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Battleship Row: The Morning Pearl Harbor Burned
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
At 7:48 AM on December 7, 1941, 353 Japanese aircraft struck Pearl Harbor — sinking battleships, entombing sailors, and ending American isolationism in under two hours. This episode follows Yamamoto's plan, the Kido Butai's silent crossing, and the devastating assault on Battleship Row that killed 2,403 Americans.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
It's six fifty-five in the morning on the island of Oahu. December seventh, nineteen forty-one.
To understand what happened that morning, you need to understand the man who planned it. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto was not a typical military commander operating inside the standard assumptions of his institution.
Six aircraft carriers. Two battleships.
At six zero two in the morning, the first wave lifted off. One hundred eighty-three aircraft.
Eight American battleships were moored along the southeast shore of Ford Island. The Japanese had spent months planning precisely how to attack them.
When the attack ended, the accounting was staggering. Two thousand four hundred and three Americans dead.
There's a piece of this story that makes the outcome harder to accept. American codebreakers had been reading Japanese diplomatic communications for months.
Franklin Roosevelt received word of the attack at the White House on the afternoon of December seventh. By evening, his administration understood the full scale of what had happened.
Yamamoto's strategic miscalculation is worth examining directly. His plan assumed that a devastating surprise attack would shock the American public into demanding a settlement.
The story of Pearl Harbor doesn't end at the harbor. Within weeks of the attack, fear and suspicion reshaped American domestic policy in ways that left a lasting wound.
Yamamoto's gamble was, in tactical terms, one of the most precisely executed surprise attacks in military history. The Kido Butai crossed the Pacific undetected.
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