The Lessons From the Pearl Harbor Attack Are Still Being Learned

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The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor 83 years ago is fading from the memory of mortal men. There are just 16 surviving servicemen of the more than 87,000 stationed at Pearl Harbor and other military installations on Oahu, according to a list maintained by Kathleen Farley, the California state chair of the Sons and Daughters of Pearl Harbor Survivors.

One of those servicemen, U.S. Navy Seaman 2nd Class John C. Auld from Newcastle, England was only recently identified. His unidentified remains, along with dozens of his comrades, had been buried in 1944. They were disinterred in 1947 when another 35 bodies were identified, and the rest reburied at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu.

In 2015, the remains were again exhumed, and using the latest DNA and other scientific means, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) was able to identify Auld’s remains in 2018. For some reason, Auld’s family wasn’t notified until recently, which was why the announcement was delayed. He was finally laid to rest on Friday in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Auld served on the battleship USS Oklahoma. She capsized after being hit by several torpedoes and went belly-up in just 12 minutes. Just 32 crew members survived. The Defense Department recently announced that all of the crewmembers who died aboard the USS Oklahoma have been identified. 

The surprise on that day was complete. Or was it? The story of the attack on Pearl Harbor from the U.S. point of view was a tragedy of missed signals, a lack of imagination, and deadly assumptions about the fleet’s invulnerability.

Newt Gingrich writing in the New York Sun:

Many assumed Pearl Harbor was too shallow for an aircraft-based torpedo attack. The theory was torpedoes would enter the water too fast, hit the seafloor, and explode. This was despite the British’s brilliant airborne torpedo attack which crippled an Italian battle fleet at Taranto a year earlier on November 11, 1940.

The Japanese had developed a shallow-run torpedo that would work in Pearl Harbor’s waters. They had also practiced with elaborate secrecy. They knew they would achieve complete surprise in delivering a devastating blow to the Pacific Fleet.

Gingrich believes the lessons of Pearl Harbor “are that even the best intelligence can be misread, people’s hopes can outweigh their common sense, and bureaucratic cultures can ignore inconvenient signals.”

Those are the same lessons that went unlearned in Israel when the Arabs staged a surprise attack on Yom Kippur and even more tragically, the October 7 Hamas attack that led to the greatest loss of Jewish lives since the Holocaust.

Some of the lessons from Pearl Harbor were ignored on September 11, 2001 as well.

The stunning terrorist stack on September 11, 2001, had a different lesson. After it happened, many defense specialists said they had never considered the possibility of terrorists using passenger planes to attack buildings. That was a sad commentary on their lack of imagination. 

In 1994, Tom Clancy wrote “Debt of Honor,” a best-selling novel in which an airliner was flown into the Capitol with devastating results. Clancy understood perfectly that a plane full of aviation fuel could be a weapon. Apparently, none of the experts read fiction — even if it related directly to their line of work.

Hindsight is never exactly 20/20. Even knowing and studying the past won’t guarantee our safety. But Gingrich believes “we can at least minimize the damage and maximize the speed and effectiveness of our response.”

Much of the same complacency that was present in the U.S. before the 9/11 attacks is also present today. Will we ever learn the lessons of Pearl Harbor and head off the next “surprise” attack?

I’m not confident.