Pearl Harbor by Gordon W. Prange

Author:Gordon W. Prange
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781480489493
Publisher: Open Road Media

PART III

FIELD COMMANDERS AND OPERATORS

CHAPTER 20

“A Sentinel on Duty”

Nature of command responsibility—Short’s background—Appointment to Hawaii and briefings—Opinions of fellow officers—His staff—Methods of operating—His chief of staff—Short’s failure to understand his mission—Dependence upon Navy—The Hawaiian Department well equipped

The commanders on Oahu made their share of blunders which contributed to the debacle. By the nature of their respective positions as Commander in Chief, U.S. Pacific Fleet, and Commanding General, Hawaiian Department, Kimmel and Short would have received the credit had their organizations discovered and defeated the Japanese task force, or at least made it pay dearly for victory. By the same token, they could not avoid blame for the surprise and defeat of December 7, 1941. The armed forces hold the officer at the top ultimately answerable for everything that happens in his command.*

This concept presupposes that officers selected for command positions, especially at high levels, will be individuals of sufficient intelligence, experience, and initiative to run their commands within broad guidelines and without unnecessary kibitzing from the next higher echelon. In Stimson’s words,

we pick the best men we can for theater commanders and assign their mission. The manner of accomplishing the mission is their responsibility and we back them up. We consider it unsound to attempt to meddle with or make meticulous supervision of theater commanders in the performance of their mission, which they in the field are better able to judge from firsthand contact.1

Admiral Ingersoll spoke in a similar vein for the Navy Department:

A commander in chief is considered by the Navy as almost a viceroy out in his own field. They tell him in broad terms what he is supposed to do and they do not bother him with asking him how he is going to do it, or keep bothering him with whether he has done it. …

When you put a commander in chief out there you want to leave him, as far as possible, free to do his job, and you trust that he is going to do it, and you help him in such ways as you can, where there are things of which he has no knowledge himself.2

In the crisis-starred autumn of 1941, the War and Navy departments could have kept closer tabs on their “viceroys” in Hawaii and been more generous with information. Yet one cannot blink away the fact that in the ultimate test Kimmel and Short did not reveal themselves as the strong, imaginative leaders Washington expected them to be.

Short had received a direct commission in 1902, the same year he graduated from the University of Illinois, his native state. He pursued the usual course of a regular infantry officer of the early twentieth century in a variety of locations and jobs, many in the area of training. He performed well with troops in World War I, and after the Armistice was one of the hardcore group that remained overseas until July 1919. Upon his return, he resumed his upwardly mobile career. He became a brigadier general in 1937, and after two stateside command assignments, the Army called him to Hawaii.

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