It began with my friend Joe Kashi: “Thinking over events of the past week, I recall years of warnings about Trump’s personality approach, coming from scores of nationally prominent psychiatrists, former heads of national intelligence, retired generals, and a lot of other experienced people.”
I responded: In a sense, like Pearl Harbor or 9/11: flashing red warnings everywhere that we were either not seeing or not capable of acting on. God knows I’ve had that happen in my personal life.
From Joe Kashi:
To make your Pearl Harbor analogy even more apt, two earlier major US fleet training exercises, about 1932 under Admiral Yarnall, and about 1938 under Admiral King, specifically staged successful Sunday morning sneak carrier air attacks on Pearl Harbor.
In both instances, the older battleship admirals clique then still at the top of the Navy managed to explain away, ignore, or forget what their rival admirals of the up-and-coming carrier force had been able to do. They even ignored a real-life battle example in 1940 or so, when a few dozen old biplanes of Britain's Royal Navy disabled the bulk of the Italian fleet at Taranto, a similarly shallow harbor ordinarily not suitable for torpedo attack. The Japanese sent some technically inclined officers to Italy and simply emulated what the British had already done.
And, despite a war warning sent to the Army and Navy commanders at Hawaii, those commanders simply assumed that it would happen far away and not immediately affect them. All that despite our undeclared but shooting war in the Atlantic with Germany, Japan's key Allied, and the Japanese move into Indochina. A few, like Halsey, saw it coming and put their own forces on high alert, rapid response status.
The US even had a direct intelligence warning about the Japanese interest in a Pearl Harbor attack via a British double-agent, Dusko Popov, who brought to J. Edgar Hoover the detailed instructions that Popov received to recon Pearl Harbor. Hoover, however, did not like Popov's playboy aristocrat image and spent his meeting with Popov lecturing Popov about his supposed moral failings rather than looking at the potential intelligence windfall.
The lower-level Navy codebreakers who turned the tide via the "intelligence victory" at Midway (particularly Commander/Captain Rochefort) were ultimately shoved aside by their jealous, less successful bureaucratic rivals even though there was a war on.
Human nature would seem to be less than perfectly evolved, even in the midst of a life-or-death struggle.
My Response:
I knew much but not all of the Pearl Harbor story, being a history buff. And having read At Dawn We Slept.
Kashi:
I just think that the pre-Pearl Harbor history of ignored warnings is a currently apt analogy.
There's an even more striking case - a 1967 MIT Poli Sci doctoral dissertation Barbarossa documents well over 100 concrete warnings of the 1941 German invasion forwarded to Stalin and why Stalin chose to ignore all of them, as he distrusted the provenance.
Basically, that arch cynic and realist Stalin had shot or imprisoned almost all of his competent generals as potential rivals, knew that the Soviet Union was not yet ready and was playing for time (just like the US viz Japan in the Pacific), accepted German assurances that they would not break their treaty with him so long as he continued to dutifully simply Germany with critical materials, and accepted German disinformation that the massing of German forces on the Russian border was actually a cover operation to disguise a new German move against Britain.
Stalin was so worried about not provoking the Germans that he shot as spies and provocateurs some of the Germans who defected with warnings, and some Russian military who accepted those warnings.
Retired Naval officer, and my first managing editor, Dr. William H. Roberts:
I recommend Roberta Wholstetter’s Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision for the intel background—it wasn’t that the indicators were missed, but that there were far too many contradictory indicators. Looking back, of course, it was easy to pick out the ones that mattered and disregard the ones that didn’t.
For the attack itself, Alan Zimm’s Attack on Pearl Harbor: Strategy, Combat, Myths, Deceptions. He pretty conclusively disposes of the “brilliance” of the attack and of Yamamoto’s supposed air-mindedness. Zimm evaluated the attack planning and execution by the standards of 1941 and was definitely not impressed with its “brilliance.”
Robert Hanyok’s Catching the Fox Unaware discusses Japanese efforts to keep the Americans in the dark.
As several authors have demonstrated, you need to be careful with At Dawn We Slept because Prange ascribes almost every decision to personal characteristics. An issue with Prange is his reliance on Mitsuo Fuchida. See Jonathan Parshall’s take.
Kashi:
I think that you make fair points. However, the Taranto, Yarnall, and King raids were strong long-term indicators of capability to incapacitate a battle fleet at anchor and there was strong long-term evidence of Japan's overall intentions. Combining those already-demonstrated capabilities and precedence with demonstrated overall intention, you have a high-likelihood overall scenario.
Halsey, for one, saw it coming and had the carrier force on ready and armed alert on the aircraft ferry trip to Wake and discussed that with Kimmel before he left for Wake with the planes. And, Halsey wasn't the most cerebral of Admirals. The big-gun clique basically had King on the bench (well, the General Board, but that's basically the same thing) until 1941.
Roberts:
Joe, the problem was that there were more “high-likelihood” scenarios than there were resources or attention to deal with them.