[Milsurplus] Japan's Pearl Harbor Blunders

[Bruce]

Hello Hue,

To save weight, many Japanese aircraft did not have any radios installed.

73,

Bruce WA8TNC
==============
Hue Miller wrote:
> '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