Pearl Harbor. Of all the aspects of the attack on that 7 December 1941 Sunday morning-including its treachery, swiftness, daring, and skillful execution-none seems more compelling than the assault's total surprise. This element is even more striking, knowing that just prior to the attack, a U.S. Army radar site at Opana Point, on Oahu, tracked incoming aircraft, and the Navy discovered a foreign submarine at the entrance to Pearl Harbor. Add to this mixture that American code-breakers were reading Japanese diplomatic messages of all types, and it seems simply incredible that Japan could pull off a thorough surprise attack.
Yet it did precisely that. How Japan could do so has intrigued Americans ever since. Vast literature, written mostly from an American perspective, has poured out in the last six decades pursuing answers to the same questions: How did the Japanese arrive in secret, and why were the Americans caught so off guard? Not unexpectedly, these writings mostly dwell on American errors and shortcomings and usually treat Japanese planning and preparations for the strike in an abbreviated, sometimes dismissive manner. Even a standard history such as Gordon Prange's At Dawn We Slept concludes with 11 pages recounting American failures, while giving Japanese efforts three paragraphs, one of which attributes a major place to "unadulterated luck."1 Proponents of the Pearl Harbor conspiratorial thesis reduce the Japanese to mere puppets, acting unconsciously to the whims of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (and, according to a few, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill).2
