John Leo's Ahistorical Take On Pearl Harbor

John Leo is a contributing editor for U.S. News & World Report, and his column on the state of our culture appears weekly in 140 newspapers across the country. Leo has covered the social sciences and intellectual trends for Time magazine and the New York Times. He is also the author of two books: Two Steps Ahead of the Thought Police and a book of humor, How the Russians Invented Baseball and Other Essays of Enlightenment. In the September 27, 2004, issue of U.S. News & World Report Leo wrote one of his typical polemical essays—"The Internment Taboo"—and proclaimed: "Evacuation was a reasonable step taken under extreme wartime pressure." Leo theorized that the internment of the Japanese during WWII was justified because the Pearl Harbor disaster had rendered the U.S. defenseless. Leo would create internment camps for Muslims in 2004 because 9/11 has rendered the U.S. defenseless. If this is (fair & balanced) cant, so be it.

[x Historiblography]
Columnist John Leo Gets Pearl Harbor Wrong
by Chris Bray

John Leo can't have the vaguest knowledge of history if he believes that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor destroyed "most of the U.S. fleet," leaving the Pacific Ocean "a Japanese pond."

The Navy offers this information on the attack. Visit that page, and you learn that there were more than 90 ships anchored at Pearl Harbor, and 21 were damaged or destroyed. "American technological skill," the Navy site explains, "raised and repaired all but three of the ships sunk or damaged at Pearl Harbor." Among the three ships not recovered were the USS Oklahoma, "raised and considered too old to be worth repairing," and the "obsolete" USS Utah, "considered not worth the effort." One hundred and eighty-eight aircraft were destroyed -- a serious loss, but nowhere near crippling to a nation with the industrial capacity of the United States.

Most significantly, the Navy reports, the "Japanese success was overwhelming, but it was not complete. They failed to damage any American aircraft carriers, which by a stroke of luck, had been absent from the harbor. They neglected to damage the shoreside facilities at the Pearl Harbor Naval Base, which played an important role in the Allied victory in World War II."

After the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor, an Army report explains, the Imperial Japanese Navy then "dispatched large forces to seize the Philippines, Malaya, and the Netherlands East Indies and prepar[ed] plans for new bases from which to strike Australia and India." And the U.S. military knew exactly what the Japanese Navy was doing, since the U.S. had broken Japan's codes. The only attack of any significance on the western United States was an attack on the Aleutian Islands, which was met -- to go back to the Navy report -- with task force of "5 cruisers, 14 destroyers, and 6 submarines." This was, you'll note on the Navy website, the task force assembled for one of the Pacific Fleet's second-priority missions.

Compare the description offered by the Navy and the Army to the picture painted by John Leo: the Pacific Fleet destroyed, the west coast undefended, and the Japanese Navy bent on attacking the west coast.

Pure, ahistorical, unsupported fantasy. Like everything else in Mr. Leo's column. A correction, and an apology, are warranted.

Chris Bray is one of three graduate students in the UCLA history program who blog in Historiblography. The blog contributors are in different fields with different ideas. Bray's field is late-19th and early-20th century U.S. history.

Copyright © 2004 Chris Bray