When Strategy Bumps Its Head Against Tactics

 

---

  OCS Signalmen Go To War In The Philippines

 

Without Logistics, Tactics Are Impossible; Without Tactics, Strategy Is Meaningless

Editor’s Note: The article that follows is a revision and rewrite of transcribed content gathered by third parties from various "official histories" of World War II.  Please read our full disclosure below regarding these sources.

We all know the story of the Signal Corps’ role in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and the detection of the incoming sortie of airplanes by an SCR-270 radar set. Most know too of the incredible damage the Japanese did.

Beginning at 7:48 a.m. Hawaiian Time (18:18 UTC), the base at Pearl Harbor was attacked by 353 Imperial Japanese aircraft, including fighters, level bombers, dive bombers, and torpedo bombers. In two waves launched from six aircraft carriers, the Japanese managed to damage all eight U.S. Navy battleships, sinking four in the process. They also sank or damaged three cruisers, three destroyers, an anti-aircraft training ship and a minelayer.

Adding insult to injury as well as to make sure that our American military didn’t just pick up the pieces and carry on as usual, before returning to their carriers the Japanese proceeded to wreck further havoc on Pearl Harbor's infrastructure, by going after the base’s power stations, dry docks, shipyard, maintenance facilities, fuel and torpedo storage facilities, and the submarine piers. Then, not satisfied with even these accomplishments, they finished the job by destroying a further 188 U.S. aircraft. In all of this the Japanese killed 2,403 Americans and wounded 1,178 others.

On their side of the equation, we were able to shoot down only 29 aircraft and sink five midget submarines. For America, it was not a glorious day.

This we know. What many of us have forgotten however is that over the next seven hours the Japanese also mounted coordinated attacks on the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, Malaya, Singapore, Howland Island, and Hong Kong.

What’s the lesson in all of this? Since no one detected their coming attacks in sufficient time to do anything about it, it’s that having in place operational coast watches and surveillance operations to guard against surprise enemy attacks is an absolute necessity. If a country is going to operate bases and military facilities remote from its national territory, at a minimum, it has to be able to protect those facilities and the men that man them.

One would think that the U.S. military of 1941 would have known this. Apparently it did not, as all of these successful attacks by Japan proved.

Fortunately for America, while the attacks accomplished their intended goal, they turned out to be largely unnecessary. This is because unbeknownst to Yamamoto, who conceived the original plan, the U.S. Navy had decided as far back as 1935 to abandon a strategy of “charging across the Pacific towards the Philippines" in response to an outbreak of war, to instead adopt something they called "Plan Dog," which emphasized keeping the Imperial Japanese Navy out of the eastern Pacific and away from the shipping lanes to Australia, while the U.S. concentrated its military efforts on defeating Nazi Germany.

From a strategic standpoint the U.S. military’s decision to ignore the kind of damage a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the other bases could do, in lieu of achieving the higher strategic goal of winning the war in Europe, might have made sense; but it did nothing in terms of protecting either America, its military infrastructure, its servicemen or the civilian society those servicemen were charged with protecting. Instead, all of this was sacrificed to the cause. They—the military servicemen and civilians who lived in the places under attack—were left to defend themselves and to die for a dubious cause, by leaving the front door that formed America’s perimeter defense open, for the Japanese to enter.

What then should America’s military have been doing, and how should it have acted during that period of time from the moment Japan first prepared for these attacks, until it concluded its perfidy along the Pacific rim? Given that there was strategic military logic in America deciding to sacrifice the Pacific in order to focus its resources on Europe, how should it’s military have prepared for war against Japan, and how should it have protected the military assets and civilian societies that it was charged with protecting?

The answer is simple: more than building up a robust response capability like battleships and aircraft carriers (i.e. tactical capabilities) in places like Pearl and Manila, America should have built up a robust coast watch and observation capability in these areas. If there was no intention to fight off the Japanese, American military resources should have focused instead on tracking what the enemy was up to, and countering those activities whenever possible. If this had been done, then the tragedy that befell Pearl Harbor and seven other bases in the Pacific may been avoided.

Last month we penned an article that looked at one example of the kind of coast watch and enemy tracking and surveillance capability that America’s military operated in the Philippines. In it we looked at an Army Signal Corps OCS graduate from OCS Class 43-19, Lieutenant Leon Tinnell, and how he ran a coast surveillance and enemy tracking operation on Mindanao.

In his case he did a superlative job of tracking and reporting on Japanese activities and shipping in the area. The only problem was that he was assigned to do this work after the Japanese won the war in the Philippines and took over the islands, not before they attacked.

Why, we ask, was this kind of mission not mounted before the Japanese attack on Clark Field? Why was there no priority for the staffing of cadre and equipment such as SCR-270 radars, backed by a well spelled out mission, to do this?

Without such a mission being assigned, and the prioritization of that mission, the bases that the Japanese attacked at the beginning of the War Against Japan in 1941—from Pearl Harbor to Hong Kong—not to mention all of America’s and its military Allies’ resources—were nothing more than tempting sitting ducks for the Japanese. It’s no wonder they attacked.

The answer to these questions is that while there was an attempt made to do these things, it was poorly executed. For example, there was a military mission written to keep an eye out over the horizon for the Japanese… and the mission was staffed. Unfortunately a) the routines, protocols and SOPs that were needed to mount the mission were not fully fleshed out and, b) the equipment needed to accomplish the mission was not provided.

Mission written and assigned: yes. Manpower trained and assigned to the mission: somewhat. Equipment and supplies provided to support the mission: no.

One can see how the lack of providing all three legs to this stool, each of which was necessary if the mission was to be successfully accomplished, when not provided caused this chair to topple over when it was needed most. QED; the mission failed.

This despite the best and often heroic efforts of the Signal Corps men and Officers assigned to do this task.

One can see this by looking at the case surrounding the Japanese attack on Clark Field in the Philippines, on 8 December 1941. Looking at this small portion of the Japanese’s Pacific rim attacks, one can see how not having the equipment needed to accomplish the mission, and poorly laid out SOPs, helped contribute to Japan’s success.

- - -  

It is interesting to note that the Philippines was a focus of Army and Navy power for over forty years before the Japanese attacked on December 8, 1941. One would have thought then that the U.S. Navy would have had everything in order, as might be required to maintain its presence and defend its facilities from attack. Certainly it, and the Army elements that supported it, should have had all of the SOPs and equipment that might possibly be required to secure its facilities from attack.

It must have come as a surprise then to learn after the fact that the one o’clock warning message that General Marshall sent from the War Department in Washington to General Short in Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, about an imminent Japanese attack—which had also been copied to General Douglas MacArthur in the Philippines, commanding general of the United States Army Forces in the Far East (USAFFE)—mysteriously failed to arrive.

The fact was, this message was transmitted—in the signal sense of the term—and it did arrive. The problem was that it was transmitted in a format that labeled it as the “number two” message. That is, its priority was second among a series of four messages that went out to Panama, the Philippines, the Western Defense Command, and Hawaii. As will be seen, this second priority level meant that while the message was transmitted and arrived, it was placed in queue for validation behind higher priority messages.

Normally this would not have significantly affected the timing of MacArthur receiving it. However, today we know that other factors intervened to slow the message down in its delivery. Specifically, we know that the four messages left the War Department Message Center at 1205 hours, Washington time, and that while enroot other traffic to the Philippines pushed it out of the focus of the message operators. Before the portion of the message that was copied to the Philippines got there, word of the attack on Pearl Harbor had already begun arriving, via unofficial channels.

About 0300 on 8 December (it was then 0830, 7 December, in Hawaii) a Navy radio operator picked up Admiral Kimmel’s message to the fleet at Pearl Harbor, talking of an attack by Japan. About the same time a commercial radio station on Luzon picked up word of the attack, and both rumors and radio traffic in the Philippines radio net began to pick up and spread the news. In other words, scuttlebutt and rumors jumped the message queue, forcing legitimate message traffic off the air.

All of this can be blamed squarely on the Army and Navy’s radio operators in the Philippines, men who tracked the more interesting unofficial reports flooding the airwaves rather than doing their job of decoding and recoding legitimate traffic, and sending it on as may be required. All of this unofficial "noise" caused the commanders involved to lose focus on the task at hand... acting on the incoming War Department messages and any orders they might contain.

The military forces in the Philippines were thus fully aware of the attacks taking place in Hawaii, yet no one was focusing on what was about to happen in the Philippines. While on the morning of 8 December 1941 this became the norm, there were still a few local ground commanders who moved to place their men on combat alert, at a point in time that turned out to be only a few hours before sunrise and the start of the hostile action that was about to take place.

Through all this noise what no one seemed to realize was that with the Pacific Fleet crippled by the attack at Pearl Harbor, the next prime target must be the Philippines. Certainly this was true as far as the Far East Air Force (FEAF) was concerned.

Why the FEAF didn’t recognize this, no one knows. With little more thought than this, everyone should have known that the Japanese would launch an attack in short order against the major airfields and naval facilities of the Philippines. Considering that of these Clark was the only big first-class airfield for B-17’s in the islands, one could have guessed that Clark should have been made ready for an attack, and the planes dispersed, if nothing else.

Part of the cause of this confusion—and therefore lack of preparedness for the Japanese attack on the Philippines—lay in  the fact that Maj. Gen. Lewis H. Brereton, Commander of FEAF, had established his headquarters at Neilson Field, not Clark. Neilson Field was a relatively small facility, taken over from a commercial owner. It had poor communication with the rest of the FEAF command, and exercised little in the way of command and control over the FEAF operation.

The result was that radio and communication net operators relegated it in their minds to a backwater operation, barely part of the “system.” In their minds it was viewed in importance as equal to all of the other second rate command centers and air fields, such as, Del Monte on Mindanao. Within the communication traffic arena, this meant that they were far down on the list when it came to notifying them as to what was going on, even though the Commander's office was located there. For all practical purposes, as far as the radio operators were concerned Clark Field was the only command and communication center of importance on the island,  comparable to Hickam Field in Hawaii.  

---

 

**FACTS** 

Veterans Make America Better