Just about to finish up Alan Zimm's The Attack On Pearl Harbor. It's a little choppy, and repetitive in places, but it's still fascinating reading. The author is a former naval officer, and the bulk of the book is an extremely critical examination of every aspect of the Japanese attack, using modern-day Operations research methods and Naval War College rules of the time to analyze what went down on the morning of December 7, 1941. Based on his conclusions, the attack was badly planned, badly executed, and many of the "what-ifs" (a third wave could have wiped out the tank farms, Japanese pilots were superhuman, a midget submarine attacked the Arizona, sinking a ship in the channel would have prevented ships from entering and leaving, etc.) are pretty much BS.
Really, it's amazing how much the Japanese dropped the ball at Pearl Harbor. The author includes a "laundry list" of Japanese failures near the end, such as Fuchida's flare-gun fumble, the 60% dud rate attributed to the 800-kg AP bumbs, the utter lack of combined-arms tactics or operational flexibility built into the plan, the lack of SEAD tactics and poor use of the A6Ms, the mutually-interfering routes assigned to the torpedo bombers, ineffective communications, an inexcusably poor showing from the second-wave dive bombers, and the hair-brained use of General-Purpose bombs against battleships. Seriously, that's just scratching the surface of what this book covers. For all the hand-wringing, finger-pointing, and scapegoating you see in discussions of the American side, this is the first time I've ever seen a serious, in depth criticisms of the strategy, tactics, and planning used by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor.
|