I am no expert on Pearl Harbor but read a couple books in the past years.
I do not blame the local commanders, except for the clueless MacArthur.
I recall that Billy Mitchell was on a much earlier trip to Asia, maybe with his wife. He predicted the day of week and the time of a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He predicted an attack the next day at Clark field. He was off by an hour.
I read a dry detailed book on how the US was financially strangulating Japan, by the Naval Institute Press. It was mostly new to me.
http://a.co/d/3Q5qCIG
Another book 1941 made it clear that all Japanese reports predicted they would lose any long war with the US.
In hindsight, if they were going to attack, the Japenese made a mistake by not going back and destroying the ship repair yards etc. at Pearl Harbor.
They also missed the fuel depot too, that and the dry docks being intact allowed the US to repair and reinforce. They also waited too long to follow up on it...and part of that can be laid at their invasion of the Philippine Islands...the Filipino people and the Americans stationed there were sacrificed to buy time for those repairs at Pearl and for the amped up war-time economy turning out new ships, planes, tanks and arms.
I don't know how detailed Mitchell's predictions were, there were a handful of people who tried to warn people of Japanese imperialism and of coming threats to America and bases overseas. Interestingly, his father served with Arthur MacArthur...fortunate for America he entered the Army and basically created American military air power, toured all over what would be future battle zones in Asia...and though the unfortunate Shenandoah affair ended his career in 1925 he continued to be a strong advocate of air power.
His predictions were a bit off, but interesting. I found this excerpt -
In April 1919, shortly after he was appointed chief of training and operations in the air service, he was invited by acting secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt to meet with Navy commanders. Mitchell told the admirals that unless the Navy developed an air force, its battleships were in danger of destruction from the air. He proposed building aircraft carriers and suggested arming planes with torpedoes, armor-piercing bombs and larger guns. In a New York Herald article in December 1919, Mitchell wrote, “Air power will prevail over the water in a very short space of time.” A few months later, he used elaborate charts to illustrate to military commanders how, in his opinion, 1,000 planes could be built for the same cost as one battleship.
Many of his words fell on deaf ears.
By the early 1920s, Mitchell was growing more concerned about the military budget; he thought too much money was being spent on ships and not enough on planes. Convinced that aircraft were key to the military’s future, Mitchell urged a demonstration of air power, pointing out that while an army fights on land and a navy fights on water, an air force could do battle over both. But Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels was having none of it. So convinced of the Navy’s superiority over planes, he warned Mitchell that if he tried to drop bombs on ships, Mitchell’s planes would be shot down long before they could get close.
In testimony before a congressional committee, Mitchell vividly described what would happen from direct hits on ships as bombs falling from the sky pierced decks and superstructures: blasts would create fires, killing everyone on the upper decks, breaking lights and throwing the ship into complete darkness below deck, disrupting all communication systems, filling rooms with poisonous fumes, causing shell shock to most on board, disrupting ammunition delivery systems and exploding anti-aircraft shells stored in ammunition compartments. His description eerily described the grisly scene on board the USS Arizona on Dec. 7, 1941.
In 1924, Mitchell toured Hawaii and Asia to inspect America’s military assets. After touring China, Korea, Japan, Siam, Singapore, Burma, Java, the Philippines and India, Mitchell wrote a 340-page report warning that the Asia-Pacific Rim could soon rival Europe in military might and America’s security depended on its foothold in the region. To Mitchell, however, Japan was the country that posed the greatest threat because of its growing military strength and its quest for external sources of oil and iron for Japanese industries.
In his 1925 book, “Winged Defense,” Mitchell detailed how Japan might attack Hawaii — starting at 7:30 a.m. with 60 Japanese pursuit planes destroying hangars and planes on the ground at Schofield Barracks, followed by 100 bombers striking Pearl Harbor’s naval base.
Though Mitchell correctly predicted the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he did get some things wrong.
He thought the Japanese would attack using land-based air power with submarines transporting airplanes in crates for assembly at an airfield on the northern Hawaiian island of Niihau and bombers flown from Midway Island. He undervalued aircraft carriers, contending that the large ships could not operate efficiently nor launch a sufficient number of aircraft for a concentrated operation. Also, Mitchell didn’t need a crystal ball to predict a Japanese offensive at 7:30 a.m. since military commanders often favor morning attacks.https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/special-reports/pearl-harbor/2016/12/06/milwaukees-billy-mitchell-predicted-pearl-harbor-attack/91625442/The sub thing is interesting, late in the game the Japanese I-400's came along, and four of these 3-bomber carrying boats set sail for a mission to bomb the Panama Canal but the mission was scraped because of the fall of Okinawa and they were instead dispatched for a campaign at Ulithi Atoll where American carriers and others were gathering for a push against their home islands.
Mitchell should have been aware of all aviation pioneers...Capt. Washington Irving Chambers who made it possible for Geroge Ely to demonstrate shipboard tack of and landing possibilities, pioneers in naval aviation like Kenneth Whiting who became the first commander of the Langley (CV-1) and another Wisconsin boy who would be an essential leader - Marc Mitscher, who gained fame with a trans-Atlantic crossing, was a vociferous advocate of air power along with Admiral William Moffett while stationed in inter-war Washington DC and interestingly enough resisted Mitchell's call for a single unified aviation command...which was fortunate as it could have killed carriers and naval aviation that largely won the pacific.
Mitchell himself demonstrated quick effectively how planes could destroy ships, and the pioneers of naval aviation took note and responded logically to the threat by creating the means to conduct offensive and defensive operations.
The economic embargo measures put on Japan before the war as a response to aggression in Asia, particularly China may be viewed as counter-productive but only from the standpoint that the resulting diplomatic negotiations were doomed from the start. In hindsight it is pretty obvious a militant Japan would expansionist and that an isolated America would be complacent to a vague far away threat from an assumed backward nation. Enough people warned, and if it was FDR's desire to stoke Japanese anger to get America into a war with the Axis...well, just fuels the conspiracy theories, yes?
There were warnings by a one-time
crime reporter, naval intelligence officer, FBI agent and cartoonist and no larger warning was issued than that of
British author Hector Bywater in his 1925 novel "The Great Pacific War". It seems clear the latter, while off on several technical points, was an influence on Yamamoto, in combination with his own experiences in America and of the Battle of Taranto of November 1940 in particular.