Should the US have been better prepared for Pearl Harbor?

Question

6 months prior to pearl harbor we had cut Japan off from her stratigic oil supply because of their Manuchuria invasion. Most experts of the time thought Japan should have attacked within the first 3 months. Looks like we had time to prepare better. Then a week later they caught us in The Phillipines with another "Suprise?". Who's fault was this?

Answer 1

The obvious answer is yes we should have been better prepared but as the other answerer replies hind sight is always right.

The great debate that was going on was not when the attack would come but how. Remember long range coordinated naval and air attacks were unknown before PH. The on the ground commanders were more worried about local sabotage. That is why you in pictures all the planes and boats parked so close together. Easier to watch for saboteurs. Had they been placed farther party , the bomb damage would have been far less.
Look how excited the local troops got over spotting a midget sub in PH and sinking it. That is the kind of attack they expected.

No one at the time thought that torpedoes dropped from a plane could run true in the rather shallow waters of PH. Again the Japanese develop new techniques and torpedoes to overcome an obstacle.

The biggest to remember about that attack is that 90% of the military plan for the future to re-fight the last war. That is why there are so blunders in early stages of any war.

As for the Philippines it was mostly MacArthur's fault. He thought he could out fight the Japanese in conventional warfare. They choose not to fight that way. Had he melted away into the jungle the Japanese would have to expend a lot of troops and supplies chasing him and the US could have eventually resupplied and retook the islands.

Answer 2

It is said that the Japanese Code had been broken before Pearl Harbour, and as you have pointed out the US had continued to be hostile to Japans colonial interest ever increasingly.

Japan had been content to be an isolationist country and excluded Europeans as a matter of public policy until 1863 when Admiral Perry and gunboat diplomacy forced open trade with Japanese merchants who culturally were controlled as the lower caste. Samurai rebelled because of this intervention but were defeated by a Conscript Army. None the less the attitude of the Japanese society was modernization for the sake of being able to enforce their rightful sovereignty and European colonization made the "Asia for Asians " slogan a serious issue.

The big riff came with Teddy Roosevelt, who in the early 1900s intervened in the interests of Russia who had just been defeated by the Japanese Navy and the quite walking Big Stick forced Japan to relinquish control over Islands near the Russian coast as a punishment for the gall of attacking a White nation!

The decade that led up to the World War also saw the US introduce it's military observer and advisor policies which it re-invented in Viet Nam. In case you didn't know those were the terms in Viet Nam untill American troops reached over 100,000 then rather than declare war which Congress would have to approve it became known as a Police action.

In short, yes, the US should have known about the the seriousness of the situation because they caused it and the Western Front was the right timming but how could the japanese have known that Hitler was such a madman!

Answer 3

This is the one area where I believe that FDR knew that it was going to happen. I don't usually think like that but the evidence show it. Why else were the carriers out at sea on "maneuvers"? Why else was the base on alert the week before but not that week? They had radar but it was very primitive. It was located on a hill and the people manning it would have to leave and then drive to a near buy restaurant to call the base to inform them of what they saw. Also there was a report of a Japanese sub that had been hit near Pearl and the base ignored the warning. To have been better prepared the base should have been on alert and they shouldn't have put all of their airplanes stacked neatly in rows to be easy targets. Also do you really believe that the reason that it was a sneak attack was the fact that the Japanese didn't take into account the time zone difference between Hawaii and Washington?

Answer 4

In the context of history on the face of it all, the US could have been better prepared for Pearl Harbor. However, in actuality, the US military was VERY prepared for Pearl, which is why it happened the way it did. There are many sources on the net that confirm the fact that both the British and the Americans had broken the naval message code that the Japanese used when they were sending messages before December of 41. It is documented fact that we had broken a variation of that same code and used this information to defeat the Japanese at Midway, which was 6 months after Pearl. So, in essence, we were prepared for Pearl, and the Roosevelt administration knew exactly what was going to happen on December 7th. The single greatest support of that knowledge comes from the fact that our aircraft carriers, which were THEE strategic weapons during the entire Pacific war, were out at sea and on maneuvers during the attack. The battleships were allowed to be sacrificed, but the carriers were too valuable, so they were sent away and out of harms way. That said, the reason to do that was this. There was a huge peace and neutrality movement that was running rampant in the US, spearheaded by the great flyer, Charles Lindbergh. Roosevelt wanted to enter the conflict to help his friend, Churchill, and needed something to motivate the American people to fight a war. So, he put out sanctions against the Japanese, monitored their broken coded messages, found out they were going to attack, and got the aircraft carriers out to sea. It was a beautiful plan, and ultimately, the American war machine turned the tide of battle in WW 2.

Answer 5

We were prepared. Look at all the battleships and war planes we had in Hawaii at the time of Pearl Harbor. Given that Hawaii is more than 3,000 away from California, it sure seemed like a huge military venture for an island so far away from the USA mainland. What were we protecting the west coast, specifically California. Did Japan want Hawaii to launch an attack on us? Or did Japan want Hawaii to control the Pacific? To figure this out, one needs a literary license to decipher history.

Answer 6

yes we knew what Japan could have been planning. But, the bottom line is... we were honoring a treaty we had with Japan limiting what we could do. (such as properly strengthening your defenses)
by the time of the pearl harbor attack, the USA was almost in full time war production. that is the reason how we were able to create so many ships (big fleet carriers and battleships take ALOT of resources and manpower to create) in such a short time.
a little research on Gen. MacArthur's "demands" to defend the Philippines will show that he was constantly denied permission to do what he thought best. (for the reason that it may provoke the Japanese)
typical politics.

Answer 7

yes we could have been better prepared for pearl. in fact we thought we were look at the facts

1. pearl was chosen as a port for a reason it was to sallow for torpedo's to be drooped from a plane. the Japanese had to fit a wooden blank to the fins of the torpedo so it wouldn't drop so far and get stuck on the bottom and a sub couldn't get in there either

2 we had broken some of the Japanese code but not all of it. we knew there was going to be an attack. but we didn't know where it was going to be. we thought it would be Wake Guam or one those pacific islands in fact the Japanese pulled a dummy attack on the Brits to take attion off of the fleet heading for pearl our inelegance thought they were heading there.

3. all those make us think that sabotage was the greatest threat to us so they huddled up the planes the ships so they were easier to guard

4.plus they had just put up a radar station that would pick up any planes coming in and it did work they did pick up the japs planes but sadly a group of b-29 were coming that same day from the main land so they just thought it was them.

they really didn't catch us off guard in the Philippines we were just over run

Answer 8

Yes! From what I've seen on documentaries about the subject, a lot of people dropped the ball.

Hawaii and the Phillipines should have been on high alert after we cut off the oil.

Answer 9

Yes but we were expecting a surprise attack by Germany.
Roosevelt was the main culprit. He was far too focused on Europe and left the back door wide open.

Answer 10

The American command that Pearl Harbour was going to happen, but waited for the attack so that there was a reason to enter WWII