Word: harbors
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Japanese military censors delayed that message for 10 hours, so it was almost midnight on Dec. 7 in Tokyo when U.S. Ambassador Joseph Grew sped with it to the Foreign Ministry. It was past 3 a.m. -- and Fuchida's bombers were within sight of Pearl Harbor -- when Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo, in full diplomatic regalia, reached the Imperial Palace. He found the Emperor listening to his shortwave radio. Togo read him the message and then the response that the government had already written for him. It said that peace was the Emperor's "cherished desire." This would "do well," Hirohito...
...fall back and try to lure the U.S. Pacific Fleet into the Inland Sea between the Japanese home islands of Honshu and Kyushu. But as early as spring 1940, Yamamoto remarked to one of his officers: "I wonder if ( an aerial attack can't be made on Pearl Harbor...
Others had suggested such a strategy but it had always been rejected as too dangerous. Pearl Harbor was too far away, too inaccessible, too well defended. Besides, the overall strategy of striking south toward Malaya and the Dutch East Indies now required all the navy's resources. Yamamoto nonetheless began in early 1941 to assemble some trusted lieutenants to make plans for Operation Hawaii, which he also named Operation Z, after Admiral Togo's historic banner at the battle of Tsushima...
...techniques of dive-bombing and torpedo bombing were still relatively new, and aerial torpedoes were almost impossible to use in water as shallow as Pearl Harbor. Filching an idea from a recent British torpedo raid against the Italian naval base of Taranto, Genda had technicians create auxiliary wooden tail fins that would keep torpedoes closer to the surface; others converted armor-piercing shells into bombs. But drilling was Fuchida's main task, and all summer his planes staged trial runs over Kagoshima Bay in Kyushu, chosen for its physical resemblance to Pearl. Only in September did Genda tell...
...General Douglas MacArthur, the retired Chief of Staff now luxuriating in the Philippines, was being recalled to active military duty and financed in mobilizing 120,000 Filipino soldiers. (Roosevelt had made another significant move that spring, when he shifted the Pacific Fleet's headquarters from San Diego to Pearl Harbor...