Who Caused Pearl Harbor

Who Caused Pearl Harbor

Pearl Harbor Day or December 7th 1941, is a day that should live in all Americans minds and never be forgotten. It was the worst single defeat suffered by the United States Navy with losses totaling more than all those suffered in WWI. This attack is of course the fault of Japan, but Americans have to take responsibility for it too. The question is who is responsible for this grave disaster, Washington officials or those in command at Pearl Harbor? Some believe government officials caused Pearl Harbor because of their failure to warn the fleet on time and for withholding valuable information from the commanders in charge of Pearl Harbor. Others, including myself, believe those stationed at the harbor are to blame for this catastrophic tragedy. There was a lack of common sense displayed by the officials, as well as many poor judgment calls.

A year before the Pearl Harbor attack, United States government officials cracked Japan’s secret diplomatic code. As a result, these government officials were able to intercept and translate Japan’s secret plans involving an attack against the United States Naval bases located in the Pacific. With this new found information, it was determined that logical Japanese attacks would come to the Malay Peninsula or the Dutch East Indies. On November 27, The Navy Department sent Admiral Kimmel, Commander of the Pacific Fleet including Pearl Harbor, a war warning telling him the dangers of attack in the Philippines, Thai, Kra Peninsula, or perhaps Borneo. They went on to tell him to ‘execute an appropriate defensive deployment.’ This war warning does not specifically mention Pearl Harbor, but common sense should have told Kimmel that when you have a naval base with eight battleships, many smaller ships, some 400 airplanes, and thousands of sailors and civilians sitting on an island in the middle of the Pacific, you should get in a defensive mode and prepare for some kind of attack.

To many people the possibility of attacking Pearl Harbor was not some bogus idea thought up by a paranoid sailor. Henry L. Stimson, the United States Secretary of War, in a report giving in the Joint Committee on Investigating Pearl Harbor said, ‘We had spent several million dollars in defense of Hawaii…That Hawaii could be attack if Japan went to war was obvious to everyone…There was a certain part of the pacific Ocean that we called the "Vacant Sea" in which there were practically no ships and in which larger movements of ships could occur without anybody seeing them.