Pearl Harbor: Military Inconvenience, Political Disaster

I Postmortems generally describe the damage inflicted by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, in dramatic, almost apocalyptic, terms. The JointCongressional Committee that investigated the event after the war labeled the attack ”the greatest military and naval disaster in our Nation’s history.”’ Leading students of the attack use similar language. John Toland has characterized Pearl Harbor as a “catastrophe” and as “the worst military disaster in [American ] history,” while Samuel Eliot Morison calls the attack ”devastating” and an “overwhelming disaster” for the United States.2Gordon Prange dubs the attack a “debacle,” and “one of the worst defeats the United States suffered in its 200 year^."^ Ronald Spector, Roberta Wohlstetter, and Louis Morton call it a ”disaster” as well, and Spector and Wohlstetter also agree on “catast r ~ p h e . ” ~ Melvin Small finds it a “crushing blow” and ”our worst military disaster.”5 John Mueller is Professor of Political Science at the University of Rochester and the author of Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War and Astaire Dancing: The Musical Films. For comments and suggestions, I would like to thank Richard Betts, Stanley Engerman, William Hauser, Carl Honig, Robert Jervis, Chaim Kaufmann, David MacGregor, Melanie Manion, Karl Mueller, and Bruce Russett. 1. U.S. Congress, Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack, Report (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office [U.S. GPO], 1946) (hereafter Pearl Harbor Report), p. 65. 2. John Toland, But Not in Shame: The Six Months After Pearl Harbor (New York: Random House, 1961), p. 38; John Toland, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945 (New York: Random House, 1970), p. 237; Samuel Eliot Morison, The Two-Ocean War: A Short History of the United States Navy in the Second World War (Boston: Little Brown, 1963),pp. 68, 70. 3. Gordon W. Prange with Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon, Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986), p. 534; Gordon W. Prange with Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon, December 7, 1941: The Day the Japanese Attacked Pearl Harbor (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988), p. xiii. Similarly, see William D. Puleston, The Znfluence of Sea Power in World War ZZ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947, p. 111. 4. Ronald H. Spector, Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan (New York: Vintage, 1985), p. 93; Louis Morton, The United States Army in World War ZZ: The War in the Pacific, Vol. 10: Strategy and Command: The First Two Years (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Army, Office of the Chief of Military History, 1962),p. 144; Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962), pp. 3, 398. 5. Melvin Small, Was War Necessary? National Security and U.S. Entry into War (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1980), pp. 234, 253. Similarly, Martin V. Melosi calls it ”the greatest naval defeat International Security, Winter 1991192(Vol. 16, No. 3) 0 1991 by John Mueller. 172 Pearl Harbor:Military Inconvenience, Political Disaster I 173 This article investigates these characterizations. In the first part, I conclude that in a direct military sense the characterizations are excessive: militarily, the attack on Pearl Harbor was more of an inconvenience than a catastrophe or disaster for the United States. The destruction inflicted by the Japanese was not terribly extensive, and much of it was visited upon military equipment that was old and in many cases nearly obsolete. In addition, much of the damage was readily and quickly repaired, and its extent was soon made all but trivial by the capacity of America’s remarkable wartime industry to supply superior replacements in enormous numbers. Moreover, the attack did not significantlydelay the American military response to Japaneseaggression , nor did it importantly change the pace of the war: the United States was unprepared to take the offensiveat that time in any case, and the damage at Pearl Harbor increased this unpreparedness only marginally. I also conclude that the persistent exaggerations of damage stem more from the tendency of writers to apply dramatic terms to notable events than from the efforts of the United States government to use...