Page 2 of 2 FirstFirst 12
Results 11 to 17 of 17

Thread: "Sneak Attack"?

  1. #11

    Join Date
    Jul 2011
    Posts
    384
    I guess I am just not smart enough to see it.
    Rick "I should have payed more attention in school" H
    or
    Rick "sorry Ron for stealing you signature, but you have really come up with some good ones" H

  2. #12
    FlyingRon's Avatar
    Join Date
    Aug 2011
    Location
    NC26 (Catawba, NC)
    Posts
    2,627
    They didn't waste effort attacking parts of Oahu because by and large there was nothing to attack. Honolulu back then wasn't a very significant city and the rest of the island was largely empty (and by and large today it still is).

    However, the US Navy Pacific fleet was a very significant target and that's where the impact was. Had they just come in and blown up Honolulu you may or may not have gotten the immediately US response that hitting Pearl did.

    Even with the rudimentary technology of the day, the beginning of the attack was detected, it's just that nobody knew what to do with the intel. The fact that the Japanese were up to something was also known as we'd already busted their code machine.

    No, you couldn't launch a sneak naval engagement today. Given the threat of nuclear attack from submarines, we've pretty much got tabs on even the underwater traffic, let alone surface shipping. In fact, surface shipping is trivial to track using the radar satellites. Even darkness and cloud cover won't obscure a big hunk of metal making a pronounced wake through the water in a SAR image. Even ATC radar would give a better warning than they had in 1941.

  3. #13
    rwanttaja's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jul 2011
    Location
    Seattle
    Posts
    2,948
    Quote Originally Posted by FlyingRon View Post
    They didn't waste effort attacking parts of Oahu because by and large there was nothing to attack. Honolulu back then wasn't a very significant city and the rest of the island was largely empty (and by and large today it still is).

    However, the US Navy Pacific fleet was a very significant target and that's where the impact was. Had they just come in and blown up Honolulu you may or may not have gotten the immediately US response that hitting Pearl did.
    Inspired me to do a bit of research. Honolulu was a bigger place in 1940 than I expected; it had 200,000 people in the city and county. Only doubled since then, I really had expected more.

    Used Google Earth to check some ranges: About eight miles from the center of Honolulu to Battleship Row, and four miles to Hickam.

    The pilots of the Imperial Japanese Navy in 1941 were probably trained as well as any in the world, and the Japanese had good Intelligence. One of the recent retrospectives said that the Japanese expected extremely heavy defenses, and the pilots were doubtful of making it back. With that, it's very unlikely that any of the pilots would have made an eight...or even four....mile error in targeting. Honolulu was not really at risk.

    The Naval and Army bases were legitimate targets. I'm guessing the hospitals, etc. didn't have large, visible red crosses at this stage of the war. Still, doubt IJN pilots would have shot up random buildings while there were still targets on the surface in Pearl Harbor. Of course, accidents (and, friendly fire, as Bill said) happens.

    No doubt civilian facilities just outside the bases might have taken a few "overs" as well. But the kind of facilities just outside the base perimeters were often the kind that the good church-going citizens of Hawaii woudn't have minded taking a few 20 mm shells.

    Interesting trivial point: The Imperial Japanese Navy had a strong British heritage, with their early ships bought from Great Britain and many of the officers trained there. IJN ships even used English for helm commands until about 1930.

    Ron "Funny in-name jokes copyrighted 2016 all right reserved*" Wanttaja

    * Actually, no. It's been an Internet tradition going back about 30 years....just old guys like me and the other Ron remember....
    Last edited by rwanttaja; 12-10-2016 at 03:06 PM.

  4. #14
    L16 Pilot's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jul 2011
    Posts
    187
    Might as well put my two cents in here. The brother of a friend of mine was a gunner on a B29 that was rammed by a Japanese plane on May 7, 1945. Rammed might be a too strong word as it could have been an air to air collision. Either way the plane was going down and my friends brother and two others were able to bail out over Hachimen Mountain on the Japanese island of Kyushu. They were captured by the Japanese and taken to Fukuoka where they were beheaded on June 20, 1945 in response for a B29 raid over the city and Japanese headquarters the previous evening. They may have been the "lucky ones" as the Japanese were using captured airmen in the headquarter area for medical 'experiments' most of which were too brutal to explain. Fast forward some 70 years and I was able to visit the crash site and also a museum dedicated in part to the lost aircrew. I was doing this as part of a research after the fact on a book I had written a couple of years previous to my trip. The local Japanese in concert with the Rotary Club were my hosts for the entire day ending with an evening banquet. They even planted a cherry tree in my honor to commemorate the visit. I only post this to show even old enemies no matter how brutal previously can become friends. It's notable that fully 30 % of Japanese prisoners did not survive while the number is something like 3-5 % for those captured by the Germans.
    If God had intended man to fly He would have given us more money!

  5. #15
    Mayhemxpc's Avatar
    Join Date
    Apr 2012
    Location
    Manassas, Virginia
    Posts
    800
    Trying to keep to the purely warbirds related portion...

    an an air carrier group, even today, has limited assets. Yamamoto tried to select targets carefully for maximum effect with those limited assets. Even though the IJN initiated a carrier strike, the mindset then was still battleship dominant, so battleships were the target. The fact that civilians were not targeted was a simple cost effectiveness calculation. That said, the targeting showed that Japanese thinking was still very tactical and not strategic. As our own review of the attack determined (1942) the IJN misprioritized the targets. What would have Had a much more serious impact would have been targeting the docks, repair facilities and especially the fuel storage facilities. The saying goes that tactics wins battles, logistics wins wars.

    The Hague Convention of 1907 (After the Port Arthur Raid and the Japanese victory) was clear that notification had to be given before the start of actual hostilities. The Japanese tried to deliver the declaration a few minutes before the attack commenced, but were delayed in D.C. So they were trying to meet the letter of the law while avoiding its intent and wound up unsuccessful.

    Clausewitz wrote in the early 1800's that strategic surprise was difficult or impossible against a reasonably intelligent opponent. There are too many signs that a war, or even a major military operation is about to happen. These cannot all be hidden. The element of surprise then, is left to the specific timing and place of the attack. Such was true in 1941. Our military and civilian leadership knew war was coming with Japan. Hence the "two Navy" appropriations act of 1940. That air power would be decisive was also no surprise. All of the airplanes we won we won the war with were in design or on order before Pearl Harbor. Up to and including designs studies for the B-36. As the time got closer, we kind of figured that war may even come before the end of 1941. But we did not know exactly when and our best guess would be that the attack would fall on the Philippines. Of course, when the Philippines were hit, they were still unprepared, even though they knew the blow was coming and that it would come first by air attack.
    Chris Mayer
    N424AF
    www.o2cricket.com

  6. #16
    rwanttaja's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jul 2011
    Location
    Seattle
    Posts
    2,948
    Quote Originally Posted by Mayhemxpc View Post
    Trying to keep to the purely warbirds related portion...

    an an air carrier group, even today, has limited assets. Yamamoto tried to select targets carefully for maximum effect with those limited assets. Even though the IJN initiated a carrier strike, the mindset then was still battleship dominant, so battleships were the target. The fact that civilians were not targeted was a simple cost effectiveness calculation. That said, the targeting showed that Japanese thinking was still very tactical and not strategic. As our own review of the attack determined (1942) the IJN misprioritized the targets. What would have Had a much more serious impact would have been targeting the docks, repair facilities and especially the fuel storage facilities. The saying goes that tactics wins battles, logistics wins wars.
    Great post, Chris.

    This echoes the same battleship-vs-aircraft argument that had been going on in our own Navy. In fact, one wonders...if the situation had been reversed, would the US still have targeted the battleships in lieu of the logistics facilities? Probably.

    Us flying types point back to Billy Mitchell and the Ostfriesland as to "proving" the superiority of the aircraft over the battleship. Wasn't as simple as that, of course...the Ostfriesland was stationary, with no defense firepower, and the time between the bomb hits and the battleship actually sinking was long enough that the ship's crew may well have stopped the flooding and kept the the ship operational. So it was good PR for the Army Air Corps, but the admirals were not convinced. Remember, the first US aircraft carriers were conversions of other ships... Langley from a collier, and Lexington and Saratoga from battlecruiser hulls that we weren't allowed to complete due to the 1922 Washington Navy treaty.

    A classic example of the Battleship admirals came from the fleet exercise in the '30s...the first message that went out said, "Lighting has stuck all aircraft in the fleet and they are grounded." So it let them play with their battlewagons without pesky aerial interference.

    The last gasp of the Battleship Admirals came in 1945. The Japanese sent the IJN Yamato as part of a kamikaze attack on the US invasion forces around Okinawa. Yamato was the largest battleship ever built. It was accompanied a light cruiser and eight destroyers. All the Japanese crews knew it was a suicide mission.

    Admiral Spruance, one of the Battleship Admirals*, was in charge of the US Navy Fleet and caught wind of the sortie. He starting dispatching his battleships to set up one final big-gun duel.

    But...Admiral Marc Mitscher, commanding the carriers off Okinawa, found out about the incoming warships. He started moving his carriers toward them. At 1045 the next morning, he launched his strike, and radioed Spruance: "I propose to attack the Yamato strike force at 1200 unless otherwise directed. Will you take them or shall I?'"

    Spruance sent back: "You take them."

    Yamato took eleven torpedoes and six bombs before it sank. Only four Japanese destroyers survived.

    The US lost ten aircraft and twelve men.

    Ron Wanttaja

    *It should be noted that Admiral Spruance commanded the US ships during the Battle of Midway...which shows even a Battleship Admiral could use air power.

  7. #17

    Join Date
    Apr 2016
    Location
    Key Largo/Lauderdale
    Posts
    15
    Quote Originally Posted by Bill Greenwood View Post
    Why would Japan even attack a country 10 times its industrial strength? We had cut off trade in steel and oil to Japan in protest over their actions toward China.
    Yamamoto tried to advise against attacking the US. He had studied there (Harvard?) in 1920s and knew of our industrial potential. But, when he was forced from above, he went all in to plan what they hoped would be a 'fatal' blow in the Pacific...... with the hope that the US would sue for peace and then Japan would have their own ocean as well as Indonesia, the Phillipines, etc to themselves.

    Yamamoto knew that our three carriers were the key. To sink them would be 'fatal' to the USN. After all, think about the 'weapon' that Japan was going to use to deliver this fatal blow! Carriers!

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •