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WWII seminar to examine why Pearl Harbor attack  surprised strategists 

Retired general will lead seminar about Japan’s infamous 1941 air strike.

Aware that the Japanese likely were on the way to invading the Philippines, U.S. strategists were surprised by the air attack on Pearl Harbor.

Contributed photo Aware that the Japanese likely were on the way to invading the Philippines, U.S. strategists were surprised by the air attack on Pearl Harbor.

ENLARGE PHOTO

Contributed photo Retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Paul Cooper will be the keynote speaker Nov. 5 during a World War II conference.

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By Tom Stafford, Staff Writer Updated 1:15 AM Monday, October 24, 2011

When the United States stopped shipping oil and other war-related material to Imperial Japan in 1941, the leaders of both nations knew war was inevitable.

“We expected Japan to attack,” said retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Paul Cooper.

Retired Gen. Billy Mitchell even predicted the attack would come on Sunday and came within a half hour of naming the time, Cooper said. The catch, said Cooper: “We thought it was going to be in the Philippines.”

As the keynote speaker for the Clark County Historical Society’s World War II Conference on Nov. 5, Cooper will discuss the attack on Pearl Harbor nearly 70 years ago and the Doolittle bombing raid on Japan that the U.S. responded with.

Perhaps more important, the general will discuss specifics of the “origin and impact” of the events, putting the front page news into historical and geopolitical context.

Key questions

Cooper retired in 2002 as commander of the Air Force Reserve’s 445th Airlift Wing at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, bringing to end an award-winning 35-year career in which he held commands in the U.S., Bosnia and the Middle East during Operation Desert Storm.

His commands and more than 12,000 hours in the air propelled his interested in military aviation history, and upon retirement, Cooper completed a master’s degree in the subject — an education he puts to use while teaching senior citizens at the University of Dayton and in three-hour tours he conducts as a volunteer at the United States Museum of the Air Force at Wright-Patterson.

As much as his studies have helped him accumulate knowledge, they have led him to focus on essential questions.

“I think, how do these things actually work?” Cooper said.

He’ll encourage those at the seminar to do the same.

Rising Japan

Cooper said the Japanese defeat of the Russian fleet in 1905 represented the first time in modern history an Eastern power had triumphed over a Western power.

From that time on, Imperial Japan began pursuing a Western model of expansion, including taking over former German colonies after World War I, during which Japan allied itself with Great Britain.

The need for raw materials to power its industries and Japanese desire to emulate the Western model of colonial and territorial reach accelerated when Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931 and mainland China in 1937.

That expansion was helped, in part by European powers’ concern over the rising and rearming of Germany in the 1930s, a concern that became a preoccupation when Adolf Hitler’s armies invaded France and the low countries in 1940.

Cooper said an isolationist United States “does not want to get into this dreadful war” spreading across the globe.

But Americans found reports of Japanese atrocities in China disturbing, a reaction heightened by pro-China sentiments generated by Pearl Buck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Good Earth,” released in 1931 and made into a popular movie in 1937.

With the United States, then an oil exporter, providing Japan with more than 60 percent of its oil, Cooper said, “we started wondering if we’re helping the Japanese war machine attack China.”

But when the decision to stop helping them arrived, Americans asked themselves “What will they do?”

Out of thin air

When the Japanese fleet steamed into the Pacific on Nov. 28, 1941, with enough ships to accommodate 50,000 troops, the United States knew the answer was on the way.

But strategists thought it would be the invasion of much of Southeast Asia, Indonesia and the Philippines was on, Cooper said.

Hawaii they considered impregnable.

As for an air attack, until it came, it seemed impossible.

Until the bombs started dropping that Sunday morning aircraft carriers were seen “strictly as defensive” tools, Cooper said. Battleships, he said, were expected by many to be the decisive tools of the naval war.

Among American military thinkers only the discredited former Army Gen. Billy Mitchell correctly foresaw the true offensive potential of aircraft that came to light during World War II, Cooper said.

“He made a prediction that the rising military empire of Japan would attack the United States and they would attack it on a Sunday morning,” Cooper said. “He was a half hour off.”

Cooper said the plan of Harvard-educated Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto was based on the Japanese strategic need to take the United States effectively out of the war so that the Japanese could capture areas with oil reserves needed to power the Imperial war machine.

The ‘plane’ truth

Among the “why” questions Cooper explored involved why American planes were so conveniently grouped together for the Japanese when they attacked Pearl Harbor.

With 160,000 Hawaiians of Japanese ancestry living in the islands, the American military was worried about sabotage and grouping the planes together so that they might be more easily defended.

In hindsight and in context of apologies issued to loyal Americans of Japanese descent wrongly interned during World War II, it seems a moral lesson in racial intolerance.

At the time, however, heightened fears of a “fifth column” of homeland sympathizers was at work even in Europe and provided the title for Ernest Hemingway’s play set in the Spanish Civil War that preceded World War II.

Cooper finally said the end of the war the United States was brought into by the Pearl Harbor attack was as surprising as the attack itself.

“No one thought a war would be fought to unconditional surrender,” he said. In past wars, the great powers had often fought to stalemates, then negotiated territorial and financial claims in a settlement.

To the man who likes to raise questions, there’s no question that the die-or-be-shamed ethic of Imperial Japan’s military culture changed that aspect of modern history.

Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368.