The Pittsburgh Press (February 4, 1942)
Roberts Report
By Al Williams
Japan must be bombed to defeat.
Pearl Harbor is the most humiliating disaster – military and naval – ever suffered by American armed forces. And the Roberts Board of Inquiry report on that disaster – a whitewashing vindication of brass hatism does not meet the full needs.
That report told us little we didn’t know or sense as soon as the military and naval success of the Japs against Pearl Harbor was flashed to the American people. We knew that the local commanders – one general and one admiral – had been asleep on their jobs, like sentries asleep on posts.
It’s true that the Roberts Report told us a lot of harassing and almost unbelievable things about how frightfully delinquent and unprepared the Army and Navy were to meet the potentialities of modern war. The Roberts Report told us of anti-submarine and anti-tornado nets across the entrance to Pearl Harbor that had left open. It told us of the inexplicable delay of about one hour and 25 minutes between the destruction of a Jap submarine in the inshore coastal waters of Hawaii before a general “alert” was sounded.
Insufficient forces
In brush-odd paragraphs, it told us:
…there was a deficiency in the provision of materiel [guns, planes, anti-air detection machinery] for the Hawaiian area.
It relates how:
The fleet… was not charged with the defense of Pearl Harbor…
…that…
…insufficient forces were available to maintain all the defenses on a war footing for extended periods of time [five-day war?].
Unfortunately, the Japs planned a seven-day-a-week war.
It continues:
The national situation permitted only a partial filling of these requirements.
The report states that the Secretaries of the Army and Navy and their staffs communicated with one another and supplied all the files of correspondence to the Roberts Board; that all kinds of general recommendations from Washington had been sent to local Army and Navy forces in the Hawaiian area (without one check up to see if those recommendations ha been received, much less acted upon). It states that Secretary Knox had written a warning that the Japs might attack Pearl Harbor – by air – recommending:
…the revision of joint defense plans with special emphasis on the coordination of Army and Navy operations against surprise aircraft raids.
(There is no evidence that the Secretary followed up this correspondence to see what had been done about revising the Army and Navy joint defense against surprise aircraft attacks).
The report tells how one warning after another out of Washington had supplied information pointing to the likelihood of Jap attacks against the Philippines, Trai, the Kra Isthmus or possible Borneo. This is complete evidence that the High Command in Washington was all set for the old type of warfare. The deep-seated, stubborn opposition of the Navy and Army high command to aviation – except as in an auxiliary capacity to land and sea forces – which is well known to the American public, all this led to the statement:
Without exception, they [the local commanders] believed that the chance of such a raid while the Pacific Fleet was based upon Pearl Harbor were practically nil.
Brass hats make mistake
There’s the real key to the Jap surprise at Pearl Harbor. The local commanders, Army and Navy, reflecting what the brass hats had so long thought and planned, just didn’t believe the Japs, or anyone else, would date to attack a base defended by a fleet. Yet British, Nazi and Italian airpower had attacked and destroyed sea power bases in Europe. That was all different – that couldn’t happen in Hawaii!
What the Roberts report didn’t tell us is that plans for joint coordination of the Army and Navy are formulated by the General Board in Washington, composed of high-ranking Army and Navy officers.
Failure and lack of coordination of the Hawaiian Army and Navy forces was the real reason for the Pearl Harbor disaster. Oh, certainly, the local commanders “slept.” But didn’t the Army and Navy General Board in Washington sleep, too?
One general and one admiral are the goats. Of course they were guilty, but these two men are the products of a system. And it is the system which licked us at Pearl Harbor.