Pearl Harbor: The Seeds and Fruits of Infamy - Ludwig von Mises ...

542 Pearl Harbor: The Seeds and Fruits of Infamy
the actual warnings sent to Kimmel revealed little of this growing
sense of emergency. 185
In Hawaii, Kimmel “put into eff ect all the security measures
that I thought we could put into eff ect, and still continue the
training at anywhere near a satisfactory condition.” Th e “war
warning” of November 27 as well as the warnings he had received
earlier, Kimmel said, “followed a pattern that had continued for
some time.” He “felt that before hostilities came that there would
be additional information, that we would get something more
defi nite.” When the attack actually came without his having heard
anything more specifi c, he
was inclined to blame myself for not having been much smarter
than I was. But when I found, some time later, that the information
was, in fact, available in the Navy Department; that
the information which, if it had been given me, would have
changed my attitude and would have changed the dispositions,
I ceased to blame myself so much. 186
Hindsight is always better than foresight. Yet Kimmel
believed that, if he had known what was in the November 26
State Department note to the Japanese government and that the
Navy Department thought this note “would prove entirely unacceptable
to the Japanese government,” his outlook would have
been aff ected “very considerably.” 187 Moreover, the ships-in-harbor
“messages inquiring as to the disposition of ships inside Pearl
Harbor itself, wanting to know which ones were in areas, the
report of the Japanese Consul giving in detail the courses taken
by those in the harbor, would have indicated to me that they [the
Japanese] were not only interested in the ships that were in the
185Ibid., pp. 655–57.
186Ibid., p. 659.
187Ibid., p. 660.