At least this is what I seem to remember reading years ago..
Not quite, Hawk. I have read a lot on it, and finished a couple of new books on the subject recently. Historians will always argue exactly what was going on. Hey, that's how they make a living!
The best that I can come up with is General Togo and crowd wanted to seize the Asian Oil supply, because Roosevelt had cut them off in an attempt to stop their Asian aggression, and a good case can be made that he wanted to force them into an attack on us. We were so arrogant at the time, and racist about the Jap's ability to fight us, that FDR figured we could hold them off and institute "Rainbow Five," our war plan to defeat Hitler.
But, even if the second part was not true, the Japs figured that taking out the Pacific Fleet, then based at Pearl, would stop us in our tracks and make us sue for peace. Yamamoto knew better, and his famous remark was, "I can run wild for six months, then we are in trouble." But he saluted, then planned and carried out the Pearl Harbor attack. It was a near run thing.
Why they did not hit the Oil Tanks at Pearl no one knows. They were a perfect and an easy target. Knocking those tanks out would have knocked us out of the Pacific for six months, no matter how much of the Fleet was sunk. |
