Today is the anniversary of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. To mark the occasion in 1966, Popular Science published a feature on how the Japanese designed such a successful assault--and how they paid for it later.
Posted 12.07.2012 at 2:15 pm
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Battleship Row
PopSci archives
Today marks 71 years since the attack on Pearl Harbor that catapulted the United States into World War II. The attack was devastating. More than 2,400 people died and more than 1,000 were wounded. It was also, in the cold language of military science, wildly successful.
Sneak Attack Success: PopSci archives
At least it was at first. The December 1966 Popular Science feature, "The Secret Weapons That Hit Pearl Harbor," cites two main factors (among other factors) for Japan's success: its shallow-water aerial torpedoes and the fleet's ability to escape detection.
Pearl Harbor was too shallow for conventional torpedoes; they would've just dived in and stuck to the bottom of the ocean floor. So a few months before the attack, Japanese designers created finned torpedoes that could perform "a feat like that of an acrobat high-diving in shallow water."
By the fall of 1941, they had perfected the weapon. Now all they had to do was transport it to the American naval base. Japan's fleet of ships managed to stay undetected throughout the journey to Hawaii that began in November of 1941. Here's how:
Braving gales, high seas, and fog, the fleet took a far-northern course beyond range of island-based U.S. patrol planes, and remote from shipping lanes. Should an American merchantman be encountered, orders were explicit and ruthless--sink it on sight, before it could radio an alarm. As it turned out, however, a lone Japanese ship was the only one seen.
U.S. Battleship California: PopSci archives
Although Pearl Harbor was a victory for the Japanese--a triumph of their technological prowess and their brutal military tactics--the war, of course, did not end well for them. Most of their battleships sunk by the time World War II came to a close. The attack's chief planner, Admiral Yamamoto, died in a plane that'd been shot down by U.S. airmen in 1943. Dictator Tojo, who ordered the attack, was hung as a war criminal in 1948.
Finally, Pearl Harbor was the Japanese warlords' fatal blunder in grand strategy. Its consequences doomed their scheme of conquest--and instead, for the first time, a conquering army trod the soil of Japan. Never in modern times, says historian Samuel Eliot Morison, has an aggressor begun a war with such a smashing victory, and never in all history has one paid for his calculated treachery so dearly.
Read more in the December 1966 issue, "The Secret Weapons That Hit Pearl Harbor."
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Pearl Harbor bad, kicking reprisal ass great!
Finding peace and making an ally best of all!
GOD BLESS PEACE and FRIENDS!
Celebrating 71 years of false-flag attacks and disaster capitalsim ;)
- wise up
On a current event side note:
globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2012/12/07/u-s-bases-in-japan-sitting-ducks/?hpt=hp_c2
They kicked our ass at Pearl Harbor with torpedoes and little pieces of wood. The Americans were so embarrassed by the "black eye" that Japan had inflicted along with the fact that they had boots on the ground in the Aleutian Islands, that we unleashed a "HOLOCAUST" of nuclear proportions upon there citizens.
Before the Atomic bombs the US was planning on invading Japan. Projected casualties US 1 million Japan 3 million
that's a holocaust. Ed
EhGiOeS,
You pull that baloney out of the air. What source of information do you have to prove this?
What I have heard, prior to Pear Harbor, the USA put many different restrictions on Japan and they felt compelled to go to war from their perspective. Even this history is a little vague.
I am glad Japan and USA are currently ally and friends!!!!
I agree with Robot. Japanese culture is fascinating to me, I've probably watched more anime than most Japanese school girls, and finally...
Japan makes the BEST ROBOTS! I <3 robots!
Also, it shows that even two opposing forces can grow together over time. It's the civil embodiment of the story of Gilgamesh (the middle part).
Japan's sneak attack was meant to draw our attention away from Europe so that Hitler could finally have victory over western Europe (without American aid being shipped in to prop up England).
The goal was never a war with the US, but to get the US to withdraw its reach and stay on its own side of the world. The thought being that a treaty could be reached once Europe and Asia were settled (Japan had only recently taken over the formally European controlled sections of China).
It turns out that the US simply was able to move ahead more publically with their plans in the European theater since they were now formally in the war (the opposite of the desired reaction).
Once focus was put on the Pacific theater, conventional war proved to be brutal on both sides, and Japanese resolve only assured that across the main islands would be a slaughter.
Nuclear arms, while brutal, were aimed at minor targets (imagine if they had been dropped on Tokyo) to make a show a strength to break the will of the Japanese people.
That it did so and ended the war without the casualties of a ground campaign was the greatest thing that could ever have happened to the doomed empire. Otherwise, their pride would have resulted in even more Japanese death (and an inevitible Japanese defeat later on).
So, the nukes were a good thing, saved lives on both sides, and today there is a McDonalds across the street from Hiroshima's gound zero park.