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Pearl Harbor - Page 2

In the fly over to America someone should have seen something and sent a warning beforehand not so? Was a fleet of kamikaze pilots really that hard to spot?

Harbor Pearl

Umber,

They were not kamikaze pilots. They very well trained pilots flying off of six very good, for their time, aircraft carriers. The world was a "Slower" and "Bigger" place back then. There weren't any satellites looking down, there was virtually no cross ocean air traffic, and there was a lot less sea traffic than today. The Japanese were very secretive about the way they went about this and they snuck their ships out of harbor. By the time we even realized they were gone we had no idea where they were heading and really lacked the resources to find them.

Pearl Harbor History & Civil Business Politics

That's true. I did read that when one Japanese plane was hit the pilot chose to use it in a kamikaze manner rather than being taken hostage. That happened against the Kaneohe Naval Air Station by First Lieutenant Fusata. Maybe he started the ideal for the rest of the war.

Page 2 Harbor Pearl

Yes, Japanese pilots often crashed their planes into targets rather than trying to land them safely. That came from their samurai heritage, where they saw surrender as an act of cowardice, even if the odds were hopelessly stacked against them. Interestingly, during the Battle of Midway a couple of US pilots also crashed their planes into Japanese ships. It was a hard fought, no quarters war… on both sides.

Harbor Pearl

America was already in the European theater fighting but not fully engaged at the time of Pearl Harbor. Many viewed that pearl Harbor could not be attacked by torpedo planes due to the shallow harbor not allowing the torpedoes to recover from the drop without striking the harbor bottom. All it took was a scientist to figure out a cheat and then bam they were able to use them. Radar was around and radar operators saw the Japanese coming with plenty of time to warn everyone but they were told it was a squad of planes coming from the states. Thus history was made. If the radar operators were not ignored and the army air corps were scrambled it would have been an entirely different outcome many believe.

Pearl Harbor

KN,

Yes, they added wooden fins to the torpedoes so they wouldn't sink and get stuck in the mud when they were dropped from the torpedo bombers. That is some little known trivia. Nice to see a fellow history buff. The fins would fall off afterwards and allow the torpedoes to sink low enough to cause tremendous damage to the ships hulls. The thing is, most of the battleships that had the most torpedo damage were salvaged because they simply sank upright and settled into the mud. We just refloated them, patched them up, and sent them to CA to be reconditioned. It was the ones that had extensive bomb damage too that ended up being unsalvageable, like the USS Arizona.

Also, had our planes gotten off the ground there would have been 350 of them in the air. Now, our planes were older, slower, and less maneuverable, but they'd have had the advantage of flying with full fuel tanks close to home so could carry more ammunition. That is always a huge advantage in air combat. It's basically why the Brits won the Battle of Britain, along with a few other advantages. Would the war have been that different? Probably not, Japan still would have crippled our flee I think but we would have bloodied their nose too. Instead, almost all our planes were blown up on the runway and in their hangers.

Pearl Harbor - Page 2

Trump signs National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day proclamation. As six Pearl Harbor veterans stood by his side, President Trump signed a presidential Source 3z.