![]() ![]() The Admiral believed war with Japan was inevitable. “Laxness, lateness and subpar performance were felonies as far as Kimmel was concerned,” Twomey writes. Kimmel, who had spent four decades in the Navy and was commander of the Pacific Fleet at Pearl, was a respected by-the-book leader. They were overconfident, not complacent, too quick to dismiss Japan’s military as second-rate and blind to the threat of modern aircraft armed with torpedoes.Īdmiral Husband E. He writes sympathetically of their struggles to understand the growing danger. ![]() There was plenty of blame to go around but Twomey wisely focuses on a handful of key Americans. The Japanese saw it as a bulls-eye, “a barrel crammed with fish, tied up and stationary, without room to maneuver and only one way out, a narrow channel that was susceptible to blockage.” Navy, still wedded to archaic battleships, had only three carriers in the Pacific. But the Imperial Navy had understood the carriers’ value, building ten by the end of 1941. No one had ever massed aircraft carriers for a coordinated attack. ![]() ![]() An inveterate gambler, he bet he could lead six aircraft carriers and two dozen other warships halfway across the Pacific - despite the dangers of discovery and difficulties of mid-ocean refueling - to deliver a knockout blow at the start of the war. ![]()
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