A new history of Pearl Harbor argues that one of the most famous “masterstrokes” of World War II was, in fact, Japan’s greatest self-inflicted disaster.
In Pearl Harbor: Japan’s Greatest Disaster, Pacific War historian and former U.S. naval intelligence officer Mark Stille contends that the December 7, 1941 attack was not the brilliantly planned, flawlessly executed surprise strike of popular memory, but a tactical disappointment, an operational failure and a strategic calamity that doomed Japan from the first day of the war.
Stille’s central target is the mythology that has grown around Pearl Harbor. He challenges the idea that war with the United States was “forced” on Japan by failed diplomacy, arguing instead that Tokyo’s leaders knowingly chose war despite recognizing the unfavorable balance of power. Negotiations, he writes, were largely a smokescreen while Japan prepared for a conflict it intended to start.
At the heart of the book is a sharp reappraisal of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, long portrayed as a reluctant warrior and strategic genius. Stille instead casts him as a hard-line nationalist whose “unhealthy obsession” with striking Pearl Harbor led him to bully a deeply flawed plan through a skeptical Naval General Staff—going so far as to threaten resignation on the eve of war.
Yamamoto, he argues, wildly misread American psychology, assuming that sinking several battleships would shatter U.S. morale and open the door to a negotiated peace.
On the operational level, Stille dissects the air and submarine attacks in detail. The supposedly devastating first wave underperformed its own planners’ expectations, while the second wave—conducted in worsening weather, heavy anti-aircraft fire and smoke—degenerated into what he calls a “total fiasco,” with poor target selection and wildly inflated postwar claims of hits.
A parallel submarine offensive, including midget subs sent into the harbor before the air raid, is described as an outright failure.
The book does not let American commanders off the hook. Stille accepts the broad consensus of ten U.S. investigations that found Admiral Husband Kimmel and General Walter Short gravely at fault for the island’s unpreparedness, even as he notes serious shortcomings in Washington’s oversight and imagination.
Despite the destruction on Battleship Row, Stille argues, the U.S. Pacific Fleet was far from crippled: the carriers were at sea, most damaged ships returned to service, and the U.S. Navy was back on the offensive within months at Coral Sea and Midway.
By transforming a regional resource war into a crusade after an “unprovoked” attack on American soil, he concludes, Japan guaranteed that the United States would fight on to unconditional surrender—foreclosing the very negotiated peace Tokyo needed to have any hope of success.
Guest:
Mark E. Stille is a retired U.S. Navy commander and naval historian specializing in the Pacific War. A career naval intelligence officer, he spent nearly 40 years in the intelligence community, with tours on the faculty of the U.S. Naval War College, on the Joint Staff, and aboard U.S. Navy ships.
He holds a BA in history from the University of Maryland and an MA from the Naval War College. Stille is the author of dozens of titles covering topics such as the Imperial Japanese Navy, carrier warfare, Midway, Guadalcanal, Leyte Gulf, and the broader U.S. Navy in World War II.
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This episode will be recorded on Thursday, December 4, 2025 at 12:30 p.m.
