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Kido Butai: The Six Carriers That Shattered the Pacific Fleet
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
On December 7, 1941, Japan's most powerful carrier strike force unleashed 353 aircraft on Pearl Harbor in history's most consequential surprise attack — and still lost the war. This chapter follows the Kido Butai across the North Pacific, into Battleship Row, and into the catastrophic miscalculation behind a tactically flawless operation.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Here's what Japan got wrong. The attack on Pearl Harbor was designed to break American will.
The attack didn't come from nowhere. Japan had been on an imperial trajectory for decades.
In late November, a Japanese naval task force known as the Kido Butai departed Japanese waters and steamed east across the North Pacific. Six aircraft carriers.
Two warnings arrived before the attack. Neither stopped it.
The torpedoes hit first. Japanese aircraft had been fitted with specially modified torpedoes designed to run shallow in Pearl Harbor's relatively shallow water.
By nine forty-five, the second wave was over and the attack had ended. The Japanese had lost twenty-nine aircraft and fewer than a hundred men.
Franklin Roosevelt learned of the attack that Sunday afternoon. By the next morning, he appeared before a joint session of Congress.
The unity that Pearl Harbor produced was real. But it had a dark edge.
The isolationist movement in America didn't fade after Pearl Harbor. It ended.
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