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Kido Butai: The Strike That Shattered American Isolationism
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
On December 7, 1941, six Japanese carriers launched 353 aircraft against Pearl Harbor — killing 2,403 Americans and ending two decades of isolationism in a single morning. This is the full story: Yamamoto's gamble, the Kido Butai's silent Pacific crossing, Battleship Row, and the rupture that pulled America into World War II.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Somewhere in the North Pacific, in late November of nineteen forty-one, six aircraft carriers slipped into radio silence and turned east. No transmissions.
Japan's path to Pearl Harbor didn't start in nineteen forty-one. It started in the eighteen nineties.
The plan came from Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. He's one of the more complicated figures in this story.
What's striking, when you lay out the hours before the attack, is how many warning signals were present and how completely they failed to coalesce into action. American cryptanalysts had broken the Japanese diplomatic code, designated Purple, and were monitoring transmissions between Tokyo and the Japanese embassy in Washington.
The first wave launched before dawn. One hundred and eighty-three aircraft lifted off the six carriers in the darkness, formed up, and flew south.
When the final accounting was made, two thousand, four hundred and three Americans were dead. Eleven hundred and seventy-eight were wounded.
President Franklin Roosevelt was at the White House when the news arrived. He spent the afternoon and evening meeting with advisors and drafting what he would say to Congress.
The unity that Pearl Harbor created came with a shadow. In the months that followed, fear and suspicion of Japanese Americans swept through the West Coast.
Yamamoto is reported to have said, after the attack he planned and authorized, that he feared they had awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve. Whether he actually said those words is uncertain.
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