Pearl Harbor : warning and decision

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Pearl Harbor : warning and decision

Roberta Wohlstetter

Stanford University Press, 1962

  • : hbk
  • : pbk

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Note

Bibliography: p. [413]-418

Includes index

Description and Table of Contents

Volume

: hbk ISBN 9780804705974

Description

It would be reassuring to believe that Pearl Harbor was just a colossal and extraordinary blunder. What is disquieting is that it was a supremely ordinary blunder. It was a dramatic failure of a remarkably well-informed government to call the next enemy move in a cold war crisis. The results, at Pearl Harbor, were sudden, concentrated, and dramatic. The failure, however, was cumulative, widespread, and rather drearily familiar. This why surprise, when it happens to a government, cannot be described just in terms of startled people. Whether at Pearl Harbor or at the Berlin Wall, surprise is everything involved in a government's (or in an alliance's) failure to anticipate effectively. Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision is a unique physiology of a great national failure to anticipate. Wohlstetter is at pains to show how easy it was to slip into the rut in which the Japanese found us, it can only remind u how likely it is that we are in the same kind of rut right now. The danger is not that we shall read the signals and indicators with too little skill; the danger is in a poverty of expectations-a routine obsessing with a few dangers that may be familiar rather than likely. Alliance diplomacy, interservice bargaining, appropriations hearings, and public discussion all seem to need to focus on a few vivid and oversimplified dangers. The planner should think in subtler and more variegated terms and all for a wider range of contingencies. But, as Wohlstetter shows, the "planners" who count are also responsible for alliance diplomacy, interservice bargaining, appropriations hearings, and public discussion; they are also very busy. This is a genuine dilemma of government. Some of its consequences are mercilessly displayed in this book.
Volume

: pbk ISBN 9780804705981

Description

For decades the controversy has raged: Was the Pearl Harbor disaster a result of criminal negligence by military officers in the Pacific theater? Was it, as some have claimed, a deliberate plot by the President in Washington? It seems unlikely that a country could have so many warnings pointing to the danger, and yet be so unprepared for the event itself. American intelligence could read top-secret Japanese codes and the U.S. was therefore in a posistion to transmit vital information to American commanders throughout the world. Most of the time Washington was able to predict both Japan's diplomatic moves and its military deployments. But, as this carefully documented book shows, the outlines of danger look sharp today because the disaster has occurred, and an entirely different image emerges upon reconstructing in detail the intelligence picture as it looked to the participants before the event. In 1941 the pieces of the puzzle were dispersed in a number of government agencies. Some were lost in the noise of signals pointing in other directions-toward a Japanese advance southward or into Siberia; some were slowed by the normal barriers of bureaucracy; and some were silenced by security requirements. At the center of the decision no one had completed the puzzle. Above all, this book reminds us sharply that detecting a surprise attack will be more difficult in the era of the H-bomb. As the Foreword states: "The danger is not that we shall read the signals and indicators with too little skill; the danger is in a poverty of expectations-a routine obsession with a few dangers that may be familiar rather than likely."

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