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The Radar Blip Nobody Acted On: Inside Pearl Harbor's Worst Minutes
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
At 7:48 AM on December 7, 1941, 353 Japanese aircraft arrived over Pearl Harbor — and a radar warning that could have changed everything was ignored. This episode reconstructs the attack minute by minute, from Yamamoto's plan to the sinking of the Arizona.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
On the morning of December seventh, nineteen forty-one, a radar operator on the northern tip of Oahu picked up an enormous formation of aircraft on his screen. He reported it immediately.
At seven forty-eight in the morning, Hawaii time, the first wave of Japanese aircraft arrived over Pearl Harbor. There were a hundred and eighty-three planes in that initial strike.
To understand December seventh, you have to go back further than the morning itself. Japan's collision course with the United States had been building for decades.
There had been warnings. Several of them.
President Franklin Roosevelt learned of the attack on the afternoon of December seventh. That evening he worked on what would become one of the most listened-to speeches in American history.
For years before the attack, the United States had been engaged in a fierce internal debate about whether to get involved in the spreading wars in Europe and Asia. The isolationist movement was powerful.
Not every consequence of December seventh falls on the side of national unity. One of the darkest chapters of the war began in the months that followed the attack.
The attack settled something that had been unresolved in American strategic thinking for decades. The United States was not a nation apart from the world's conflicts.
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