The Japanese organizers had hoped for a knockout punch when they attacked Pearl Harbor 80 years ago, but one historian says it most likely didn't work out that way.
After just an hour and 15 minutes, 353 Japanese planes attacked in two waves, leaving behind 2,403 American dead, nearly 200 U.S. aircraft destroyed, and 19 U.S. Navy ships damaged.
Ian W. Toll said in a phone interview that it was all for nothing.
He believes that Japan lost the war in 1941.
Toll was the author of the acclaimed "Pacific War Trilogy" which included interviews with 300 Pearl Harbor veterans in 2006 and 2007, and he said that Japan should never have attempted a dawn raid on Pearl Harbor.
He said that attacking Pearl Harbor the way they did was a mistake.
It's difficult to attack.
The architect of the Pearl Harbor attack had the same thoughts.
One of the few naval men in Japan at the time opposed war with the United States. He knew a raid would cause a lot of anger in America. He knew that it would overwhelm Japan.
Toll quotes Yamamoto in his book as saying that Japan lacks the national power for a naval race with America.
At Harvard University, Yamamoto was learning to speak English. He witnessed America's abundant natural resources as well as its people's determination during the Great Depression.
The U.S. Pacific fleet was anchored at Pearl Harbor and Yamamoto proposed a single punch to the gut.
"We should decide the fate of the war on the very first day," he said.
Toll said he hoped the raid would have such a devastating impact on American's psyche that American leaders would request a truce with Japan.
Toll said there was no chance of that happening. The attack on Pearl Harbor enraged the American people, as every schoolchild knows. We didn't stop until we had achieved total victory over Japan after the unanimous vote in Congress the next day.
What if?
Franklin D. Roosevelt used the phrase "date which will live in infamy" when he asked Congress for the declaration of war.
What if the Japanese carriers had launched a third wave of planes, targeting strategic sites such as oil storage tanks, key repair bays, and dry dock facilities?
What if the planes had caught America's two fleet aircraft carriers in the harbor? America's future war efforts in the Pacific depended on the carriers. Imagine if the U.S. Navy had to abandon Pearl Harbor and start operations from California.
Toll attended a "what if" panel discussion at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, where he and others contemplated the various scenarios that could have happened had history been different.
If the American fleet carriers had been at Pearl Harbor, the war would have been stretched out a bit, possibly into 1946 or 1947. He said that it would have altered the war against Japan.
The Battle of Coral Sea would not have happened if the Japanese had not landed at Port Moresby. It's possible that the Japanese wouldn't have launched their attack on Midway if they'd known that the real goal was to destroy our carrier fleet.
Toll said that none of it would have mattered.
If the Japanese had sunk every ship at Pearl Harbor and destroyed every plane in the Hawaiian Islands, our economy would have been 10 times larger than theirs. The United States would have reacted in a unified sense of rage and purpose if we had begun building this enormous new fleet earlier.
'Utter chaos'
The morning of Dec. 7, 1941, a majority of the people of Joplin were on their way to church. It would take hours more for area residents to learn about the attack and the death it caused.
Men born and raised in the area were in the thick of things that morning.
Walter Roberts was the first man from Joplin to die in World War II. He was on the ship when a bomb went off, causing it to sink. More than 900 bodies are entombed on the ship.
Carl Christiansen is a resident of Columbus, Kansas. The 19-year-old was about to leave the ship after the air raid began but hesitated when his brother, Edward, left his side and went below deck to retrieve the item from his bunk. Edward did not survive the ship's destruction.
The attack on Hickam Field began when Brian Lengquist was stationed there. He thought the noise and explosions were a drill for the Army Air Force. He looked out a window and saw the explosions and said to himself, "This isn't the Navy." He told The Joplin Globe that it was chaotic. He rode out of the raid after taking shelter.
Dick Ferguson was standing in the battalion leader's office when the Japanese planes appeared. A friend ran into the office screaming for the keys to the rifle rack. A Japanese bomb blew off the magazine of a destroyer in the harbor. Ferguson's friend, who had just asked him for the keys, was killed when a 5-inch shell launched into the air by the detonation landed nearby.
Fred Russell Jr., a future Carthage resident, was an 18-year-old signalman on the destroyer the USS Conyngham who looked up and saw planes overhead. He watched as the enemy pilots hit the American cruiser. During the attack, Russell would carry his weapons from below deck to the gun crews.
The Oklahoma capsized after enemy torpedoes pierced the battleship's hull. He was alive. More than 400 others did not.
Isolation ends.
The Pearl Harbor raid ended America's love affair with it and made the rest of the world's problems worse. Most Americans felt like Hitler's crusade against France, England and Russia was a European problem and not a big deal. The fight against Hitler was a noble cause that needed the attention of the Americans, but the memory of World War I and the Great Depression made this stance hardened.
"In the fall of 1941 the isolationist movement in this country was in some measures growing even stronger", Toll said, "so you had this very strong isolationist sentiment in the country, particularly in the Midwest." It had strength in the people, in both parties, and in the press.
The situation suddenly changed during the early hours of December 7, 1941.
The most important outcome of Pearl Harbor was the change that it brought about in this country, according to Toll. He said that people tend to think about the Japanese attack in military terms, but it was the impact on America that proved the tipping point. Toll said that the nation was unified after that.
Lloyd Tillock said he felt "hot" after learning about the Pearl Harbor raid. Tillock and Whaley went to a recruiting station in downtown Joplin the following morning. The doors opened at 8 a.m. and the two men were the first in line. Hundreds of others would follow in their footsteps in the days and weeks to come. Tillock told the Globe that the two men chose the Navy because of Pearl Harbor.
He was on his way to the Great Lakes Naval Training Center in Chicago less than 48 hours later. He was assigned to the William P. Biddle. The "Willie P" participated in seven invasions over the next four years.
The war ended when the two atomic bombs were dropped on the Japanese home islands. Tillock settled back down on the farm in Sarcoxie, where he had left things off four years earlier.
It was the ultimate victory.
The Japanese military underestimated the rage that erupted from Americans after the Pearl Harbor attack.
It was one of the worst decisions ever made to go to war with us. It resulted in the complete defeat of Japan and millions of deaths among the Japanese people in less than four years.
