I don’t buy that. They should at least have been able to identify the signals from singles planes, a squadron or a full armada. How difficult could it be to train on proper identification with all that air traffic over Hawaii. I guess the same reasons meant that it would take a long time to protect the shipping at the US east coast. Even when they know the U-boats were coming.
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After writing it I was thinking about another explanation. Pilot training there are 5 hazardous human errors but a 6th one has been proposed which I think is a trouble maker.
Fear to speak up (out of embarrassment). When I had to cross a runway I wasn’t a 100% sure I had the clearance. I was thinking at first that I would look stupid in asking again but then I remembered this and I asked anyway. I had the clearance but experienced people found it really good I doublechecked. Hierarchal culture have far more trouble with people not speaking up, e.g. the lower ranked co-pilot,
Guess now in Hawaii early Sunday Morning at the end of you shift up a lonely mountain with new tech. There are some beeps which might be enemy planes but you are far away from Japan and and attack over the Pacific of this distance is unheard from. The planes might be B-17s. Will you yell the alarm and get up fighter support or be afraid that they will call you the idiot that woke everyone up for the next 6 months.
The latter depends on the “culture” of an organization. There are lots of organizations were managers will hold it against people who saw a risk that never materialized. Unfortunately it happens and most often with managers who say the opposite continuously. I think that can happen! Systems are great but they still depend on people. Here in 2-5 are the 5 other hazardous attitudes + Antidote, I think these are applicable to not just aviation:
PHAK Chapter 2 (faa.gov)
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I do not, in any way, criticizes the behavior of the guys at the radar and of Kermit Tyler (Whom I met in Honolulu in 2001). As you write, under the circumstances, they did what was logical in the moment.
I just wonder why the british experiences from the summer of 1940 was not transferred and implemented into the US way of doing things.
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Not Sure, most likely because the US was still neutral and I know e.g. from flight training in the US and UK that even the terminology is not the same.
Today it is still an issue as even in Afghanistan national laws prevented handing over /sharing information between international participants. That is what some veterans told me .
In 1944 they worked together intensely but that was 4 years later!
In hindsight they should and in hindsight the vacation paradise Hawaii in the middle of nowhere wasn’t the paradise it looked like in 1941. Planes only recently were able to fly into it. And the Japanese were mired in China and not dumb enough to take on the mighty US Navy in Pearl? That would be outrageously stupid, maybe some Japanese American spies would sabotage a plane but that is it!
PS I know the latter didn’t happen :-/
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The “not invented here” syndrome was alive and well in the 1940s as it is in tech companies today. British experiences could – and sometimes did – help US forces be better prepared, but in many cases, it wasn’t clear to US observers that the British practices were in any way better than their existing doctrine so there was no urgency to change.
It cut both ways, however, as the Royal Navy had to learn a lot from the USN when the British Pacific Fleet was formed … the US had learned the hard lessons from fighting the Japanese, while the British experiences fighting the Germans and Italians did not adequately prepare them for the different environments, different Japanese tactics and tendencies, and vastly longer and more complex logistical needs.
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Great points just a little add. I work with Change management and it is hard to get 10 people to work differently. Let alone train 100s of thousands to work with new procedures and ways of thinking. Doctrine means a way of working rammed into people so they know it by heart and can function with it after they have extreme stress. (like losing a lot of people in combat). Implementing a new doctrine take lots of effort and will incur the “not invented here” syndrome (but maybe we are also creatures of habit and don’t like change imposed on us anyway ;))
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I also don’t think there was any effort to teach best practices to new operators. During the war, the US would rotate many. Of their best pilots back to teach. I don’t think they did this universally but it might have been helpful. Also I don’t think they were officers or enlisted working to train with other countries then.
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For the US Army radar was still new, the unit was still in pre-operational training. Sunday morning and the more experienced members were not on duty. This was still peacetime and the most junior get the crap duties that meant Saturday night could not be enjoyed.
And they were expecting aircraft to arrive from the mainland.
The blunder was that senior leadership, in a time of tension, hadn’t developed clear standard operational procedures and hadn’t ensured that some more experienced people were part of the duty shift.
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Unfortunately it would not be the last time radar was ignored.
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