[Milsurplus] Japan's Pearl Harbor Blunders

[Hue Miller]

'WWII Magazine'  Nov.-Dec. 2011, "PEARL: Japan's shocking blunders and how
they led to its defeat".  Interesting article which deflates the 
conventional
thinking about Japan's surprise attack. Seems the strategy was well enough
devised, but contingency planning not carried through, with rather poor
execution.  Just an example, attackers had report day before attack that
carriers were not at Pearl, but didn't carefully provide for this 
eventuality.
Strike commander Fuchida was to fire a flare from his plane if attackers
had achieved surprise, to go with the surprise plan. However, he thought
that few attackers had seen his flare, so he fired another, which was taken
to be a two-flare signal meaning, Americans already alerted. This lead to
a pell-mell scramble by all the Japanese planes to attack at once, rather
than in graduated waves as planned. Why didn't Fuchida just use the radio?
I don't know. Perhaps not all the Japanese radios were on the same channel,
and not all Japanese radios were multichannel. Fuchida at least had a 
working
long distance radio: his surprise attack report was received back at the
launch carriers, and in fact, all the way back in Japan.
-Hue Miller