Piercing the Fog - Air Force Historical Studies Office

Piercing the Fog
lacked drop tanks, and American airmen continued on a course of fighting the
Germans with unescorted bomber formations until the second disaster over
Schweinfurt in October 1943. As the American official historians suggested,
such an oversight “is difficult to account f0r.’’I3
Even before America entered the war, its attention centered on Europe.
Among other reasons, Roosevelt and his advisors determined that Germany
represented the greatest strategic threat to the security of the United States. Nazi
hegemony over the European continent might be irreversible, while the prospect
seemed small that Japan could defeat the United States. Europe and Germany
were known entities, familiar and calculable to most Americans; therefore the
natural proclivity was to concentrate on the known. If American understanding
of German capabilities was poor, the understanding of Japan was far worse.
Intelligence estimates reported that the Japanese built battleships, airplanes,
tanks, and other weapons, but estimators could not conceive that they could
come close to the performance of Western technology. Nor could Americans
believe that the Japanese could launch effective military operations or
understand that they would have a differing approach in their calculations of
war risks or of the relationship of means to ends.
The war in the Pacific should hardly have come as a surprise. The last
prewar issue of Time magazine had the following to say about the situation:
Everything was ready. FromRangoon to Honolulu every man was at battle
stations. And Franklin Roosevelt was at his. This was the last act of the
drama. The US position had the single clarity of a stone wall. One nervous
twitch of a Japanese trigger, one jump in any direction, one overt act,
might be enough. A vast array of armies, of navies, of air fleets were
stretched now in the position of track runners, in the tension of the
moment before the starter’s gun.I4
Despite the efforts of historians to discover a smoking gun that would
implicate the Roosevelt administration in the Pearl Harbor disaster, the real
cause of the catastrophe lay in the assumptions and attitudes of American
civilians and military. Ignoring Admiral Togo Heihachiro’s surprise attack on
the Russian Far East Fleet at Port Arthur in 1904, few could imagine that the
Japanese would or could launch another surprise attack in 1941.15 The result
was a tactical and operational defeat in the Philippines and Hawaiian Islands.
A peacetime mentality clouded the judgment of American commanders. The
Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor had made minimal preparations to resist air attack.
The Army (including the AAF) assumed that the Navy was handling matters,
despite the fact that the AAF’s mission in Hawaii was to protect the fleet.I6
The real causes of the Pearl Harbor disaster had more to do with faulty
assumptions and a general unwillingness to take enemy capabilities seriously
than with a failure to gather intelligence. The destruction of American air power
in the Philippines resulted from slightly different factors. Pearl Harbor had
occurred eight hours earlier; American aircraft remained parked wing tip to
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