First I'm going to say that WWII history has been my passion for at least 50 years. I've read the accounts from all sides, historians and participants alike. Pearl Harbor has been a particular target of revisionist history almost from the outset. This show attempts to give those efforts new credibility by the use or recently unclassified reports. They will succeed in the minds of many but the reality is that they have only hung new flesh on the existing skeleton of evidence.
Much of what is "revealed" here only elaborates on the excellent and nearly contemporary account provided in Gordon W. Prange's "At Dawn We Slept". This should be no surprise as Mr. Prange conducted extensive interviews with many of the key surviving participants on both sides right after the war including Genda who helped plan the attack and Fuchida who led it. While he did not have access (I assume) to the reports now declassified, he had more than enough to describe most of the espionage involved.
Much is made here of intelligence that wasn't shared and with whom but at no point is the double-edged nature of intelligence discussed. In short, the higher the value of the intelligence source, the harder it is to act upon without permanently compromising the source! They asked why the Navy asked the FBI to back off on investigating the British spy? The answer is probably quite simple: if you've identified a spy and you can read everything they are sharing and with whom, they are more valuable to you in operation than in jail! Even at Midway, they were concerned that ambushing the attacking force would alert the Japanese that we had broken their codes. Finally, it was worth taking that risk and it paid off magnificently. Churchill once had to accept an bombing raid on one of Britain's cities as the cost of keep their breaking of the Enigma code secret because winning the Battle of the Atlantic and very survival depended on protecting that secret!
There is also another dark issue here that rears it's ugly head that shows up in other "documentaries" that claim that the pyramids were actually built by ancient aliens because there was "no way the Egyptians could've figured out how to do this since we can't now...". It's a form of subtle racism. In this case, the Japanese caught us unawares and with better technology so they HAD to have had British spies sharing the great technology the nations were developing, they simply couldn't have done it on their own! This view conveniently ignores the Japanese navy's defeat of the Russian navy at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905.
Finally, there are two additional huge flaws in the logic presented here. Number one was that additional information shared with Kimmel and Short would've substantially changed how they responded to the "War Warning" they received days prior to the attack. There is simply no evidence to suggest they would. There were fundamental flaws of communication between the two commanders and it's unclear that either one really understood the threat that a carrier borne strike presented. Both were stuck in the thinking of the last war.
The second flaw is that, quite simply, Kimmel and Short already had more than enough information to understand that they needed to be prepared for an attack to occur without warning. The British had already successfully attacked the Italian fleet in the shallow harbor of Taranto and Kimmel should've understood that the same could be done at Pearl Harbor yet he never requested torpedo nets which would've negated that threat. Short was fixated on sabotage and clumped all of his fighters, without fuel or ammunition into an easily guarded, but equally juicy target for air attack and he had no recognition of the value of radar that he only had it manned for a few hours a day and it was shut down just before it would've detected the incoming attack!
None of those facts are drawn from a lack of intelligence being shared from above! It was simply two aging commanders who had failed to appreciate the dramatic changes that had taken place between the wars. They weren't alone. In 1925 Gen. Billy Mitchell was given a courts martial for insubordination and "conduct detrimental" for rightly insisting that air launched attacks could sink battleships and that the Navy and War Departments were "incompetent and criminally negligent" for refusing to recognize that danger.
I'm disappointed that none of the "experts" recognized or called any of this out but given the nature of how these types of shows are made I will give them the benefit of the doubt that they may not have realized the theories the director would later attach to their observations.
Much of what is "revealed" here only elaborates on the excellent and nearly contemporary account provided in Gordon W. Prange's "At Dawn We Slept". This should be no surprise as Mr. Prange conducted extensive interviews with many of the key surviving participants on both sides right after the war including Genda who helped plan the attack and Fuchida who led it. While he did not have access (I assume) to the reports now declassified, he had more than enough to describe most of the espionage involved.
Much is made here of intelligence that wasn't shared and with whom but at no point is the double-edged nature of intelligence discussed. In short, the higher the value of the intelligence source, the harder it is to act upon without permanently compromising the source! They asked why the Navy asked the FBI to back off on investigating the British spy? The answer is probably quite simple: if you've identified a spy and you can read everything they are sharing and with whom, they are more valuable to you in operation than in jail! Even at Midway, they were concerned that ambushing the attacking force would alert the Japanese that we had broken their codes. Finally, it was worth taking that risk and it paid off magnificently. Churchill once had to accept an bombing raid on one of Britain's cities as the cost of keep their breaking of the Enigma code secret because winning the Battle of the Atlantic and very survival depended on protecting that secret!
There is also another dark issue here that rears it's ugly head that shows up in other "documentaries" that claim that the pyramids were actually built by ancient aliens because there was "no way the Egyptians could've figured out how to do this since we can't now...". It's a form of subtle racism. In this case, the Japanese caught us unawares and with better technology so they HAD to have had British spies sharing the great technology the nations were developing, they simply couldn't have done it on their own! This view conveniently ignores the Japanese navy's defeat of the Russian navy at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905.
Finally, there are two additional huge flaws in the logic presented here. Number one was that additional information shared with Kimmel and Short would've substantially changed how they responded to the "War Warning" they received days prior to the attack. There is simply no evidence to suggest they would. There were fundamental flaws of communication between the two commanders and it's unclear that either one really understood the threat that a carrier borne strike presented. Both were stuck in the thinking of the last war.
The second flaw is that, quite simply, Kimmel and Short already had more than enough information to understand that they needed to be prepared for an attack to occur without warning. The British had already successfully attacked the Italian fleet in the shallow harbor of Taranto and Kimmel should've understood that the same could be done at Pearl Harbor yet he never requested torpedo nets which would've negated that threat. Short was fixated on sabotage and clumped all of his fighters, without fuel or ammunition into an easily guarded, but equally juicy target for air attack and he had no recognition of the value of radar that he only had it manned for a few hours a day and it was shut down just before it would've detected the incoming attack!
None of those facts are drawn from a lack of intelligence being shared from above! It was simply two aging commanders who had failed to appreciate the dramatic changes that had taken place between the wars. They weren't alone. In 1925 Gen. Billy Mitchell was given a courts martial for insubordination and "conduct detrimental" for rightly insisting that air launched attacks could sink battleships and that the Navy and War Departments were "incompetent and criminally negligent" for refusing to recognize that danger.
I'm disappointed that none of the "experts" recognized or called any of this out but given the nature of how these types of shows are made I will give them the benefit of the doubt that they may not have realized the theories the director would later attach to their observations.
