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Yamamoto's Gamble: The Plan, the Strike, and the Warning No One Heeded
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Admiral Yamamoto's Pearl Harbor plan was tactically brilliant and strategically catastrophic — six carriers crossed the Pacific in silence, 353 aircraft killed 2,403 Americans, and changed history in under two hours. This chapter follows the long road to December 7, 1941: Japan's imperial expansion, the oil embargo countdown, and the fatal miscalculation that Japan could force America to negotiate.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Here's something that tends to get lost in the story of Pearl Harbor. The attack wasn't a complete surprise to everyone in Washington.
To understand what happened at Pearl Harbor, you have to understand what was already in motion long before December of nineteen forty-one. Japan had been expanding aggressively across Asia and the Pacific since the eighteen nineties.
The man who designed the attack was Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. He was an unusual figure in the Japanese military establishment, partly because he'd spent time in the United States.
At seven forty-eight AM Hawaii time on December seventh, nineteen forty-one, the first wave of Japanese aircraft reached Oahu. There were two waves in total.
Now go back to those warnings. The radar operator at Opana Point on the northern shore of Oahu was running a mobile radar unit early that morning.
On December eighth, President Franklin Roosevelt stood before a joint session of Congress. He spoke for six minutes.
Japan's attack achieved its tactical objectives. The Pacific Fleet's battleships were destroyed or damaged.
The attack's consequences didn't stop at the water's edge. In the months that followed, fear and political pressure produced one of the most serious domestic failures in American constitutional history.
Pearl Harbor was a turning point in a way that's easy to understate. It ended a long argument about America's role in the world.
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