Early Warning (July/August 2001 | Volume: 52, Issue: 5)

Early Warning

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Authors: Thomas Fleming

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July/August 2001 | Volume 52, Issue 5

On February 1, 1932, the United States began its annual Grand Joint Army and Navy Exercises. As in earlier years, the participating soldiers and sailors were divided into “Blue” and “Black” teams. This year the goal was to test the defenses of the main American bastion in the Pacific. The Blue attackers, with the Navy’s two new carriers, USS Saratoga and Lexington, plus a formidable array of battleships and cruisers, were ordered to land a combined Army-Marine assault force on Oahu, Hawaii.

The Black defenders, equally well supplied with battleships and cruisers and submarines, were supposed to stop them. The Blacks also had imposing batteries of antiaircraft guns and more than 100 planes at their disposal.

For a decade, the Navy had been evolving Plan Orange, which envisioned a war between the United States and Japan. By 1932 the Japanese had the third strongest navy in the world, surpassed only by the United States’s and Great Britain’s. Already, Japan’s diplomats were dropping hints that the country resented the restrictions imposed by the arms-limitation treaties of the 1920s and planned to insist on absolute parity in the upcoming naval talks in London.

The Navy knew surprise attack was one of Japan’s fundamental strategies. The Japanese had begun their war with Russia in 1904 with a devastating strike on Port Arthur that annihilated the Russian Asiatic Fleet.

As the joint exercises got under way, the Blue force sent its two carriers and four destroyers ranging ahead of its battleships and cruisers, under the command of Rear Adm. Harry E. Yarnell. A blunt, salty 57-year-old from Independence, Iowa, Yarnell was one of the few American admirals with an avid interest in airpower. He had learned to fly in the 1920s and had commanded the USS Saratoga when she was launched in 1927. The plans for the Grand Exercises called for the Saratoga and Lexington to make an air attack on Hawaii, but everyone assumed the carriers would be detected and “sunk” by submarines or land-based planes long before they could get close enough—roughly 100 miles—to launch their planes.

Yarnell had other ideas. To evade Black patrol planes, he led his task force to a stretch of ocean, northeast of Oahu, where rain, squally winds, and lowering clouds were abundant in the winter. He also knew that the prevailing northeast wind sent this dirty weather swirling over Oahu to dump its moisture on the 2,800-foot-high Koolau range, which overlooked Pearl Harbor.

Not only was there a good chance that his ships could maneuver off Oahu undetected, but, once they launched their planes, the pilots could roar through the rain clouds and burst into clear, sunny weather over Pearl Harbor. The canny Yarnell decided to add one more touch to his plan. He would attack early on Sunday morning.

At nightfall on February 6, 1932, Yarnell’s Blue task force was plowing through