355: Tora! Tora! Tora! with Jon Parshall

Dan LeFebvre  05:00

I always like to kick off with a letter grade for historical accuracy, because I move we all know movies are not entirely accurate. They’re not documentaries, but Tora! Tora! Tora! is a little bit different in how it presents itself. So I’m going to start by quoting the text at the beginning of the movie. It says, The American Pacific Fleet was attacked and partially destroyed by Japan on Sunday morning, December 7, 1941 this attack led to the entering of the United States into World War Two. All of the events and characters depicted are true to historical fact. Now, that last line really stuck out to me, because most movies that I’ve covered here, they claim to be based on a true story, but that one’s saying all the events and characters are true to historical fact. And it seems I mean to me, it implies it’s basically a documentary. So I’m going to start off with a two part question, rather than just asking the letter grade one, are all the events and characters in Tora! Tora! Tora! true to historical fact? And if not, I’m guessing maybe we’ll continue with the episode. It’s not an A++++ for letter grade for historical accuracy. So what would it get?

Jon Parshall  06:03

That’s a great question. I think they get a very good grade overall. I do think that there are some characters in here that I have a suspicion are composite characters, right that, and we see that on a fairly frequent basis in movies, but yeah, overall, I would give it, I’d give it an A minus, nice, okay, yeah, a very strong grade. I think that this movie stands up very well, you know, given even despite the fact that it’s, you know, 40 some years, maybe almost 50 years old at this point, I can’t believe I’m even saying that. So, yeah, it gets a good, gets a good grade. There are some things, obviously, just, just given the nature of the special effects that they can use during this time. I mean, we’re using American aircraft carriers, post war aircraft carriers, to film a lot of these sequences. And so those are not necessarily, you know, they don’t look like a Japanese aircraft carrier all of the time that they do use models in the movie. Those are, those are very high quality.

Dan LeFebvre  07:08

At the beginning of the movie, we find out the reason for the Japanese attacking Pearl Harbor, as well as the reason why it’s such a surprise for the Americans. And from the Japanese perspective, the movie explains that they’re faced with an embargo of the raw materials that they need for their war in China. According to the movie, they basically have two choices, improve diplomatic relations with the US and withdraw from China, or find another source of raw materials in Indochina. And then a little later in the movie, we find out that the Japanese have set a deadline of October for the diplomatic solution of things. And then, from the American perspective, the movie sets up that even though the fleet has moved from San Diego to Pearl Harbor, the movie says that there’s not going to be an attack at Pearl Harbor, because a torpedo dropped will plunge to 75 feet, and Pearl Harbor is only 40 feet deep, so that’s not going to happen. But how well does the movie do setting up these two different sides of the story prior to the attack?

Jon Parshall  08:05

That’s all fairly well done, although I’d say that the American explanation of things is sort of overly simplistic. So let’s, let’s talk about that. Yeah, from the Japanese perspective, that’s right on the money. They’re involved in this war in China, the raw materials that are being cut off are American raw materials. We’ve basically, as a result of their move south into French Indochina, which is now Vietnam, the Americans put in place an embargo on the Japanese that cut off all of their scrap iron and steel exports. But most importantly, oil, and Japan has no domestic source of oil, and so at this point, you know the clock is running. Unless that oil embargo ends, you know they’re gonna run out of oil within, I don’t know, a couple of years, something like that, which doesn’t sound all that drastic, but if you’ve sunk as much blood and treasure into building up your navy in the inner your war, inter war years as the Japanese have, you’re now in a position where you got to use it or lose it, right? Because without oil, that Navy is useless. And so the clock is ticking, as far as the Japanese are concerned. And the only place that they can get oil, if they can’t get it from us. They’ve got to go down south to Borneo and Indonesia, because that’s where the oil is and Java and Borneo and those places. So, yeah, that’s, that’s what’s happening on on the Japanese side. They’ve either got to come to a diplomatic solution, or they’ve got to wage war in the South Pacific from the American side. Yeah, we move our battle fleet, the Pacific portion of our fleet. And understand, of course, you know as as being a two ocean country, we’ve got, our fleet is basically split in half, and the Atlantic units are all out there, and the Pacific units, traditionally are based in San Diego. We make the decision to move them out to Pearl Harbor. As a deterrent to let the Japanese know we’re serious about this. But the Yeah, the ability of the Japanese to attack our units at Pearl Harbor is still an ongoing source of controversy. I Yeah, the torpedo thing is one thing, Pearl Harbor is a relatively shallow harbor. Typically torpedoes, when you dump them in the water back in the day from an airplane would need, yes, 75 to 100 feet, it would dive down before it would come back up to running depth again. So that’s one thing, but more important, I think we did not understand at this point in time the level of sophistication that the Japanese carrier forces evolved to. We thought in our minds that, okay, maybe they would conduct a raid against us because we had done similar things during some of our exercises in the inner war years too, we had used our own carriers, like Lexington to attack Pearl Harbor. In our mind, a raid would be maybe one Japanese carrier, maybe two, and they’d launch 3040, 50 aircraft, and then they’d turn around and run right. What’s happened is starting in april 1941, the Japanese make this sort of conceptual leap to what would happen if we started using our carriers instead of in ones and twos. What if we took all the big flight decks in our Navy and put them together into one great, big carrier fleet, and so in April of 41 they make the decision to do that, and it’s one thing to issue an order and say, Okay, we’ll create this thing called, you know, the mobile fleet. It’s quite another to then work out all of the nuts and bolts of, how do you actually make that happen? You know, you got to figure out, how are these ships going to steam together? How when they launch aircraft, how many are they going to put up at a time once those aircraft are up in the air? Okay, now I’ve got these groups of aircraft from four of these carriers, later, six of these carriers. How are they going to operate in the air? Are we going to put them into one big, cohesive Strike Force? Are they still going to be commanded by the individual carrier captains, you know? So they’re all these nuts and bolts that have got to be worked out. And that’s all happening during the summer of 1941 as the Japanese are thinking in themselves, we may go to war. And if we do, Admiral Yamamoto, who’s the head of combined fleet, is like, we’re going to attack Pearl Harbor. So you can think of this almost in terms of like a disease. It’s like, this is cancer metastasizing, and the Japanese carrier force is a completely different animal in six months from April to like november of 1941 they bring on two brand spanking new carriers, the shokaku and the zuikaku. So now they got six carriers to play with. They work through all these administrative issues, and they come to the conclusion that what we’re going to do is we’re going to put up these great big groups of aircraft, 160 180 190 planes at a time, they’re going to be commanded by a single commander in the air. And now we’ve got the ability to not launch 30 planes, but you know, damn near 200 and come. And you know, I can now release these enormous pulses of combat air power, which can do strategically meaningful things on the battlefield. This is absolutely revolutionary. And the British Navy and the American Navy have not made that same leap. It’s kind of the same thing, you know, if you look at 911, if you talk to the average American on the street on September 12, 2001 and said, you know, can you weaponize commercial airliners and fly them into buildings in a coordinated fashion and turn them into terrorist weapons? Everybody be like, Well, yeah, that’s obvious, but it sure as hell wasn’t obvious two days before, right? And so the Japanese have made this leap, and the other navies have not. And so that, I think, just from a conceptual standpoint, that is why the Americans feel that they’re safe at Pearl Harbor. Because the Japanese, they we don’t understand their abilities, first of all, with their carriers, and also, the other thing I should mention is underway refueling. How do you actually get a force of carriers 3500 miles across the Pacific. We didn’t know that the Japanese had actually figured out how to use tankers to refuel those ships underway, and now they’ve got this capability where not only can they bring this great, big, powerful force, but they can refuel it and bring it off of Hawaii. So there’s a bunch of things going on there on the American side as to why we don’t have the sense of danger that we might well have had, you know, a little later on the war, when we understood what their carriers could actually do. Sorry, that’s kind of a long winded explanation, but there’s nuance there.

Dan LeFebvre  14:51

And I like the example that you gave of, you know, with 911 and how after something happens, then you know that that can be done that way. Thing. And. That leads right into something I want to ask about, that the movie shows with the the airfields on the island, that it really suggests in the movie that the Americans are just not expecting an attack. Because we see a scene where, I think it was General Walter short notices that the airplanes are spread out in standard procedure in case of an enemy air attack. But he’s like, there’s 130,000 Japanese on the island. Our biggest problem to worry about is sabotage. So the planes are then grouped together into airfields, and not to get too far ahead of the timeline like I implied to earlier, the result is not good, rows of airplanes just blowing up easily as they’re attacked from the air. And that seems like one of those miscues that it’s an obvious blunder after the fact, after we knew about it. But did that really happen?

Jon Parshall  15:44

Yeah, no, it really did. Okay. There’s a little nuance there. I know the guy who is, is the the greatest Pearl Harbor scholar in the world, and he says that it kind of varied from airfield to airfield. Is just how densely those aircraft were grouped together. But yes, broadly speaking, general short, who’s the army commander on Oahu, thinks that sabotage is the more serious threat, and so in order to make those planes more easily guardable, he congregates them into the middle of the airstrips so that he can put, you know, centuries around them to make sure that nobody can sneak up and try to blow these things up. Because, yes, we were very concerned. I forget what the percentage of the population on Oahu was first or second generation Japanese, but, you know, it’s 3040, 50% something like, there’s a lot of Japanese people there, but as it turns out, they were Americans, you know, and and there really was very, very little in the way of a fifth column or something like that. One

Dan LeFebvre  16:48

thing that we see throughout the movie is the American intelligence trying to figure out what the Japanese are up to. And there’s a mention of even how the Americans can decode the messages faster than the Japanese embassy in Washington. So they seem to be, at least in the movie, it seems like they’re almost know what’s going on in real time as things are being sent, as close as you can get in real time in 1941 I guess there’s in the intelligence circle, there’s mentions of things like the 12 Apostles, that the 12 people that are allowed to see the Japanese intercepts President of the United States, for example, although there was a time, I think, where the movie mentions there was like something found in the waste bin at the inner an intercept in the waste bin in the White House, or something like that. And so he’s taken off. He gets added up again. But overall, how well does the movie do showing the American code breaking capabilities and the intelligence and their impact on the events leading up to December 7,

Jon Parshall  17:38

right? Good question. Um, and, and I’m just going to put out right right away that I do not consider myself a scholar of the cryptographic side of this battle. I’m good enough to be dangerous, but I’m that’s not really my thing, but I can certainly paint some broad brush pictures of what’s going on here. Um, it is true that we had broken two different sets of Japanese codes. The first one that you alluded to is the diplomatic codes that are going back and forth between their embassies and their foreign minister back in Tokyo, a guy named Togo. So we can break that stuff. We’ve also recently broken the Japanese naval operations code, which is called Jn 25 and we’re reading some of that traffic as well at this time, the problem is that, yeah, on a good day, we can maybe decipher, I don’t know, 10, 20% of the code groups at any given message. The diplomatic stuff is better than that, but we’re really gated in terms of translation manpower. This is right before the war. Our military, all through the Depression, has been starved of people and resources and money, and we’re not out of war footing at this point. I was just reading a little bit more about this this morning. I mean, the army had maybe a half dozen good Japanese translators in its crypto unit. The Navy probably had a similar number. So you’re talking about a dozen people trying to evaluate the intelligence that’s coming through here. And, of course, there’s, it’s one thing to be able to decode the message. It’s another to be then able to translate that into English and then analyze Okay, well, what the heck does this mean? Right? So, yes, ex post facto, you know, fast forward to 1945 1946 by the end of the war, we have 1000s of translators working this stuff, and it’s being aided by IBM tabulation machines. We’re using, you know, machine aided methods to do this stuff. So by the end of the war, yeah, we are reading Japanese. These diplomatic traffic that’s going between their foreign ministry out to the embassy in Moscow. For instance, we’re reading that and translating that and turning it into English faster than the Japanese are doing it themselves. It’s really impressive. That is not where we are at September on October of 1941 so at the end of the war, they went back. Now we got all these analysts. Let’s go back and actually look at some of these messages that were floating around in September and October and November. Let’s decode those suckers. Now, what did they tell us? And you know, first of all, there’s 1000s of messages that you got to go through. Were there smoking guns in there? Yeah, there absolutely were. There was a message that was translated in 1946 that laid out the exact composition of nagumos carrier task force, you know, down, you know, ship by ship and yada yada yada. So, you know, if they had gotten lucky and gotten the right messages and gotten them translated by one of those six dudes. You know, we might have gotten the smoking gun. It might have fallen into our lap. The problem then, in in September and October at 41 is, yes, there are some clues out there. But how do you put the put them all together into a cohesive picture? Because the other thing that’s happening is that we’re getting a lot of we would call it false returns, but they were, they were actually, they were real returns. So let me expand the picture here. This movie is about Pearl Harbor. We focus on Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor, from the Japanese standpoint, is just one small component of their overall plan of campaign, which is aimed to the south. So, you know, as we’re looking at the Intel, we’re like, they could attack us in the Philippines. Maybe they’ll attack down in Malaya. Maybe they’re you going into the Central Pacific. The answer is yes, they’re going to attack in all of those places. Okay, so how do you then make sense of that and pull out the little kernels that might also point to the fact that maybe they’ve got an interest in Hawaii as well. Those pieces were there. But again, just given the deluge of different data points that are all pointing in different directions, it’s real easy ex post facto to come back and say, well, there’s this and this and this and there, therefore, clearly Pearl Harbor was in danger. It was not nearly as obvious at the time. Yeah,

Dan LeFebvre  22:29

I like what you mentioned, like, with the smoking gun, and as you were saying that, I was thinking referring back what you’re talking about with 911 or, like, how would you know that that’s actually the smoking gun, until you knew after the fact what they did to know that that was the smoking gun and not just some deterrent or propaganda or exactly some other message that you don’t know what it means,

Jon Parshall  22:49

right? That’s right, yeah, if you actually look at just a map of the opening moves of the Japanese offensive that they’re going to start unloading, you know, on December 7. I mean, there’s ships all over the place, because they are landing divisions in Malaya to go after the British and, you know, march down towards Singapore. They are doing initial moves out of the Palau’s, which are southeast of the Philippines, you know, down into the Central Pacific. And very quickly, they’re going to start putting troops into the Philippines as well. There’s a lot of transports moving around in the East China Sea, and it’s all got to happen by clockwork, because the Japanese don’t have enough troop transports. And so the transports, they’re going to take that initial Echelon down to Malaya, are then going to have to move back up north, go to Formosa, pick up more divisions there that are going to be used for the landings against the Philippines. You know, there’s just tons and tons of things going on here. It’s not all it. The movie makes it seem like, you know, you know what’s going on with Pearl Harbor. Where are the Japanese aircraft carriers? But you have to understand that there’s just tons of different stuff happening at the same time.

Dan LeFebvre  23:58

The world’s a much bigger picture. So it’s not being focused on the United States. Yeah, at one point in the movie we did see Colonel Bratton is kind of piecing together the intercepts because of a message from Tokyo that indicated that they wanted to conclude negotiations no later than November 29 so he’s convinced that the Japanese will attack on Sunday, November 30. Was there really a belief that that would be the date of the surprise attack? I

Jon Parshall  24:24

don’t have a definitive answer to that one. I was actually looking around for that on the basis of the those questions. And my sense is that this is another one of those sort of false positives that you’ve got clue A, B and C, that leads you to, you know, an indication that this could be the day. But this kind of stuff happens all the time. You know that you’ll get something that looks like it’s a smoking gun, and then nothing happens on that day. And now all of a sudden, all of the decision makers, you know, the admirals, are looking at you, Mr. Defense analyst, and like, well, what the heck. Robe, no. How many times has

Dan LeFebvre  25:01

the world, the end of the world been predicted over the right? Exactly,

Jon Parshall  25:05

exactly.

Dan LeFebvre  25:08

Yeah, yeah. Speaking of those messages from Japan, there is a plot line during the course of the film that talks about a quote, unquote, very long message in 14 parts that sent from Tokyo to the Japanese embassy in DC, and since, like we talked about, the Americans are intercepting everything. They’re able to read each part as they come in in the movie. But then Tokyo specifically doesn’t want to send the final part until the morning of December 7, so the 14th part of the message instructs their ambassadors to submit their reply to the US government on December 7 at precisely 1pm local time in Washington, DC. And then there’s a follow up message where they tell their embassy to, quote, unquote, destroy at once your cipher machine all codes and secret documents. And then, in a nutshell, that’s kind of seems to be the final confirmation about when the attack will take place. Of course, they still don’t know where it’s going to take place, but is the movie accurately portraying the storyline of the 14 part message?

Jon Parshall  26:10

Yeah, that’s that’s basically all correct. There was a 14 part message. It does not and we’re aware that this message is coming, and we know that, yes, the the 14th art needs to be delivered at at 1pm Washington time. The message starts getting transmiss admitted, and it doesn’t come over sequentially. It’s not real clean. It’s like parts five and nine were the first ones to be broadcast. You know, it’s just all over the place. And then there’s this big gap of the number of hours, and then, yeah, so everybody’s kind of waiting around for the for the 14th part to land. And from the Japanese standpoint, this was all kind of bungled. I mean, that what the Japanese wanted to do was be able to walk into our Secretary of War’s office with, you know, a declaration of war precisely at 1pm and then the attack on Pearl Harbor is going to go down like five minutes later. Okay? And they’re cutting things really fine, because, given the sensitivity of this message traffic, the Japanese embassy in Washington was ordered not to use a typist to actually, you know, type out all of the the message and put it into this document that’s going to be, you know, handed to our our guys. So the Japanese end up bungling. This is what it comes down to. And the attack ends up occurring before the message actually gets delivered.

Dan LeFebvre  27:47

Okay, that’s so I think the movie does kind of make a point of having this guy typing there on the key on the typewriter, trying to type things out. Take that jacket off a little bit too. Yeah, and go back to typing and just taking so long everybody else is just watching the clock on the wall to see climbing

Jon Parshall  28:03

the walls. Yeah, absolutely. It’s funny. I actually, I did a presentation, this was years ago down in New Orleans at the World War Two Museum down there on Pearl Harbor, and it was either the son or the grandson of one of those Japanese guys in the embassy was there to give a talk on that very episode, and he was still just infuriated that, basically, you know, the Foreign Ministry back in in Tokyo had set his dad up for failure here because they didn’t get this traffic out to him in a timely basis so he could do his job. It was, it was kind of a, kind of a foster clock on the on the part of the Japanese, I

Dan LeFebvre  28:48

guess they didn’t have the emails they can just schedule to send it. Say, one, two, yeah, a little bit different,

Jon Parshall  28:54

yeah, exactly, yeah. Just, you know, can we just queue this up in MailChimp and have it drop? Oh, come on, exactly. Yeah, that heard it happening. So,

Dan LeFebvre  29:03

yeah. Well, we’re about halfway through the timeline of the movie, and I want to ask about a rather it’s a brief scene in the movie, but it seems to be significant on a rather routine patrol. Least seems so in the movie, there’s a US Navy ship that notices a submarine’s Periscope just a stern of a navy tug seems to be trying to sneak into the net around Pearl Harbor. So the American ship fires on the submarine. And since the movie is focusing heavily on the planes from the characters or from the carriers, I should say that’s really one of the only times that we see submarines used by the Japanese in this movie. So can you feel this more historical context around how they fit into this overall strategy.

Jon Parshall  29:41

So the Japanese want to use five little mini subs that they are. They’re transporting them out on these mother subs. And they’ve got a little hatchway that you can get up into the bottom of the submarine. You’ve got a two man crew in each one of these things that are going to be launched. And the idea. Is that these five mini subs are going to sneak into Pearl Arbor at the same time that the aerial attack is going to go down and deliver their own torpedo attacks. They each carry two torpedoes against the American ships that are in there. Well, you know, things, things go awry. Let’s just put it that way. And and there’s still an ongoing controversy as to whether or not one of those submarines did manage to sneak into Pearl Harbor. There’s a photo that alleges to show, I don’t personally believe it myself, for reasons I won’t go into, but anyway, this incident that we’re depicting here absolutely did happen. So the USS Ward was an old four stacker destroyer, and oddly enough, so I live in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the ward was manned primarily by naval reservists from Minnesota and so, and she had a brand new captain. This guy had been in charge of the ship for like, less than 24 hours. And just as you say, you know, on the morning of the attack, about an hour and a half before this all goes down, lo and behold, the LORD cites the sub. Yeah, the sale of a sub at a periscope too. And, yeah, they end up taking two shots at it. And for years, the boys from St Paul claimed that they had drilled that sub, you know, put a hole right through the sale of that thing. Neat is neat. And nobody believed them. And it took, I forget, 5560, some years, before they finally found that submarine. And there was a hole in the base of the of the Codding tower, you know. And we still have the number four gun from the USS Ward sits out at the state capitol about seven miles that way. Wow. Yeah, it’s really cool. Wow. So, yeah, this incident happens. They sink this submarine, they kill its crew, and it sinks. And the Lord then sends a message up, you know, through the through the channel, saying we have attacked, and we believe sunk an enemy submarine off of the mouth of the harbor. And normally you would think that that would be sort of an attention getter. But what ends up happening is that it’s we’re at a peacetime setting, and the the people on the land based side of things are looking at the captain, the warden, like, this guy is wet behind the ears, man, this dude doesn’t know what he’s doing. And they’re a bunch of naval reservists. Like, yeah, okay, whatever you know. And so they, they ignore it, and it’s, it’s not really gonna sort of come into the consciousness of the base people, until the attack starts going down. It’s like a light bulb, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s thing. Well, that leads to

Dan LeFebvre  33:04

that, kind of, like the good letter grade that you gave before his historical accuracy. Because I think there is even a mention of how this guy, oh, he’s green, he’s, you know, Captain green, he’s, he’s new. I want confirmation. I need confirmation. And kind of going through that

Jon Parshall  33:18

confirmation of a sub that you’ve already sunk you know, yeah, in the movie. And not to get

Dan LeFebvre  33:22

too far ahead of the timeline, the movie, in the movie, as as all the planes are going, I think that comes back. Is that enough confirmation for you? So I’m like,

Jon Parshall  33:28

yeah, exactly, exactly. Um, and, you know, there’s, there’s a question here. Okay, 630 you’ve got roughly 80 minutes or so before the attack is going to go down. What could the Americans actually have done with that amount of warning time? It would be very, very difficult to start getting the ships actually out of the harbor in that amount of time. I mean, a lot of cases, these ships are not at actions none of them are at action stations. A lot of their crews are ashore for shore leave. It’s Sunday morning, um, and just the physical act of firing up the boilers and raising steam takes a long time on a warship of that vintage. And so, you know, I don’t know that the ships would have been able to be moved Had there been coordinated communications between the army and the navy, though, among other things, you could have had a better air presence over the island as a result of that. I mean, 90 minutes is plenty of time for me to wake up a bunch of pilots at these airfields and get get planes up in the air, so that that could have materially change things. It sounds

Dan LeFebvre  34:41

like that’s another one of those elements that remembering that the US was not in the war, which I know, it’s something that everybody knows, but also it’s helpful to continuously remember that, because I think there’s a big difference between I think I just watched recently another classic, you know, the Battle of Britain, right? Where you have all these pilots that are just waiting for the call to go up, and so they go up in just a matter of minutes. And this is a little bit different for the guys who, you know, there’s no war going on. It’s technically peace. So it’s a little bit different. They’re not gonna, yeah, they could get up faster, but still, it’s not like, it’s not more time. And I think it’s always good to remember that that

Jon Parshall  35:20

and among other things, this is one of those sort of boring, you know, behind the scenes things that nobody thinks about. There was no joint Army Navy operations room for the defense of this island at this time. So there’s no easy way for a navy Skipper to send a report up to, you know, his superiors and then have that information be promulgated across to the army, who is in charge of the air defense of this island, to say, scramble your damn fighters. You know, there could be something coming in here. Something’s up. You know, at least be on higher alert, because we just sank a submarine out out in front of the entrance of the most important naval base in the Pacific. Speaking

Dan LeFebvre  36:01

of things that they hadn’t figured out at this point in the war, yet, there is a new piece of technology that the Americans get, according to the movie, to help detect intruders on the sea and in the air. And this new technology is called radar. On the morning of December 7, we see two guys manning the radar station at Opana point, and they detect two large pulses coming in, so they call it in. Lieutenant Tyler answers, and he says, Ah, don’t worry about it. They’re just the B seventeens coming in from the mainland. And then a little later in the movie, we actually see the B seventeens arriving. So they’re a real thing, but they’re also getting attacked by the Japanese planes. I love the quote from one of the pilots. It’s like, what a way to fly into a war, unarmed and out of gas. Can you take us through what actually happened with the radar and the B 17? That’s

Jon Parshall  36:47

all 100% legit. All of that happened, yeah? So yes, there’s a there’s a brand new experimental radar station up at Opana point. You can still drive by it today. And yeah, there were these two cats up there who were calibrating the radar set, and one of them was brand new. And so, you know, the more senior guy was kind of breaking this junior dude in. And, you know, here’s how you operate this particular radar set. And so, yeah, they see this understand too that at this time, that era of radar didn’t have the sort of the classic radar scope that we look at the where we’ve got this, you know, rotating thingy, and it’s plotting the azimuth. No, basically, these guys are looking at an oscilloscope and and what they’re seeing is that at this bearing, which is almost due north, we got this big old spike, something’s coming in from the north. And so, yes, they, these two cats, telephone down to Lieutenant Kermit Tyler. And I, actually, I met Kermit Tyler right before he died. I was, I was out at a symposium in Hawaii, and that poor guy, I mean, he’s, you know, he had to live with that particular set of events for the rest of his life, because he knows that there’s some B seventeens coming in, and he knows that, you know, they often approach, you know, kind of from the north, to do their their landing exercises. And he, you know, we got a big spike. It’s in that general neck of the woods. Yeah, that’s what he says. Don’t worry about it. And the other thing again, is that even if Kermit Tyler had raised Holy hell, once again, the fact that we do not have joint communications with Army and Navy, he didn’t have the ability to, you know, pick up the phone call Admiral Kimmel, for instance, and say, you know, there’s airplanes coming in. There was none of that sort of, what I want to say, operational communications infrastructure in place. You know, Kermit really had kind of his hands tied behind his back in terms of what he could do. But yeah, he becomes one of these sort of scapegoats that everybody knows about this incident, you know. And, yeah, it absolutely did happen, and Kerman had to live it, live with it, for the rest of his life.

Dan LeFebvre  39:05

It sounds almost like the scapegoat in the movie, at least the version of, you know, the Japanese typist trying to type things out really slowly and and all that kind of makes that out. And it almost sounds like it’s another version of that, you know, you’re, what can you do? I mean, even if you did get that notification, yeah, what would you do with it? What

Jon Parshall  39:26

would you do with it? Right? And this is, this is later than then. You know that that sinking of the submarine, where, you know the planes are getting close at this point, and you know, just given the speed of advance of that, of that air power that’s coming in, you know they’re going, yeah, the better part of 200 miles an hour. You know your your time to take actionable information and turn that into results on those airfields in terms of getting more fighter cover overhead is distinctly limited. And yeah, that window closed. Loses very quickly, and now it’s game on. The

Dan LeFebvre  40:02

movie doesn’t mention this, but I would imagine, especially too, because they changed the formations of the planes on the airfield, that would take a little bit longer for them to get up, I’m guessing, just to a little bit different than what would they would normally be. And so that would just add another they would have to know your even earlier for to make any sort of difference, right on that, right?

Jon Parshall  40:24

The other thing is, too, that the Japanese were taking very serious measures to make sure that they were going to really stomp on air power in the Hawaiian Islands. Again, in the course of the movie, we, of course, tend to fixate on what happens in the anchorage in Pearl Harbor itself. But if you look at a breakdown of the individual sorties that the Japanese, okay, I got this package of 180 planes coming in in the first wave. I got another 167 behind them in the second wave. If you look at what those 180 planes are supposed to be doing in that first way, half of them are airfield suppression, because the Japanese are terribly concerned that there are a lot of aircraft on Oahu, and we don’t want those airplanes coming up in the air, messing with our attack force, or, even worse, reaching out and touching our aircraft carriers. No, no, no, no. So a lot of those planes are devoted to shutting down every airfield on Oahu. Again, from from the American standpoint, a Japanese raid would be one or two carriers, right? And they would be probably focused on the anchorage exclusively the Japanese. This is an entirely different animal. We’re bringing 350 planes, and we’re not just going to attack the Anchorage. We’re gonna we’re gonna shut this whole island down, in terms of all the aircraft too. It’s an immensely sophisticated plan. You know, no, no other Navy in the world could do this at this point in time, the Japanese carrier force, Kido Butai, you know, is as revolutionary in its way as the German Panzer Division was at about the same time in terms of ground warfare, nobody else has this capability at this point. We couldn’t do this kind of attack until early 1944

42:17

Wow. Yeah,

Jon Parshall  42:18

it’s a really this is a distinctly capable beastie that the Japanese have unleashed on us. We just don’t understand what it can do anyway. I’m, I’m, I’m digressing here, but the point of the matter is that even if we had gotten a few more fighters up in the air, it doesn’t really matter. I don’t think in terms of the overall impact, because they’re bringing dozens and dozens of zero fighters down that are expressly tasked with just sweeping the skies clean of any fighters that they run into. The Zero is a better machine than most of the fighters that we am on the island, and at this time in the war, we don’t understand the capabilities of the zero as an airframe, and so we would be fighting it using the incorrect kind of tactics. At this point in time, our fighter pilots are taught you want to get into a dog fight. That’s how you shoot down an enemy plane. Here to tell you, you try flying a P 40 or, even worse, an old or P 36 which was a lot of the machines on this island. You try dog fighting that against the zero. You are dead. You get shot down like boom. They take you right out because the zero climbs faster, turns tighter. It’s just and they got really, really good pilots. So the net result is to say that even if Kermit had done his thing, even if, even if we had given the, you know, call out the hounds and we managed to get a few dozen more fighters up in the air, I don’t know that it necessarily has that big an impact on the outcome of the

Dan LeFebvre  43:41

attack? Yeah. No, that makes sense. And I like that. You mentioned the the zeros and not fighting against that made me ask, not associated with the movie at all. But was it who was the the general The Flying Tigers that were fighting overall in China? Yeah, did that? Did that help them at all to know, like strategy of fighting against zeros, or in that strategy that maybe not every all the pilots on Pearl would happen to to know that. But did that help at all

Jon Parshall  44:10

if they had listened to chenl? Yes, yes, because you’re absolutely right. We, you know, we had this unit in China that had been tangling with the zero for for a little while. And, yeah, we knew the characteristics of this plane, but chanal, really, you know, he’s, yes, he’s technically working for the for the US Army Air Corps. But he’s also kind of this, this rogue operator who’s out in China, and nobody believes the the Intel that’s coming out of there. It’s, going to take, you know, a good six months or so of actually tangling with this airplane and in the in the course of those early war campaigns, the zero gains this reputation is really being sort of a super fighter. You know, it’s not, but if you use the wrong tactic against it, the. The results are distinctly unpleasant, and so it really would not be until the Battle of Midway, a guy named Jimmy thatch came up with a new tactic. He’s like, Okay, well, we can’t out turn these suckers, but I’ve got this method of interweaving, you know, my airplanes, so that any approach that the the enemy fighter takes, they’re going to face the potential of a head on attack against one of my elements of fighters, that is, you know, maneuvering back and forth anyway. We eventually get a handle on how to fight the zero, but it takes a number of months, and honestly, a lot of dead fighter pilots along the way to realize that this is an extremely capable, nimble, dangerous airplane. Don’t dog fight it, or you will die.

Dan LeFebvre  45:42

If we go back to the movie, we’re about an hour and 47 minutes into the movie is when we hear it’s a long the movie. It is a long movie. It is a long movie almost two hours into it when we hear the title, Torah, Torah, Torah. And those are the code words according to the movie. Those are the chord words to be sent by the Japanese pilots if they’ve achieved the element of surprise. And we see it happening the movie. The planes are flying over the island. There’s no anti aircraft guns firing, no American fighters over the harbor. It seems to be a complete surprise. So the code words are sent, and then soon after that, we see the first shots being fired by the Japanese fighters. There’s three planes of strafing a submarine in the harbor that that’s the first shot that we see in in the movie. Moments later, it’s funny, there’s a band playing this the Star Spangled Banner as the flag is being raised on one of the decks of the ship. And then the Japanese start swarming, and they just rush through the song. They don’t just stop. They just rush through their song to finish it as they start to realize what’s happening. How did the movie do showing the moment of the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor itself?

Jon Parshall  46:40

I give them a, b, b plus on that. Okay, so the actual first attack on Oahu doesn’t happen at Pearl Harbor. It happens further north on the island at at Wheeler airfield. Oh, okay, yeah, and again, because they want to suppress, they being the Japanese, want to suppress the American air power on this island. Wheeler, which is, which is north, gets, Gets Plastered by dive bombers and strafing fighters and so that goes down about 10 minutes before the actual attack on the anchorage itself. Yeah, I think the first bomb that lands actually does land on Ford Island in the middle of the Anchorage. And then, yeah, there’s a lot of sort of hurry up kind of stuff going on, because you’re right then that that’s legit. You know, there were flags being raised, you know, it’s the beginning of the morning. It’s, yeah, oh, 800 you know, let’s get the get there, get our day on. And all of a sudden, yeah, you got these planes buzzing around the harbor. I’ll tell you what, when you stand today on the on the deck of the USS, Missouri, which is moored there in the harbor, basically at the point where the USS Oklahoma, which is one of the battleships that was sunk during the attack, you stand on the deck of the Missouri and you can look out over the water, and particularly up the length of the southeast lock, which goes up towards the submarine base. And that body of water, because it basically aimed right at Battleship Row, was the point of attack for a lot of the Japanese torpedo planes, they went right down the southeast lock as they’re heading towards Battleship Row, and then they sort of peeled off to hit, you know, Oklahoma, West Virginia, what have you. It is still to this day. It just brings shivers up my spine standing over that, you know, looking over that body water and imagining what it must have been like to be an American sailor on one of those ships, and watching these planes coming in on you and dropping their torpedoes, one, one at a time. There’s not a damn thing you can do about it. I mean, you’re just utterly helpless. You know, the guns are not manned. In many cases, the ready ammunition for the guns is locked up in lockers and you can’t find the keys. I mean, it was a hot mess. And again, just the the feeling of powerlessness, watching these puppies lining up on you and dropping these torpedoes, and, you know, in they come like these accusing fingers, you know, towards the side of your ship. Oh, man, this is not gonna be a good day.

Dan LeFebvre  49:23

It’s understandable, like, you’re not gonna know exactly what happened the moments. It’s not like there was footage, you know, security camera footage that we have of that attack moment. But I did like the way that the movie portrays different reactions by different people. Like, you know, one of the officers is just like, I’ll get that guy’s number, you know, I’m going to get him in trouble, right, for for flying, and then bomb drops. He’s like, wait a minute, what you know? And then you even have the officers off a ways from the harbor itself, and you can see things going off in the distance, right? And everybody’s just starting to recognize what’s going on. And it’s a it’s that moment that you. Yeah, I can imagine what it would be like.

Jon Parshall  50:01

Yeah, unimaginable. You know, how, how, unless they have been feeling trying to change their entire perceptual apparatus to, yeah, oh, my God, you know, because, obviously, there were a lot of guys in the Navy at this point who felt that there’s going to be a war, but not a lot of them thought that we’re going to be there the first casualties in that war. You know, that was not a thought that it occurred to many of these people in peacetime. Oahu at all. You know, it’s going to be this, poor clowns on the Philippines. We know they’re going to get invaded. You know, it’s going to be them, and it’s like no baby.

Dan LeFebvre  50:39

We talked earlier about the airfields and the moving the planes to avoid the sabotage. But then, as we see the attack happening in the movie, can see that the planes are trying. There’s some that are trying to get off the ground. They’re obviously outnumbered. There’s some that are blowing up before they can get off but then there’s two American pilots that manage to get off the ground. We see, I think I counted that they shot down three Japanese planes that we saw in the movie. But we don’t really see a lot about what happened to them. Can you fill in kind of the rest of the story around the American pilots who did manage to get off the ground during the attack?

Jon Parshall  51:11

And this is where you don’t get your good value for your money, because I’m, like, a big picture, you know, operations level dude. And I don’t know the the individual particulars. I can’t remember the names of the two guys. How’s that for lane? But yeah, the the bottom line is that there was a little, um, almost like a divert field. Wasn’t even a main airfield at all. It was like this little dirt airstrip up north on the coast. And these two guys, yeah, they pile into their into their Jeep, and they go racing up there. I don’t think he was a jeep. Actually, was like a civilian Studebaker or something, you know, because there’s a couple of P 40s sitting up at that strip that they know of. And they’re like, Yeah, let’s go. And so yeah, they they hop up there, they get in their planes, they get up and yes, they do shoot down two or three of those aircraft, you know. So yay team. I mean, those guys showed commendable initiative, and they did what they what they could do. And I would just like to stop it there and say that, of course, in one of the movies in the in the recent Pearl Harbor movie, of course, two of those cats then end up supposedly being pilots on the Doolittle mission, you know,

Dan LeFebvre  52:20

of course, which is the Americans had more than two pilots. What

Jon Parshall  52:26

I’m here to tell you that no fighter guy is gonna be like, Yeah, put me in a multi engine medium bomber that, you know, handles like a dump truck. Yeah, that is so the duty that I want. Yeah, it’s just absolute nonsense. Well,

Dan LeFebvre  52:41

was it Ben Affleck? He hands up coming Batman anyway. So you used to flying all that kind of thing. True. Good point.

Jon Parshall  52:49

Yeah. There you go. Yeah. But that, that incident did happen. They did shoot down a couple three the Japanese planes, and then kind of, you know, ran out of target. So I think one of them was forced down. I can’t again. I can’t remember the particulars. Well, maybe

Dan LeFebvre  53:04

this is a maybe, maybe you’ve already answered this kind of a hypothetical situation. But as I was watching the movie, I couldn’t help but think about what might have been different if maybe they hadn’t grouped all their planes together so that they had gotten easily destroyed. Maybe they could have more. Do you think that would have changed anything, or kind of what we were talking about earlier? They didn’t know much about the zeros and attacks, and it really wouldn’t have made much difference anyway. Yeah, I

Jon Parshall  53:25

mean, certainly it would have complicated things for the Japanese. But I think in the grand scheme of things, you know, I forget the exact number of zeros that they’re bringing down for the in the first wave, but it’s the better part of 50 or 60 zeros, and they’re, they’re gonna wipe out whatever aircraft we put up. Is my, is my guess. But we should not, we should not poo poo, the the value of time in this case, because even in the first wave attack, where the the Japanese basically had their way with us, because we were completely surprised in the Anchorage, at least, if you really get down in the weeds and grind the numbers on the casualties amongst the Japanese torpedo plane attackers, for instance, it’s clear that even within the space of 234, minutes that American anti aircraft fire was increasing dramatically. And there was a there was a destroyer moored in the southeast lock, a ship called the Bagley, and it had, you know, basically these torpedo planes that were running down the southeast lock, lining up the runs against battleship road were just parading past Bagley. And by the end of that series of runs, the Bagley bags several of those planes. And so you can sort of see the casualties of the Japanese were already starting to go up by the tail end of the first wave attack. And so if you posit that. Yeah, okay, somebody listens to Kermit Tyler. There’s a big bunch of unknown planes coming down on this island, even if we had so much as had 10 extra minutes to just get the ready usage ammunition for the anti aircraft, guns ready to go. And those ships were buttoned up. They couldn’t move. But if they’re at least in better watertight integrity, and they have more of the ready ammo that could have significantly increased Japanese casualties, as it is. You know, the first wave comes in. They do their thing. They destroy the Arizona, they sink the Oklahoma, the capsizer. And the first wave is just a nightmare for us. There’s the second wave that comes in that composed mostly of dive bombers. And if you look at the photography, the historical photography that is taken from some of these Japanese planes in the second wave, as they’re coming in, Holy Moses, there’s a lot of anti aircraft fire. They were very disagreeably surprised with how incredibly dense American hack Act was. So again, in a counterfactual vein, you know, even 10 or 15 extra minutes might not have done that much in terms of the damage that was inflicted against those vessels, but it could have done a lot in terms of the amount of damage we could do against the Japanese attacking force, makes

Dan LeFebvre  56:22

sense. Makes sense, yeah. And then it goes back to, I mean, it’s a what if we don’t looking at it after the fact, we don’t really know, yeah, but if we shift back to the movie while the attack is happening there at Pearl Harbor, the movie then goes to Washington, DC, and we see the Japanese ambassador Nomura arriving at Cordell Hull’s office to deliver their message as ordered by the 14th part. We kind of talked about that a little bit earlier. But even though they were told to deliver it at 1pm The movie shows it’s slow typist. This reason why they’re being late. We already talked about that. When they get there, Mr. Hall is on the phone with the President. Wants to confirm that the attack has happened before he receives the Japanese ambassador. When he does the ambassador hands him the paper, and, you know, he reads it, and this, this is the dialog that hull has in the movie. From that response, he says, I have never seen a document so crowded with infamous falsehoods and distortions on a scale so huge that I never imagined until today, that any government on this planet was capable of uttering them, and then no more words said, Nomura just gets up leaves the room with tail between his leg. I mean, obviously very hush, quiet, somber moment. Do you think the movie was successful in capturing the essence of the true story here, word

Jon Parshall  57:38

for word, that’s perfect. Wow, it’s perfect. And the the subtext there that we don’t get is Nomura and Hall are friends. They’d known each other for a long time, and Nomura, there’s some pathos there. Nomura was not aware that this attack was coming. He was he was legitimately sent to DC as a special envoy. And he was working earnestly and honestly to try to come to a diplomatic agreement, you know, between his two countries. And so he really, you know, he’s one of these guys that just really got set up, you know, because the militarists, of course, had made the decision long before that they wanted a war. And so, you know, here’s Nomura really doing his best to bring about a settlement. And yeah, he’s, he’s now the fall guy, and has to give this document to Paul, who he knows, and so, yeah, he he was personally crushed by the the attack and the results of of this war, you know, between these two countries. Because he’s, he’s been in the US a lot. He knows us. Wow,

Dan LeFebvre  58:56

that adds even more context to in the movie when he receives that final message, and he looks at the clock on the wall, and I think it says something like 11 o’clock in the morning or somewhere around there, and he’s expected to deliver this at 1pm in just a couple hours. So it seems like that’s just when, maybe that’s just when he’s finding out what actually is happening. It’s just kind of unraveling like, Yeah,

Jon Parshall  59:18

are you kidding me? Really, wow, yeah, exactly.

Dan LeFebvre  59:22

Yeah, that, yeah, again, that’s one of those things I can’t wrap my head around, like being in that moment realizing what’s happening and right? Or it’s already happened, really, and you have to be the one to break this news. It’s already happened. That’s right,

Jon Parshall  59:34

yeah, the machine is is operating here, and it is completely out of your control, and now you’re left to pick up the pieces and yet be the delivery boy for this thing that you did not want. I mean, understand, there are plenty of people in in the Japanese government who thought that a war against the US was going to be a disaster, and had been, have been working. As assiduously as they could. There’s, there’s a really interesting book written by a Japanese woman called 1941 road to infamy, and she talks about just how feckless the Japanese senior leadership was. And there were plenty of people in their leadership who understood that a war with us is not going to end well, but no one was willing to fall on their sword and actually stand up in some of these liaison meetings where they’re actually, you know, lurching towards war through the fall, and say, time out, guys, this is nuts. You know, we can’t do this. Everyone else is looking at everyone else and say, Oh, that guy falls on his sword. And the result is that the can just keeps getting kicked down the war, you know, down the road. And now the carriers have sailed, and Nomura, you know, is one of these cats, and he gets to pick up the pieces. And the Yeah, the ship has sailed. You know, we’re at war now. Oh, my God, not only

Dan LeFebvre  1:00:59

being at war, but also the manner in which it happens, like if him, if him, finding out that it’s already happened. I don’t know. The movie doesn’t really seem to imply, with no more knew that ahead of time or not, or if it was just hull that knew that the attack had, but you’re gonna find out. I mean, that’s just, yeah, it’s just your honor, your everything is just broken. Yeah,

Jon Parshall  1:01:21

that’s exactly right. Well, if

Dan LeFebvre  1:01:23

we go back to the attack at Pearl Harbor in the movie, it shows the Japanese planes returning to their characters, and focus has on one of the pilots, Lieutenant Commander Futura, who is shocked to find out that they’re not ordering another wave of attacks to destroy the American carriers, and they’re dry docks instead, the signal is for all the ships to head back to Japan as soon as the rest of the planes return, that’s right, the explanation in the movie is that they’ve achieved the mission that they were tasked with. Their task force is vital to the war effort that they’ve just started, and the war is just beginning. Yep. Now, as I understand it, this is the part of the movie that drives what we now know as the fuel tank myth, the idea that if the Japanese had launched another wave of attacks, they would have launched that wave of attacks against the repair facilities and fuel tanks around Pearl Harbor, right? And that would have essentially been the nail in the coffin, so to speak, for the American war effort. Yep. Can you unravel this true story behind the fuel tank myth that’s implied in the movie here? Oh

Jon Parshall  1:02:16

yeah. There’s so much to unpack. Wouldn’t even start, oh, yeah, where do we go? Fuchida is a very important guy. Fuchida was the attack leader for the mission. He was the air group commander on the Akagi. He was a very charismatic, intelligent man who wrote a number of books after the war. He survives the war. He converts to Christianity, becomes a Christian missionary, and he’s a technical advisor also on Tora, Tora, Tora, and he also spins some of the most pernicious myths and lies about this war that pertain to the Battle of Midway, that pertain to some of the early war operations out in places like India, the Indian Ocean, and they really pertain here at Pearl Harbor, that whole sequence of events. So we see fuchi to land on the Akagi, and just as you say, he gets out of his cockpit, he talks to his crew chief. Is like, Why aren’t the preparations for a third attack wave happening here. And the crew chief says, Well, we haven’t gotten any orders. Fuchida looks up to the bridge, and he sees his buddy, Minoru Genda. Genda is the air officer for first air fleet. He’s the real, you know, the visionary, the air power guy. He’s Admiral degunos, right hand man when it comes to air planning. And so fuchida and Genda share this sort of profound look, you know, and and Genda then turns around and has this argument with with Admiral Nagumo on the bridge that, you know, we can’t stop now. We’ve got to go back and attack the America, find the American carriers, attack their their fuel depots and repaired basins. And Nagumo says, somewhat rudely. You can hear this in Japanese chicao, which means it’s different, or you’re wrong. It’s really rude to actually say that in Japanese. It’s just it’s kind of like shut up. And Nagumo says, No, this is the war is just beginning. We have achieved the directives that we’ve been asked to achieve, which was to sink four American battleships. That’s not in the movie, but that we know that now, and so, you know, we have to preserve this force. And we’re turning around. We’re going home. That argument never happened, never happened. It’s all a concoction of fuchida. And Genda tells this. This in his own autobiography that was published after the war as well, where he becomes aware when Tora, Tora Tora comes out. Now, there’s this sort of kerfuffle that happens, you know, in the States and also in Japan. You know that, wow, there should have been a third attack wave. You know, none of that happened because the the Japanese nakuma, nakuma. Never wanted to do a third attack against against the harbor. And even if he had, he never would have targeted repair depots and fuel tanks and stuff like that. And here’s why. If you look at the actual target priorities that are handed down from Combined Fleet ie Yamamoto to Nagumo, this is what your target list is. Buddy. At the top of the list is land based air power. Right again, they’re very concerned about our aircraft that it’s aircraft carriers, battleships, cruisers, destroyers and other combatants, merchant ships, and only item number six do you get into harbor facilities. And we as Americans, we look at that, we’re like, Well, my God, why wouldn’t you go after logistics? And it’s like, well, because Japanese naval doctrine didn’t really think that Logistics was all that important. They’re focused on they’re focused on short term gains, because they know this war has got to be short in duration. If they can’t win this thing in a year or less, they’re they’re doomed, right? And the coin of the realm at this point in time, in terms of naval power, is the battleship. So really, what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to attack American morale we’re trying to and, yeah, we’re gonna sink a bunch of your battleships, and we don’t have that many, right? There’s only 15 or 16 in the total US inventory at this point in time. And so if you sink four or five of those, man, that’s tantamount to a national calamity there. So the goal is that they’re gonna bloody our Navy and make us basically say, you know, what the heck with this? We’re gonna go fight Germany, and we’ll let the Japanese have their, you know, their ill gotten gains in the Pacific. So it’s a total morale play. In that context, in that metal context, Are we really gonna throw in the towel because they blew up a bunch of our fuel tanks in Pearl Harbor. Oh, nobody, you know the American population. You, you, we’re, we’re the biggest oil exporter in the world at this point. You know, Texas floats on crude oil. Oh, they blew up some fuel tanks. You know, had bed. And it’s absolutely immaterial. And for the Japanese as well, their navy is oriented strictly around, what are we doing in terms of destroying enemy warships? If you’re not sinking anymore warships, you’re doing something wrong. So Logistics is just very much an afterthought. So it’s interesting, if you look at from cheetahs accounts, they interviewed him right after the war in October of 1945 and they asked him point blank in those interviews as part of the strategic bombing survey, they said, Why didn’t you guys go back and hit us again? Why didn’t you go after the fuel tanks? And his answer in October 1945 is, well, you know we had sunk, we knew we had sunk at least four of your battleships, which, you know, check the box in terms of what we were tasked to do. We didn’t know where your carriers were. That really was kind of worrisome. And, you know, at the end of the day, we thought we had fulfilled our mission. So we went home. Fast forward to 1963 when he’s giving interviews to Gordon praying, who’s the guy who wrote At Dawn We Slept, and was also a technical advisor for Torah. Torah Torah fuchida in 63 tells Gordon Prang. Oh, you know, when I was flying back from Pearl Harbor, I was mentally cataloging all of the shore facilities and, you know, fuel tanks and logistics stuff. So what fuchido wants you to believe is that I had this mental epiphany in the air where, you know, we’ve barely worked our way into item number three on the target list, but I know that if I just jump down to the bottom to item number six, that’s going to win the war for us, right? That’s the line he’s basically trying to sell us in this movie. It’s baloney. It’s all baloney. And I think what really happened is that interview in October of 1945 put the clue into Fujita head. They really thought the fuel tanks were kind of important. I wonder why that was. He’s a smart guy, a charismatic guy, and, lo and behold, you know, by 19 6318 years later, his narrative has turned around into a story that hands us Americans this, you know, the thing that we would expect to hear, and also makes fuchida out to be more intelligent and prescient than he actually was so but the bottom line is, because everybody has seen Tora, Tora, Tora, this whole fuel tank thing, and third attack wave is cemented in the collective American consciousness. Amount around this war and to this day, you know, even though I put empty articles out on it, and other people had to, you know, this whole notion of the fuel. Tank attack is still out there, because, of course, how many millions of people have seen Tora, Tora, Tora, as opposed to the, you know, the 10,000 folks, who’s, you know, read some nerd named Jon Parshall article on the fuel tank myth? Right? It’s, it’s an unequal contest, but that’s where we’re at.

Dan LeFebvre  1:10:17

Well, we’re trying to balance that out a little bit, maybe get a few more people to reach That’s right. It’s fascinating that you mentioned that though about the the Imperial Japanese Navy’s perspective on logistics, because you were just talking about earlier too, where the Americans didn’t think that the Japanese would be able to take this huge fleet and fuel them to get a get to where they did, and Japanese figured out how to do that, and so it would make sense then that okay, if we figured out how to do that, it’s only a matter of time before the Americans can too. So that’s probably why it’s not as important, like the ships are more important, just even from that perspective. I’m not a military strategist by any means, but I could, that makes sense to me.

Jon Parshall  1:10:57

Yeah, yeah. So again, yeah, it’s, it’s difficult to to put ourselves back in the heads of participants, you know what, 80 plus years removed, but that you’re exactly right. And there’s, there’s some arrogance on our part too. We also were very good at underwater fueling. We were the, you know, pioneers in the in that respect. And so we knew we could do it, and we were also, we also knew that we were better at it than the British. And so, you know, from our perspective, well, if, if the Brits can’t do it, there’s no way in hell the Japanese are able to do that kind of thing. So again, you know, we’ve got these kind of societal blinders on in terms of what their carrier force could actually do. And man, this is a real eye opener for us here on December 7.

Dan LeFebvre  1:11:43

Well, there’s another major thing that comes out of this movie, Torah Torah tour, that I want to ask you about at the very end of the movie, the line of dialog, and you already know what it is, but I’ll set it up for the listeners. It’s delivered by Admiral Yamamoto in the movie after he finds out about the whole blunder with the diplomats who failed to deliver their message on time. Here is the direct quote from Yamamoto in the movie. Quote. I had intended to deal a fatal blow to the American fleet by attacking Pearl Harbor immediately after Japan’s official declaration of war, but according to the American radio, Pearl Harbor was attacked 55 minutes before our ultimatum was delivered in Washington. I can’t imagine anything that would infuriate the Americans more. I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve. End quote, and that is how the movie ends. That last line is what we’ve I mean, it’s that’s really what people have done. But the beginning part sets up some of that context from the movie. So as we wrap up our discussion today, perhaps I’ve saved the biggest question for the end, how accurate is that Sleeping Giant quote from Yamamoto that we see in the movie?

Jon Parshall  1:12:51

Man, screenwriters really get, you know, they earn their money. That line is one of the most famous lines, I think, in almost any war movie, and there is absolutely zero written evidence that Yamamoto ever said it. So, yeah, there you go.

Dan LeFebvre  1:13:12

There’s it just knocked it down from that A plus plus plus plus plus plus all the way down to the today.

Jon Parshall  1:13:18

Yeah, good point. Actually, good point because, yeah, that I, there’s been a lot of speculation about that particular quote, and, you know, some of the nerds and I, you know, there aren’t that many biographies of Admiral Yamamoto. There’s only one that’s sort of the standard work that gets, gets quoted in in English. And yeah, if you, if you troll through a Gala’s biography of Yamamoto, you will not find that quote in there. He does say to several different people, there’s another sort of similar quote where he’s like, you know, if I, if I’m told to go to war against the Americans, I will run wild for the first, you know, six months to a year, but after that, I have no confidence of victory. That is a legitimate, legitimate quote. But, yeah,

Dan LeFebvre  1:14:06

I think the movie mentioned something like that briefly when I don’t remember it. Maybe it was Yamamoto, but early in the movie, was talking to Emperor’s like, how long can we survive a war? And he’s like, maybe a year after that, right? That kind of which, again,

Jon Parshall  1:14:18

you know, gets into this point that the Japanese go into this conflict understanding they’ve got to get it over with rapidly. You know? They’ve got to get us to the negotiating table as soon as possible. Which is why they’re trying to not only Pearl Harbor. There are two intended effects. As far as the Japanese are concerned. From a purely military standpoint, but they want to do is they want to knock the American battle fleet out of action so that it is not in a position to counter attack across the Central Pacific and go into the flank of all of their advances, which were heading south to grab the oil. Right? That’s, that’s the first thing you got to do, is cover your flag. But more important is we’ve got to crush America. American morale, so that they become so demoralized that they will be willing to come to the bargaining table. And from that standpoint, the way that they opened the war with what the American public perceived as being a dastardly sneak attack. You know that quote is right on the money. I mean, we were infuriated. And you know, you can say at that point, you know, the negotiated settlement Gambit is almost is dead on arrival at this point, because Roosevelt says in his address the following day to Congress, when he’s asking for a declaration of war, that the American people are going to win through to to complete an utter victory. Yeah, he’s almost spelling out the whole unconditional surrender thing that’s going to be absolutely clearly articulated starting in 1943 after the Casablanca conference. But from their very get go, he’s basically saying to the Japanese, we’re not negotiating with you guys. Yeah,

Dan LeFebvre  1:16:01

we tried that not happen again. You know,

Jon Parshall  1:16:04

this is what’s going to happen. We are going to dictate the terms of the end of this war we and only we and so, you know, buckle up because, because here we go. The other thing I would like to say before we wrap this up is that, you know, Pearl Harbor continues to be the source of conspiracy theories. You know that Roosevelt knew, Roosevelt, you know, deliberately got us into this war. And this is another aspect of of this battle that just won’t die. And again, there are clear analogs here between Pearl Harbor and 911, in that, I think we as Americans, being a very large, powerful country, just have difficulty wrapping our heads around when an undervalued, poor enemy somehow gets the drop on us, you know. And the truth of the matter is, of course, that nasty surprises are the or the currency of war. I mean, that’s that always happens, and sometimes even the poorer opponent out thinks you and we hate to admit that, right? So you look at 911, I had to be an inside job, you know, Earl harbor get the same thing just from a what do I want to say a simplicity standpoint, if you posit that FDR did want to get the us into a war against Japan, there were a lot easier ways of going about doing it than getting half of your battle fleet sunk and killing 2500 guys at Pearl Harbor, right? We knew that there were Japanese troop convoys at sea in, you know, the the China Sea, that was basically the waterway that runs between China and the Philippines. All you had to do, all you had to do was send one or two American destroyers out into those waterways from Manila and snoop around some of those Japanese troop convoys. I guarantee you the Japanese would have sunk those ships, and you’ve now got your Cass belly, okay, and you’ve killed 200 American boys, as opposed to 2500 and gotten rid of five battleships, two of them permanently. So I just think that the notion that FDR knew this was coming again, just given the hodgepodge of intelligence that we had, that’s nonsense. And furthermore, even if he had nefarious goals, there were much easier ways of accomplishing those nefarious goals than getting stomped on at Pearl Harbor.

Dan LeFebvre  1:18:47

Well before we do wrap up, there’s one, one thing I want to ask, because we talk about Torah. Torah. Torah today came out in 1970 We talked briefly about the other movie, Pearl Harbor, from 2001 31 years after this one that was still 23 years ago as we’re recording this in 2024 so I have a two part question for you. Do you think it’s time for another Pearl Harbor movie? And if so, let’s just say that they’re going to assume you hire you as the historical consultant. Yeah. How would you approach it differently? Yeah,

Jon Parshall  1:19:16

well, obviously the fuel tank myth is gonna go that’s got to invest a lot more in in CGI, right? I mean, really, what we, what I’d want to do is just have a better depiction of the attack sequences and a little bit more of the nuance around some of the, some of the traditional scapegoats, like Kermit Tyler, you know, let’s you know. But again, even within the context of Tora, Tora, Tora, which is a damn long movie, there’s always this difficulty in how do you convey nuance to an audience who only can really tolerate the introduction of so many characters and so. Many plot twists in the course of a two hour spiel. You know, it’s pretty tough to do.

Dan LeFebvre  1:20:04

It needs to be a series, is what you’re saying, Yeah, kinda,

Jon Parshall  1:20:08

you know, yeah. Turn it into a mini series that probably would, would, would go much better. Well,

Dan LeFebvre  1:20:14

thank you so much for coming on the show to separate fact from fiction. Movie. Torah, Torah, Torah. I guess I lied in the last question before I let you go. Actually, I have two more questions for you. The first is for listeners who have only seen the movie, I want to learn more about the true story. Where would you recommend they start? And then secondly, can you give us a peek into what you’re working on

Jon Parshall  1:20:31

now, you know, there’s a mountain of books on Pearl Harbor, and so I would say, you know, Walter Lords Day of Infamy remains very good from a narrative standpoint. I don’t have a copy of that up here. Gordon prangs, At Dawn We Slept. Still remains sort of a standard. You know, it’s pretty, pretty hefty, but if you want to get into it, that’s a good one. If you’re just going out to Hawaii and you’re going to tour Pearl Harbor, and you want a quick, much thinner, little trimmer, I would say, Mark stills Tora. Tora Tora. He’s using a lot of the latest research on the battle. He’s a really solid author. I recommend him highly if you’re interested in sort of the Japanese side of the battle. HP, Wilmots, Pearl Harbor. This is kind of harder to find, but he is working with a Japanese co author, a very fine naval historian, a guy named Arawa tomatsu, who’s really, really good. So this is a good one too, but in terms of the definitive multi volume series that is still in the process of being published, now, there’s this group effort by my friend Mike Wanger and some of his co authors who are using incredible photography from the battle. Mike does such good work in that regard, and he’s also really good with the Japanese sources. So this multi volume series that is coming out from Naval Institute Press, we’re still waiting for the volume that’s going to actually talk about the attack on the anchorage itself, but when it comes out, I think it’s going to be really wonderful, really definitive, because it really does dig into the Japanese sources. So yeah, Wenger, Bob Cressman and Jon divegilio, and also Sam Tanga is another, their fourth co author that they just roped into this project. These are tremendous in terms of what I’m doing. I have been working for the last 16 years on a new history of the year, 1942 basically talking about the entire war, Pacific Eastern Front, Mediterranean Battle of the Atlantic, the whole schmear, looking at how the Allies turned around their train wrecks during that year. Because the year starts out, it’s just a dumpster fire. You know, Pearl Harbor, calamity all across the Pacific, bad things happening in the eastern run. It’s just, it’s terrible. And yet, by the end of the year, with the battle of El Alamein, the landings in North Africa and torch our successes in Guadalcanal, and, of course, the counter attack around Stalingrad, that war has been turned on to an entirely new path. How did that happen? There’s a lot of stuff going on under the hood. So yeah, I will be publishing that book in the first quarter of 2026 and if you want to learn more about it, you can visit the website, at www 1942 book.com, and yep, sign up for the for the mailing list. I promise not to spam you, but give you occasional updates on how the book is progressing, but I’m looking forward to

Dan LeFebvre  1:23:35

getting it out. Fantastic. I’ll make sure to add a link to that in the show notes. Thank you again, so much for your time. Jon, appreciate it

Jon Parshall  1:23:40

Yeah, great to be here.