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Japan's Attack on Pearl Harbor Was a Colossal Mistake
Eighty years ago the Imperial Japanese Navy pulled off an astonishing feat of arms, pummeling the U.S. Navy battle line moored at Pearl Harbor.
www.19fortyfive.com
This article sums up the traditional view of Japan's failures at Pearl Harbor: not just the miss of the US carrier fleet, but the failure to attack fuel stores and repair facilities.
in my opinion the author is guilty of two misses. First: of relevance is Japan's desperation in late 1941 as a result of the Anglo-American embargos. Japan had to build an empire that could provide it with the resources it needed to self-sustain, and it had to do so in a hurry. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and Japan was in desperate straits in November of 1941.
Second, the author analyzes the attack on PH in strategic and tactical terms. I contend that this is a mistake. Whatever hopes the Japanese may have had of achieving a tactical advantage, I think a (if not the) primary aim was psychological - shock and awe - defeat by dispiritment. That doesn't change the fact that it was a colossal miscalculation - but I think the psychological misfire was far greater than the strategic. Japan DID in fact achieve the tactical victories it originally aimed for in the months afterward, and the element of surprise did succeed in overthrowing British and French power in the region. There was simply no way to account for an economic behemoth like the US, the likes of which had no historical precedent. They hoped that the shock of PH would cow the Americans into acquiescence (aided, incidentally, by some far-fetched notions of racial superiority over the white man).