. With the civilian economy becoming a seller’s market, how long could the nation continue to support both?
The new Ford Motor Company plant at Willow Run, Michigan, was a case in point. As the largest aircraft production plant in the country, designed to turn out one B-24 heavy bomber per hour, it found its production stressed to the point that it was turning out only one aircraft per day.30 With thousands of parts per aircraft and hundreds of design changes, each required the major retooling of machines that Ford was equipped to deal with.
The plant was about an hour’s driving distance from Detroit, and with the eventual rationing of gasoline and tires, as well as a lack of local housing, the daily absentee rate at the plant was just under 20 percent. At times, just as many workers were leaving as were being hired. Added to this was Henry Ford’s policy of not hiring women for factory jobs. The employment dilemma was finally resolved by scaling down the workforce, made possible by farming parts out to subcontractors and to other plants. But it would still take until 1944 to fine-tune the operation to the point that it could actually produce one aircraft per hour. Meanwhile, with skepticism running high, the employees of Willow Run jokingly asked the question, “Will it run?” Detroit was just one example. Other varieties of aircraft, plus artillery barrage balloons and radar, were coming off the assembly lines in dangerously low quantities.
Senator Harry Byrd (D–VA) announced that he considered it “an act of utter folly for the nation to become a voluntary shooting participant in the war.”31 Byrd reported glaring examples of production inefficiency. As examples, he explained that only sixty, four-engine bombers were coming off the assembly lines each month, adding that only a dozen 90mm antiaircraft artillery had actually been delivered.32 He cited that tank and naval ship production was a disgrace for the money spent. He then suggested a total reorganization of the U.S. war production system to be redesigned “along sound lines of business efficiency.”33