MBR ISSUE 25 - low res all

MBR News Global Round-Up
Malta Business Review
The aspect of Pearl Harbor that’s never discussed: it
was a massive management failure
By Steve Twomey
Give Japan’s navy its due. It successfully
ambushed Pearl Harbor seventy-five years
ago because its commander was partial
to gambles; its technicians eliminated a
confounding quirk of torpedoes, and its
seamen proved adept at sailing thousands
of miles undetected. The Japanese got lucky,
too.
In the era before spy satellites, they had no
way of knowing as they set out whether
the Pacific Fleet would even be in Hawaiian
waters on December 7, 1941. And, no,
Franklin Roosevelt did not know they were
coming.
But mostly, the Japanese were the
beneficiaries of acute managerial
breakdown. One of the most unexpected,
self-image shattering events in American
history may be receding into a misty other
century, but it is the perfect primer of the
mistakes that government and business –
that all of us — make every day.
Lesson one: Make sure there’s no other
way to read what you write.
As peace was fraying in late November,
Washington alerted its forces in the Pacific to
probable Japanese aggression. Or thought it
had. In reality, when officers at Pearl Harbor
saw the Navy Department’s unprecedented
first sentence – “This dispatch is to be
considered a war warning” – they concluded
danger lay elsewhere, because the note
immediately went on to list Japan’s likely
objectives, and Hawaii was not one of them.
Its writers knew what they had meant – that
while the listed locales seemed especially
threatened, no outpost should feel safe –
but they hadn’t considered how recipients
might conflate the parts. If he missed the
point, the fleet commander said later, “Then
there must have been something the matter
with the message.”
Lesson two: To assume is to regret.
That commander, Admiral Husband E.
Kimmel, was not required to report he
understood the warning, or what security
steps he was taking. Those in charge on
the sea frontiers had risen to their exalted
positions by demonstrating smarts and
judgment, and the Navy Department was
certain they would do the right thing. It
wouldn’t micromanage. Only too late did
Washington ask Oahu if search planes had
been out, only to learn the answer was no.
It is wise to give subordinates the room to be
creative; it is not to remain ignorant of their
choices.
In contrast, the Army did order its Hawaii
commander to report how he was
responding to the warning. But the War
Department then failed to grasp what
General Walter C. Short wrote back: He was
guarding only against sabotage by islanders
of Japanese descent, not an attack from
without. “I told them as plainly as I could,”
Short said. The Army Chief of Staff blamed
a deluge of work for not reading carefully a
reply he had demanded personally.
Lesson three: You can’t have multiple
leaders.
The Navy and Army on Oahu did not
compare notes after the warnings. Neither
was subservient to the other. A congressman
who was also a Marine reservist had spent
a month of active duty on the island that
summer, and concluded that one man
ought to be in charge of both services there,
someone to whom the crucial data and
problems went, and from whom the big
decisions emanated. To leave responsibility
muddled “may prove dangerous and tragic,”
the congressman wrote the Navy in October.
Nothing had changed by December. As for
whether Kimmel had begun a search after
the warnings, which is what he thought
might happen, Short said, “I did not pin him
down.”
Lesson four: Don’t let your desires colour
new facts.
Too often on Oahu the latest intelligence was
interpreted in a benign way, which enabled
everyone to avoid disrupting plans and
routines. By December 2, the names of four
Japanese aircraft carriers had vanished from
intercepted radio traffic, but the conclusion
was they most likely remained in home
waters. By December 3, Japanese diplomats
were destroying codebooks and machines
in Washington and elsewhere, but that
was seen as merely a precaution Japan was
taking in case the United States attacked it. “I
didn’t draw the proper answer,” Kimmel said
later. “I admit that. I admit that I was wrong.”
This tendency to give information a sunny
spin was especially costly in regard to
torpedoes. Dropped from an airplane, a
torpedo plunges deeply before running
to its target. Pearl Harbor was but fortyfive
feet. In June, Washington advised that
while an attacker would probably need
considerably more water than that to avoid
having its torpedoes plow into the sea
Photo: Fox Photos via Getty Images
bottom, no depth should be thought safe.
The fleet did not take the caution to heart.
No cumbersome protective netting was
strung around the tethered battleships,
which wound up punctured repeatedly by
torpedoes the Japanese had modified for
shallow waters.
Lesson five: If you are given expert
advice, remember it.
In March 1941, a general and an admiral on
Oahu concluded that in a time of tension,
a fast Japanese raiding force might reach
island waters “with no prior warning from
our intelligence services,” and prior to a
declaration of war. Launched from one or
more carriers, Japanese planes might catch
the fleet unawares in port, the two officers
said. Reconnaissance would be the only
antidote.
But then, just about everyone relegated that
dangerous scenario to their mental back
pages. It was a box that had been ticked.
Americans did not view the Japanese as
particularly creative or capable. The Navy
felt its own ships would have a hard time
pulling off a comparable strike on Japan, and
if our boys couldn’t do it, theirs couldn’t. In
the days after the war warnings, with four
enemy carriers unaccounted for, no one
even mentioned the news to the admiral
who had co-authored the March report.
That morning long ago, as warplanes with
red balls on their wings swept down on his
ships, Kimmel stood in his yard watching
with a neighbour, who would remember the
look on the commander’s face. He was “as
white as the uniform he wore.” MBR
EDITOR’S NOTE
Steve Twomey is a
Pulitzer Prize–winning
reporter and the author
of Countdown to Pearl
Harbor: The Twelve Days
to the Attack
www.maltabusinessreview.net
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