212: Pearl Harbor with Marty Morgan

00:02:24:14 – 00:02:44:08
Dan LeFebvre
We’ve covered a lot of World War Two movies over the years, but it has been a little while since I’ve had you on the show. And one thing I’ve started doing since the last time we talked is to kick things off with an overall letter grade for historical accuracy. So we take a step back to look at Pearl Harbor from a historical perspective.

00:02:44:26 – 00:02:46:03
Dan LeFebvre
What grade would you give it?

00:02:46:23 – 00:02:47:10
Marty Morgan
F minus.

00:02:47:27 – 00:02:51:11
Dan LeFebvre
F minus. Okay. I’ve had a Z.

00:02:53:02 – 00:02:54:14
Marty Morgan
Oh, I didn’t realize that was possible.

00:02:55:03 – 00:02:57:09
Dan LeFebvre
I didn’t realize it either. But, yeah, we were making it up anyway.

00:02:57:09 – 00:03:35:04
Marty Morgan
So I don’t mean to be too cruel about the movie, but it doesn’t. It doesn’t take a scholar to recognize and observe that the 2001 motion picture, Pearl Harbor had deep historical inaccuracies. It had as an overall characterization of the film. It had a basic contempt for the actuality of the historical time period that it was presenting. That shows through very painfully in all of the set piece elements of the story, and I’ve divided it into four set piece elements.

00:03:35:04 – 00:04:02:27
Marty Morgan
And that’s element number one, which is the United States pre-war, sort of within a universe of U.S. Army fighter pilots. I would characterize I would describe set piece two as the U.S. military, the U.S. Eagle squadrons in service in the United Kingdom prior to Pearl Harbor. Set piece number three is Pearl Harbor. Set piece number four is the Doolittle Raid.

00:04:03:10 – 00:04:39:00
Marty Morgan
And within the context of all four of those historic set pieces, there are. And again, I don’t want to be terrible, but there are so many deep historical inaccuracies that were very clearly produced by a contempt for historical accuracy on the part of the filmmakers. I realize that those are some pretty powerful words. And, you know, those are fighting words, but I, I can’t think of a more rational way of presenting it without engaging in histrionics.

00:04:39:04 – 00:05:08:18
Marty Morgan
I am given to being a little histrionic about this movie from time to time and the more balanced, levelheaded side of my character has to take over for just this setting to say that the movie, as much as it has created a legacy that’s still with us today and the unfortunate legacy of that is, I mean, the movie is recognized by posterity as being one of the biggest failures of historical accuracy, that there’s ever been depicted on the big screen.

00:05:09:02 – 00:05:30:27
Dan LeFebvre
That’s the that’s pretty telling right there. Well, you mentioned the Doolittle Raid. And early on in the movie, we do see Alec Baldwin’s version of Major Doolittle telling Ben Affleck’s character, Rafe McCauley, that only a few British pilots are all that stand between Hitler and total victory in Europe. And of course, we’ll get to the Doolittle Raid itself later on.

00:05:30:27 – 00:05:51:02
Dan LeFebvre
I was mentioning mostly Major Doolittle there. He’s kind of introduced as a character here because at this point, the movie doesn’t really mention it by by name. But the impression I got is that it’s talking about the Battle of Britain. Doolittle mentioned something about how it’s only a matter of time before the U.S. is pulled into war, and then Rafe has been accepted into what the movie calls the British Eagle Squadron.

00:05:51:02 – 00:05:58:10
Dan LeFebvre
So he heads over to England. Did the U.S. military let their pilots go to England to help fight against the Germans?

00:05:59:03 – 00:06:24:06
Marty Morgan
That’s a hard it’s hard to say either yes or no to that, because there’s it would be wrong of me not to point out that the way that it’s depicted in the movie is inaccurate. This is the first time I’ve said this for this podcast, and I’m already bored with myself. And I’m sure you are too, because almost everything that we will bring up to discuss, I will begin as my preamble.

00:06:24:06 – 00:06:49:09
Marty Morgan
I will begin by saying the way that it is depicted in the movie is historically inaccurate, and I don’t want those words to become completely meaningless. But this movie confronts us with so many fundamental inaccuracies that I’m going to have to repeat that statement over and over and over again. And the way that you presented the question was, did the U.S. military allow pilots to serve?

00:06:49:09 – 00:07:12:04
Marty Morgan
And the answer is no. The U.S. military did not. The United States was under intense obligations to remain neutral at a very critical time in that era, prior to December 1941, when the president was obviously aware that the United States would ultimately be drawn into the conflict as a combatant power and that the United States would have to begin preparing.

00:07:12:17 – 00:07:38:09
Marty Morgan
But he also understood that it was going to be necessary for us to maintain neutrality, or at least the theater of neutrality, as long as we possibly could, just by virtue of the fact that we weren’t militarily completely ready for for taking on three very powerful nations. And because of that, we had to adhere to strict standards of neutrality.

00:07:38:09 – 00:08:10:26
Marty Morgan
And that meant that the United States military could not support the RAAF mission in attempting to fight off the Luftwaffe. The way that the Eagle Escort Service and the Eagle Squadrons was elaborated was that aviators, sometimes aviators, sometimes people who had not even yet received flight training. They were they were forced to cross the border into Canada so that they could then present themselves at a recruiting station, so that they could join the Eagle squadrons.

00:08:11:03 – 00:08:39:26
Marty Morgan
So they had to be fully if they had been in the military, they had to be fully severed from that service at the time that they crossed the border to go to Canada, to go to a recruiting station. So you had you had aviators? Not a lot. The majority of the men who served in the Eagle squadrons were not prior service military elite aviators, either in the Navy or the Army.

00:08:41:11 – 00:09:15:07
Marty Morgan
The ones that did that, though, they had to be fully separated before they were volunteer service in the Eagle Squadrons. It’s depicted in the movie is, of course, Jimmy Doolittle is standing there, portrayed by Alec Baldwin. It’s so it’s such a weird like elephant in the room now for Alec Baldwin to come up because a point I frequently make about this is that there are a few acting performances in this film that I think are good, and I think Alec Baldwin, the one of them people, will immediately howl because this is not the kind of character that Jimmy Doolittle presented.

00:09:15:08 – 00:09:34:28
Marty Morgan
It’s very much an Alec Baldwin being Alec Baldwin and Alec Baldwin. I mean, I feel like we we should now at least be honest with ourselves enough to recognize he’s one of our greatest living actors. Something terrible happened. He’s done forever now. And his performance in this movie is one of the only performances that I found convincing anyway.

00:09:35:24 – 00:09:58:28
Marty Morgan
But it’s depicted as Jimmy Doolittle, portrayed by Alec Baldwin going Your transfer came through to the Eagle Squadron and off you go. That is not how it worked, the way that it would never have been. Someone in uniform service receiving the way was receiving. What’s presented in the movie as being a transfer assignment or a temporary duty assignment of any kind.

00:09:58:29 – 00:10:30:18
Marty Morgan
That’s not how it works. The United States would have been in a lot of trouble if we had allowed a situation like that to exist. And they’re the era that kind of characterizes the period from the beginning of the Battle of Britain until America’s entry in the conflict. That period is characterized by an American military that is walking a very delicate line, an American government that is walking a very delicate line and trying its best not to put so much as a toe over the line of neutrality.

00:10:30:27 – 00:10:55:29
Marty Morgan
The reality, though, is that we did, we frequently did. And in fact, ultimately, President Roosevelt’s policy, his declared policy was anything short of war. Those that’s the take away quote, short of war. And I often use that as a means of describing his character as being decisive and prescient because he recognized there’s no way we’re getting out of this alive.

00:10:56:01 – 00:11:18:18
Marty Morgan
There’s no way that we’re going to watch war destroy Europe and Asia and then set where during which we will sit, sit by and watch as a bystander. He understood that that was not going to happen. And the president understood also, I have a country that is not unanimously in support of being involved in another European war or another world war.

00:11:18:27 – 00:11:42:17
Marty Morgan
And I also have a defense complex that is not prepared either. It’s also often very troubling for me when when conversations about this time period come up, because I find that a lot of mythology has crept into that, into that thinking. And I should just make this broader point that is that I find that mythology has crept into every corner of the subject.

00:11:42:17 – 00:12:01:17
Marty Morgan
And in such a way, in such a pronounced way, as the mythology becomes the dominant factor. And I’m going to give you a give you one example from last month about the Eagle Squadrons. So I lead these tours in Europe every year. I had two years off because of COVID, and I got back to it just last month.

00:12:02:15 – 00:12:26:18
Marty Morgan
So it was the first time, for example, that I was in Normandy for the D-Day anniversary since 2019 and I’m not. It was, you know, 2020. D-Day 2020 was the first time that I wasn’t in Normandy on the anniversary, 26 years. So sort of it sort of felt very different to be homeward bound to be homebound and not be in Normandy.

00:12:26:19 – 00:12:47:17
Marty Morgan
It was great to be in Normandy last month for the anniversary, but something interesting happened. The trips that I lead for National Geographic are trips that start in London, and as a part of our London guided experience, I would take people around to sites and locations that were associated with World War Two that can be found there. I used to live in London, I went to school in London, and so I’m kind of familiar with all of these sites.

00:12:47:17 – 00:13:08:12
Marty Morgan
And I take people to places like HMS Belfast, the Cabinet War Rooms, the Spirit War Museum. We take a trip up to Bletchley Park to talk about Codebreaking, during which people only want to ask me about the Imitation Game or movie we should talk about at some point. Because when I was at King’s College, I specialized in Bletchley Park intercepts of U-boat transmissions.

00:13:08:12 – 00:13:13:01
Marty Morgan
And when the movie came out, I kind of like that movie. That movie is absurd.

00:13:13:06 – 00:13:27:06
Dan LeFebvre
It’s actually Talk to Mark. Who is he runs the podcast for Bletchley Park about that. Yeah. So it’s fascinating to learn all about going on there. And I would love to go to Bletchley. I need to take that to her website. It’s a very sorry. I didn’t mean to cut you off there, but.

00:13:27:09 – 00:13:47:11
Marty Morgan
No, that’s all right. It’s a Bletchley is a very special place. And I still like that movie. But that movie, like all movies, is not a documentary. Right? It just as this one is not. But anyway, so last month I was doing the standard tour around London before we crossed the ferry to go to France. And as a part of that, we stopped in Grosvenor Square, which is the site of the old U.S. Embassy.

00:13:47:11 – 00:14:05:03
Marty Morgan
And there are some memorials and monuments there. And in the middle of the park at Grosvenor Square, there is a memorial, the Eagles, Walkers, the three American, the three RAAF squadrons that were composed of American volunteers and I tend to go up and give my tour group a little bit of sort of a preamble and a little bit description about Eagle Squadron stuff.

00:14:05:03 – 00:14:47:15
Marty Morgan
And it begins with a general description of the Battle of Britain and the Blitz. And I found that as the conversation began, I was answering a lot of questions about the movie Pearl Harbor and I found myself saying the way that it’s depicted in the movie Pearl Harbor is not entirely historically accurate, which is, you know, I’m going to spend the rest of my life repeating those words, but I feel like this is on a macro intellectual point, something that should be brought up here now with you, because of the fact that over the years, over the two decades since this movie came out, I have over and over again heard from people that want

00:14:47:15 – 00:15:08:14
Marty Morgan
to trivialize the complaints about historical accuracy and things like that and say, oh, why can’t you just relax and enjoy it as a movie? And why can’t, you know, just you pinheads and your historical accuracy? Why is it that you have to make such a big deal about it? It didn’t help at all that, you know, I been for 15 years now leading tours to Pearl Harbor.

00:15:08:23 – 00:15:34:25
Marty Morgan
And I specialize in the subject. And I have over my time period in leading tours to Pearl Harbor and dealing with the topic and publishing kind of a lot about the subject. I’ve encountered a lot of people that worked on that movie. I did not work on that movie. I have encountered a lot of people who have. And if that movie comes up in their present, it fight is about to start because they are so over it.

00:15:35:15 – 00:15:59:26
Marty Morgan
I have two people that I encounter in Hawaii every time that if the movie comes up, they sort of start rolling up their sleeves like, All right, let’s do this. They they get quite combative. They get quite confrontational, and they’re at this stage unapproachable. They are unwilling to they’re unwilling to consider any conversations about historical accuracy, because I think they have just been broken.

00:15:59:26 – 00:16:24:25
Marty Morgan
Their will has been broken over this movie. And it’s because for 20 years now, all they get are people who are casting off the occasional sardonic one liner about the movie, and they they defend the movie. It’s fascinating to me to watch it because they’ll defend it. Well, you know, movies can’t all be perfect. They come up with a standard battery of counterarguments.

00:16:25:06 – 00:16:45:27
Marty Morgan
Movies can’t all be perfect. The important thing here is that we get, you know, the word out. This was a blockbuster, a lots a lot of people saw it and it made money for the film industry. And what is the one quote I hear frequently? A rising tide floats all boats. It’s the suggestion that in the movie Pearl Harbor would create this broader rising tide of positivism.

00:16:45:27 – 00:16:48:13
Dan LeFebvre
About there’s no such thing as bad publicity type thing.

00:16:48:22 – 00:17:13:01
Marty Morgan
Yeah, that’s exactly. Exactly right. Exactly right. And when I was standing there entertaining questions about the movie Pearl Harbor at Grosvenor Square in front of the Eagle Squadron Memorial last month, I remember thinking, this is this is the powerful argument, the argument that I that I think needs to be made about movies that make these conscious decisions, not to honor historical accuracy.

00:17:13:14 – 00:17:41:15
Marty Morgan
Not all movie will know it, not all movies will approach historical accuracies. Some do better than others, the ones that don’t when they’re bigger and they’re more powerful, like this movie or like Saving Private Ryan, what they end up doing is they end up replacing an actual historical narrative with the movie’s narrative. It’s to the extent that I remember there was an era before this movie came out and that era from my childhood.

00:17:41:15 – 00:17:59:17
Marty Morgan
I remember very clearly the the movie that dominated the conversation was the movie tours or tours from 1970? Yeah, great movie. And it came out the year after I was born. I grew up kind of with a group of military bases. They would they would play this movie ever December 7th. And I sat through it many, many times before I was even ten years old.

00:17:59:17 – 00:18:18:10
Marty Morgan
And what I remember was the the way that the discussion moved forward then. And then I remember the way that the movie the discussion moved forward after May of 2001, when the movie Pearl Harbor came out. And what it looks like to me, I remember all of the discussions that were created by Tora! Tora! Tora! Prior to 2001.

00:18:18:10 – 00:18:57:27
Marty Morgan
And it was discussions about historical inaccuracies that are in that, so that there are tropes and falsehoods that were released into the Wild by Torturer Tora! That were still around when Pearl Harbor came out. And in fact, there’s a there’s one that I’m I’m not going to mention everything, but I am going to mention just a couple of things as examples from this movie, the one that I find sort of the most alarming, but also at the same time, an intellectual case study that is definitely worth mentioning, and that is that the Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto character, as depicted in this movie uses part of a quote from the movie Tora!

00:18:57:27 – 00:19:19:17
Marty Morgan
Tora! Tora! And the quote is, I fear that we have awakened a sleeping giant and this the thing that I find troubling about that is that we now know for certain that the the the more extensive version of that quote that was used in torturing Tora! Which was I fear that all we have done is awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible result.

00:19:20:21 – 00:19:44:12
Marty Morgan
Those are words that Admiral Yamamoto never spoke or wrote. Those are words that were entirely created by the screenplay writer for two words were Tora! And it fascinates me because this is this is how this is where the rubber meets the road in terms of the creation of mythologies and folklore. And it’s because the quote was created by a screenplay writer for Torturer Tora!

00:19:44:19 – 00:19:51:18
Marty Morgan
And then it was cited in the movie Pearl Harbor in 2001. And so it continues on into the future.

00:19:51:18 – 00:19:52:18
Dan LeFebvre
Further and further.

00:19:53:07 – 00:20:13:08
Marty Morgan
Yeah. And I mean, it’s this vision reaction that is occurring of all of what might seem like minor historical inaccuracy, questions that will just continue popping and spreading with the passage of time. Another big argument that I frequently get for from the people that I know in Hawaii who were quick to defend the movie because they were involved with it.

00:20:13:08 – 00:20:34:14
Marty Morgan
That’s the only reason that they’re defending it, because they were part of it and they’re sick and tired of being attacked by about it. A standard argument that they’re making is that yes, but people suddenly got interested in Pearl Harbor as a result of this movie. And here we are 20 years later. And I don’t believe that I can draw a line of connectivity with that thought.

00:20:35:03 – 00:20:48:03
Marty Morgan
I don’t believe that this movie created a new era of enthusiasm for Pearl Harbor. Certainly not the way not comparable to the way that the movie Saving Private Ryan created a new enthusiasm for D-Day.

00:20:48:04 – 00:20:54:07
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, no, we talked about that. Yeah. How that huge, huge impact from the movie. Because of that, I’m still working.

00:20:54:07 – 00:21:11:10
Marty Morgan
I’m still leading towards the Normandy now, after all, you know, decades after Private Ryan came out and I’m still talking about Private Ryan and Private Ryan a great when it comes to historical accuracy, it’s I think it’s doing more harm than good. It’s sort of it’s this movie is on a different level than Private Ryan on many levels.

00:21:11:10 – 00:21:32:12
Marty Morgan
But what I the reason I’m bringing up the point is to say that Private Ryan, for whatever reason, it resonated with a specific audience and that specific audience was primarily younger men. It created a new era of World War Two reenacting that didn’t exist before. It created an enormous amount of enthusiasm and that’s in many ways still with us today.

00:21:32:19 – 00:21:34:00
Marty Morgan
I don’t think Pearl Harbor did that.

00:21:34:06 – 00:22:03:22
Dan LeFebvre
Hmm. Yeah. It’s fascinating to kind of compare those two and how that I guess that quotes. That’s a great point there that you know you just this movie and based on that and then it kind of makes me wonder if that quote is always going to be tied to Pearl Harbor, to the event and people are just going to continue to make anytime they see any other movies that are made in the future, if they’re going to continue to include things like that quote, and just get further and further and further away from that path like you were talking about.

00:22:04:04 – 00:22:29:12
Marty Morgan
It’s it’s definitely cited endlessly, even now to the point that from the perspective of the of the bottom feeding tour guide that leads tours on Oahu, that that explores December 7th as a general subject, I can assure you that every single tour that I lead in Hawaii, someone will inevitably like they they spend a lot of time listening to me, telling stories.

00:22:29:12 – 00:23:05:12
Marty Morgan
And I think people get a little weary of the one sidedness of that. They get a little tired of the presenter equality of the tour guide that’s going here this year in that hear that and they’ll eventually sometimes they like to like tossed in a little hey here’s a little fact that I know and the one that gets tossed in the most is of I fear that we’ve weakened as a sleeping giant in dealing with a terrible loss of it’s forced me to adopt a personal policy and the personal policy for years before the adoption of my personal policy, I used to go, well, actually, and I used to do that one thing that nobody

00:23:05:12 – 00:23:25:19
Marty Morgan
ever wants to hear, nobody ever wants to hear, some pinhead that goes well, you know, actually, that was created entirely by and the person that created that line ultimately then went on to describe how he created that line because he needed something to close out the movie. And that was the perfect way to do it. And he was inspired by a few things that Yamamoto actually said and actually wrote.

00:23:25:19 – 00:23:47:25
Marty Morgan
But those words Yamamoto did not say are right. People don’t like to have the tour guide just sort of slam dunk them like that immediately. It’s a personal policy I have adopted is that when it comes up, I will often either just not acknowledge the statement and like look away where I obviously am reacting in a noncommittal way.

00:23:47:25 – 00:24:10:19
Marty Morgan
And I move on to where it’s very, very obvious that something’s going on. Or I will say, Hey, if you would like to know more about that quote, I have done a little bit of writing on the subject. Just let me know. And when I present it like that, that’s just easy. I’m baiting people on and baiting the fish up onto the boat when I do that because they immediately go, Well, what are you referring to?

00:24:10:19 – 00:24:30:10
Marty Morgan
And then I’ll go, Well, actually. And then I’m right back where I started. So what I am attempting to do more and more now is just not is just to not acknowledge it. And what I have learned is that what the world I know, what the world wants and what the world doesn’t want and what the world doesn’t want is what I have to say about this Pearl Harbor quote, What the world does want is the quote.

00:24:30:22 – 00:24:38:22
Dan LeFebvre
I mean, the end of the day, it is a great well, I mean, you know, it is great quote. I will give them that. It’s a great way to end the movie, that’s for sure.

00:24:39:12 – 00:24:40:14
Marty Morgan
Perfect way to end the movie.

00:24:41:28 – 00:25:08:27
Dan LeFebvre
Speaking of things, from the Japanese perspective, in Pearl Harbor, the first time that we see things from the Japanese military’s perspective is a discussion about how war is inevitable. The Americans have cut off the oil. That’s their lifeline. They only have enough for 18 months. So war is the only option from their perspective. And so a massive sudden strike to wipe out the American Pacific fleet in a single attack at Pearl Harbor is the only way that they can succeed.

00:25:09:13 – 00:25:19:14
Dan LeFebvre
And that’s basically how the movie sets up the decision to attack Pearl. How old did the movie do explaining the reason for that attack C-minus?

00:25:19:14 – 00:25:48:13
Marty Morgan
It’s it’s it’s a decent example of exposition. There’s a lot that’s got to be thrashed out through this little section of its its dialog. And also the senior referred to is the scene that of all scenes in this movie? It is it has a cringe factor that I put right up there with, you know, the scene when the pilots are getting there in knocking Asians from the this little girl squad, the nurses.

00:25:48:19 – 00:26:20:12
Marty Morgan
Yeah. And it’s it’s it is as if it was written by children in terms of the way that it’s set up. And everyone is a complete caricature. Everyone is a complete, ridiculous, laughable, clichéd dialogue’s awful that scene the poles. I’ve seen a couple of other scenes in the movie, but the scene where there’s this exposition about why we must do this is so very odd and uncomfortable for me to sit through because they filmed that at Fort MacArthur, at San Pedro and the Los Angeles area.

00:26:20:23 – 00:26:29:17
Marty Morgan
And the way that they set the place up, just because it has sort of a military look about it, but it’s set up as this very peculiar outdoor meeting.

00:26:29:26 – 00:26:36:20
Dan LeFebvre
They were outside. I was wondering why it’s me outside all these. Okay. I guess they just have their meetings outside. It’s nice weather, I guess.

00:26:37:15 – 00:26:56:02
Marty Morgan
Right. And and it strikes me as even stranger because of depicting Yamamoto as the commanding officer, the Japanese combined fleet. And it’s all is created in a very exposition of like, we must do this because and I, in my first thought, is like, why is he trying to talk his staff into it? He didn’t have to talk his staff into this.

00:26:56:15 – 00:27:18:26
Marty Morgan
It seems to me that that the entire concept of this scene, which comes across very comic book, much of what’s going on here comes across is very comic book in terms of its clichéd settings where every possible piece of set dressing that could be crammed into a camera shot is crammed into a camera shot where everything is a cliche, everything is over the top.

00:27:18:27 – 00:27:40:06
Marty Morgan
There can’t be a moment of dialog where the camera’s not in motion. It’s like it’s like the independent film buffs worst nightmare. Because in or like I must I’d love to know how French people react to this, because French people are notorious for like having movies that are set at a dinner party where everyone sits around and talks about their feelings.

00:27:40:15 – 00:28:06:00
Marty Morgan
And that’s the entire movie. And I’m not ridicule like that. I am saying, though, that they’re depending more and more on dazzle and stunt within each shot. There’s a point in the in the Eagle Squadron scenes where it’s the Ben Affleck character and then the the wing commander or group commander, they’re walking together and they cut to a cutaway shot of an unnamed character who has one line of dialog and as like.

00:28:06:00 – 00:28:29:15
Marty Morgan
And his line of dialog was something to the effect of all five didn’t come back. And as they do it, it’s the camera angle has a sweep to it. And as it’s sweeping around him, three Spitfires are flying overhead perfectly through the shot, perfectly framed through the shot, so that there can’t even be a line of establishing dialog from an unnamed character without it looking like a Faith Hill video.

00:28:30:04 – 00:28:59:17
Marty Morgan
And that’s what’s going on with this out, this peculiar outdoor meeting, which I’m still sort of not understanding who’s supposed to be in this meeting. Is it supposed to be Yamamoto in the and the Naval general staff to come? Is it supposed to be is it naval general staff or is it the combined fleet and its staff? It’s certainly not an Imperial Cabinet meeting with with the emperor and his civilian military staff, which is where it seems like conversations like this would have been playing out.

00:28:59:18 – 00:29:04:13
Dan LeFebvre
You would think it would be involved in that. The decision to go to start a war. Yeah.

00:29:04:19 – 00:29:26:05
Marty Morgan
Rather than a naval commander talking to all of his subordinates, which is what it comes across. And I get it. I should like it. This point just mentioned that there are some problems in the movie that I shouldn’t even mention because they had no choice. There are a lot of these. They had no choice type moments, like there are lots of shots where you have Spitfires that aren’t there correct models.

00:29:26:26 – 00:29:43:19
Marty Morgan
They had no choice. You’re going to take what spit what Spitfires are still flying it might not be the right model Spitfire, but that’s what is there. Like there are shots where you can see the angled flight deck of aircraft carriers in the 1960s during the jet age, I almost I don’t even want to mention stuff like that because they had no choice.

00:29:43:19 – 00:30:08:19
Marty Morgan
Their shots where you see it’s a modern aircraft carrier and they’re flying off, they had no choice. The USS Enterprise continues to no longer exist, just as does USS Yorktown and USS Hornet. They had no choice. There are times where the historical accuracy matters are matters, where the filmmaker had no choice. He had to use a late war spitfire because that’s what was available.

00:30:08:19 – 00:30:33:18
Marty Morgan
He had to use an aircraft carrier from the 1960s because that was available. However, there are areas where the filmmaker had choices to make. And what I find is that this movie is notorious for the filmmakers being guided mainly by interest in creating a comic book and certainly not being guided by interests in creating a movie that at least even acknowledged the historical time period.

00:30:33:18 – 00:30:56:03
Marty Morgan
Because the movie shows such deep and complete contempt for historical accuracy that there are moments where I have to wonder what it was like to work on the film. I didn’t work on the film. I’ve worked on projects like this, and I have been in settings even quite recently where I’m dealing with people that have a direct contempt for the historical accuracy, where they hire somebody to be the historical advisor.

00:30:56:03 – 00:31:14:14
Marty Morgan
And what quickly develops is and hostility between the people who feel like I’ve got a job to do, I’ve got a movie I have to make. And you, as the historical advisor, you are interfering with our progress toward the completion of this project. I’ve seen that happen many, many times, and I’ve been on the wrong side of that many times.

00:31:14:14 – 00:31:35:04
Marty Morgan
And it’s pretty clear that that’s what happened here when at the top of the pyramid, where, you know, inhabited by Michael Bay, there was there was a decision to, like, I think, lean into the people that he was more used to working with, which is why this looks more like an action movie than anything. And strangely and it also it’s a movie that doesn’t know what it wants to look like.

00:31:35:14 – 00:31:49:00
Marty Morgan
Is it is it set on this piece of historical fiction or is it like a docu drama or is it an action film? Or is it the creepiest three way love triangle that has ever existed?

00:31:49:16 – 00:31:50:14
Dan LeFebvre
Yes to all.

00:31:50:27 – 00:31:54:04
Marty Morgan
It’s yes to all three books.

00:31:54:07 – 00:32:09:11
Dan LeFebvre
Yes. I mean, if that obviously that wasn’t how the Japanese decided to attack Pearl Harbor, can you set up some historical context around like the actual reasons why the decision to attack Pearl happened?

00:32:10:29 – 00:32:37:02
Marty Morgan
Yeah, the Japanese were engaged in a kinetic ground combat maneuver war in China. It was tying up national resources to a significant level. The United States, as well as other world powers, were protesting against the continuing Japanese war in China. And our protests ultimately after 1940 came in the form of a series of embargoes, and the embargoes had a very negative effect.

00:32:37:09 – 00:33:12:18
Marty Morgan
It’s funny to be narrating this here in 2022, when I could just as easily be describing something that’s happening on the other side of the world right now. But the Japanese were the Japanese had been cut off basically from North and South America, not all South America, but North America and Europe. Because of this, the war that they were fighting in China, the Japanese were were painfully feeling the embargoes, particularly of oil and then ultimately steel, because the Japanese home islands are home islands that are rich in certain things and scarce in others.

00:33:12:18 – 00:33:41:03
Marty Morgan
The home islands are scarce in terms of oil, tin and rubber resources as well as steel. But since those resources are that’s a laundry list of the most important items that a military needs. The Japanese were in the era of the sanctions that were imposed upon them by specifically the United States. The Japanese began looking around the neighborhood that surrounded them in Asia and they designated an area immediately to the south of the Jap.

00:33:41:09 – 00:34:02:17
Marty Morgan
The extent of the Japanese empire and the extent of the Japanese empire at this stage was the island of Taiwan, Formosa, which was annexed into the Japanese empire. The it would ultimately be an asset of the Japanese. In part, the Japanese recognized that a zone existed to the south in the Dutch East Indies. That was where these resources were abundant.

00:34:02:17 – 00:34:22:27
Marty Morgan
And the Japanese understood that an attack toward the South that could take control of this resources on one as they designated it, would allow the Japanese themselves to maintain control over resources that they needed to win the war in China. And because they were they were in the position of needing those resources, because they had been cut off from those resources.

00:34:23:00 – 00:34:47:05
Marty Morgan
Much of the there was a great irony, too, in 1937, when the Japanese dramatically escalated the war in China with an attack on Shanghai. There was an irony to the fact that there were American warships in port at Shanghai and American warships that were ultimately affected by the Japanese expansion of military activity and that the Japanese were firing shells that came from steel that they had purchased from the United States.

00:34:47:05 – 00:35:06:21
Marty Morgan
And they were flying aircraft that were powered by petroleum products that had been imported from the United States. And so the United States understood very well that when the Japanese began the major escalation of the war in China, that a great way to restrict and limit that ongoing war was to cut the Japanese off from the resources that they were that they needed.

00:35:07:03 – 00:35:29:06
Marty Morgan
So we cut them off. They began looking toward a replacement. They realized that just to the south in the Dutch East Indies, that there was a resource zone where these resources were abundant. And the Japanese realized that if they launched an aggressive military campaign to take control of the resource zone, that that would then provide them with the tools and the resources that they would need to win the war in China.

00:35:29:25 – 00:35:49:19
Marty Morgan
The only problem was that snatching the resource zone was going to be complicated because it would require the Japanese to begin war with not just the Americans, but the British and the Dutch as well. So the Japanese understood that well. When we begin, when we make our moves, when we attempt to capture the resource zone, the American Pacific Fleet is going to interfere with us.

00:35:49:20 – 00:36:09:13
Marty Morgan
The United States will probably declare war. And the United States is an extremely powerful modern Navy. Typically, people like to imagine that the American military during the Great Depression was one that was starved of everything that it needed, one that was weak, when in reality, only parts of the American military were like that. The United States Navy was one of the best navies in the entire world.

00:36:09:13 – 00:36:49:28
Marty Morgan
It had probably what I would consider to be in 1937, the most advanced fleet air arm of any Navy in the world. Now, the Japanese would quickly pass us, but we were we were nothing to sneeze at at the time. And the Japanese understood that the American Navy would be in a position to interfere their expansion to the South, and that when the Americans attempted to attack, as the Japanese reached for the the resource zone, the attack would come from a series of island outposts that would lead ultimately to the Philippines, and that the Philippines would be a major node for the American military to interfere with the Japanese military’s campaign to capture the resource

00:36:49:28 – 00:37:17:28
Marty Morgan
zone in the Dutch East Indies, and that the island outposts linking it all together were places like the territory of Hawaii and Guam. And so as the Japanese imagined launching this offensive, which they would ultimately refer to as the centrifugal offensive, they realized that it was going to require them to conduct a series preemptive attacks that were designed to prevent the United States Navy from interfering with them as they pushed south to the Dutch East Indies.

00:37:18:09 – 00:37:41:11
Marty Morgan
As time has gone by, we tend to fold. We tend to focus on what happened on the island of Oahu on Sunday, December seven, 1941, where the Japanese conducted an attack on not just Navy facilities, but Army Marine Corps facilities as well. They basically conducted attacks on all military installations on the island of Oahu. Pearl Harbor is only one of 14 different military installations that came under attack that day.

00:37:41:21 – 00:38:04:02
Marty Morgan
It’s the one that stands out as the most memorable because of the fact that the battleships were there. And battleships like Oklahoma and Arizona, that we suffer so terribly with the loss of those ships. And we experienced such high loss of life, over 1100 on Arizona, over four Oklahoma. And that’s why I understand I understand why we focus on Pearl Harbor itself.

00:38:04:03 – 00:38:33:27
Marty Morgan
But that neglects the fact that we that the Japanese attacked other parts of the island that day and that the Japanese also, within the framework of a simultaneous attack, launched attacks against Guam and the Philippine Islands, well as Midway and then eventually wake the Japanese attack attacked many other places that were outside of American Overseas Holdings as well, and all of this was done to preempt an American military response to this major escalation of the war in Asia.

00:38:34:06 – 00:38:42:28
Dan LeFebvre
Okay. Okay. So, yeah, so they it was kind of centered around oil and oil centered around the resources that they knew that they were going to need.

00:38:43:07 – 00:39:07:05
Marty Morgan
Yeah. And in that respect, the movie does not present an inaccurate it’s just extremely simplified. The movie did it the the movie did it far more concise than I just did it. But the college professor part of me comes through every single time and I can’t help myself. However, I understand why filmmakers sometimes struggle with moments like this because that little monologue that I just provided about why Japan conducted the attack, what was that?

00:39:07:05 – 00:39:27:15
Marty Morgan
Three or 4 minutes long? Maybe five? I don’t know. I lost track of time. But filmmaker can’t just have 5 minutes of developing. We’re going to do this attack because of this reason and that reason and that reason. And the filmmakers have to do it very quickly. I understand that. And the scene is not bad. It’s the part that I just can’t get over is why are they outside?

00:39:27:28 – 00:39:45:11
Marty Morgan
Why are these, like, sort of waving banners out there? And they’re the there’s a there’s a battery at Fort MacArthur that’s called battery House Good. FARLEY And it’s it’s a concrete battery that was covered with Earth. So it looks like a hill. And then they just have like two centuries with rifles standing on that hill. And I’m like, not this very weird.

00:39:45:11 – 00:40:02:18
Marty Morgan
None of it makes sense. It all feels very act all feels very contrived. And I could almost just picture the way that it happened because I’ve had to deal with this myself and that is that somebody in set design or the cinematography people, they look at a shot and they go, There’s not enough going on here. We have to have texture.

00:40:02:18 – 00:40:19:00
Marty Morgan
We have to have something interesting look at, and they tend to answer those questions as quickly and easily as they can, or they tend to respond to those challenges as quickly and easily as they possibly can. And what they tend to do is just sprinkle a bunch of stuff in the background. This movie is really bad for that.

00:40:19:00 – 00:40:45:02
Marty Morgan
This movie is really bad for a cinematographer who has a bit of a reputation for spectacle and he has a this movie is very reflective of the filmmaker’s background in that in that way, because it’s just shot after shot where you just kind of have stuff sprinkled into it, even when it doesn’t really make sense. And I think the frustration that I am dealing with here more than anything is this frustration of with the passage of time we’re moving farther and farther away.

00:40:45:02 – 00:41:13:10
Marty Morgan
We’re drifting away from sort of a real and honest, undistorted vision of what happened that day. We’re drifting away from that because of the way I tend to have the empiricists view of the way that intellectual knowledge is accumulated with the passage of time. And it’s looking more and more like my view is the incorrect view, because my view has always been, well, with the passage of time, and we get further and further, further away from an historical moment, from the moment that it begins.

00:41:13:10 – 00:41:45:29
Marty Morgan
When it began on Sunday, December 7th, 1941, at Pearl Harbor, it was first the news media trying to make sense of what happened, and then the military tried to make sense of it. And the military has operational concern, operational security concerns. So the military can’t really talk about it. The news media steps in. You get sort of a flamboyant and reporters version of the story and I have always thought in sort of a formulaic way that, okay, well, then with the passage of a few decades, you get to a point where we’re bringing the event into greater focus because more and more you’re getting people like me who spend a lot of time studying a

00:41:45:29 – 00:42:10:24
Marty Morgan
subject, and we’re reading more and more from a body of literature that’s getting broader with each passing year where I have this, the mistake of assuming that every year is going to provide a harvest of new, intellectually worthwhile and useful books about December 7th, and that all of these forces, all of these things, as they flow together, they will give us a clearer picture of what happened.

00:42:10:24 – 00:42:29:17
Marty Morgan
And that picture will only get clearer and clearer and clearer with the passage of time and that what happens what’s happens is the opposite of that. The farther we get away from the moment, the more distorted it’s getting. And there was a period where I think it was brought as much into focus as it possibly could, and that was in the 1970s.

00:42:29:17 – 00:42:47:14
Marty Morgan
And that that was because there were still so many living participants. I mean, almost everybody that was there, there were still plenty of people still alive who experienced December 7th. And this movie, I don’t see this movie being made in the way that it was, being the movie that it is. It could not have been made in 1970.

00:42:47:17 – 00:43:06:09
Marty Morgan
The only movie that could have been made in 1970 was Towards War Tora, which although it has historical accuracy problems, it is far, far, far more accurate than this movie is. It’s also very slow moving. It’s often the slow burn with a lot of background, a lot of development. There’s inaccuracy in there, but there’s more accuracy than inaccuracy.

00:43:06:09 – 00:43:38:11
Marty Morgan
And they could not have made something outrageous like this. Then, I think because there were too many survivors around when this movie came out, there were survivors around. Which brings me to the point about Glen Brazel. So my uncle, my late uncle Glenn Brazel, volunteered for the United States Army from Mobile, Alabama, in 1938. He volunteered specifically to serve in the Hawaii division that was being served by the United States Army at the time, and that ultimately resulted in him completing basic training and being transferred to the territory of Hawaii.

00:43:38:25 – 00:44:06:01
Marty Morgan
He was then assigned to becoming the 27th Infantry Regiment of the U.S. Army’s 25th Infantry Division. He was based at Schofield Barracks on Oahu, and he was on the island on December 7th. He was army, so he wasn’t down at the harbor. He was on the island. He saw interesting and fascinating things that day, but he wasn’t at the harbor when I was a kid growing up in this era when there was still sort of a hangover from the movie tour to our Tora, a movie that I kind of consumed a lot of when I was a little kid.

00:44:06:01 – 00:44:26:07
Marty Morgan
And then I was around Uncle Glenn, who was actually there, and I spent a lot of that poor man, spent a lot of time being interrogated about December 7th by me from about 45 years ago when I was a little kid. And I had this experience in my in my youth of being raised in the company of somebody that was there that day.

00:44:26:21 – 00:44:44:27
Marty Morgan
And it led to later in life when I was an adult. And I was intellectually interested in the subject matter. I spent time with him. I interviewed him, I did a lot of work with him, and we had a strong relationship and he inspired me to a really important level toward a better understanding of what happened on December 7th.

00:44:45:00 – 00:45:06:05
Marty Morgan
The unfortunate thing that happened was so my Uncle Glenn was still alive in 2001. This movie came out. I was working at a museum here in New Orleans area at the time, and it was decided they did. This would be two brothers, two, and that is that they had a premiere event for Band of Brothers on Utah Beach in in Normandy, and they had a premiere event here associated with the museum.

00:45:06:09 – 00:45:25:28
Marty Morgan
The same thing was done for Pearl Harbor. And because of that, the they wanted to invite Pearl Harbor veterans to come. That kind of landed on me as a responsibility. And I was like, Well, my uncle is still alive. He lives in Mobile. He could drive over for the night. And I got a hotel room for him and I invited him and his wife to come over to be to go with me to this premiere event.

00:45:25:28 – 00:45:46:15
Marty Morgan
And I promise you, it was I don’t know if it was 10 minutes or 15 minutes in, but it was somewhere around there that I was like, Oh my God, what have I done? And I was sitting next to him and I just kind of kept looking awkwardly over at my Uncle Glenn. And mercifully, at some point before the attack, he just kind of went and he passed out and he fell asleep.

00:45:46:22 – 00:46:01:18
Marty Morgan
And I was like, I feel like this is for the best. And I just kind of let him sleep. But then the attack began and it kind of woke him up and he watched it. And it was weird after to have to like take him back to the hotel and chat a little bit about the movie because it confused him a lot.

00:46:01:19 – 00:46:22:22
Marty Morgan
And I can imagine, I can only imagine how confusing it must have been because he he was a member of the Pearl Harbor Veterans Association. He had gone to premiere events like that 30 years earlier. And when Door towards War came out and he was at a stage in his life where I think he just like looked at the youthful world and he was like, I just don’t understand.

00:46:22:22 – 00:46:44:12
Marty Morgan
I don’t get it. And the movie just didn’t resonate with him. Veterans were pretty vicious about this movie when it came out because of the historical accuracy problems we’re flirting with some of it. I gave a broader F minus grade right at the beginning of this, but since you brought up the meeting during which there’s the exposition about why Japan has to attack the United States, I wanted to mention two things, if I could.

00:46:44:23 – 00:47:08:14
Marty Morgan
And number one is that that scene was necessary 20 years ago. It’s much, much worse now. But 20 years ago, people needed to have it mansplain it to them because the newer generation of people with lower levels of historical literacy, we’re going to be seeing this movie. And I don’t think it was necessarily wrong of the filmmakers to realize, listen, we have to explain this to everybody.

00:47:08:14 – 00:47:36:26
Marty Morgan
Otherwise people would be like, why are they doing this? Because we’re moving through an era when historical literacy is declining. 20 years ago, I can see now when I look back to when I went to the premiere event for this movie, I can see the extent to which historical literacy was on the decline. I was at that point in my thirties and I was a big fanatic about anything related to Pearl Harbor, of course, partly because of the fact that I was dominant and I had just recently finished my master’s degree in history.

00:47:36:26 – 00:47:55:24
Marty Morgan
Before this movie came out, I was working at a museum about World War Two, and my uncle was there. I had I was not like your average bear in terms of an interest in this subject matter. Almost everybody else had a significantly lower like enthusiasm level than I did. I’m not saying I’m not speaking down like they weren’t smart enough.

00:47:55:24 – 00:48:16:12
Marty Morgan
I’m saying that they they the they probably were a little aware that there had been a December 7th and they realized that it was important, but they didn’t have like this broad, sensitive, meaningful understanding of it. It was it was a process of ongoing historical, superficial ization was already at work 20 years ago to the point that this scene was necessary.

00:48:16:12 – 00:48:31:11
Marty Morgan
We had to explain to people in a way that Torah toward Torah just didn’t have to. Two words were taught by the 1970s. There were still so many living people, and they were still living and they were still working. Some of them were still in the Navy, most not very, very few, but some of them are still in the military.

00:48:31:15 – 00:48:52:10
Marty Morgan
For the most part, it wasn’t necessary to go through long expositions about why Japan attacked America in 2001. It was necessary, and you can only imagine if this movie had to be made today. The extent to which exposition would be required. Since I just said that, I just, you know, coughed up the words if this movie was made today.

00:48:52:20 – 00:49:19:01
Marty Morgan
I’ve watched it a few times this week to prepare for this conversation. It’s been kind of a long time since I looked at the film, but in watching it over and over again, like this movie, this movie couldn’t be made today for a number of reasons that we don’t have to go into. But like the number one thing to me that really stood out was the use of a racially condescending pejorative that is just sprinkled throughout this movie in a way that you you would never get away with in 2022.

00:49:19:01 – 00:49:45:23
Marty Morgan
And it’s the word Jap that is, it has been elevated in broader to ethno cultural understanding as being equivalent with the N-word as a pejorative that is functionally unspeakable in public today. But when this movie was made in 2000 and 2001, that was a word that was in a part of sort of that the vulgar, the common vulgar of everyday usage to the point where you don’t see spasming.

00:49:45:23 – 00:50:10:02
Marty Morgan
It’s bending and flexing to get around the word like you would today. I also feel like there are a lot of gender roles and, the way that they’re depicted and also race and the way that it is depicted here is it it feels very jarring to be in 2010. In 2022, and look back at this movie from 2001 and see the way that some of these depictions portrayals were presented publicly.

00:50:10:02 – 00:50:32:25
Marty Morgan
In one way, I would mention Cuba Gooding Junior’s character in the film, Doris Miller. The movie uses the name Dori instead of Doris, and we understand now that he did not go by Dory. His name was Doris, and his family called him Doris. The people that served with him called him Doris. There’s still an argument about where Dori came from, but here’s what I think.

00:50:32:29 – 00:51:02:13
Marty Morgan
Not that you ask me, but what I think is that a common practice at the time was that African-American men were often not using the an adult version of their name. The most. The example that I use most frequently is that the name William is extremely common for white men and African-American men in the United States. It was very common 80 years ago during World War Two, when you see African-American soldiers who were killed in action in Europe, if their name was William, you do not see William on their headstone.

00:51:02:16 – 00:51:22:24
Marty Morgan
You see, Willie, it is a racial condescension that was a product of the era of the Great Depression. It was a product of the era of the Jim Crow South, whereby even adult men named William were not referred to using the adult version of their name, but using the child’s version of their name from their youth, using Willie instead of William.

00:51:22:24 – 00:51:49:28
Marty Morgan
What I believe probably happened with Doris Miller is that that ethno cultural reality from the time period took over, and you’ll see the contemporary written reports. They’re referring to him as Dory. It could have been done for another another number of reasons. I don’t believe that was the case. I believe it was sort of an indication of the way that race elaborated within the greater context of the United States in the 1930s and forties he’s referred to as Dorian movie.

00:51:49:28 – 00:52:17:01
Marty Morgan
And if the movie was remade today, I don’t think they would do that. So I didn’t mean to get off on a tangent about that. But I the bigger point that I was attempting to make there was that this is a movie that wouldn’t get made today. And if it was made today, it would be very different. And it’s even it’s strange now to look back 20 years on it and see the way that it had to be sort of a new, superficial, ized and dumbed down version of events for a viewing audience that was being allowed to drift more and more away from the historical fact.

00:52:17:01 – 00:52:41:19
Marty Morgan
And rather than just being a cranky old man that complains about it, I should recognize that that’s a process that I believe is probably inevitable, that with every historical event, there’s going to be a point where the drift becomes very pronounced. And that’s typically the point at which the veterans are gone. So that like I remember the bicentennial of the American Revolution and when it happened, I was a kid and I was at school and I therefore got dragged along to go see a bunch of Revolutionary War Battlefield olds.

00:52:41:19 – 00:52:58:10
Marty Morgan
And I got to there was like a lesson plan or I was in fourth grade, maybe fifth grade at the time. There was a lesson plan for how you teach the revolution to young people. And I look back on that sort of critical moment in my youth where it was a public education to somebody who wasn’t really a history fanatic yet.

00:52:58:10 – 00:53:20:19
Marty Morgan
And the way that I interacted with the bicentennial at a point at which the subject was being privileged, among other historical subjects, by virtue of the fact that it was the Bicentennial and the version of the American Revolution that was served to me as a fourth grader in 1976. Looks I just led last year an American Revolutionary War tour.

00:53:20:19 – 00:53:58:09
Marty Morgan
This is something that I also do. I did more of it during COVID because I couldn’t leave the country. But the version of the American Revolution that was available to me as a four year old in 1976 is very, very different than the version of the American Revolution that I know now. As someone who studied American history and studied specifically American military history, I understood and that the the point at which I entered that that historical continuum as a fourth grader in 1976, the point at which I entered that part of the conversation was a point that all of the veterans were long gone and gone by more than a century, and that the way

00:53:58:09 – 00:54:21:19
Marty Morgan
that it was taught to me necessarily meant that there had had to be a lot of exposition, there had to be a lot of it description of like, well, here’s why the United States decided, here’s why Lexington and Concord had to happen. Here’s the Tea Party. We have to you have to understand the Tea Party and that this process of establishing context for people who have drifted drifted away from a subject that’s inevitable, that’s going to happen.

00:54:22:00 – 00:54:58:07
Marty Morgan
It happens with this movie. And it’s weird just to for me to be old enough to have grown up very, very familiar with Twitter towards Aurora and then Pearl Harbor 2001 happened. It was it’s so weird and that perspective because it felt very much like a comic book version of December 7th that was being presented for people who didn’t have a life like mine growing up interested in the subject because of a family member and because of the movie tour to our tour and because of I was born on a military post and I was raised in the, in, within the cultural context, the United States Army, because my father was an Army officer and

00:54:58:07 – 00:55:15:16
Marty Morgan
I was around the military. And I know that for a fact that the first time I saw towards Oratorio was on December 7th, and I think it was in 1975, and it was at the Post Theater because that’s what you do on the anniversary is you show every year on December, on June 6th, they would show the longest day every year.

00:55:15:16 – 00:55:26:14
Marty Morgan
On December 7th, they would show towards Aurora. I’m not sure that post theaters today are showing Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor every December seven. I’m not convinced that that’s happening. Yeah.

00:55:27:19 – 00:55:50:06
Dan LeFebvre
It’s as I, I don’t know. I’ve I would guess not. Well we talked about some of the, the context from the Japanese side. And in the movie there is a discussion between Admiral Kimmel and an analyst there where from the American side and the analysts suggest that there’s no need to be concerned about an attack at Pearl. The water’s too shallow for an aerial torpedo attack.

00:55:50:06 – 00:56:08:27
Dan LeFebvre
And not only that, but it’s surrounded by subnets. The only thing we really have to worry about here is sabotage. And don’t worry, we’ve bunched the planes together to make them easier to protect. The movie explains Distance is an ally. And then, of course, the movie cuts to the Japanese saying, Hey, we’ve accounted for the shallow harbor by attaching a wooden fence to the torpedoes.

00:56:09:17 – 00:56:18:25
Dan LeFebvre
Are there some of the reasons why the US Navy didn’t expect an attack at Pearl and then how the Japanese were able to plan for it anyway?

00:56:18:25 – 00:56:44:20
Marty Morgan
Those were some of the reasons and I’m glad you brought up the the subject is the tailfins, because that’s something that I wanted to moan about and that’s simply because of the fact that in the film they are in this awkward outdoor setting. They have three type 91 torpedoes lined up on these rolling cards as a part of this outdoor briefing where an admiral, we have prepared these new this new apparatus to mount on the back of our torpedoes.

00:56:44:26 – 00:57:03:24
Marty Morgan
And they show the tail the tail structure of Type 91 aerial torpedo, and then they show them snap the wooden fins. Yes, they show it and it’s saying, hey, it’s bouncing off of the fact. In a moment for you heard Americans go and they can’t do it here. This the harbor is 40 feet deep and can’t use an aerial torpedo in a shallow harbor.

00:57:03:24 – 00:57:30:03
Marty Morgan
And then you got to the Japanese have come come up with a way to overcome that challenge. And the interesting thing to me is that then they have that exposition about the break, the breakaway fins on the torpedo, and then when you get to the actual attack happening, there’s a there’s like an up perspective, a point of view perspective where your position is you’re behind the torpedo slung underneath the B5 in not a B5.

00:57:30:03 – 00:57:55:04
Marty Morgan
Yeah, yeah. Beef. I’ve been one beef I’ve been to Kate torpedo bomber the torpedo was then released and your perspective as you follow it all the way down to the water, it splashes into the water. Then with props turning, it zips off toward USS Oklahoma. And what it depicts is that wooden table frame assembly in place. And when the torpedo splashes into the water, the wooden tail frame assembly remains in place on the torpedo all the way to the target.

00:57:55:04 – 00:58:17:14
Marty Morgan
And when I see that, I’m like, you’re daffy. Ding the point you all you actually know better that was a breakaway retarding device that was that was intended so that as the weapons fell from beneath the aircraft and it fell down through the air flow, what they were attempt the Japanese were attempting to overcome was when the weapon struck the water because it was heavy.

00:58:17:14 – 00:58:49:24
Marty Morgan
I mean, that’s a 21 inch diameter torpedo that weighed over £3,000, that had 200 miles an hour forward momentum. So there’s a lot of kinetic energy that’s associated with the moment that the weapon enters the water. And what the wooden box frame on the tail assembly was intended to do was to prevent the torpedo from diving deep, then correcting itself, because a problem that they were having was that when that torpedo was first developed, they were designed to be used against ships in the open sea where you don’t have to worry about how deep it dives in a torpedo attack.

00:58:49:24 – 00:59:26:26
Marty Morgan
But when suddenly your target is in a harbor that’s shallow, you do have to concern yourself with how deep weapon dives before it corrects itself, because it would dove deep and then correct itself. So it’s running just a few feet below the surface of the water. There were times that, depending on a combination of factors, depending on the altitude of the aircraft, the forward airspeed of the aircraft and the water conditions you could get when the torpedo entered the water, the the torpedo might dove 30 feet and then correct itself, but it might dove a hundred feet before it’s able to overcome the momentum of entering the water and then moving back up to the

00:59:26:26 – 00:59:52:19
Marty Morgan
gyroscopic stabilized firing solution that will take it to its target. And so the Japanese conducted extensive experimentation with a breakaway tail fin assembly that they found provided enough reliability to get them through that attack. And just for the record, that system, its success rate on December 7th is around 50%. So it was sort of successful, but not overwhelmingly successful.

00:59:53:04 – 01:00:12:19
Marty Morgan
There are in fact, there’s one of the greatest artifacts on display when you visit the visitor center before you go out to the USS Arizona Memorial. There’s a museum exhibit that’s a part of the visitor center, and they display a Type 91 aerial torpedo that had apparently been directed against us is California. But when it hit the water, it dove too deep.

01:00:12:19 – 01:00:33:24
Marty Morgan
But it’s I believed that what was happening was that the the way that the wooden tail frame assembly was mounted to the back of the weapon is it wasn’t mounted hard enough, so it broke away too easily. And therefore the tail assembly didn’t provide enough resistance right at the critical moment as the torpedo slipping into the water and the result was the tail assembly broke away.

01:00:33:24 – 01:00:54:24
Marty Morgan
But the torpedo delved too deep. It went underneath the ship entirely and then went and embedded itself in this mud bank on Fort Island. And there it sat until 1992 when there was an attempt to do some dredging, dredging and a dredging. A bucket loader dropped down and pulled up a live type 91 torpedo.

01:00:54:28 – 01:00:55:05
Dan LeFebvre
Oh.

01:00:55:25 – 01:01:22:16
Marty Morgan
Oh was right because that’s over £700 of tour packs and remains just as dangerous. 70, 60 years later as it is on the day that it’s released. So what they’re depicting in the movie, I wanted to sort of pull this example apart, which is why I’m so glad you asked the question about the tail fin assembly thing, because what it’s revealing to you is that within the filmmaking universe for this movie, there were silos where there were they had military advisers that worked on this film.

01:01:22:16 – 01:01:39:18
Marty Morgan
I was not one of them, but I know several of the people that worked on this film, and they’re smart people. They’re smart people that would have that would have and did advise these filmmakers against these terrible historical inaccuracies. But the filmmaker would do what all filmmakers eventually do. And that is like, we got to make a movie, we’ve got a movie, we’ve got to get it done.

01:01:39:18 – 01:02:01:29
Marty Morgan
We have a deadline. There are literally millions of dollars on line. I think the budget on this film was $140 million. That’s that’s an enormous amount of money. And I can imagine the pressure that the filmmaker must endure to get that to to give birth to that. And that doesn’t make me feel better about the fact that the film has this movie remains noteworthy.

01:02:01:29 – 01:02:25:20
Marty Morgan
Only for how bad it was and how much contempt that it showed toward historical accuracy. So you had silos within the filmmaking, too, where there’s a piece of exposition in the movie where they are explaining the break away tailfin assembly that makes it possible to use torpedoes in a shallow harbor. And then when it went to the animator who digitally animated the torpedo, that animator didn’t know.

01:02:25:20 – 01:02:47:01
Marty Morgan
Oh, you mean that wooden part breaks away? Oh, he didn’t, though. I’m sure whoever did that sometime shortly after the movie released and everyone began howling endlessly. That poor guy would probably or girl that poor person was probably like I mean I just I didn’t know I didn’t know because the way that these these experts, these very, very skilled people move from one project to the next is that they’ll get a project.

01:02:47:01 – 01:03:07:07
Marty Morgan
They’ll work on it for maybe a year, maybe less than a year. They’ll get the project that doesn’t mean that they’re immediately going to consume every book that has ever been written on this subject. And what I am finding, the way that this is elaborated here within the contemporary era is that that doesn’t even mean that these highly skilled technicians are even going to look at the Wikipedia page.

01:03:07:07 – 01:03:27:21
Marty Morgan
What they’re probably going to just do is go forward with whatever requires the least amount of effort. And so that’s why we have the awkwardness of this movie, which in this one detail try to do the right thing by explaining the way that the Japanese sort of ingeniously came up with a method for overcoming the deep dove, the depth of dove on the torpedoes.

01:03:27:21 – 01:03:45:09
Marty Morgan
And that’s explained in one scene. And then 30 minutes, 40 minutes later in the film, it’s the meaning. And the point is completely lost, by the way, that it was animated by somebody on a somebody that was sitting in a studio, not somebody that was involved in principal photography, but somebody in the edit that was doing digital animations.

01:03:45:10 – 01:04:14:01
Marty Morgan
The reality here is very fascinating because the Japanese did come up with a method that was sort of successful. It sort of failed a little bit, too, and that there were so many variables associated with achieving a successful torpedo attack in the shallow harbor with the type 91 aerial torpedo. Because what it did was it required the aircraft carrying the torpedo to get to the lowest possible altitude because when you when you compress the altitude, the weapon is falling a shorter distance.

01:04:14:01 – 01:04:42:22
Marty Morgan
Therefore, the weapon is generating less centrifugal forces. It’s not centrifugal force, but it’s it’s developing less speed. It has less time to develop speed on its way to the water. And that meant that the crew, the air crews knew we have to get really low because we’re delivering this sort of delicate package. And when it hits the water, the tailfin assembly, hopefully it would hopefully the weapon would hit the water at a correct low altitude at a correct speed, because it also required that the aircraft had to slow down.

01:04:42:29 – 01:05:14:12
Marty Morgan
The faster you’re going, even if you’re at the correct optimal altitude and it’s low, if you’re going too fast, the weapons are going to be carrying even more momentum when it hits the water. Right. And that means it’s going to dove deeper. And so the result is that the Japanese delicately had to balance these factors and I know that this must be miserable for you to sit through it right now, but there’s light at the end of the tunnel because there’s a point to be made about this very subject that says something spectacular about what happened on Sunday, December 7th, 1941, and that is that the Japanese had this very well laid out plan and

01:05:14:12 – 01:05:44:11
Marty Morgan
the whole thing went to hell the second it started. The Japanese plan, as time gone by, we have tended to recognize the Japanese came up with this ingenious planned and carried out a successful attack. And it was an ingenious it was an ingenious plan and it was so poorly executed, suited that they made an absolute mess of it, the successes that they did achieve and that in terms of sinking, damaging ships and killing people, those successes, everything occurs within the first 15 minutes.

01:05:44:21 – 01:06:04:25
Marty Morgan
After the first 15 minutes, the Japanese are there getting very, very little return for their investment until the point where they finally disengage and the aircraft fly back to the fleet and the fleet makes a run for it. But during this first 15 minutes, which is when you have I think it’s 48 aircraft carrying type 91 aerial torpedoes, about half of them work.

01:06:05:08 – 01:06:32:17
Marty Morgan
The ones that connect my God, they put on a show because look what happened to USS Oklahoma. You look what happened to USS California. They connect and enough of them connected to make sense. But an important point that I want to make here is that the reason that there is such a high failure rate is because as the Japanese, as what is it, 183 aircraft on the first wave as they intrude into the airspace to attack the primary target.

01:06:32:17 – 01:06:58:06
Marty Morgan
They were attacking all these other military targets on Oahu. But the primary target was let’s face it, it was Pearl Harbor, Navy Base, Pearl Harbor. And as they piled in to attack the Navy base, they experienced massive problems with what the military today, air power today calls deconfliction, meaning that they had very carefully laid out that the torpedo aircraft would circle all the way around the western side or the leeward side of the island.

01:06:58:13 – 01:07:21:13
Marty Morgan
They’ll come back around Barbara’s point. They’ll come back partly over the far western outskirts of Honolulu itself, as they then get into position to approach Fort Island to attack the battleships. And then dove bombers will cut across the mountain range here to attack Wheeler Airfield. And this will all be done in such a coordinated way as everything happens all over the island, all at once.

01:07:22:05 – 01:07:40:21
Marty Morgan
What the Japanese ended up doing was making a big mess of all of that, and it was to the point that there were aircraft, there were torpedo bombing aircraft. In other words, B five into Kate torpedo bombers that were lined up to attack that be the west side of Fort Island where USS Utah was and USS Raleigh were.

01:07:41:06 – 01:08:01:00
Marty Morgan
And those aircraft were looking for aircraft carriers. They saw USS Utah, which was at the time a target ship, and it had big wooden planks laid out on its depth. And some aircraft mistook it for being an aircraft carrier and they attacked it. Some other aircraft at the last minute went, wait a minute, that’s not an aircraft carrier.

01:08:01:14 – 01:08:29:00
Marty Morgan
And so the pilots shifted around to the south going, I mean, I brought this torpedo a long way from Japan and I’m supposed to throw this thing at an aircraft carrier. And so their instinct was like, All right, not here. That’s That’s not an aircraft carrier. I’m supposed to hit aircraft carriers. They flew south around the southern end of Fort Island, and then they were going to come back up to the other side of the island would be the eastern side where Battleship Row was looking for aircraft carriers.

01:08:29:12 – 01:08:58:12
Marty Morgan
And the result was that you had aircraft that had flown all the way around. Barbara’s point, they were in position to release against I’m going to do it like this. They were in position to release against Battleship Row. And right at the point when they were lowering their altitude, pulling back on the strategy to to bleed off a little bit of forward air speed, getting into the position to drop the torpedo so that the torpedo had the greatest possible chance of connecting with its target right at that moment.

01:08:58:12 – 01:09:32:26
Marty Morgan
Suddenly friendly aircraft flew straight in front of them, right across their flight path. And it was because of this mix up and it caused a few pilots to go, Oh, crap, now I can’t do it. They totally, totally spoiled my lineup. It caused aircraft to disengage. And another factor that comes up, too, is that there was a plan that within each cocktail, within each group of torpedo bombers, as they moved into the position right before they attacked Battleship Row, they had flown 200 and something miles from the aircraft carriers.

01:09:33:05 – 01:09:54:03
Marty Morgan
They had thrown in a formation that made sense for the altitude that they were flying. And then they moved out of that summation into a formation that made more sense for the attack that they were about to conduct. And so there were aircraft that they had choices to make as they changed that formation from basically the transit formation to the battle formation.

01:09:54:03 – 01:10:13:09
Marty Morgan
And the decisions that they had to make was they had two possible attack formations and one was where every aircraft was lined up behind the other, where every single aircraft was, it was a line of aircraft. The other formation would have been one where instead of being lined up, one after the other, they lined up wingtip to wingtip.

01:10:13:09 – 01:10:39:10
Marty Morgan
And it was understood that they would, depending on the circumstances, the flight lead could make a decision, depending on what he was seeing there at the target, he would make a decision to break the transit formation and go to either in-line or wingtip to wingtip. And one thing that they were experiencing was that small aircraft of them they were seeing, they had to fly over the Navy base and they’re flying over big buildings on the Navy base right at the moment before they begin releasing torpedoes.

01:10:39:10 – 01:11:00:04
Marty Morgan
And it’s Battleship Row, and they were seeing aircraft in front of them that were being buffeted up by this up gassing of warm air, because these big Navy buildings, they absorb the sunshine, they heat up and they create convection directly above them. They create an area of warmed air just directly above them. And an aircraft will experience some turbulence as it passes through that.

01:11:00:10 – 01:11:23:10
Marty Morgan
And so there were pilots that were realizing that the aircraft in front of them were being buffeted a little bit right at the moment when you’re trying to get low, trying to slow your airspeed down and get as level possible to give your torpedo the best possible chance of success. They were seeing that. And the pilot, the the lead the lead pilot and at least two formations I’m aware of realized that that was happening.

01:11:23:18 – 01:11:40:06
Marty Morgan
And instead of directing his men to break transmit formation at the wingtip to wingtip formation, he kept them in line because he thought, well, if we stay in line, then we’ll have a more direct assault and we will be less affected by this buffeting of this warm air.

01:11:40:10 – 01:11:44:09
Dan LeFebvre
The turbulence being wingtip to wingtip, what he thought maybe would affect more. Yeah.

01:11:44:19 – 01:12:03:19
Marty Morgan
There was a thought that the the that there was also a recognition that it wasn’t like one just big general area of disturbed air. It was over the buildings and there was a real realization that, well, if we break up into wingtip to wingtip formation, some of my planes are going to be passing over buildings and getting bumped around a little bit by warm air.

01:12:03:28 – 01:12:21:18
Marty Morgan
And my others aren’t. And it looks like that might not be the best possible way for me to deliver this attack. And so they remained in line and there was one group of them that as they were in the in-line formation and up at the sub base, which is would have been off to the right of these aircraft on the top to the north of Battleship Row.

01:12:21:21 – 01:12:44:15
Marty Morgan
Well, there was a better, better part of Torpedo Patrol Torpedo Squadron One, which was a boat squadron that was embarked aboard Transport ships to be taken to Midway because the boats had been loaded onto petty tenders. They had their guns on them, they had their ammo on them, and the crews were there. And so there were men in Patrol Torpedo Squadron one I who keep in mind these are petty boats.

01:12:44:15 – 01:13:10:17
Marty Morgan
They’re called a squadron though that they immediately man their guns and the forward most tab on a bow was the what is it the mark. Well no it’s the mark 18 mod two planned 50 caliber machine gun mount, which is of a swiveling mount there where you have a skate ring mount where the weapons can traverse through traverse, they can elevate.

01:13:10:17 – 01:13:33:00
Marty Morgan
And there the mount was equipped with two and and 250 caliber machine guns, which are extraordinarily effective weapons against aircraft at low altitude, at low speed. And the result was this one section that remained in line formation, a gunner that shot several of them down. He said, I didn’t even have to traverse my guns. They just flew right into my field of fire one after the other.

01:13:33:02 – 01:13:52:22
Marty Morgan
We tend to emphasize how brilliant the Japanese plan was and how well carried out it was, and it really wasn’t that well carried out. The Japanese were quite lucky. A lot of things went very badly wrong. And when I say lucky, they were. Think about what the big successes our loss of Arizona is. The worst thing that we go through that day was Oklahoma’s pretty damn bad, too.

01:13:52:27 – 01:14:15:26
Marty Morgan
There are aerial attacks at Hickam Army Airfield that are extremely costly. We lose 89 at Hickam. It’s at the Navy base where the loss of life is the highest. And all of these things that aren’t indicating as being the greatest successes, the Japanese experience that day, they all happened within the first 50 minutes. And during that 15 minutes, the United States, the Americans on the ground are beginning to react.

01:14:15:28 – 01:14:35:24
Marty Morgan
I find that overwhelmingly the way that people think of the rate today, because they’re told to by movies like this one, they’re told to imagine Americans who were soundly asleep and not paying attention. Americans were disconnected and enjoying the high life. And that is not what happened. Americans, although they weren’t fully braced for an attack first thing in the morning on Sunday.

01:14:36:18 – 01:14:54:03
Marty Morgan
We were we just come out from under a general alert in the Hawaiian Islands. Like there’s even a point where like one of the one of the actors that charms me, even though I don’t want to be charmed in this movie, I don’t want to like this movie at all. But for God’s sakes, I mean, I’m a human being.

01:14:54:03 – 01:15:15:28
Marty Morgan
And you look at Kate Beckinsale and you’re like, yes, I believe anything you tell me. And I actually think she’s pretty good in this movie. And I think that Alec Baldwin is pretty good in this movie. No, he’s not Jimmy Doolittle, but I think he’s actually one of the I’m one of the good actors in this film. That’s a movie that’s really dominated by a lot of really bad acting and a lot of bad acting from good actors.

01:15:16:12 – 01:15:44:19
Marty Morgan
Like I think Cuba Gooding Jr. His role in this movie is very badly acted and it is not his fault. That man is one of our greatest living actors. He’s a magnet for us, an actor, but look who was directing it and look at what he was doing. It’s Cuba Gooding Jr who was, I think, coaxed into giving this sort of over-the-top, very broad way in over exaggerated, servile, 1930s African-American performance.

01:15:45:05 – 01:16:07:22
Marty Morgan
And then a lot of him hammered away with the 50 caliber machine gun and screaming like the old cliche of action movies. But one of the actors who I think is actually quite good in this is Dan Aykroyd. And Aykroyd is not playing an actual character, but rather playing a conglomerate. He’s playing a group. He’s playing a character that’s based on several different characters, that’s assessing, evaluating intelligence before the attacks.

01:16:08:00 – 01:16:27:13
Marty Morgan
And there a point where the movie spent some time developing this idea that the Japanese fleet has disappeared. The nobody knows where the combined fleet is, and that’s rolled out in dialog in the film. And I love to add that in because I think I’ve told you I lead tours, I’ve led three tours of Pearl Harbor this year.

01:16:27:13 – 01:16:45:09
Marty Morgan
I’m leading to in the next couple of months. Oh, you feel so terrible for me. I have to go back to Hawaii and talk about World War Two. It’s awful what I go through, but when I when when this comes up, I love to point out that all military forces on Oahu had gone under a full alert on November 20th.

01:16:45:09 – 01:17:08:25
Marty Morgan
That full alert lasted until December 4th. And part of the reason why this exaggeration of this misrepresentation of Americans who were off like, you know, the Alec Baldwin’s Jimmy Doolittle as a moment of light about our two fighter pilot, main protagonist characters being in Hawaiian shirts when they flew their mission. It all the idea that Americans just weren’t ready.

01:17:09:04 – 01:17:33:09
Marty Morgan
Part of the reason that you do see that is and and part of the reason that for many of these warships, commanding officers and also senior leadership on board, the ship is not on the ship. They’re ashore at the time of the attack. And that’s because when we went to full alert on November 20th. Everybody was on their station 24 hours a day until we relaxed from full alert, which we did on December 4th.

01:17:33:09 – 01:17:54:15
Marty Morgan
So that literally the night of Saturday, December 6th, 1941, that was the first Saturday night that anybody had had in weeks to go do something fun to get off post or to get off the ship, to go do something enjoyable, like go play a card game that the actual two fighter pilots, that the two protagonist characters in this movie are based on, Taylor and Welch.

01:17:54:15 – 01:18:13:25
Marty Morgan
The two of them had been cooped up at this temporary airfield that was a remote airfield on the North Shore during the entire general alert. And they’re finally allowed to go back to Wheeler Army Airfield to the bio crew. They’re allowed to hey, you guys, Saturday night off. And it’s unsurprising that they were like, well, we’re going to go to we’re going to go down to Waikiki.

01:18:13:25 – 01:18:34:05
Marty Morgan
When you go to the Royal Hawaiian, we’re going to get we’re going to put on our dress uniforms. We’re going to have a night on the town, because we haven’t been able to enjoy that for a long time now. And that general alert was entirely created by the fact that the Japanese combined fleet disappeared. So you can say that, yeah, the Americans were everybody was out partying and these officers weren’t on board these ships.

01:18:34:05 – 01:18:54:18
Marty Morgan
And yes, we had relaxed. But that’s not a an actual it’s not an accurate picture of what was actually happening in the actual pictures, one in which we are paying a little bit closer attention and we are sensitively watching the developing situation when it comes up. What people tend to point to is how we were surprised. There was no big surprise.

01:18:54:20 – 01:19:16:29
Marty Morgan
We knew when the combined fleet disappeared in November. We knew that it was out there. We knew that it was probably going to do something. We knew that the ambassador and the special assistant that was assigned to him, Caruso and Nomura, we knew that something was up with them, that intelligence was pouring in, that that coded messages were pouring in to the Japanese embassy in Washington, DC.

01:19:17:11 – 01:19:45:12
Marty Morgan
We knew that something was about to go down. We just looked farther toward the resource. So a lot of very smart people looked at the situation and thought probably going to be an attack on the Philippines, or it might be the Japanese really get outrageous about it. It might be Guam. If you could indicate any shortcoming on our part, it would be the shortcoming of us not imagining something as a possible and that something is something that had never happened in human history.

01:19:45:29 – 01:20:09:23
Marty Morgan
Just for the record, the Japanese, of course, of the flotilla that carries out the December 7th attack is based on six aircraft carriers, and they maneuvered as one battle element in one formation. They crossed the North Pacific under a total radio and carried out their attack. And at no time since then have six aircraft carriers maneuvered as a part of one maneuvering body.

01:20:09:23 – 01:20:32:08
Marty Morgan
On the surface of the ocean. Well, so that in the entirety of what happens after Pearl Harbor in World War two, their task groups that are smaller in size than six carriers in one unit in everything that happens in the decades after the Second World War, there’s no point where anyone maneuvers six aircraft carriers and one unit. Total Radio Silence, Secret Mission Crossing the breadth of the Pacific Ocean.

01:20:32:13 – 01:20:49:02
Marty Morgan
That had never happened before and it hasn’t happened since. Wow. And so it’s, I think, therefore easy to understand why it was that people didn’t imagine that as a possibility. Right. They had no reason to imagine that the Japanese would do that. If it was me, if I was alive, then I would say, yeah, they’re going to hit the Philippines.

01:20:49:02 – 01:21:08:04
Marty Morgan
Which of course they did on December 7th. I mean, it was there’s an international date line between Hawaii and the Philippines. So when you read written accounts, it will say that they attacked in the afternoon of December 8th. Well, that’s almost simultaneous, that then there were there were attacks on Guam that were almost simultaneous. And that was in addition to all these other attacks.

01:21:08:04 – 01:21:22:25
Marty Morgan
What if there was one failure? It was the failure to think big, to think that what if the Japanese and we were we were pretty well aware of the fact that they’re probably going to hit the Philippines, they might hit Guam. The one thing that nobody apparently stopped to think about was like, what if they hit everything all at once?

01:21:23:09 – 01:21:41:15
Marty Morgan
What did they hit? Almost, almost every single one of our island outposts in the Pacific, all at one time. We didn’t imagine that being possible because that had never been done before. And there was also some confidence over things like the harbor to shower. There was some confidence over things like, Oh, they’ll never this far across the Pacific they hit Why Hawaii is too far away.

01:21:41:15 – 01:22:01:03
Marty Morgan
And in many respects, Hawaii was sort of far away. I’m not saying that I’m not using this as a means of excusing the fact that they did get in a pretty powerful blow against us. But I also like to point out that the attack, although it produced I mean, it killed 2403 people. It sank or destroyed 21 warships.

01:22:01:04 – 01:22:19:22
Marty Morgan
It was resulted in the destruction, 188 aircraft. It was this is nothing to sneeze at. This is a very serious attack. However One thing I have heard over and over again, repeated, especially in the years since this movie came out, is that the Japanese destroyed the Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor. They did not do that. The Pacific fleet lost permanently.

01:22:19:22 – 01:22:49:16
Marty Morgan
How many ships? Three. Utah, Arizona, Oklahoma. USS Nevada is badly damaged in this attack and happens eventually with that ship. Nevada’s throwing shells ashore on D-Day. They didn’t sink everything. I find that there is a tendency for people to emphasize histrionic beliefs about the December 7th attack. They didn’t destroy everything. And in fact, in recent years, since the movie came out, one thing that I have something that comes up all the time that I to sort of provide an answer for.

01:22:49:18 – 01:23:06:01
Marty Morgan
And that is like, well, the Japanese were foolish because they didn’t attack the fuel farm. And my argument to that is like they only had 352 single engine aircraft and they had to run as fast as they could to get the hell away from Hawaii, because on Hawaii there were a lot more angry aircraft and ships than they had.

01:23:06:05 – 01:23:27:05
Marty Morgan
And so they had to get in, get it done and get out as fast as they possibly could. And you can’t hit everything with 352 single engine aircraft. You have to pick your targets carefully. And they made the right decisions, I think, in terms of picking their targets carefully. And that was number one, our number one aircraft carriers and in their absence, number two battleships and then maybe some.

01:23:27:05 – 01:23:52:15
Marty Morgan
Sure fire side facilities. And other thing that really gets under my skin is people will frequently say, while the Japanese didn’t attack the repair facilities, nonsense, the Japanese attacked several repair facilities. There’s the famous photograph that depicts the destroyer USS Shaw exploding, and USS Shaw was in a floating drydock that came under Japanese attack. The read their famous that show USS Pennsylvania, USS Carson and USS Downes in a flooded drydock area.

01:23:52:21 – 01:24:13:03
Marty Morgan
And the area was flooded because the Japanese kept dropping bombs on those ships, the drydock, and they finally flooded it to contain the fires on those ships. Well, the Japanese did carry out Shoreside attacks on repair facilities. They didn’t go the fuel form. And that’s because I think they had too many other they had a target rich environment that they were trying to deal with.

01:24:13:09 – 01:24:24:18
Marty Morgan
And that target rich environment was Pearl Harbor and there were lots of ships there and nearby Hickam Army Airfield with lots of airframe prime airplanes. And so they went after those targets. Of all the targets, those are the ones you’re going to go to first.

01:24:25:02 – 01:24:55:06
Dan LeFebvre
Well, it’s interesting you mentioned Dan Aykroyd’s character, because the movie does mention the fictional character, Captain Thurman in the film, but he does throw out something about how the fleet’s probably headed towards Philippines or Southeast Asia. I think Nimitz said something like, Show me some evidence. And he’s like, Well, it’s what I would do. Yeah, kind of gives that oversimplified line, but it’s that the filmmakers did at least throw a nod to that, at least that that was a possibility that they were thinking about, that there was an attack that’s probably coming.

01:24:55:06 – 01:24:57:06
Dan LeFebvre
But just not thinking that as part of the pearl.

01:24:57:27 – 01:25:15:29
Marty Morgan
Right. And that was what I thought was interesting about that specific exchange in the film was the fact that he is engaging with the Nimitz and the Nimitz character is like, show me proof of this. When all along, strangely, Nimitz was someone who felt genuine concern about the anchorage at Pearl Harbor.

01:25:15:29 – 01:25:18:08
Dan LeFebvre
Oh, really? So he was concerned about it the whole time?

01:25:18:12 – 01:25:55:01
Marty Morgan
Yeah, there was. I don’t find what I have found overwhelmingly in the years since this movie came out is that people have this tendency to imagine, which I think is really more of it’s more of an indication of the era. The post-modern cynicism of this era in that is that people tend to think that any general is corrupt, incompetent, or any admiral is corrupt or incompetent, that that there is this old trope from World War One history, from Civil War, history of that the leaders of the one that by not being down there in the trenches, are not being close to the battle they have lost touch with and that they needlessly and wantonly sacrifice

01:25:55:04 – 01:26:14:08
Marty Morgan
lives of people below them. And what I have overwhelmingly found in studying this subject for most of my adult life is that that is not what happened, that it was a series of leaders that were engaging in and sober conversations about what the Japanese might do, that it was not a quality of being disconnected and unconcerned and dismissive.

01:26:14:10 – 01:26:41:00
Marty Morgan
I have even heard the rolling out of a racialized narrative where people will frequently say that Americans never expected this because they never expected that Asian people could do something like this. And that’s nonsense. That’s absolute nonsense. We had every reason to believe that the Japanese were capable of almost anything. There was no reason for us to be dismissive of Japanese military capabilities, and nobody wrote or published thought toward that end.

01:26:41:08 – 01:27:02:17
Marty Morgan
So none of these high ranking officers were on record saying something dismissive about Asian people and what they were either capable or incapable of. What they thought instead was that we had to, if there’s anything in the movie that I feel like a line that I do sort of appreciate, a lot of it comes from Jon Voight playing FDR, who I think is great in this movie.

01:27:02:17 – 01:27:21:23
Marty Morgan
I think he plays probably the best FDR that’s ever been played. I think he’s quite good. I know he’s bonkers and crazy now, but he Jon Voight was good in this movie. I really feel like that. And there’s a point where they’re discussing war production in a cabinet meeting that definitely would have not discussed war production, but they’re still doing it.

01:27:22:06 – 01:27:47:29
Marty Morgan
And in it, he says, we need to transfer more to Europe. And they show an officer, maybe even the Nimitz character, not the Nimitz character. Maybe the Kimmel character, says, So we’re going to keep stripping things from the Pacific to help the to help Europe. And Jon Voight, FDR replies with, What else can we do? And to me that encapsulates a point very effectively, and that is that the United States was sort of thrust into a war.

01:27:47:29 – 01:28:24:24
Marty Morgan
What else can we do? Position? We did not have infinite military capability. We had limit. We had finite strengths at the time, while the administration was desperately doing everything that it possibly could to increase the production of weapons, ammunition, the things that we ultimately knew we would need when we joined the fighting war. And so to me, I feel like the quote says something that needed to be said in this train wreck of a movie, and that is that the United States was facing this constantly evolving daily news continuum during which no decision, the right decision, every decision is wrong.

01:28:25:03 – 01:29:00:08
Marty Morgan
You’re not going to win. What do you do? That was sort of the position that the administration was at. And the administration, therefore It’s therefore unsurprising that our military, which could not be omnipresent, our military which had finite strength, I often use an example to illustrate this in the form of patrol aircraft. A critically important element of this story is that the Hawaiian Islands had to be protected and the best way to protect the enemy from sneaking up on them was to conduct daily long range maritime surveillance flight operations through the use of aircraft like the Peabody Week at Catalina.

01:29:01:01 – 01:29:32:20
Marty Morgan
The aircraft could fly out 500, maybe even more miles, conduct a search grid and return to Hawaii. Well, when Kimmel takes over as the commander in chief Pacific Fleet, which is in February in 1941, one of the first things he requested is more patrol squadrons. And as a part of that request, he illustrates the point and I think an extraordinarily powerful way by saying the assets I now have available on this island in terms of long range maritime surveillance patrol aircraft, allow me to cover 25 degrees of the 360 degrees that surround this island.

01:29:32:20 – 01:29:51:12
Marty Morgan
Wow. And in doing that, he really, I believe, brought the appropriate emphasis to the fact that you’re setting me up to fail, which is precisely they were doing. They set that man up to fail over the issue of patrol aircraft. The compromise measure that was then made was they couldn’t give him all the B-boys that he asked for because they hadn’t been made yet.

01:29:51:12 – 01:30:09:26
Marty Morgan
And we were beginning this process of expanding PBI production because it was recognized that that aircraft is so very, very valuable, which is why ultimately production of the PBI was established, miles, that way in the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, because we just couldn’t make enough of the damn things. We had to have somebody else open up a facility where we were.

01:30:09:28 – 01:30:33:03
Marty Morgan
We were producing the aircraft the compromise measure that was made was that they gave him additional PBI patrol squadron assets. And in addition to that, they had just developed this new thing at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, which is called the C.R. to 77, which is radar. And the thought then became, all right, we have I have this many patrol squadrons and I have these mobile SDR to 77 A or was it B?

01:30:33:03 – 01:31:06:19
Marty Morgan
It was B because the mobile unit was designated as C, R 277 B, but there was a recognition for the fact that we I’m sorry, I said to 77 it was to 70 SDR to 70 A and B, I think eight is permanent and B is mobile anyway. So there’s this great memorial to this and it’s at Turtle Bay where they filmed Sarah Marshall and the funny thing that I ended up doing with my doors is that we go there because I can show them this memorial.

01:31:06:19 – 01:31:24:19
Marty Morgan
And then I would typically like all of the Hawaiian air flights that are going there. Forgetting Sarah Marshall is or is available to watch is one of the movies because it’s all about Hawaii, it’s about life in Hawaii and all these funny things. And this film, The Turtle Bay. And so it turns into it’s partly like talking about radar and December 7th and then partly like they film this scene here.

01:31:24:22 – 01:31:47:03
Marty Morgan
And when Kristen Wiig is doing the scene where she’s teaching the yoga class, it was in this village. It turns into a combination of those two things. But the S.R. 270 radar, the reason I mentioned it is that it was part of this compromise measure that they had with Kimmel, where Kimmel asked for more patrol squadron assets. They gave him what they could, but they then think also it’s a big Pacific Ocean and we need Catalina’s on Guam.

01:31:47:06 – 01:32:17:09
Marty Morgan
We need Catalina’s in the Philippine Islands, we need Catalina’s at places like Palmira and Midway and Johnston and all of these other remote island outposts that we were worried the Japanese were going to occupy. Anyway, as a part of the compromise, they said, We can’t give you everything you wanted, but we can give you this and we can give you these radar sets, these U.S. Army 70 and you can put those in a place that will help you and that will the way that that will help you is that you can by day, you’re running your long range maritime surveillance flights using the Catalina’s.

01:32:17:12 – 01:32:36:00
Marty Morgan
And then at night when the Catalina’s can’t do anything anymore because they can’t see in the dark, turn on the SRT 17. And so the result was then that part of what Kimmel had decide was, okay, great, I have had this asset made available to me. I can’t search 360 degrees. I can only search a sliver. What sliver makes the most sense?

01:32:36:09 – 01:32:51:22
Marty Morgan
There was a general thought that if the Japanese conducted an attack against the wall, it would come from the south. Well, it came from the north. And that’s not to say that Kim Kimmel was a fool, because Kimmel, he thought if they’re going attack, it’s going to come from the south. So there are more assets on the south shore than on the North Shore.

01:32:51:26 – 01:33:11:21
Marty Morgan
But then he realized, like, I can’t leave my my backdoor unguarded. I can’t let them sneak up on me from South. And so what Kimmel ended up doing was what he put the S.R. 70 at a pinpoint on the North Shore because he then had he could then think, all right, well, that’s covered by radar. So somebody tries sneaking up on the islands at night, it’ll be picked up on radar.

01:33:11:28 – 01:33:17:21
Marty Morgan
And meanwhile, I’m going to focus on the South because I think that’s where they’re going to come if they show up here.

01:33:18:03 – 01:33:54:01
Dan LeFebvre
Well, it’s funny you mention that, because in the movie it does show the radar in the morning of December 7th. There we see it, a radar outpost, and the movie describes it as a large haze. It’s the radar operator. Still relax. It’s just a flight of 17 from the mainland. And then another event happens in the movie. It gets mentioned when at 7:20 a.m., Admiral Kimmel gets a report that he’s playing golf and he gets a report that American Destroyer reported having fired on and sunk an enemy submarine attempting to enter Pearl Harbor, that the report was 720.

01:33:54:01 – 01:34:07:11
Dan LeFebvre
But the movie mentions that that had happened at 6:53 a.m.. Was there really a Japanese that was sunk? And then this haze that showed up on the radar then was misidentified as B-17s just before the attack began?

01:34:08:02 – 01:34:33:08
Marty Morgan
Yes, these things actually happened. If I could provide a little more context for. Yeah, that’s more understandable. And that’s because, first of all, I’ll address the midget submarine thing. So as a part of this operation, the Japanese Imperial Navy also deployed five midget submarines to participate in the attack. The way that they were supposed to participate was that these midget submarines, each one of them, there were 49 ton vessels that were powered by batteries.

01:34:33:11 – 01:34:58:04
Marty Morgan
They had a crew of two sailors and each one of them was carried piggyback style on the back of a long range Japanese boat, a full sized Japanese submarine, when they maneuvered into position, they would surface the two sailors that would man the the midget submarine would come out of the main submarine, climb aboard the midget submarine, seal the hatches, deck crew would then unleash the lashing that held the midget submarine to the deck of the larger submarine.

01:34:58:15 – 01:35:20:27
Marty Morgan
The larger submarine would then dove away. The midget submarine, now free of the larger submarine, could then move on and carry out an attack on its own. What was supposed to happen was that all five of them during the predawn hours were supposed to penetrate Pearl Harbor, and once they were inside harbor, they were to maneuver into and position themselves in the open body of water between four the island of the Navy base.

01:35:20:27 – 01:35:42:18
Marty Morgan
In other words, the body of water against which battleship row was situated. The plan was that they won once they were once they had penetrated the Navy base and got into position, they would sink down to the bottom and rest on the bottom of Pearl Harbor. Until such time as they heard the attack begin, they’d hear it. I mean, they hear massive explosions going off above them, at which point they would blow some ballast.

01:35:42:18 – 01:36:02:10
Marty Morgan
They would they would ascend through the water column and they would release torpedoes against the ships that were lined up there. The reason that they were being used is there was a concern that the Japanese 91 aerial torpedo, that’s the torpedo we’ve spoken about thus far, which is the type of torpedo that was being carried by decided to create torpedo bombers during the attack.

01:36:02:10 – 01:36:28:11
Marty Morgan
The aerial torpedo was a less powerful weapon then the type 93 torpedo, which was designed to be used by ships and submarines, the type 93 torpedo was a significantly more powerful weapon. The Type 91 aerial torpedo of the type that was released by the aircraft had an overall TNT charge. I believe that it’s in the weight range of £400 of high explosive.

01:36:28:15 – 01:36:44:16
Marty Morgan
That’s nothing to laugh at. That’s saying a lot. But the type 93 torpedo as carried by two each carried by the midget submarines. So five midget submarines each one carrying two type 90 threes. That makes for ten type 93 torpedoes. Those weapons carry over £700 of high explosives.

01:36:44:16 – 01:36:45:00
Dan LeFebvre
Wow.

01:36:45:01 – 01:37:20:23
Marty Morgan
That’s a ship killer. Yeah. And the thought was that the combination and. And partly this was them. The Japanese hedging their bets because the Japanese were not 100% convinced that all of the type 19 ones would work. Because, again, there’s the issue of the shallow harbor. Even though the breakaway fins worked, these people weren’t stupid. They understood very clearly that, you know, when we get to when we get down to the lowest possible altitude, 50, and we slow down to this speed, and we released the breakaway wood fin assembly, it retards the dove and the torpedo doesn’t dove, but about 15, maybe 20 feet.

01:37:20:27 – 01:37:37:02
Marty Morgan
And you know that there were naysayers there, like, yeah, but what’s going to happen when we get shot at and they realize that, well, if we’re getting shot at, you might have aviators that don’t get to 50 feet and slow down and they release those. So those torpedoes might not work. And so the thought was then that, okay, well, we’ll hedge your bets.

01:37:37:02 – 01:38:04:11
Marty Morgan
We will also employ these midget submarines carrying the more powerful type 93 torpedo. The midget submarines were, as I said before, all supposed to penetrate the harbor and sink down to the bottom and wait for the attack to begin. What we now is that out of the five, the one that was spotted shortly before 7 a.m. on December seven was then ultimately attacked by the destroyer USS Ward, which was a World War One Air Force tanker destroyer.

01:38:04:11 – 01:38:25:11
Marty Morgan
And that ward fired on it with several of the weapons on board the ship, but that its three age 50 gun scored two hits on this midget submarine that was attempting to penetrate the harbor by sailing in behind another ship that was going in. And that when the three inch hit that midget submarine, it killed the two men aboard and caused that midget submarine to sink.

01:38:25:13 – 01:38:44:15
Marty Morgan
That submarine was found and I’ll never forget it. It was found, I believe it was August of 2001, I think is when it was discovered. It was discovered in 1400 feet of water just off the harbor entrance. And that that conclusively proves the first shots fired on December 7th were fired by the United States Navy at the Japanese.

01:38:44:18 – 01:39:04:08
Marty Morgan
So the first shots of the Pacific War were not the Japanese attacking us, but that was known there was a delay in getting that information into the right hands. An argument that I make about that is I think we’re making a lot about something that we shouldn’t be making a lot about when we harp on the fact that the message didn’t get to Kim quickly enough.

01:39:04:08 – 01:39:22:17
Marty Morgan
And my thought was, okay, let’s say it got to him immediately. What could have been done and what would have been done? The islands had been under a full alert for a couple of weeks. They’d only just come down off of the full alert, going back to full alert on the basis one report was it would have been irresponsible for the foreign officer to do that.

01:39:22:17 – 01:39:34:08
Marty Morgan
And just for the record, it wasn’t like nothing happened, nothing happened, nothing happened. And then Kim Kimmel was told we shot in the midget submarine off of the harbor entrance this morning. There had been other reports that turned out to be false.

01:39:34:09 – 01:39:34:26
Dan LeFebvre
Oh, okay.

01:39:35:00 – 01:39:52:16
Marty Morgan
Other reports had been made. Just for the record. There were over and over again there were reports of Japanese paratroopers up on the North Shore. There were reports of a Japanese trawler here or a Japanese trawler there, or Japanese ships were spotted in this area. This the sort of thing that happens. That’s I think we always just sort of sloughed it off to fog of war.

01:39:52:17 – 01:40:13:22
Marty Morgan
We recognize that part of what determines success or failure in combat is not so much skill and knowledge. But sometimes luck is a factor and it is often a process of you’re bombarded by a lot of false information, a little bit of true information, and you have to be smart enough to figure out what’s false and what’s true very quickly.

01:40:13:22 – 01:40:41:01
Marty Morgan
And that asks a lot of leadership. The was that the message was slightly delayed. The message by the time that it got to him, there was an insufficient amount of time for a dramatic soul alert type reaction that would have reduced the losses that we had. One big thing that people criticize quite frequently is the fact that there were anti torpedo nets available and, that they were not used to protect the fleet at Battleship Row and there’s a reason for it.

01:40:41:01 – 01:41:07:25
Marty Morgan
It’s not a great decision. That’s not one of the it’s a hard call. I’m glad I didn’t have to make it. And the decision that he made was we’re not going to use them. And the reason that he made that decision was he was more concerned that his advanced early warning system of PD by Catalina’s would spot a Japanese task force when it was 200 miles away, and he would catch them before they launched their aircraft and that he would then get the fought the fleet up to full steam and get out of the harbor as fast as possible.

01:41:07:25 – 01:41:29:17
Marty Morgan
And if you had torpedo nets around your ships, it took hours to dismantle them. And so imagine I mean, what would you what would you do if you’re like, well, sir, we can put these torpedo nets up and they’ll protect the ship. In the unlikely event that the Japanese attempt to conduct a torpedo attack in a shallow harbor and torpedoes just don’t work in these shallow harbors.

01:41:30:02 – 01:41:49:19
Marty Morgan
We can either put up these torpedo nets for this unlikely possibility, or we can not use them and give the fleet the ability to get out of the harbor much quicker. And the decision he made was obviously he didn’t use the torpedo nets and it was because he favored or he privileged this idea of getting everybody up to steam and out of the harbor quickly.

01:41:49:19 – 01:41:53:06
Marty Morgan
And if I was in his position, I’m not sure I would have made a different decision that he did.

01:41:53:11 – 01:42:11:05
Dan LeFebvre
I mean, we know from hindsight that it was not the correct decision, but at the time, you don’t have the luxury of hindsight, obviously. And so, you know, it’s easy to to cast that sort of judgment on decisions like that, that I’m sure there are a lot of other decisions that played well or some did not, some do, some don’t.

01:42:11:05 – 01:42:15:10
Dan LeFebvre
And that’s I don’t want to make those decisions that go back to that. You.

01:42:15:10 – 01:42:33:15
Marty Morgan
Right. And if what if anything there was a positive that comes out of this is that there was a joint a joint structure that was ultimately created by which all of the branches of the military had to come together. We would eventually refer to it as the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and it provided greater levels of cooperation and communication between the branch service branches.

01:42:33:15 – 01:42:49:02
Marty Morgan
And we we weren’t there yet. But also keep in mind, I like to keep in mind is that how long had the Pacific Fleet been in Pearl Harbor? At this point? A little over a year. Resources were finite. We were doing everything we possibly could. Kim had been placed in command and immediately, quickly assessed, we’re going to need more.

01:42:49:02 – 01:43:04:22
Marty Morgan
We’re going to need this. We’re going to need that. He was he didn’t have everything that he wanted because he just couldn’t have everything that he wanted. And also there was a war going on in Europe. And that’s distracting. That’s distracting resources away from you. Ye he took sort of a bad rap, I think in history as time goes by.

01:43:04:22 – 01:43:38:17
Marty Morgan
Yeah, there are a couple of decisions that can be easily criticized, but I think it’s a failure, an intellectual failure, not to recognize that this was a man who was against a series of circumstances where he couldn’t possibly win and we were against an enemy who was extremely good. One thing that I have, I have I get like a case of indigestion about is that people very frequently love to call attention to American military failures before December 7th, when what I like to point out is like, you know, you can either do that or you can say the Japanese had the greatest fleet air arm in the world at the time.

01:43:38:21 – 01:43:59:12
Marty Morgan
They had the best fighter. They had the best torpedo plane. They had really good torpedoes. They had really good aircraft carriers, and they had great command leadership that could come up with bold plans and carry them out effectively. So which is it was an inept and corrupted American system that was asleep at the wheel and not paying attention?

01:43:59:12 – 01:44:23:08
Marty Morgan
Or was it an extremely efficient, efficient and effective Japanese military force? Because I don’t think you can have both. I think those two things live in different zip codes and you have to kind of have one or the other. And I tend to favor the fact that the Japanese were extremely bold, they were extremely good. And I leverage my belief in all of that with the fact that there were a lot of problems associated with the way they carried out this attack.

01:44:23:09 – 01:44:47:03
Marty Morgan
And I think one of the most important things to remember is that Pearl Harbor itself was not supposed to be the target that they attacked because the fleet could be either one of two places. The fleet was either at Pearl Harbor or it was at Lahaina. Rhodes And if you look at a map of the Hawaiian Islands, you’ll see that on the Western shore of Maui, there’s a town called Lahaina, and there is a protected body of water that’s called Lahaina.

01:44:47:03 – 01:45:11:18
Marty Morgan
RHODES That’s between it and Molokai and one of the other islands and Lahaina. Rhodes is deep and broad and it’s an extraordinarily well-protected bay. That was the location where the it was to keep the fleet at Lahaina. RHODES Because that Lahaina. RHODES Everyone could spread out. There was easily ten times as much space at Lahaina RHODES And there was a draw.

01:45:11:18 – 01:45:40:26
Marty Morgan
And the fleet was in the in those months leading up to the attack, the fleet was, it was like 5050. They were either at Lahaina or they were at Pearl Harbor. And when the Japanese set sail on the mission to carry out this attack, the Japanese had to trade for both, which is why they the first thing that happens that morning is the Japanese cruiser Chico say launches a patrol aircraft but it’s a single engine floatplane and that I’m sorry it was Chito say and there was another cruiser or two cruisers launch float planes and.

01:45:40:26 – 01:46:04:03
Marty Morgan
Those float planes fly out to Pearl Harbor and Lahaina Rhodes and those float planes. Their mission was to determine whether or not the fleet was at Lahaina or at Pearl. And so these aviators as as as much as we love to admire the skill, I mean, I’m guilty of it. As much as I like to admire the skill that the Japanese military had was an extremely well skilled and well-armed military force.

01:46:04:08 – 01:46:21:16
Marty Morgan
As much as I like to admire the Japanese Imperial Navy, I also have to remind myself that for that morning they had trained for Lahaina and Pearl, and that morning they were waiting for the verdict to come back from the float planes. And when the verdict came back, it was, okay, we’re not doing planning. We’re doing plan B there at Pearl.

01:46:21:16 – 01:46:43:28
Marty Morgan
We’re going to Pearl. And so a point I’d like to make that I think very effectively explains why the Japanese had all these deconfliction problems over the objective was because they were training for two missions. Yeah. And that’s a that’s a, that’s a data dump for, for a lot for the aviators to be prepared for. And that’s a lot of geography that you’ve got to brief on.

01:46:44:12 – 01:47:07:00
Marty Morgan
There are there are a lot of variables that are at work with two options. And the result was that I think you couldn’t because they had trained for two missions, you couldn’t expect that there wouldn’t be problems when they finally got to the position and carried out one of them and, there were big problems. They had some massive shortcomings in the way that they carried out that attack and that was with them being really, really good.

01:47:07:04 – 01:47:09:00
Marty Morgan
Yeah. And they still have massive problems.

01:47:09:00 – 01:47:27:02
Dan LeFebvre
You talked about the submarines. I want to ask about like the B-17 being or I’m sorry, misidentified B-17. What about what about that side of it was that I’m assuming that was actually something that took place as well was was a timing the movie doesn’t really explain the timing of that necessarily other than suggesting that was around then.

01:47:27:02 – 01:47:35:25
Dan LeFebvre
But we don’t hear any times as far as when things were reported, was that ever reported back to Nimitz or anybody else that they knew that there was this fleet coming in.

01:47:35:26 – 01:47:58:06
Marty Morgan
The notoriously the way that that ended up being reported was that a call was placed to Fort Shafter, which was the main army post on the island down in the vicinity of where Tripler Army Medical Center is. It’s it’s on basically oriented the center of the south shore of a while. And there was an officer on duty, Lockard and Elliot, who were the two technicians that were running the S.R. 270 radar system until Pana.

01:47:58:06 – 01:48:21:18
Marty Morgan
Then a phone call was placed to this information center. The Information Center was being crewed by a man by the name of Kermit Tyler. The interesting is that Kermit Tyler was vilified by both of the major movies about December 7th. He’s vilified in a really shameful way in the movie torturer. He’s also vilified in a less shameful way in this movie.

01:48:21:18 – 01:48:25:24
Marty Morgan
And you saw it in that he’s there and he’s in an office and he’s got a seat kicked up.

01:48:25:29 – 01:48:28:25
Dan LeFebvre
He’s the one lounging with or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:48:28:27 – 01:48:46:15
Marty Morgan
He’s playing chess. And I was like, who? Who plays chess at seven in the morning, for God’s sake? But they had to have him that weakness, she said. And I feel like I know I’m harping on to something that seems minuscule and inconsequential, but the fact that they deliberately chose to depict him playing chess. Yeah, that’s presenting an appearance.

01:48:46:15 – 01:48:56:00
Marty Morgan
That’s presenting an appearance of being disconnected and unconcerned and unprofessional. What it looks like is somebody is like, I whatever. I’m kind of interested in what’s going on in my.

01:48:56:00 – 01:48:57:21
Dan LeFebvre
Playing A game while you’re on duty. Yeah.

01:48:57:21 – 01:49:22:04
Marty Morgan
Yeah. And the reality is that Kermit Tyler did not actually do that. He wasn’t playing chess that morning. And in fact, what he was what ended up happening that morning with him is that he had a conversation and the conversation that he ended up having with open a point was one in which he sensitively talked to them about the radar report that they were seeing.

01:49:22:04 – 01:49:44:29
Marty Morgan
Because we obviously what we know is that the operators in Alpena, they picked up the Japanese aircraft as they were approaching the island and they tracked them using the AC r to 70 radar all the way until the point that they were lost by ground clear meaning that they were tracking the aircraft as they approached the island all the way to the point where they could no longer track them because.

01:49:44:29 – 01:50:06:23
Marty Morgan
The ground was interfering with the radar, the oscilloscope, what the report that they were seeing on the assault scale. Well, the conversation that was actually had was one that made a lot of sense. And I’ll keep this brief. They called down to Shafter. Tyler answered the phone. He wasn’t playing chess. He didn’t have his feet kicked up. He wasn’t paying attention into our territory.

01:50:06:26 – 01:50:23:03
Marty Morgan
It’s depicted with sort of a like a corpulent dude who’s chomping on a cigar and he goes, Oh, it’s just a bunch of B-17. Don’t worry about. And then he abruptly hangs up the phone. So that’s an even worse hack job than this movie did with the actuality of the event. The reality is that he had a long conversation.

01:50:23:03 – 01:50:41:20
Marty Morgan
They talked about things like setting and direction and altitude, and eventually as a part of that conversation, he reached the conclusion that they were the aircraft that were being observed were B-17s that were flying in from the West Coast, which is that actually happened. There were 12 aircraft consisting of C model B-17s and immortal B-17s that were coming in.

01:50:41:20 – 01:51:13:23
Marty Morgan
Some of them were 48 constant squadron. And as the aircraft approached the island, they were coming down out of altitude. They were preparing to pass over the the one IRA and get into position to land at the bomber base on the island which was Hickam Harbor Airfield right next to the harbor. Well, one of the points that came up in that conversation, because I met Kermit Tyler and talked to him and one of the things that he wanted me to know was that while he was on the phone, having that conversation was the point that he made was the formation was obviously situated north of the island and they said stairwell coming in from the

01:51:13:23 – 01:51:36:03
Marty Morgan
north. And he said, well, that’s not unusual. It’s we do have a group of B-17s that are coming in. They’re doing within the hour, and that’s probably them and they’re probably just out of position. And when he mentioned it, he had mentioned before that you remember two weeks ago when the B-17s came in, and that was because there was this other incident during which took off from California to fly to a load of land at Hickam.

01:51:36:09 – 01:51:56:14
Marty Morgan
And it was all because of this build up within the 11th bombardment group of aircraft. The 11th Bombardment Group was building up strength on Oahu because it was about to ship to the Philippines. And it’s because we thought the Japanese were coming to get the Philippines. And as we were building, as we were building up strength as as the entire bombardment group was preparing to go to the Philippines, it was necessary to bring aircraft in it.

01:51:56:14 – 01:52:22:20
Marty Morgan
It was the process of moving an entire bomber group. And a few weeks prior, a group of B-17s in from the West Coast. And apparently a common thing that happened was that at night you don’t have homing beacons, you had navigation, and your navigation was back then it wasn’t foolproof. And what could happen is that mistakes could be made during the process of navigation by which, as you approached your destination, you were a little of position.

01:52:22:20 – 01:52:42:09
Marty Morgan
And apparently the common thing that was happening was that as formations of bombers who had never been to Hawaii before, as they flew across the Pacific in the middle of the night with no land below them, with nothing to give them a beacon to hone in on, they tended to, depending on what the wind was doing, they if they were flying toward it, this is Hawaii.

01:52:42:09 – 01:53:01:21
Marty Morgan
And this is the bomber they tended to as they flew toward Hawaii, they tended to get blown a little off course. And they were tending to being being pushed a little to the north and so what had happened a few weeks earlier was that this flight of B-17s came in, they were out of position and they were north of A and the at the point when the sun is up and now they go, Oh, there it is over there.

01:53:01:21 – 01:53:22:10
Marty Morgan
It’s on the left side of the aircraft. And they made a simple course correction that brought them in. So in other words, the navigation from California to Hawaii wasn’t 100% reliable dead perfect every single time. And there had been this incident a few weeks prior by which at dawn, when the bombers could figure out where they were, they figured they were a little farther north than they needed be, and they made a simple course correction.

01:53:22:10 – 01:53:49:10
Marty Morgan
And so Tyler had brought that up on the phone. And so it wasn’t him playing chess and being disconnected and it wasn’t him chomping on a cigar. And we had don’t worry about it hanging up the phone. It was a sensitive discussion about what it was and a point I love to make to humanize the story even further is the fact that radars knew we had no to believe that the Japanese were had just successfully sneaked their way across the North Atlantic, the North Pacific, and to approach Hawaii from the North.

01:53:49:10 – 01:54:09:26
Marty Morgan
We had no reason believe that that was any practical possibility. We had every reason to believe that if an attack was going to unfold, it was going to unfold against the Philippines and there were B-17s coming in and they knew it and they were due within the hour. And so the movie tours to our Tora so thoroughly ruined that man’s life that he, for the rest of his life, received mail periodically from.

01:54:09:26 – 01:54:31:04
Marty Morgan
He showed me one, in fact, and it was a letter from a woman that wrote him and said, My son died on Arizona because of you. How that man withdrew. He didn’t withdraw entirely, but he mostly withdrew from public appearances because he he’s named in Tora Bora. People saw a movie, told him in a movie, told these people that he was the bad guy and they believed it.

01:54:31:04 – 01:54:50:18
Marty Morgan
And it was something that that followed him for the rest of his life. He was alive to see this movie when it came out. And he wasn’t happy with this depiction either. He went to a he died in 2010 and he went to his grave, very sad feeling, very unfairly depicted for what happened. And the reality was that he was part of this bigger picture.

01:54:50:18 – 01:55:14:16
Marty Morgan
And it was unfair that he got sort of saddled with a lot of blame here because people were very quick to the Monday morning that immediately stepped up, were very quick to criticize the fact that this man, who basically was unknown to the world until this book came out, this book that was called At Dawn We Slept. And when the book came out, I can’t remember what year the book came out.

01:55:14:17 – 01:55:41:21
Marty Morgan
When the book came out that named him. And when when he was named. And then when the movie got made in 1970, the movie towards Iraq, he was propelled from being someone who was largely anonymous within the broader story of December 7th, it went from him being sort of an anonymous person who was there that day to becoming instantly this target of a great deal of ire and hostility from people.

01:55:41:21 – 01:55:41:27
Marty Morgan
All of.

01:55:41:27 – 01:55:43:26
Dan LeFebvre
Sudden, the villain of the story, you know, he.

01:55:43:26 – 01:55:51:15
Marty Morgan
Was in many ways, he became this villain. And the man did not deserve it. And it was just sort of a shame to see it. But I mean, isn’t there some.

01:55:51:15 – 01:56:04:09
Dan LeFebvre
Obvious conclusion to come to? I didn’t realize there were a B-17s that came in a couple of weeks or a few weeks prior. I mean, basically coming in what you’re saying, like, it just seems like that would be the most obvious answer, that it is probably what they are.

01:56:04:11 – 01:56:23:12
Marty Morgan
And it seemed like an obvious answer to commit Tyler and he went with that and it turns out it turns out to have been mistaken. And it’s very strange to me because as you know, I continue to lead these tours out there and I’m leading one in a couple of months. It always comes up and we always end up having this problem.

01:56:23:12 – 01:56:49:02
Marty Morgan
We end up having this discussion because I find that if people care enough about this subject to hire me to come be their tour guide in Hawaii, there are people that have done some reading and there they’ve done some reading and they’ve done a lot of movie watching. And so they’ve seen this movie and they seem towards Aura and they therefore kind of want to drag Kermit Tyler out of the grave and curse him out once again and quick to point out that there’s a lot more to that story.

01:56:49:02 – 01:57:14:24
Marty Morgan
And he’s a lot less of the sickening villain than they want to believe he is. And they believe that. Why? Because a movie them to believe that. And that’s why I find it so very bizarre. And that’s why I value the work that you do in this podcast, because I find that it’s so bizarre that I am on a regular basis reminding adults with educations that it was in a movie, and just because it was in a movie doesn’t mean it was true.

01:57:15:04 – 01:57:38:01
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Well, we talked a little bit about the attack itself earlier, but we’re at the point in the movie’s timeline where we see the attack. And now from a visual perspective, I thought the filmmakers did a good job putting together the effects of, you know, you see the planes swarming in and dropping torpedoes as I think it was used the trailers at at the time.

01:57:38:01 – 01:58:03:11
Dan LeFebvre
There’s a you know, the camera that follows the torpedo. The first torpedoes dropped into the water explodes against the ship. Probably one of my favorite ones is when it drops a bomb, you know, not a torpedo, but an actual bomb that goes all the way down, impacts the ship below. And of course, as we talked about it, the movie also portrays that the Americans just seemed to be shocked into the reality of the situation of what’s happening.

01:58:03:11 – 01:58:20:08
Dan LeFebvre
It’s they think it’s a drill and all the time these explosions start erupting. A lot of them are just waking up. You know, the sailors are sleeping on the ships and they wake up. It just seems to be pure chaos over. Iraq, what do you think the movie did showing the attack itself at Pearl Harbor?

01:58:20:20 – 01:58:39:20
Marty Morgan
It didn’t do well. And I’ll tell you why, since you mentioned those those are those very memorable scenes where you see a bomb that has been dropped from ab5 into torpedo bomber because that’s how they killed Arizona. Arizona was not killed by a torpedo. Arizona was killed by artillery shell that had been modified and engineered into a freefall bomb.

01:58:40:03 – 01:59:00:09
Marty Morgan
And it’s because the Japanese didn’t have any weapons that any of the Japanese didn’t have aerial bomb capable of penetrating battleship armor. And the result of that was they had to create this. It was designated the type 99 Special Attack Munition, and it was a naval gun shell that they put on a lathe and they tapered its walls back to where they were angular.

01:59:00:18 – 01:59:21:05
Marty Morgan
They put a fin assembly on it and they put fuzing on it so that such that it would penetrate a deck air, penetrate the armor of a deck and explode below deck. And it was using this method that they hoped to defeat the armor on, on American battleships. And it worked because that’s what destroyed the Arizona the section where they depict the death of the Arizona.

01:59:21:05 – 01:59:42:02
Marty Morgan
I find especially the moment of the explosion. I find it to be very compelling because it’s, I think, quite well depicted. But leading up to that is one of the weirdest things I have ever seen in my in my life. So, you know, the scene you already referenced it. It’s the bomb strikes the ship. It penetrates through the deck immediately next to turret number one.

01:59:42:15 – 01:59:54:01
Marty Morgan
And number two, rather, penetrates down, pushes into an ammunition storage room associated with the 14 inch main batteries of the ship. And you see the band kind of come crashing through. And there some sailors there and everybody’s kind of looking around.

01:59:54:01 – 01:59:55:03
Dan LeFebvre
It doesn’t explode right away.

01:59:55:03 – 02:00:11:10
Marty Morgan
Yeah, yeah, don’t explode right away. And you see shells on racks that kind of come tumbling down. And if you listen to the sound design, this movie does some sound design stuff that I’m like, What was wrong with you people? Because it sounds like tin cans tumbling down. It’s supposed to be 14 inch shells that way, over £1,000.

02:00:11:10 – 02:00:35:06
Marty Morgan
And it goes and it’s there tumbling down. It’s like clang, clang sounds ridiculous. And then you see the bomb sitting there and they’re in the tail assembly of the bomb. You see the spinner? That’s good. You hit that, it stops. And there’s a moment of suspense and then kaboom. And then you see Arizona erupt. And while the explosion, I think, is a very compelling way of depicting that and I don’t have a criticism for that that’s not how fuzes on bombs work.

02:00:36:16 – 02:00:37:10
Marty Morgan
Just for the record.

02:00:37:15 – 02:00:38:19
Dan LeFebvre
I had a feeling there wasn’t.

02:00:38:27 – 02:01:00:02
Marty Morgan
Yeah, Daddy. And that’s. And it’s not just once that it happens, it it’s twice. Because then there’s a scene where our two protagonist fighter pilot characters are sort of rampaging around like pirates over the airfield. And before they get in their planes and take off where they’re at an airfield, it’s androgynous, not identified. That’s probably supposed to be Wheeler, but it’s not very Wheeler.

02:01:00:02 – 02:01:14:24
Marty Morgan
But it’s supposed to be wheeler. And bombs come in and they see a guy who’s, of course, in a position right next to fuel trucks and a bomb coast think tank. And it bounces and kind of skids up to where this guy’s position is. A few run away and he looks down and he goes, Hey, guys, it’s okay.

02:01:14:24 – 02:01:39:10
Marty Morgan
It’s a dud. And you see, once again, this is the spinning, the spinner sort of, and then it kaboom. And it sets off all this fuel. And there’s a massive Michael Bay explosion. And my first thought was, once again, that’s not how Fuzes work, because the fuzing that you’re seeing there, that Fuzing is associated with arming the weapon, the weapon when it’s carried on the airplane, it’s not armed because it’s really a dangerous weapon, you know.

02:01:39:17 – 02:01:58:16
Marty Morgan
And so they’re in a safe mode. And you’ll notice if you ever see ordnance that strung or slung beneath, the wings are mounted on the hard points of an aircraft. You’ll notice that the ordinance is usually there and there’s usually a wire of some kind connecting something to the to the frame of the aircraft. And that’s the wire that’s associated with.

02:01:58:16 – 02:02:20:23
Marty Morgan
They would retard that spinner by putting looping wire through a hole in the little blades on that spinner. And then that wire would attach to the aircraft that spinner. Therefore, when the when the ordinance bomb, torpedo, whatever, it’s really over bomb, when the bomb released from the wing of the aircraft, that wire will break and it will allow that spinner to begin spinning.

02:02:21:08 – 02:02:45:16
Marty Morgan
The spinner, after completing a certain designated number of spins, will release a plunger that arms the weapon. That doesn’t mean the weapon explodes. It means that the weapon is now armed. And so for the type of bomb that was depicted in this scene that’s supposed to be Wheeler Army Airfield, that would be a point detonating bar, meaning that the weapon has a plunger at the nose.

02:02:45:16 – 02:03:09:27
Marty Morgan
And when that plunger is compressed, when the bomb hits the ground, kaboom. The spinner is there to pull something out of the way to allow that prop plunger to move backward and set off the explosion in. Other words, that’s how you are. The weapon for the type 99 special attack munition, the type of modified naval gun shell that was turned into a bomb just for the Pearl Harbor attack.

02:03:10:14 – 02:03:41:16
Marty Morgan
You had different types of fuzing and they were associated with arming that tail fuze assembly was associated with arming that weapon because that was intended to be it. So it’s not plunger or contact detonated because you want it to penetrate armor and then explode the that tail mounted fuze assembly was associated with arming the system so that when it made contact you would get the delay was caused by two chemicals that were that were contained in two vials.

02:03:42:02 – 02:04:20:03
Marty Morgan
And when that fuze assembly was crushed on impact, it shattered vials allowing the two chemicals to mix and react, which then set off a chain reaction that caused the explosion. And that would provide just a moment of delay. And that moment delay was all that was necessary to allow the strength of the bomb to punch through the armor of the ship and then go off so that if somebody seen that bomb the moment before it exploded below deck on Arizona, what they would not have seen would have been an intact tail assembly, something spinning almost like it’s an alarm clock.

02:04:20:20 – 02:04:45:10
Marty Morgan
I realized that the filmmakers did that and that they did it for the specific point, toward the specific point of having a moment of suspense. And when I watch these movies, I’m I’m not constantly just I’m not forever just this asinine pinhead that’s picking everything apart do tend to watch them to enjoy it. And as as absurd as that spinning Fuze is, I watch it.

02:04:45:10 – 02:05:23:07
Marty Morgan
That moment is delivered with all of the technical skill of Michael Bay and action filmmaking. And it’s it’s a good moment. It’s just not true. That’s just not the way these bombs, however, the explosion that’s depicted after that, I remember watching it on the big screen the first time, and that was the moment where I just kind of went back and I went, okay, finally the movie got me this and the movie finally dragged me in because when I went to the premiere of it that we had here, it wasn’t until Arizona blew up that I finally had a moment where I was like, because the movie from start to that and I think it’s

02:05:23:07 – 02:06:08:16
Marty Morgan
over an hour the into the movie because this is a long movie it’s over an hour in before I finally realized that wow that was that moment and the computer animation of the explosion, the Arizona I think, was quite well-executed. And they did that justice. But I had tolerated over an hour of just this awful, absurd garbage and love story nonsense with dialog that seems to have been written by four year olds with great actors who were who were given bad direction and with a storyline that was weird and up to the point, up to that point, it had not even jumped the shark, you know, the expression jumped the shark from the good old

02:06:08:16 – 02:06:31:00
Marty Morgan
era of happy days. The movie jumps the shark when you have two fighter pilots who suddenly become bomber pilots and get assigned to the Doolittle Raid. That’s that’s a jump the shark moment that I remember when it happened in the movie, I was like, You’ve got to be kidding me. Where you will have people like me. Like when sat down to watch that movie the night I wanted that movie to be so good, and I was ready to overlook problems.

02:06:31:16 – 02:06:57:00
Marty Morgan
And they piled the problems on me so deep that I was just annoyed, even with periodic cuts to, you know, the girl squad, the nurses who were all just like devastatingly beautiful women. And what’s funny to me, too, is that they have this one actress in there, Sara Rue, who at the time she was she was the chubby nurse.

02:06:57:14 – 02:07:19:07
Marty Morgan
She is since then. She’s very she’s lost a lot of weight, very thin now. But even when she was chubby in, the movie, she’s still just beautiful. She’s still spectacularly attractive as an overweight woman. And so you have these beautiful women and even that was annoying to me because beautiful women. And they were they’re great, actually, for God’s sake.

02:07:19:07 – 02:07:45:07
Marty Morgan
Like there is this like I feel like I should find them for their underuse of Jennifer Garner and her acting ability, because she’s a great actress and she’s turned. What is she in this movie? She’s turned into a girl who always looks a little frumpy and wears little glasses. And she’s the nerd friend that’s in the girl group where you have a representative example of every type of girl and every girl buddy flick, just as have a group of army fighter pilots.

02:07:45:07 – 02:08:07:28
Marty Morgan
And you’ve got every guy in that, the guy who’s constantly trying to talk nurses into going home with him. And you have the guy that stutters lot, but he develops this kind of quaint and cute little relationship with one of the nurses. And then you have the obvious male romantic lead and the obvious female romantic lead were all it was just syrupy in its sweetness and it was too much and it was absurd.

02:08:07:28 – 02:08:30:15
Marty Morgan
And I had a hard time digesting all of it. And that was even with like the best possible cinematography and these amazingly beautiful and attractive people. And they still made me hate it and hate every minute of it. And I can’t just continue to dump on this movie like this and talk about terrible acting and terrible dialog and terrible story.

02:08:30:15 – 02:08:58:25
Marty Morgan
But it’s terrible and all of those things in ways that my vocabulary struggles to provide different words that that adequately express the depth of disappointment that I feel in looking at this movie again. And that disappointment is in, first of all, its quality as a movie, which I think is deeply disappointing. And then the fact that it just had this open, arrogant contempt for historical accuracy made it something that I still struggle with.

02:08:59:09 – 02:09:17:03
Marty Morgan
I still watch it, and I keep watching it every year. And I think I write part of it off in my mind is like, it’s important for me to understand the psycho cultural phenomenon that’s at work here. But part of me keeps thinking that there have been movies in my life where the first five times I watched them, I hate them.

02:09:17:10 – 02:09:38:18
Marty Morgan
And then later in life I’m like, That’s the greatest movie ever made. I get convinced by movies and I keep giving this movie a chance and it’s just not convincingly like I remember the movie Alien Prometheus. At first I was like, What the hell is this is stupid, this is nonsense. And here I am five years or ten years later, and I love that movie.

02:09:38:18 – 02:10:03:05
Marty Morgan
And I watch it over and over again all the time. There are movies that do that to me, and I keep giving this movie chances to real me. And and I get distracted over and over again where I just sit there in the most catty and childish way. Knowing the only accent in this movie that is believable is the one from the British person who’s using an American accent.

02:10:03:15 – 02:10:30:23
Marty Morgan
Because Kate Beckinsale is presenting herself as an American Army Navy officer and she sounds like an American, whereas the Americans who were born in this country, who are trying to sound like they’re from Tennessee, they sound like the biggest, ridiculous joke. They sound like Foghorn Leghorn. We have over and over again. It’s this is a larger complaint that I have about a lot of movies, and that is that movies don’t do well when they try to render Southern accents.

02:10:31:08 – 02:10:50:15
Marty Morgan
And here in the Deep South, we have a diversity of accents to where I can pick Alabamians out of a crowd from mile away and I can pick Tennesseans and Kentuckians and Georgians out of a crowd from miles away because we’re all very, very different. And for God’s sake, I live in Louisiana, which is practice practically its own language in a way.

02:10:51:01 – 02:11:23:03
Marty Morgan
And yet what do they do every time they have a movie where they have Southerners, everybody talks like this, and everybody has these absurdly exaggerated cartoons. They talk like Gomer Pyle. They have these exaggerated, cartoonish accents, and I personally find that deeply annoying. I’ll stop on that. But the movie, it very quickly gets under my skin. I mean, basically from the opening over matters like you’re seeing that the two kids playing in the hangar that will ultimately become our protagonist characters in the creepy love triangle.

02:11:23:14 – 02:11:45:14
Marty Morgan
But the two of them are watching this crop dusting aircraft overhead at a time when crop dusting aircraft didn’t exist in the United States. And the aircraft that they depict is flying overhead. And crop dusting is an airplane that didn’t exist until the 1930s. Yet this is supposed to be the 1920s. And yeah, I can I can like look away from little minor inadequacies like that.

02:11:45:14 – 02:12:04:28
Marty Morgan
But then they cut to their adults now and they’re both Army fighter pilots and they’re in game engaged in this little act of this game of chicken where they’re flying toward each other. And what kills me is that every time I forget and every time I just get a little I feel a little vomit come up because it cuts to a shot of a P40.

02:12:04:28 – 02:12:34:19
Marty Morgan
And I was like, Hey, this movie’s got P40, and that’s awesome. I can’t wait to watch this. And it cuts to something that says Mitchell Field, New York, January 1941, and it cuts to a shot that is very obviously Southern California with hills in the background during the during the summer months. And then it’s got all this interaction of the it plays up this this this this nauseating trope of these showoff fly boys are out here misbehaving.

02:12:34:19 – 02:13:11:29
Marty Morgan
And then then the son of scowling, scolding officer like and those boys are in deep trouble. And you cut to all of these absurd cliches and it’s all in such a California, and it’s supposed to be Mitchell Field on Long Island in the middle of the bleak midwinter. And it’s Southern California with the hills in the background. And it’s I remember when that happened, when the movie when the movie got underway, I was sort of ready to forgive the whole that pre scene of the two boys when they were kids and then they accidentally fly briefly in this Stearman that has that doesn’t exist for another decade.

02:13:12:09 – 02:13:37:23
Marty Morgan
And then they have this big moment of dialog with the one father who fought the Germans in World War One. And he talks with an accent like this, and that guy is actually this excellent actor. What is his name? Oh, is it Fichtner? I think it’s Fichtner. Is it? He’s actually such a great actor. William Fichtner. Yeah. And he plays Danny’s father in the movie Victor, who is like frickin great in a movie that came out later that year.

02:13:37:23 – 02:14:06:15
Marty Morgan
Because I have to remind myself that what was this calendar year in May? It was Pearl Harbor in September it was September 11th, followed by Band of Brothers, followed by Black Hawk Down. And I’m sorry, but the movies that came out later in the attracted much more of my attention than this one did. Because, let’s face it, I think Black Hawk Down is one of the finest movies that’s ever been made.

02:14:07:17 – 02:14:30:24
Marty Morgan
There are so few negatives that can be uttered about that movie. That movie is perfection. So many levels with so many good actors and so much good acting and sitter who was also in this play, this ridiculous joke of I’m a Southerner, but I’m a trumpet World War, one better entity BLEEP. And he was directed by a poor director who didn’t use him well.

02:14:30:28 – 02:14:51:20
Marty Morgan
And then he had, for God’s sake, Ridley directed him in Black Hawk Down, and he’s absolutely excellent. I mean, that movie, I just I have nothing negative to say about that movie, but that’s not why we’re here. We’re here to talk about the Room Harbor, which is so weird to watch the way that it just abused these actors.

02:14:53:03 – 02:15:26:09
Marty Morgan
But the fact that I’m now moaning endlessly about the opening character establishing scene of the two boys is it’s overlooking the two movies that I think we should be talking about. Because if there’s one good thing that Pearl Harbor 2001 did is that it created opportunities for, satire. And I’m not sure if you’ve seen the movie Walk Hard, which was a satire of the Johnny Cash bio.

02:15:26:18 – 02:15:31:06
Dan LeFebvre
Okay. Okay. I don’t I don’t I never saw it. But I know which one you’re talking about. Yeah, yeah.

02:15:31:23 – 02:15:47:23
Marty Morgan
Please go watch it. Because if you watch it now, what you’ll pick up on very quickly is that they have a whole character development. So the whole thing is just a ridiculous, over-the-top comedy satire, and it’s slightly hysterical. But they have an opening scene that is satire in the opening scene from Pearl Harbor.

02:15:48:01 – 02:15:48:14
Dan LeFebvre
Oh, really?

02:15:48:22 – 02:16:15:27
Marty Morgan
It’s got two kid actors horsing around and it’s so funny. And it fascinates me that this movie so quickly entered our cultural zeitgeist as a joke. It so quickly slid into our cultural zeitgeist that movies very quickly started taking punches at it. Which leads us to the elephant in the room, which is the greatest motion picture ever made in human history, which is Team America.

02:16:17:22 – 02:16:43:25
Marty Morgan
Team America is basically nothing but one long drawn out satirical commentary about Pearl Harbor, even to the point that it includes a song that includes the lyrics. Pearl Harbor Sucked, But I Miss You. And why is it that Michael Bay is still allowed to make movies? That’s a line in the song. And what? Oh, yeah, they missed the point.

02:16:43:25 – 02:17:01:23
Marty Morgan
Almost like Michael Bay missed the point of Pearl Harbor and the comedy gold is just endless. And it’s almost like at the time I remember I couldn’t I just walked away that night. And again, I had dragged my uncle from Mobile to go sit through this movie with me at this premiere. And it was such a such a profound disappointment.

02:17:02:17 – 02:17:23:13
Marty Morgan
And I couldn’t see into the future to realize that the guys who brought us South Park would provide and would give me this gift and this is just a few years away. And if you can hang on, it’ll suddenly make all of the misery that came from sitting through Pearl Harbor worth it. Because that is exactly America did it made it all worth it.

02:17:25:06 – 02:17:48:03
Dan LeFebvre
What you’re talking about the kind of the set up with the two, two boys there. And of course, that’s Danny and Rafe, the characters in the film. But we we see them kind of as you mentioned again earlier, they’re there, they’re pilots, and then they end up actually taking off over the during the attack itself. They end up shooting down.

02:17:48:03 – 02:18:09:23
Dan LeFebvre
I think for I think there was even a scene where the planes they made, they do the chicken thing again and then the Japanese planes collide in midair because of it, you know, that kind of thing. They shoot down some more and they I think there’s a line of dialog or something in there that mentions that they ended up shooting down seven Japanese planes and of course, they end up making it back safely.

02:18:09:23 – 02:18:13:17
Dan LeFebvre
Were there actually any American planes that made it into the air during the attack?

02:18:14:05 – 02:18:35:29
Marty Morgan
There were several, and I’ve written a lot about this subject because I knew several of the pilots, the one that I knew the best was made of Harry. Brown. The U.S. Army’s 47th Pursuit Squadron was a squadron of P 40 and 36 aircraft that were based on Oahu at the time of the attack they were based regularly, permanently at Wheeler Army Airfield in the center of the island right next to Schofield Barracks.

02:18:35:29 – 02:19:01:13
Marty Morgan
But they had been moved on a temporary basis to a remote area on the north side of the island near the town of Oliver, to what was designated at the time, what was ultimately designated Oliver Auxiliary Airfield. And it was a grass strip at the time, and they had been moved up there for the purposes of carrying out a qualification with the weapons systems on board the aircraft.

02:19:01:13 – 02:19:25:08
Marty Morgan
And so the P 36 aircraft squadron operated and the P 40 aircraft that they operated were equipped with 30 caliber eight and two caliber machine guns and 8m2 50 caliber machine guns. And part of developing your skill as an effective fighter pilot was that you had to conduct some live fire training from time to time. And the result then was that this squadron, in preparation for what they knew was coming.

02:19:25:08 – 02:19:59:10
Marty Morgan
And just for the record, they knew they were getting sent to the Philippines and part of the reason that they sent them up to Oliva, which was just a grass strip right on the edge of the water near the, you know, the town. Part of the reason that they were sent up there was so that they could undergo some training and soft field or remote airfield operations, because it was understood that once the once we go to war and we’re going to be fighting in the Philippines, we’re going to move squadrons to the Philippines, and they’re probably not going to be able to operate out of an actual airbase.

02:19:59:26 – 02:20:17:17
Marty Morgan
They’re probably going to be operating out of like Schofield. They’re going to pick a field somewhere and the squadron’s going to set up shop and fly out of that. And they’re probably to have to move a lot. And so it was understood that part of the squadron’s readiness was to train and to experience operating from a remote airfield.

02:20:17:17 – 02:20:36:20
Marty Morgan
And so they put the airplanes and the and the maintainers up there, and they were up there for the entirety of the alert from November 20th to December 4th. And then at the end of the the alert, the squadron was still staying up there, but the pilots could go back to Wheeler Airfield, which was just 12 miles away to the south.

02:20:36:28 – 02:21:10:01
Marty Morgan
It’s not even that far, maybe eight miles away to the south. And the aviators could be in the back of the Bachelor Masters quarters, and the squadron commander could go home to wife squadron executive officer to go home to the wife at Wheeler. But everybody else stayed with the aircraft up bit. Oliver When the attack began, I met several of these pilots Welch, Taylor, Brown, Daines, Rasmussen he was in another squadron, but he was one of the guys who got airborne there were about a dozen pilots that got airborne.

02:21:10:19 – 02:21:33:14
Marty Morgan
The two most memorable are George Taylor and Kenneth Welch. And it was because two of them both shot down multiple aircraft that day. Harry Brown in a P 36, shot down one confirmed with one probable problem that he probably shot down a second aircraft as well. And all of these pilots were ultimately decorated for what they did that day.

02:21:33:29 – 02:21:57:21
Marty Morgan
And an interesting detail emerges in that when they were there was a shortage of 50 caliber ammunition on Oahu at the time because they were under war emergency. Oh, sure. There was they had they had finite quantities of ammunition and all of the small caliber, all of the small caliber system calibers. And that was being held back for the emergency reserve in the event that there was an attack.

02:21:58:08 – 02:22:23:04
Marty Morgan
And that attack during the era of the the full alert, that attack never presents itself. And so the aircraft are still up at Oliva and all they have is 30 caliber ammunition up there because the 50 caliber and the more powerful caliber version, more 5050 caliber ammunition was being was being hoarded at Wheeler Army Airfield just in the event that there was war.

02:22:23:21 – 02:22:45:21
Marty Morgan
And so when the attack began, these pilots who had gone out the night before in Waikiki had gone to play cards at the Royal Hawaiian. And then they came back to Wheeler, they got back to Wheeler and stumbled back into the box to a an hour or two before the attack began. These pilots got there. Most of the attack begins with bombs falling on Wheeler at 732, I think it was.

02:22:45:21 – 02:23:15:23
Marty Morgan
They jump into a car drive to Oliva Drive eight miles up to Oliva where they have their maintainers there who are have the aircraft of fuel that. They armed the aircraft with what they could, which was 30 caliber ammunition only. And so these pilots all took off. TAYLOR And Welch take off and immediately they attack a couple of aircraft and immediately then fly down to Wheeler Army Airfield and land because they know the 50 caliber ammunition is at Wheeler.

02:23:16:17 – 02:23:40:08
Marty Morgan
And they taxied to this like forward rearming point that was set up in a tent along the airfield because they were they had just come off of this readiness alert. And the readiness alert for fighter pilots meant that they created an emergency rearming point right next to the airfield, so that if they had to fly a combat mission, they could they could taxi the aircraft right up to this rearming point.

02:23:40:08 – 02:24:05:27
Marty Morgan
And the ammunition was there. They could put it in the aircraft and it would the get it armed aircraft into the air more quickly. And so Taylor and Welch immediately flew down and landed there, which is with this charming story that you probably heard unfold. And that is that the two of them taxi up to this rearming point and a tent where they know there’s 50 caliber ammunition and they want 50 for the guns and the P40 because it’s the more powerful weapon.

02:24:06:09 – 02:24:26:23
Marty Morgan
And they they they taxi up to it. They tell the men there they need 50 cal. They start to load the aircraft. A major up and says, Who are you, man? And what are you doing here? That’s not ammunitions on shortage that the war is on and they he was literally scolding them for loading their aircraft with 50 caliber ammunition while Japanese aircraft were retiring toward the fleet behind him.

02:24:27:08 – 02:24:57:02
Marty Morgan
And famously, this officer storms off. They look at the maintainers go finish they loaded and as they as the two of them took off they were wingmen. So they took off in a two ship flight. And as they rolled out, Taylor famously, as he’s rolling out, he had a switch to bring his gear up. And he looked up and there were Japanese valley dove bombers right in front of him and he opened fire on them before he reached down to flip the switch to pull his gear up.

02:24:57:17 – 02:25:16:24
Marty Morgan
So he still got his gear down and he’s already shooting the enemy down. They ended chasing an aircraft all the way down to the south shore near Barbers Point, which creates this wild story that I’ll have to tell you some other time. But it’s a story where they are chasing a dove bomber from Chicago and they shoot it to pieces.

02:25:17:06 – 02:25:41:00
Marty Morgan
And Taylor almost gets killed by the tail gunner, but eventually the aircraft ditches right off of Barbers Point and the lighthouse keeper, Barber’s Point watches the Japanese pilot drag his copilot out of the cockpit, ditched just offshore in the water. He watches them drag him out of the cockpit and drag him ashore. And then the lighthouse keeper put a call in to for Kamehameha that.

02:25:41:00 – 02:26:02:06
Marty Morgan
It went to the 49th Coast artillery. They said, hey, I just watched a Japanese pilot, this copilot wander up into the sand dunes right here near Barbers Point, and it led to the army. Sit down a truck to go find these, the reported Japanese troops. And there was a gun battle overnight on after sunset on December 7th and sort shortly after dawn on December 8th.

02:26:02:06 – 02:26:22:09
Marty Morgan
They found them and killed them. And it’s fascinating to think that Pearl Harbor is this fighting at sea, in the air and on the land, and it’s fighting that occurs even after December 7th. One example. So, yes, there were fighter pilots that got in the air that day that attacked the enemy. The Japanese 29 aircraft out of 352 that day.

02:26:23:02 – 02:26:43:27
Marty Morgan
And it’s noteworthy that out of the 29 aircraft that are lost that failed to return to the carriers, six of them were the result of aerial combat. And I mention that simply because I need to call emphasis to the fact that what the movie’s trying to depict is the actuality of the the Taylor and Welch wing man duo and what they did.

02:26:44:03 – 02:27:05:12
Marty Morgan
Those weren’t the only pilots that flew and shot down enemy aircraft that day. There were several others. And the fact that they chose to emphasize that, I thought that’s a cool choice. I would I would have encouraged somebody to feature them because you get all of the rewards and of two very, very young junior lieutenant fighter pilots who get up and fight back.

02:27:05:12 – 02:27:25:07
Marty Morgan
Because the point that I make about December 7th is that as time has gone by, we have more of an emphasis on the way that we were caught unprepared and we didn’t do well. And I love to point out that we fought back. We back very well. We fought back so effectively that the Japanese results on December 7th were far less bad than they could have been.

02:27:25:19 – 02:27:34:24
Marty Morgan
And perhaps the best example of the way that we fought back effectively was the way in which US Army fighter pilots got in the sky and shot down enemy aircraft that day.

02:27:35:20 – 02:27:42:27
Dan LeFebvre
But there was no explosions in midair like we saw with. But after playing chicken.

02:27:42:27 – 02:27:46:23
Marty Morgan
I remain unaware of any examples of it.

02:27:46:29 – 02:28:05:04
Dan LeFebvre
I did it while I was watching the movie as I timed it from the first time. The first was dropped to the moment that Admiral Yamamoto decides not to send a third wave, that the time in the movie is 30 minutes and 45 seconds. How long. Did the actual attack take?

02:28:06:12 – 02:28:41:07
Marty Morgan
The actual attack is right before it starts right before 8 a.m., and it’s basically concluded little after 10 a.m., not longer. So yeah. And I should just point out something else that you just brought up and that is sorry. I’m going to look for one thing real quick that I wanted to share with you. HIRONO Yeah, I just like I am forgetting names of people that I should remember because can I just hit you with this one really quick sidebar?

02:28:41:07 – 02:28:42:02
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, go for it.

02:28:42:02 – 02:29:04:08
Marty Morgan
Yeah. And it’s worth mentioning that, you know, so for all of the silly, bonkers nonsense that’s going on with aircraft having midair collisions and things like that will be served by P40 fighters while dog fighting with P40, which is something that did not happen. And I should I got to say this first, get this off my chest and that is that.

02:29:04:15 – 02:29:23:03
Marty Morgan
So 29 aircraft failed to return to the carrier. Six of them are shot down in aerial combat. The six that were shot down in aerial combat, none of them were zeros that were dog fighting for those the aircraft that were shot down in aerial combat by the American by the U.S. Army fighter pilots. They were either die bombers or torpedo aircraft, mostly die bombers.

02:29:23:13 – 02:29:52:03
Marty Morgan
And that’s an aircraft that is quite a bit less agile and maneuverable than the zero. So there were there were there was no dog fighting an air to air combat of P 40 versus Japanese zero that none and it’s because the P40 was really not an effective airframe for dogfighting zero P40 was at a number of significant disadvantages against the Japanese zero on time to climb maneuverability firepower speed.

02:29:52:04 – 02:30:11:12
Marty Morgan
Obviously the only one thing that the P40 had that the zero just couldn’t the if you got a zero on your tail in a P40 40, the only way to get out from under that problem was to just shove the stick over and run away from him. Because the P40 was a heavier aircraft and it was therefore in a dove capable of achieving a little bit more speed.

02:30:11:27 – 02:30:43:28
Marty Morgan
And you could you could quickly get away from a zero. But in terms of turning with him, a dog fighting him, not a chance. Absolutely The airframes were just completely on. They were not matched well, one another. And so the U.S. Army fighter pilots that fly that day, they end up shooting down less maneuver, less maneuverable Japanese dove bombers, a torpedo bombers, which I think is an important point, because what this movie does is it shows rip roaring dog fighting going on between zeros and p forties.

02:30:44:14 – 02:31:05:24
Marty Morgan
That includes lots of really, really big explosions. And of course, that didn’t happen. I mentioned that for all of the silliness of things like mid-air collisions, an aircraft crashed. There’s a scene where the Doris Kent Miller character is hammering away with a 1050 caliber machine gun, which is the wrong type of 50 caliber mount. And he’s using the wrong type of 50 caliber machine gun.

02:31:05:24 – 02:31:24:16
Marty Morgan
But whatever. I’m going to let that go. But it shows Doris Miller kind of following him. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tock. And he’s like, I’m shooting at him and making all these absurd theatrical noises and the aircraft gets hit and then runs into a crane and then crashes down. That’s depicted. And while that’s interesting, that’s not something that happened that day.

02:31:24:17 – 02:32:01:19
Marty Morgan
I think they drew some information, though, from the zero that was piloted by Petty Officer Takeshi Hirano, which is an aircraft that was in combat that morning, directly across the main flight line from Hickam Army Airfield and Hirano. There were a number of eyewitnesses that saw what happened to Hirano and Hirano. I got what they talk about a lot in the world of the fighter pilot or the bomber pilot that is target fix fixation, meaning that Hirano was so busy looking through his gun site at stuff that he wanted to kill, that he lost track of where he was in the air.

02:32:02:06 – 02:32:22:26
Marty Morgan
And so right across the main airfield from Hickam Army Airfield at the time was an area that was another Army post called Fort Kamehameha. It’s now just generally part of the overall broad sprawl of what’s now referred to as joint base Pearl Harbor. Hickam, where the Navy base in the and what is now Hickam Air Force Base. They’re all merged into one joint base.

02:32:23:15 – 02:32:43:23
Marty Morgan
But it used to be that you had Hickam Army Airfield and it was right across the flight line from Fort Kamehameha. And there is an area of buildings at Fort Kamehameha. And Hirono got so Target fixated strafing in that area that Hirono really, really low. He got so low that I think he didn’t see it coming up. But there was a car parked on the side of the road.

02:32:44:07 – 02:32:54:26
Marty Morgan
And as he was strafing, looked up, he saw the car and he pulled back on the stick trying to get above the car. And the aircraft’s propeller impacted with this parked automobile.

02:32:55:04 – 02:32:56:21
Dan LeFebvre
Wow. Yeah, that’s.

02:32:57:06 – 02:33:03:19
Marty Morgan
Wow. That’s how low he was. That’s pretty damn low. That’s what I think fighter pilots would all agree is maybe a little too.

02:33:03:19 – 02:33:05:21
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, I’d say it’s a little too low. Yeah.

02:33:05:21 – 02:33:34:19
Marty Morgan
And so when he hit it, of course, he was pulling back. So he was already killing a little speed and trying to get up and over. Pratt hits the car, he was done. There was nowhere he could go. He couldn’t exert control of the aircraft. One blade apparently was so warped that the aircraft had this immediate noticeable loss of loss of thrust and the aircraft impacted with the ground and skidded along a series of buildings and impacted with this series of buildings.

02:33:34:19 – 02:33:56:24
Marty Morgan
And that was whenever you see photographs of a zero. And it’s when as it kind of tumbled and impacted with the buildings, the wings broke off the impinge of the aircraft from the fuselage. And so all you have left is the engine, the wing roots and the cockpit. And it’s in front of this. So you see a group of buildings leaning up against the building.

02:33:56:24 – 02:34:18:00
Marty Morgan
And it’s a group of signs, one of which says Ordinance Maintenance Shop. And it was for ordnance maintenance from Fort Campbell. And so the that come out of Hirono zeros I Rondeaux zero they’re among the first photos of what’s left of a zero that we get and we were able to inspect it. So a lot of photographs get taken of what’s left of his aircraft.

02:34:18:12 – 02:34:58:14
Marty Morgan
And that’s when we find things like the Japanese were using American made radios in their aircraft and they had some forward made parts in them that we were surprised to see. But I think that this idea of the enemy pushing in so low that he collides with a parked car on the ground that might have inspired the filmmaking team here to come up with some of the stuff that’s a little bonkers and zany in in this, where they’re like flying between buildings and like over and over again during the the Doris Miller sequence, you’re seeing Cuba Gooding Jr character where they had a camera placed on a higher ship structure than where his his mount

02:34:58:15 – 02:35:15:22
Marty Morgan
was. So, you know, there’s that whole scene where Captain Bennion is like, get them in to do this. He’s offering these commands and the Doris Miller Miller character in a scene that so overacted that I can’t believe that Cuba Gooding Jr did it he’s like sir you don’t have to worry. You’re trained as well, sir. You’re trained as well.

02:35:15:22 – 02:35:34:19
Marty Morgan
And he likes letters and dies like every other terrible four movie ever made. But it then shows him have this moment of resolve where he looks up and there’s a gun. There was a line of dialog presented earlier to the Kate Beckinsale character was like, I’ve been in the Army for a year and they haven’t let me fire a weapon yet, which is nonsense, by the way.

02:35:34:20 – 02:35:59:15
Marty Morgan
But then, I mean, he was a he was a he was a mess assistant. He that’s what the United States Navy remains segregated throughout World War two. The United States Navy was of the American military branches during World War two, the one that clung to segregationist policies as long as it possibly could with the result that you had men like Doris Miller, who were they were capable of cleaning up in the officer’s mass.

02:35:59:15 – 02:36:18:00
Marty Morgan
And that’s all they really let them do, which is why it’s exceptional that on that day, what this man did in his moment of resolve is he ran out to a machine gun and began firing. But one thing that just irks me to no end is that they keep showing like the ship that’s supposed to be useless. California, where Doris Miller was, I’m sorry, USS West Virginia.

02:36:18:16 – 02:36:46:03
Marty Morgan
And then there’s like they’re doing this on modern ships just because they had their left with no other choice. And they keep showing him firing this twin 50 caliber machine gun, which is the wrong, wrong type of 50 caliber, whatever. And they keep every time they show him is like you’ll see they had obvious air in the CGI aircraft that kind of zoom in between these two ships and they show him and he’s going get into the desert and he’s following them and strafing them when there’s another ship in the background.

02:36:46:16 – 02:37:20:13
Marty Morgan
And I’m like, he’s shooting this other ship and that there were there were losses that day that were the result of of an asymmetry of fire, meaning that we had not adequately laid out symmetrical fire zones where we would prevent friendly fire casualties. And that was one of the tragedies of that day, was that there were some civilian at the harbor and outside of the harbor as well, five miles away from the harbor that were the result of asymmetries of fire men sort of blindly firing in 360 degree arcs.

02:37:21:13 – 02:37:29:22
Marty Morgan
But it feels so absurd when you see Cuba Gooding Jr hammering away and there’s a ship 25 feet away from him and he’s pointing directly at it.

02:37:30:23 – 02:37:47:10
Dan LeFebvre
Well, you talking about the plane flying solo and I know I know we were talking earlier about the torpedoes having to be lowered. There’s a sequence in as the the Japanese planes are flying in over the island south. They haven’t gotten to the harbor yet, but they’re flying over the island. They’re, I don’t know, maybe 50 feet above the ground.

02:37:47:10 – 02:38:05:04
Dan LeFebvre
There’s one like one of the guards. The back of the plane is like waving off at these kids that are playing baseball and everything. You know, everybody just kind of looking up at these Japanese planes that are flying over. Did actually have to fly that low over the land to get to where they were going to drop the torpedoes.

02:38:05:05 – 02:38:13:03
Dan LeFebvre
I know you mentioned, you know, obviously, there was a tactical advantage flying low and slow to actually dropped a torpedo. But were they flying that low that entire time?

02:38:14:09 – 02:38:33:25
Marty Morgan
Some of the torpedo bombers were, yes. And that is because keep in mind that the torpedo bombers on Sunday, December 7th, they flew two different missions. Mission number one was you carried a torpedo. Mission number two was you carried a series of these are you carried a modified artillery shell that would be used as an armor piercing bomb.

02:38:34:11 – 02:38:56:20
Marty Morgan
Those aircraft, the aircraft that were carrying the modified artillery shells, they were the same airplane, the same torpedo bomber. But they delivered their ordnance from an altitude of almost 10,000 feet. Oh, wow. So they were they were at high altitude, the torpedo bomber aircraft that were carrying torpedoes. They had to be low. And what we know is that in the first wave, there were 48 of those.

02:38:57:09 – 02:39:20:01
Marty Morgan
And what that is depicting is something that that did happen to a degree, and that is that it’s depicting aircraft among the 48 in the first wave torpedo bomber B5 in two Kate torpedo bombers that were carrying the type 91 aerial torpedo. That’s what that’s depicting. Those were the only aircraft that were that would have been seen at that extremely low altitude.

02:39:20:01 – 02:39:37:03
Marty Morgan
And the only reason that they were at that extremely low altitude was because that was necessary for them to complete the mission and deliver the ordnance. You don’t see fighters doing that. There are some examples in second wave of fighters that get pretty low on strafing missions. I mean, for that matter, there are some examples in the first wave like there are a group of fighters.

02:39:37:03 – 02:40:02:23
Marty Morgan
Yoshio Shiga leads a group of nine fighters into attack. That would be the Marine Corps Air Station. What is that? The ever mooring mast field, which is down to a barber’s point where nine zeros were sent into as their instructions to reduce the EVA air drone. They literally went in and they were supposed to strafe everything on the airfield, which they did.

02:40:02:23 – 02:40:24:12
Marty Morgan
They were very, very successful and they were at very, very low altitude to the point that there was a marine named Mel Thompson. And at the time, Eva is no longer a marine Corps air station. BEEN it’s a closed field now. It’s been closed since the sixties, but ever had a main gate, there’s a golf course there now.

02:40:24:12 – 02:40:50:11
Marty Morgan
They kind of it ceased to operate as a as a marine Corps air station. It now operates as a golf course. And the the area of the main gate is still there. It doesn’t look like it did in 41. It looks more like it did 61. But it’s still the same main gate area. And and this Marine male, Thompson, was on duty at the main gate ever that morning when Yoshi-Hashi got in, his fighters came in and began strafing aircraft on the on the field.

02:40:50:11 – 02:41:11:14
Marty Morgan
And as sugar who was slightly banked away at one point sugar in his after action report, remember that he saw a marine walk out of the guard post at the main gate, draw his pistol and sit there and fire full magazine that is out from his pistol at him and got what later in life? Remember that? That was the bravest man I’ve ever met.

02:41:11:25 – 02:41:12:09
Dan LeFebvre
Wow.

02:41:12:24 – 02:41:15:15
Marty Morgan
That’s how old they were. So there was some low stuff going on.

02:41:15:27 – 02:41:41:03
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. Wow. Wow. Well, if we head back to the movie after the attack itself, we do see President Roosevelt giving the Day of Infamy speech on December eight. There’s also a scene where as that that’s that speech there we see men still trapped in USS Arizona. You can hear them tapping. They’re trying to do everything they can to get to them, of course.

02:41:41:05 – 02:42:06:09
Dan LeFebvre
And the pilots, Danny and Rafe, go from flying during the attack to helping in the hospital to helping rescue the men trapped in the harbor. You know, they seem to be everywhere and not to skip ahead. But at the very end of the movie, it mention that 1177 men still lie entombed in Arizona to this day. Can you give a little more historical context around Arizona itself and, the men on board and whether any of them rescued?

02:42:07:00 – 02:42:38:17
Marty Morgan
There were some that were rescued and there were survivors from the ship. However, it is true to observe that 1177 U.S. Navy sailors and United States Marines lost their lives on that ship that day. It’s the single is the highest loss of life on one ship during the Second World War. It is prior to that the last time that a large number of officers and men were we have to go back in history kind of far to get to examples of losses of life that are high like us.

02:42:38:18 – 02:43:23:29
Marty Morgan
Spain at Havana Harbor, February 15, 1898. USS Tecumseh, which was a canonical glass ironclad that was sunk at Mobile Bay August five, 1864, with 96 officers and going down. The USS Arizona stands out as it is dramatically higher than all of those other incidents that were considered massive losses. Arizona is a complete write off, and that’s because of the fact that one of these type 99 special attack munitions, these modified artillery shells, penetrates the upper deck of the ship and ultimately then detonates and ammunition storage magazines associated with the 14 inch main batteries toward the bow of the ship turret number one, turn number two, that’s why you see in the explosion, which is, I

02:43:23:29 – 02:43:45:17
Marty Morgan
think quite well depicted by digital animation, that movie you see the decking around turret one to heave upward suddenly this massive explosive force. And it’s because what has happened is that bomb has exploded in the Powder magazine. That wasn’t the only bomb to hit Arizona. Just for the record, another bomb dropped not by the same aircraft, but one of the aircraft in its formation.

02:43:45:17 – 02:44:10:07
Marty Morgan
They were in these formations of five aircraft. These these these of five aircraft. One of the other bombs dropped by. Not that formation, but the formation immediately ahead of it. Just moments before the death of Arizona, another one of these bombs hit the sloping arm or the side of one of the forward turrets of Arizona. And the weapon was deflected into the water next to the ship, and it exploded in the water harmlessly.

02:44:10:07 – 02:44:29:21
Marty Morgan
By the way, just the same weapon, it’s in the water and when it goes boom, so it strikes the side of the turret, which sets off that chain reaction for the delay explosion. But the angle of the turret deflects it away from the ship and into the water, it penetrates part of the hole on its way there, but then it goes into the water and then it explodes and it doesn’t even damage the ship.

02:44:30:04 – 02:44:51:11
Marty Morgan
Well, but then a moment later, another one comes down, crashes through the decking. It explodes in the ammunition storage magazine. It sets off all this ammunition. If you if you have an interesting looking one, actually looking, at what actually happened to the ship, it was well documented by a U.S. Army surgeon who was serving aboard the USS Solace.

02:44:51:11 – 02:45:25:27
Marty Morgan
His name was Eric Hodgkinson, and Eric Hodgkinson was when the attack began, he came out on deck. He had a film camera and he recorded he was is aiming film camera at us as Arizona when the explosion occurred. And you see a number of fascinating things that occur in the Hodgkinson footage which inspire the digital reanimation in the movie and one of the things that you see that kind of blows my mind and drops me that for every time I see it is that the main explosion goes off and you can see Arizona had these cage masts one forward, one shaft, and they were associated with a range finding associated with a 14 inch main

02:45:25:27 – 02:45:48:01
Marty Morgan
battery. So the one facing forward, one facing half, the one facing forward was four turret one, two, two, one facing aft was for turret three and four and it was four. It was part of the fire control for those weapons. Anyway, the forward most mast when the explosion occurs, you can see the mast is thrown 30 feet into the air and then it comes back down and collapses over it.

02:45:48:01 – 02:46:16:08
Marty Morgan
This acute angle and if you ever see film or footage of the aftermath, you’ll see that you’ll see the forward mast. Cage mast of Arizona is collapsed over on top of the turrets at this this jagged angle Eric Hodgkinson captures that in the footage you see that mast wrenched upward by 40 feet as this massive explosion list literally lifted the entire deck where turrets one and two were lifted up 30 feet in the air and then they crashed back down.

02:46:16:08 – 02:46:38:26
Marty Morgan
And when they crashed back down, they completely flattened all of the ship’s structures that were supporting them. So that that’s why the bow of Arizona, there’s no longer there’s no longer a coherent form, because all of this mass was was was hurled upward and it crushed down everything that was below it. When it came back down as a part of that explosion, it’s, of course, creating it.

02:46:39:04 – 02:47:08:19
Marty Morgan
It’s created mainly by a secondary explosion of all this ammunition. And it’s high explosive TNT that’s in the shells themselves. But it’s also the powder charges that were associated with the propellant for the powder magazines. These powder bags are thrown away from the wreckage of the ship when the explosion occurs. And you can see them in the Hodgkinson footage and they’re cooking off one after the other, so they’re thrown out of the ship and you’re seeing these smaller explosions taking place as these bags of powder sail through the air.

02:47:08:19 – 02:47:30:12
Marty Morgan
But they’re smoldering and then they pop and there are about a dozen or so of them. You can also in the Hodgkinson footage see that the explosion occurs and it propagates upward, but it’s also through the water flow. And you see this, this wave, this tidal wave wash ashore and for an island and splash against everything on the island, all of it testifying to how violent that explosion was.

02:47:31:05 – 02:47:56:06
Marty Morgan
And the violence of that explosion is what destroyed that ship once and for all. The ship could not be restored or salvaged. And that’s why it is still there to this day. In 1954, a memorial was built on Fort Island by the survivors, the U.S. and Arizona. It’s still there today. It’s a very powerful Moore Memorial. If you ever get out there, it’s on the island and you can walk to it.

02:47:56:15 – 02:48:18:21
Marty Morgan
But then there’s the more famous memorial from 1961 that was built over the wreckage, straddling the wreckage on and particularly the bow area wreckage of the ship. Now, there was a lot of ship structure that above the water that was cut and hauled away eventually. And that’s why you see pieces of the USS Arizona and museums and other institutions all over the country.

02:48:18:21 – 02:48:45:23
Marty Morgan
But that what happened to that ship, I know that in my childhood I’m born 25 years after the war ended. But in my childhood that was a big deal. It was a big, big deal such that in the old era of standard broadcast television, before cable television existed when broadcast TV when I was a kid, broadcast TV was from eight in the morning to about 10:00 at night.

02:48:45:23 – 02:49:07:20
Marty Morgan
You’d get the nightly news, and then they would sign off and they would play the national anthem, and that would be the end of the broadcast day. And you wouldn’t have TV again until in the morning. And I remember as a kid that when I would watch the sign off at night because my dad always watched the news every night and I would stay up late and watch the news with him, and I’d watch the sign off with the National Anthem.

02:49:07:20 – 02:49:33:19
Marty Morgan
And the national anthem was always played with a view of the Arizona memorial. Wow. And that it just assumed these looming massive proportions to me from the point I was very young. And whenever I go there, every time I go to Oahu I go out on that memorial and I’ve been on that memorial when nobody was there associated with TV projects, stuff that I have done before.

02:49:34:10 – 02:50:04:06
Marty Morgan
And every time I go there, I feel like I am being given a great privilege even when I go there and there are 200 other people on the boat kind of elbowing me out of the way. I feel this intense moment of reverence over that ship has symbolic power that it’s very meaningful to me and. I’m going into all of this just simply to say that I feel like it doesn’t have it doesn’t possess that symbolic power anymore.

02:50:04:24 – 02:50:33:24
Marty Morgan
The movie ends, and I know you see the end of the movie. The movie ends with sort of this sweeping shot that’s sort of flowing around the wreckage and showing the memorial. And it’s ending with her providing this voiceover about grander things like our war began at Pearl Harbor, but we went on to win the war. And I had sort of thought that that the movie was going to be giving the subject to a new generation, the way that Private Ryan gave D-Day as a subject to a new generation.

02:50:34:06 – 02:50:57:28
Marty Morgan
And it’s disappointed me. The movie itself an extreme disappointment. And it disappointed me, too, that it didn’t really create much of a legacy, because I don’t believe that it elevated the historical literacy of people to the extent that they know and understand what the Arizona memorial is, I find that older people get it. Older people like me, who grew up in the era of broadcast TV with the nightly sign and the national anthem in the U.S.S. Arizona.

02:50:57:28 – 02:51:21:22
Marty Morgan
And also I my life overlapped with people who survived because I had been friendly with a man named Don Stratton, who was very very badly injured that day and was on the ship when the explosion occurred, but survived at all and was recovering after because he was very badly burned as a result of the explosion. And he received a medical discharge from the Navy while he was in recovery.

02:51:22:08 – 02:51:53:08
Marty Morgan
As soon as and as soon as he was well enough to out of the hospital. Keep in mind that he was at that point discharged from the United States Navy. As soon as he was well enough to walk out of the hospital, he immediately went to a U.S. Navy recruiting office and re-enlisted. And I think of him very often when I go there, because I tend to think of concepts of service and, of duty, obligation, sacrifice, things that characterized the generation that fought the Second World War.

02:51:53:18 – 02:52:14:04
Marty Morgan
I know there are people that will immediately nay say the idea and point out that that generation had its flaws. Of course, all generations have their flaws. But I spent a lot of my life trying to understand that generation, and I continue to be impressed by the people that survived that ship. And every time I go there, I stand in front.

02:52:14:04 – 02:52:43:24
Marty Morgan
When you go to the back of the Arizona memorial, the back wall is the names of everyone, all the sailors and marines who died that day. And that feels like it feels sacred to me to be allowed the privilege of standing there. That’s a little on the corny side, but that’s also part of the reason why when I came out of the theater the first time I saw this movie, I was a little let down because it just didn’t feel like it was a meditation on something sacred and something hallowed.

02:52:44:09 – 02:52:48:08
Marty Morgan
It felt like a big, dumb, silly action movie. Yeah.

02:52:48:28 – 02:53:08:03
Dan LeFebvre
Well, towards the end of the movie, you mentioned this earlier, and we do see the Doolittle Raid depicted. The way the movie kind of sets this up is after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt insists on striking back at the heart. Japan. The challenge, though, is that the Army Air Corps has long range powers, but they don’t really have anywhere to launch them from.

02:53:08:17 – 02:53:37:02
Dan LeFebvre
So the movie mentions that they take 16 B-25 for what now becomes Doolittle’s raid. They take the time to train the pilots people to take off it. The movie mentions 467 feet, learn how to fly at 30 feet off the ground like a fighter. I strip everything out that’s unnecessary out of the plane. And then April 2nd, 1942, movie shows deck of the carrier USS Hornet, holding all of the B 20 fives, which I thought was interesting.

02:53:37:02 – 02:53:58:15
Dan LeFebvre
It seems like they’re kind of all on one carrier, but then before they get to the planned launch distance of about 400 miles off the coast of Japan at 624 miles, there are some Japanese ships that spot the fleet. They don’t really know if they’re going to have enough fuel on planes to make it to China, which was whether it planned on landing afterwards.

02:53:58:15 – 02:54:20:15
Dan LeFebvre
According to the movie, Doolittle makes the to launch 12 hours and 224 miles ahead of schedule. Still the B-25 in the movie they we see them dropping the bombs on Tokyo before any anti-aircraft fire starts it looks like they pulled off the element of surprise. How well did the movie do portraying the Doolittle Raid?

02:54:20:15 – 02:54:44:01
Marty Morgan
Strangely, the depiction of the Doolittle Raid in the movie I find to be the more compelling and interesting part of the movie. And it’s not because it’s true. And it’s not because it’s historically accurate, because it’s not in the movie even. And that’s that part of the even in that part of the story, it continues to have a contempt a direct contempt for historical accuracy.

02:54:44:11 – 02:55:12:16
Marty Morgan
That’s a little bit embarrassing. But still, I feel like as I try to grade it and enjoy it just as an entertainment product and I did kind of enjoy that sequence a little better, although it has its moments of misrepresentation, a distortion. What actually did happen during the Doolittle raid is that there was a on the presidential level, there was an interest in immediately not committing to an attack of some kind that can the Japanese home islands, because the United States needed good news.

02:55:12:27 – 02:55:33:27
Marty Morgan
Everybody back home was being bombarded, absolutely bombarded by bad. And if you think of the historical setting, we have Pearl Harbor, a very bad day for the United States. We join the war. What happened soon thereafter that? Well, we then very quickly were moving toward the surrender at Bataan, which was the largest surrender of American forces up to that point in the war.

02:55:35:00 – 02:55:56:02
Marty Morgan
We have also had a number of other setbacks. The Japanese have captured Wake Island, for example. We tried to get back in the fight very quickly by conducting a series of raids, and it’s an area that we refer to as the hit and run era. It starts in February of 41 where we hit it. We hit and run where we have aircraft carrier task forces that move in close to Japanese island outposts.

02:55:56:16 – 02:56:18:09
Marty Morgan
We conduct an air raid. The return to the aircraft carrier. The aircraft carrier gets out of the area as fast as possible and happens a couple of times. And as a part of as a continuing expression of this, this hit and run era, the president wants something, wants the military to figure out how to strike Japan. The best idea comes from the submariner, which is to load Army bombers onto a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier.

02:56:18:09 – 02:56:46:22
Marty Morgan
The aircraft carrier USS Hornet, which was brand new at the time, was selected for the mission 16 U.S. Army B-25 B Mitchell Medium Bombers are loaded onto the ship. They are too big to go below deck so the aircraft have to ride across the pacific. Lashed down on the flight deck of the ship, which is why you get the unusual appearance of 16 multi twin engine bombers tied down on the deck of an aircraft carrier.

02:56:46:22 – 02:57:12:10
Marty Morgan
As you’ve already indicated, the the mission was supposed to take off closer to the Japanese home islands. And the objective of the mission was to hit not just Tokyo, but to other major industrial cities, and that the aircraft after that striking these three cities would then fly onward and land at bases, safe zones in China, in parts of China, where the Japanese military did not occupy it.

02:57:13:05 – 02:57:37:07
Marty Morgan
Well, everything went wrong when. A Japanese trawler spotted the the task force as it approached the Japanese home islands. The aircraft had to launch 12 hours earlier than. They had planned to and they had to launch several hundred miles earlier than they expected. And what that led to then was that the aircraft were not able to complete the mission in the way that was planned, meaning that they would fly onward.

02:57:37:15 – 02:57:52:12
Marty Morgan
And just after dawn they would land at airfields in a safe zone in China. That’s that didn’t happen. All of the aircraft were out of position coming in over China, carrying in the pre-dawn hours rather than after dawn where they were.

02:57:52:12 – 02:57:55:02
Dan LeFebvre
They also three in Japan. Now, before they got to China or.

02:57:56:01 – 02:58:01:05
Marty Morgan
Whether the all six aircraft weren’t hitting one target. So the six, they went to different targets.

02:58:01:13 – 02:58:03:07
Dan LeFebvre
Okay. So okay, I misunderstood.

02:58:03:07 – 02:58:22:13
Marty Morgan
And then they would continue onward to the bases in China where they would land. And of course, because of the disruption that was associated with this trawler, spotting them earlier, they had to take off earlier. They had to therefore come in over China before dawn. And in the predawn darkness, they had to try to figure out a way to a place to put down.

02:58:23:05 – 02:58:45:25
Marty Morgan
None of the aircraft landed safely, obviously, aside from one of which experienced engine trouble and diverted and landed at Vladivostok in the Soviet Union. And the aircraft and the crew were then interred by the Soviets in an effort to maintain Soviet neutrality against the Japanese, and that neutrality was and a treaty obligation from something that had happened in 37.

02:58:45:25 – 02:59:05:02
Marty Morgan
We can talk about that time. But nevertheless, 15 of the aircraft continued on to China. They ditched the even Colonel Doolittle’s aircraft had to ditch and Doolittle himself survived. You had some men that did not survive the ditching. You had some men that were captured and men that were placed on trial, men that were captured by the Japanese, placed on trial.

02:59:05:02 – 02:59:26:07
Marty Morgan
There were executions of some of the the Duke Raiders were the result of the Doolittle raid was nothing like what was depicted in the movie there I said it again in that what the movie does is it’s Michael Bay’s idea of everything because in Michael Bay’s mind, every explosion is a gas explosion that lives 300 feet into the air.

02:59:27:02 – 03:00:11:21
Marty Morgan
The reality was that the Doolittle Raid produced very modest success on against targets, meaning that bombs were dropped. They did hit their targets. The the results were nowhere near as spectacular. Michael Bay would have you think they were. But nevertheless, American bombs had fallen on the Japanese home islands, and that was a turning point in the course of the Second World for the Empire of Japan, because what the Empire of Japan did in the aftermath of the Doolittle raid was that the Empire of Japan made a series of critical decisions about the best way to defend the home islands, and the Japanese would ultimately decide to conduct that.

03:00:11:21 – 03:00:38:03
Marty Morgan
Committed to a large scale opposed amphibious landing operation that would occur in June of 1942, by which they would conduct amphibious landings against two island groups, one of which is called Korea, and the other is called Midway. And that the idea of carrying out landings at Korean Midway would provide the Japanese with a fleet anchorage and a seaplane base deeper in the Pacific, but close enough to strike the Hawaiian Islands.

03:00:38:21 – 03:00:54:18
Marty Morgan
And that that would function as like a fence, almost like a cordon that stretched deep into the Pacific, such that the United States would never be able to succeed again in sneaking up to the Japanese home islands the way that they had on April 1842 during the Doolittle Raid.

03:00:55:21 – 03:01:02:00
Dan LeFebvre
So the Doolittle Raid pretty much directly led to Midway. Definitely on Midway.

03:01:02:12 – 03:01:03:07
Marty Morgan
It definitely did.

03:01:03:22 – 03:01:10:15
Dan LeFebvre
Wow. Okay. Yeah, I didn’t I didn’t realize there was that connection there that was so poorly. I mean, obviously there was the war, but yeah.

03:01:11:03 – 03:01:29:18
Marty Morgan
There’s an even more interesting little shred background I would offer about that. And that is that the Japanese realized that we could take Korea, which is where they were going to establish the submarine base, and then Midway, which is where they were going to maintain two separate airfields, because Midway is not one island, it’s two islands and there’s an eight total and there were airfields on both of the islands.

03:01:30:03 – 03:01:49:01
Marty Morgan
The Japanese realized that if we could take Korea and Midway, that puts us in a position to continue bombing the Hawaiian Islands. And that is because there was a second attack on Pearl Harbor. This is I find it it’s not very well known that usually when I think when I mention it, people look at me like, what are you talking about?

03:01:50:25 – 03:01:55:12
Marty Morgan
It’s not in the that’s not in the movie. They didn’t include. That was Ben Affleck. There was.

03:01:55:12 – 03:01:57:19
Dan LeFebvre
But the important question.

03:01:57:29 – 03:02:31:02
Marty Morgan
Yes, the important questions that need to be asked about the second attack on Pearl Harbor was conducted by two Japanese long range float planes on March 9th, 1942, called Operation K, and in the Operation K, these two long range Japanese maritime surveillance seaplanes that are called we gave them the nickname Emily. The aircraft were appropriately designated the Konishi Konishi h8k flying boat and these were four engine flying boats that obviously had a great range.

03:02:31:02 – 03:02:58:03
Marty Morgan
And the aircraft took off from Japanese seaplane bases from a Japanese seaplane base in the Marshall Islands. They flew to the north east to a place called French frigate and French frigate. Shoals is technically a part of the Hawaiian Islands. It’s just that it’s much farther to the west of Hawaii. Then you have the Hawaiian Islands and Kawai anyhow, and if you go another, I think it’s another 400 or so miles beyond Kabuki and Neo.

03:02:58:22 – 03:03:32:18
Marty Morgan
You get two French frigate Tribbles which at that at that stage was an area of shallow water with what was left of a volcanic cone from millions of years ago. French frigate Shoals is noteworthy because of the fact that there’s still a coral reef fringing the area of the shallow water and there’s still, therefore, a lagoon. The lagoon has an open side, makes it possible for ships to enter from the open sea and sail into the lagoon and the lagoon because it’s a shoal area that’s fringed by coral reef.

03:03:32:26 – 03:03:57:18
Marty Morgan
It’s very calm water. So calm, in fact, that Japanese float planes can land in the middle of that lagoon. So for Operation Cay, in March of 42, the two float planes took off from the Marshall Islands. They flew to and landed in the lagoon of French frigate Shoals. There were two Japanese long range submarines waiting for them there because again, that lagoon is open on one side, open to the open sea.

03:03:58:01 – 03:04:21:29
Marty Morgan
And so the two submarines were able to sail the lagoon and tie up. When the float planes landed, they taxied up to the two submarines. The submarines transferred fuel on to the aircraft and the once they had refueled, they then had a sufficient amount of fuel to fly all the way onward to Oahu and then fly onward from there back to the Marshall Islands.

03:04:22:28 – 03:04:50:18
Marty Morgan
And it’s a pretty incredible story. And it’s a story that doesn’t come up much, but a story that I, I mention it simply because I think it helps you understand something critically, critically important about the Japanese and Pearl Harbor, and that is that the Japanese carry out the Pearl Harbor attack. And they very quickly realized that they had not done nearly as well as they thought they they had.

03:04:51:04 – 03:05:11:21
Marty Morgan
And they therefore come up with this plan. And it’s a plan that is kind of an all out effort, this effort by which two Japanese float planes that I mean, the first leg of the flight was they took off from watch in the Marshall Islands. They flew 1845 miles to French frigate Shoals, where they put down in the lagoon.

03:05:12:07 – 03:05:39:08
Marty Morgan
They rendezvoused with the submarines and they topped off fuel. And then with a full tank of fuel, they flew another 550 miles onward from French frigate Shoals to Pearl Harbor. They dropped their bombs and then they flew back to the Marshall Islands and the return flight after they dropped their bombs was 2270 miles. So that’s a total distance of over 4600 miles in one flight operation.

03:05:39:08 – 03:06:12:06
Marty Morgan
It was interrupted by, of course, refueling at French frigate Shoals. And I, I wanted to mention it and describe it to you because of the fact that the Japanese quickly realized, like, well, you know, we missed a lot. They were aware, even at this point that the United States had this ongoing salvage operation even by February 42, just a few months after the attack, word had gotten out because Hawaii had there were spies in Hawaii and word had gotten out that the United States Navy was involved in a full salvage operation of the ships that had been damaged and sunk on December 7th.

03:06:12:20 – 03:06:32:14
Marty Morgan
And the Japanese wanted to do something to interfere with that salvage operation. And so they come up with Operation Kay, the very ambitious operation with the two float planes. And as it turns out, they just luck was not on their side. Luck was on their side on December 7th, but it was on the day of Operation K March, March 4th, 1942.

03:06:32:14 – 03:07:03:18
Marty Morgan
And when they got when the two aircraft got to Oahu, they approached it from the north. They were picked up on radar, aircraft were sent to intercept them. It was very cloudy. The interceptors never found the two Japanese float planes and the Japanese float planes were six miles farther to the east of where they thought they were. They thought they were coming in directly over Pearl Harbor and instead they were coming over, coming in and the island over the area where the Punchbowl Cemetery is today, which is basically Honolulu.

03:07:04:01 – 03:07:28:07
Marty Morgan
So instead of coming in over the harbor, they come over Honolulu. One aircraft drop its bombs because they’re looking down through broken cloud cover. They can’t see anything. That aircraft drops its bombs south of the island and then returns to the Marshall Islands. The other aircraft dropped its bombs on what’s called Tantalus Ridge, which is very it’s the ridge line that’s immediately to the north of the area of the punchbowl cemetery on Oahu.

03:07:28:26 – 03:08:06:05
Marty Morgan
And there are still craters there from the bombs that were dropped by that aircraft that day. In the aftermath of Operation K, the Japanese realized, God, it sure would be so much more convenient if we had a base operation that was closer whereby we could work and get aircraft here and we wouldn’t have to go through something as complicated as we did on March 4th with Operation K and then the Doolittle Raid happens, and that’s the at which these discussions of establishing a forward operating base much closer to the Hawaiian Islands, that’s when those discussions really go into high gear.

03:08:06:05 – 03:08:12:06
Marty Morgan
And that’s the point at which the Japanese make the critical decision to embark on the battle that we now know is midway.

03:08:12:21 – 03:08:18:28
Dan LeFebvre
Wow. Wow. Yeah, that’s that’s fascinating. I never knew about that in the second attack.

03:08:19:14 – 03:08:37:17
Marty Morgan
The second attack is it’s a footnote. It’s a weird footnote. I, I tend to be a big acolyte of that story because I think it’s far more important than the short shrift that it has been given. And I think when you understand the story of Operation K, the second attack, I think it helps understand December 7th a little bit better.

03:08:37:26 – 03:09:01:07
Marty Morgan
Yeah. And it helps you to understand that the Japanese, they punched us and they punched us hard, but they didn’t destroy the Pacific Fleet. And the Pacific fleet was in the process of being salvaged. When the Japanese tried to punch us again, the Japanese had this idea that really didn’t recede until later in 1942. This idea that I mean, there was an idea that they’re still out there, they could still attack us.

03:09:01:18 – 03:09:27:25
Marty Morgan
Partly that’s on the in place because the fact that they attacked Hawaii, they attacked Guam, they attacked the Philippines. They eventually they attacked midway on December 7th, but they eventually then conduct landings at Wake Island and then they ultimately captured Wake Island. There was this sense that I think has drifted away from us, that they’re you know, they’re still out there and they’re still dangerous and they could still come back to Hawaii.

03:09:28:03 – 03:09:49:15
Marty Morgan
And it’s not until you get into 1943 that ideas of the Japanese conducting, an attack again against Hawaii. It’s not until 43 that those ideas sort of begin to dissipate. Certainly throughout calendar year 1942, there was a big concern that the Japanese could come back in the form of an amphibious or at least an air raid. And they did come back in an air raid in March of 42.

03:09:49:27 – 03:10:17:04
Marty Morgan
It’s just an air raid that for the most part, nobody noticed. Everybody heard a few explosions. Nobody understood it. But Hawaii was under martial law. The military was training you. You could you could kind of go, oh, there were some explosions last night, but it’s probably just training. And then the military never wanted to explain what happened because we didn’t want to provide the spies on Oahu with greater amounts of detail about the either the success or the failure of the Japanese operation.

03:10:17:12 – 03:10:35:15
Marty Morgan
Right. And that’s a point about this movie that I think is worth mentioning, is that this movie flirts with this idea of spies on a while, and it does so in a couple of scenes. And the most the most noteworthy of which is this very bizarre scene where you see a dentist, the dentist, his office. Yes. And there were some there.

03:10:35:20 – 03:10:43:15
Dan LeFebvre
And U.S. intelligence just happens to be listening in on the phone at the time, like you seem to be listening in on all the phone calls, apparently.

03:10:43:15 – 03:11:05:26
Marty Morgan
Yeah. And there’s a really cool backstory to that as well. I mean, I can’t keep you here all night long, but I would invite you to have a look at the leaky help incident. And that’s an incident where one of the Japanese that was damaged over Oahu flew on to the island anyhow and ditched on that island and was then assisted by an American of Japanese ancestry on that island.

03:11:06:08 – 03:11:33:09
Marty Morgan
And he would ultimately burn his airplane. He would ultimately ransack the island with the help of this this half Japanese like a beekeeper. And he would ultimately then be killed by one of the Hawaiians on the island. And he’s killed on. Oh, gosh, that would have been December 11th. No, not the 11th. He’s killed after that. Maybe he’s killed on the 12th.

03:11:33:09 – 03:12:16:23
Marty Morgan
He’s killed on 12th. At any rate, there’s an important reason for me mentioning this story, and that is that that name was Shiga Nori Keiichi. And Michi Keiichi is helped by an American of Japanese ancestry on on the hilt. There is an FBI investigation after the fact and the FBI investigation into the Nico incident ultimately reveals that there is some reason to be concerned that Americans of Japanese and then native born Japanese people living in the Hawaiian Islands aren’t to be entirely trusted.

03:12:17:12 – 03:12:52:14
Marty Morgan
I’m not saying it’s right. I’m saying it happened right. This would to some extent influence the president to issue executive order 1966, which was the internment order. But what the NIE, Howard said it does on an immediate basis for the Hawaiian Islands is that it leads the FBI and to a certain level of suspicion for potential fifth column activity, meaning the activity of people who might not who might not be faithful patriots, who might be willing to help the enemy.

03:12:53:03 – 03:13:17:16
Marty Morgan
And as a result of that, the FBI conducts some wiretapping on the island of people who were suspect on the. There are also people because keep in mind, immediately after Pearl Harbor, there is martial law is put in place in all of Hawaii and all of the territory Hawaii and martial law remains in place until October 1944. Wow.

03:13:17:28 – 03:13:42:11
Marty Morgan
And under martial law in you, you’re there’s a dawn to dusk curfew. I mean, I’m sorry, a dusk till dawn curfew. You have to have transport paperwork to go here or there. You are limited in where you can go on the island because there are areas of the islands that have been annexed or through a process of eminent domain, they have become military areas.

03:13:42:28 – 03:14:10:12
Marty Morgan
And there were some people on the island that weren’t happy about that. There were some people on the island who were agents of espionage. The most famous case that we’re aware of is men named Takeo Yoshikawa, who was a Japanese naval officer who worked at the Japanese consulate on Oahu. And Yoshikawa was he operated there under a false name.

03:14:10:12 – 03:14:45:08
Marty Morgan
And I can’t remember what his false name was. It’s I think it’s asking too much of me to remember the false name that Takeo Yoshikawa used. But he operated under the false name Tadashi Mor Motomura when he was on Oahu, and he was ultimately expelled when all of the consular staff and was expelled because the Japanese had a consulate in Honolulu and they had a consulate there because for God sake, 40% of the people living in the Hawaiian Islands were they were either Japanese or they were of mixed Japanese ancestry.

03:14:45:27 – 03:15:09:00
Marty Morgan
And so it was obvious that you had a consular office to assist the Japanese people and the people that were descendants of Japanese people that were on the island. When Tokyo Ishikawa went to work for the Japanese consulate in on Oahu under the name Tadashi Mori Mura, he was supposedly there to help people process visa applications to visit Japan.

03:15:09:16 – 03:15:44:09
Marty Morgan
When he was actually there to spy, he was there spying on the American military. He is expelled on figure out when he was expelled because I am I think he was expelled before the attack. He arrived on March 27th, 1941. I’m sorry. He was not expelled until after the attack. He didn’t return to Japan until August 42. Oh, and that says something important because he was there before, during and after the attack, and he was an agent of espionage.

03:15:44:10 – 03:16:23:06
Marty Morgan
The consular staffs were ultimately expelled and exchanged and he ended up staying behind. So there was a concern about this Fifth Column activity. The movie has a nod to that. And I’m extremely unhappy with the way that the movie does it, because the movie manages to at the same time under represent and exaggerate the same thing, because they show things like a man who has a special camera rigged up, who’s then walking around snapping photographs, end of the Navy base.

03:16:24:06 – 03:17:00:05
Marty Morgan
There was a man who was a well-known photographer in an operator. He had a photography studio in Honolulu. I’m trying to think of his name right now, but he took a number of famous photographs at Hickam of Aircraft after Ty Sing Lou. What’s his name? Ty Lou. Who was Chinese, not Japanese. And I think what that in the movie did was sort of blend the idea of taking Lou, the photographer with Takeo Yoshikawa and kind of merge them into a composite character.

03:17:00:05 – 03:17:08:04
Marty Morgan
There’s a lot of composite character stuff that goes on in this movie, and none of it’s well executed. By the way, the Chinese are.

03:17:08:07 – 03:17:09:27
Dan LeFebvre
Fighting the Japanese. So that wouldn’t.

03:17:09:27 – 03:17:10:11
Marty Morgan
Exactly.

03:17:10:20 – 03:17:11:20
Dan LeFebvre
That wouldn’t make sense.

03:17:12:00 – 03:17:31:04
Marty Morgan
It wouldn’t make sense. But the way it’s depicted in the movie, it’s a character who is obviously a Japanese man that’s playing the person that’s the photographer. But I feel like that was partly inspired by Tyson Lou. And in the aftermath of the attack, there were people that were concerned that Ty, seeing Lou, was a Japanese agent when he was Chinese.

03:17:31:04 – 03:17:54:26
Marty Morgan
There were lots of cultural misunderstandings about this, which is why you see people in you see Chinese people in San Francisco that put up signs at their businesses saying, I am Chinese, I am not Japanese. Or they’re pointing out the difference to a lot of people who were very angry and and weren’t they didn’t understand Asian culture enough to be able to tell the difference between Chinese and Japanese people.

03:17:55:18 – 03:18:18:19
Marty Morgan
And they were blindly blaming Chinese people for the attack when Chinese people were our friends 100% of the way. But you had further to that story. The actual very real concern of people of Japanese ancestry who were living in the islands, who could conduct, who could gather espionage and gather intelligence. And we’re pretty sure that it did happen even after the attack.

03:18:19:12 – 03:18:49:25
Marty Morgan
The problem that you have, though, is that on February 16, 1942, when president issues the internment order, the internment order provided an exemption for the entirety of the territory of Hawaii because how are you going to lock up 40% of Hawaii? You’re not. You can’t. In the end, we locked up suspicious cases. We locked up people like the wife, the man who helped Saginaw in Chicago.

03:18:49:25 – 03:19:22:03
Marty Morgan
And he had during the night he had an incident. She was locked up at first on Sand Island and then at a place called Honolulu. We created basically an internment camp in the White Islands. It was nothing like Heart, Mountain or all of the other internment camps in the United States. It was nothing to compare to that. But nevertheless, we had the very difficult the very difficult situation of there was a significant population of people that the United States government immediately did not trust.

03:19:23:02 – 03:19:45:27
Marty Morgan
And the way that the United States government reacted to that, the movie is nodding, nodding to that idea. And to that, I don’t think the movie depicts this delicately or sensitively. I think the movie sort runs over it like a bull in a china shop. And if I had my say, if I had been the historical advisor of this film, I would have advised totally different.

03:19:45:27 – 03:20:01:18
Marty Morgan
But this is obviously a movie where they did not pay attention to their historical advisors because I know a couple of them. And there are people who are far, far smarter than me about December 7th, and they provided feedback to the filmmaker and the filmmaker ignored them.

03:20:03:04 – 03:20:10:10
Dan LeFebvre
I mean, I guess end of the day when as a historical advisor, there’s only so much you can do. I mean, you can provide the feedback they’re going to make, the movie they’re going to make.

03:20:11:00 – 03:20:32:26
Marty Morgan
It’s a balance. And this is a movie where the historical authenticity was was not in the proper balance, which is why I think we don’t see it creating a legacy the way that Private Ryan did. Private Ryan is not a perfect movie. We’ve talked about this. Private Ryan has lots of problems, but it is far more historically accurate than the movie Pearl Harbor from 2001.

03:20:33:19 – 03:20:50:06
Marty Morgan
Private Ryan resonated powerfully with people. I was there for every minute of it. I watched as and I’m still watching the way that it resonates with people because I led a tour in Normandy last month and I finally had to go enough. No more questions about Private Ryan. We’re here on Omaha Beach. Let’s talk about what really happened.

03:20:50:27 – 03:21:23:19
Marty Morgan
People still talk about it because people watch that movie and it’s a known and loved movie. I admit to having had a great deal of enthusiasm about that movie when it came out. Pearl Harbor did not do that. The only area area where I where there’s a noticeable blip of enthusiasm is from young women. I found that if there’s one thing that this movie did do is it created an enthusiasm among young women for I think and I don’t mean to sound belittling or trivializing.

03:21:23:19 – 03:21:46:18
Marty Morgan
I think it created an enthusiasm for bringing back sort of the overall esthetic of the style from the time period. Because if I could offer one last big gripe about this movie is that there’s this squad of nurses and there we follow them throughout. And we tragically watched the death of one of them on December 7th, and we followed them throughout the whole thing.

03:21:46:18 – 03:22:10:28
Marty Morgan
And we follow them down this awkward path of a weird three way love triangle. And that group, women, what ever they’re presented, they’re just presented as goddesses and they’re always immaculately dressed and their hair is always perfectly executed. And they have perfect makeup. They have stature and poise, even the one that’s supposed to be the ugly, fat friend.

03:22:10:28 – 03:22:37:15
Marty Morgan
She’s even this this goddess. She’s even beautiful. And I feel like that spoke to a lot of young women that the esthetic that was presented, which was a very curated, a very manicured esthetic, was something that spoke to a lot of women. And I don’t just pull that out of the ether. I pull that because over the course of 20 years, I’ve watched kind of a lot of enthusiasm.

03:22:37:15 – 03:23:04:07
Marty Morgan
I watched this thing emerge, which was that World War Two reenacting existed this movie. And then after this movie, there were a lot more women that were around the general orbit of World War Two reenacting, and they were there and in nurse impression or civilian impression. And there was an era where swing dances were a thing as a part of World War II reenactments.

03:23:04:07 – 03:23:28:09
Marty Morgan
And and I was seeing more and more young women were attending this and really kind of going into the fashion statements with the era. But at the same time, I should point out, just as one, an additional gripe that it’s a very 20th century or. Well, I guess, yeah, 20th century, early 21st century spin all of what their fashion looked like.

03:23:28:09 – 03:24:00:23
Marty Morgan
Because my big complaint is that these women always look completely perfect. And I think there was a lot less perfection going on. They have perfect makeup, perfect hair, and they’re in that. They’re in styles that look good. They’re very flattering. And what I see in the photography of the era is that that for women, they could they could obviously dress it up the way that men could, because it was an era when men would dress up with a zoot suit and put on a really dashing appearance and women could get dressed up, too.

03:24:00:23 – 03:24:26:19
Marty Morgan
And I found that within the framework of their everyday lives, they don’t look like these women look in this movie, every single scene, these women are just perfect. And I feel like it’s a little misleading and it’s a little inaccurate. I did a great deal of work on what I think is probably my greatest legacy project as a historian in my lifetime, which was I had been involved with a piece of color film footage that was recorded during the attack.

03:24:28:01 – 03:24:50:10
Marty Morgan
Maybe I send it to you. I don’t remember if I did, but I made a YouTube video about it. It’s a couple that were at Hickam Army Airfield during the attack, Harold and Ada Oberg. And they had a camera and they had color film stock. And they recorded the only color film footage of the Japanese attack. What they got footage of was mostly aftermath and a bunch of billowing smoke clouds.

03:24:50:10 – 03:25:22:12
Marty Morgan
So it’s not it wasn’t appealing enough to TV producers to get a documentary film made, which is why I ended up making a documentary documentary myself. And their story is still very, very interesting to me. And I spent a lot of time getting to know them where they were, everywhere they were at every minute of the passing day on December 7th, and it was me following him and he was in uniform because he was in the 11th Bombardment Group at Hickam and me following her as the spouse, as the civilian, the as the army wife and everywhere she went.

03:25:22:12 – 03:25:44:16
Marty Morgan
And I ended up with a sort of a significant body of photography of her in Hawaii before the attack. She shows up on camera a couple of times during the attack. And then there’s I have footage and photographs of her after the attack, she finally went home. She didn’t go home until February 42. And she doesn’t look like these women in this movies.

03:25:44:29 – 03:26:09:19
Marty Morgan
She had like obviously like Houska work around the house type outfits. There are photos of them when they were going out on the town and she looks spectacular. And then there are photos of her when it was obviously hot out. She wanted to dress in something that was made sense. And she’s not wearing makeup and she doesn’t have perfectly manicured hair in a blowout where her hair looks a little and it looks a little unkempt.

03:26:09:19 – 03:26:38:03
Marty Morgan
And I feel like in this sense, this this is a three hour long music video in many respects because it’s you’re bombarded constantly by beautiful people. I mean, there are a lot of people in this movie that aren’t beautiful people because you get like Dan Aykroyd and Alec Baldwin and you get some guy they’re not beautiful people, but you do get a lot of beautiful people perfectly made up.

03:26:39:06 – 03:27:01:29
Marty Morgan
And that appeals to a certain cohort of people who watched this movie. And it wasn’t the young men that I wasn’t young. When this movie came out, I would have been, my gosh, 32 years old when this movie came out. Yeah. And to me was just like, get this thing away from me. I just didn’t care for it.

03:27:02:04 – 03:27:16:28
Marty Morgan
Whereas just a few years earlier, I mean, my, the trajectory of my life changed when Private Ryan came out and I saw it and I just was blown away by that movie. This movie came out. I was like, But I believe that young women had a totally different experience with this movie.

03:27:16:28 – 03:27:30:20
Dan LeFebvre
It makes sense. I mean, and that’s the way it is with movies. I mean, everybody looks very different than it’s their movies. It looks very different. The real life that’s that’s normal. And I think that’s a common thing for Hollywood.

03:27:31:01 – 03:27:48:09
Marty Morgan
That’s why a few years later, I had I was interviewing for an internship position and a woman named Amanda was interviewed for it. And I had a standard battery of questions. And the number one question was, what got you interested in World War Two history? And she immediately responded without having to think about it. Oh, Pearl Harbor. I love that movie.

03:27:48:09 – 03:28:10:20
Marty Morgan
That movie’s great. And I kind of went, Okay, what was it about the movie that you liked? Because I was I was like already like, wrong answer her. And she oh, my God, the clothes were amazing. And she gave me an answer that clearly testified to the fact that what she liked about Pearl Harbor was totally different than what I disliked about it.

03:28:11:03 – 03:28:31:13
Marty Morgan
And because I was all fussing about like those are all j model, the Doolittle Raid, there were no J models on that raid. There will be models. And I was that was what? Well, I got under my skin about the movie and I found myself a little bit less able to disconnect from that and just enjoy it for what it was.

03:28:31:13 – 03:28:50:03
Marty Morgan
And I feel like that the choice of leading man actors was something that appealed to a large number of young men, that the fashions associated with the film appealed to them as well. And this, at least in the one example of this intern, she testified that that’s what spoke to her about the movie, got her interested in World War Two history.

03:28:50:25 – 03:29:03:17
Marty Morgan
So I think it’s fair to say that the if there is a legacy to be seen from this movie of enthusiasm, it’s not a legacy of convincing young men to pay closer attention to the subject.

03:29:04:06 – 03:29:18:07
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah Yeah, well, like you said, we can continue chatting all night, but thank you so much for coming on to talk about Pearl Harbor. For listeners who want to catch up with your work, can you share a bit about what you’re working on lately or maybe join one of your tours now that you’re touring again?

03:29:18:23 – 03:29:36:18
Marty Morgan
Yeah, well, I certainly am touring again. It’s good to be back and I continue to lead tours. It normally I lead tours all over the world. But the main my main job is I lead tours for National Geographic Expeditions every June and September. I have one going off in just a little over a month, in fact. So there’s that out there.

03:29:36:23 – 03:29:56:10
Marty Morgan
You can look up National Geographic Expeditions, but I also do private tours that include frequently providing guide services on Oahu that relate to December 7th. And I’m quite interested in that and I enjoy doing that because let’s be honest, it’s Hawaii, so it’s great to be able to visit and it just so happens that there was a battle fought there.

03:29:56:10 – 03:30:17:25
Marty Morgan
And I really I continue to go to learn and grow when it comes to my intellectual understanding of what happened on December 7th, because it’s a vast subject that deserves to have more attention paid to it. So I continue doing that, but I also do some TV work, continue to be on a show on the Discovery Science Channel called What on Earth?

03:30:17:25 – 03:30:27:24
Marty Morgan
And I just signed on to a couple of new shows on the History Channel that’ll be coming out before too terribly long. So I’ve not just been sitting on the sofa watching TV and eating popcorn.

03:30:28:10 – 03:30:33:29
Dan LeFebvre
Now, you’ve been super busy, that’s for sure. Thank you again so much for your time, Marty.

03:30:34:11 – 03:30:43:04
Marty Morgan
It’s my pleasure. Good talking to you.