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By Root 1731 0

battleships in port, three were sunk (that is, grounded), one – Oklahoma – capsized, and the others were more or less seriously damaged. Three light cruisers, three destroyers and other vessels were also sunk or seriously damaged, but vitally no submarine was affected.15 Only 54 Navy and Marine planes out of 250 either survived intact or were reparable, but 166 out of the 231 USAAF planes also survived. The American death toll amounted to 2,403 servicemen and civilians killed and 1,178 wounded.16 The Japanese lost only twenty-nine planes and a hundred lives, but all five midget submarines, only one of which made it inside the harbour, were sunk. Yet what was an undoubted disaster for America could easily have been a catastrophe. Fearing a counter-attack because the American aircraft carriers were not in harbour, Nagumo did not send in the third wave of bombers to destroy the very installations – oil depots and repair yards – that the Pacific Fleet would need to reconstitute itself. It was one thing for Pearl Harbor to be effectively neutralized for six months, but complete destruction would have been quite another. Even as their men celebrated, Nagumo, Genda (who was to command the Japanese Air Force from 1959 to 1962) and Fuchida (who was to become a Protestant pastor and in 1966 an American citizen) knew they had not achieved what they needed to. As it was, all the ships except two destroyers would be repaired and rejoin the Pacific Fleet. (The Arizona remains a tomb to this day.) Once Yamamoto had realized that the attack on Pearl Harbor had fallen far short of his original plans he dolefully wrote in a letter: ‘A military man can scarcely pride himself on having “smitten a sleeping enemy”; it is more a matter of shame, simply, for the one smitten. I would rather you made your appraisal after seeing what the enemy does, since it is certain that, angered and outraged, he will soon launch a determined counterattack…’17

The very completeness of the surprise attack has spawned many conspiracy theories and accusations of cover-ups regarding Pearl Harbor, which allege that the Roosevelt Administration (and sometimes also the Churchill Government) had prior warning of the attack but deliberately failed to warn Kimmel and Short in order to bring the United States into the war. This is nonsense: Roosevelt was keen to provoke Germany into conflict, it is true, but he did not want a war on two fronts, and indeed he would have liked to transfer part of the Pacific Fleet to the Atlantic.18 Moreover, FDR loved the US Navy, had been its under-secretary during the Great War, and any such conspiracy would have needed the co-operation of, at the very least, the War Secretary Henry L. Stimson, Navy Secretary Frank Knox, Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall and Navy Chief of Staff Admiral Harold Stark, all of them honourable and patriotic men. ‘Nor was anything to be gained by allowing the great ships to be destroyed at their moorings if they could have been alerted and at sea,’ states Roosevelt’s biographer, Conrad Black. ‘An ineffective Japanese attack would have been just as good a casus belli.’19 Kimmel’s culpability was all the worse because Churchill had sent Roosevelt the official summary of how the Taranto raid had been carried out; Roosevelt sent it to Stark, who sent it on to Kimmel, who ignored it.

Pearl Harbor certainly was the perfect casus belli, however. Recruitment offices had to stay open throughout the night as Americans volunteered for service; trade union leaders cancelled strikes, and on Monday, 8 December Congress voted 470 to 1 (the pacifist Jeannette Rankin of Montana) for war. This was the opportunity for Roosevelt to rally the nation with the words: ‘Yesterday, December 7, 1941 – a date that will live in infamy – the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.’ As well as the fact that ‘very many American lives have been lost,’ he reported attacks on Malaya, Hong Kong, Guam, the Philippines and Wake and Midway Islands. ‘No matter how long it