Earlier Saturday, a navy whaleboat had eased away from the officer’s landing in Southeast Loch and made for the battleship California. It carried a piece of paper and Edwin Layton. The early morning was soothing, with scattered clouds; the warship ahead was beautiful, powerful, looming larger as the launch closed the gap. The California flew the flag of Admiral Pye, the second-highest-ranking officer in the fleet and somewhat of a consigliore to Kimmel, who wanted Pye’s opinion about the paper Layton carried.

It was a message from Manila, from Admiral Hart, who was eighteen and a half hours deeper into Saturday than was Oahu. Some three dozen Japanese transports, escorted by twenty-eight warships, had been sighted surging around the tip of Indochina and into the Gulf of Siam, Hart reported. Lying directly ahead of them, only hours of sailing away, were the coasts of Thailand and British Malaya. To Layton, this was it. The war was on. The only remaining, and oft- debated, question was whether “they would leave us on their flank as a menace,” Layton said, or attack the American airfields and naval installations in the Philippines to snuff the threat of retaliation for their invasions elsewhere.

Tommy Hart, as noted, thought they would. Layton was inclined that way, too: “The Japanese have rarely left a strong enemy in an immediate flank.” But aboard the California, Pye demurred. The Japanese would skirt the Philippines, the sage thought, for the same pragmatic reason endorsed by so many in the navy: America was just too muscular. Why would they pick a losing fight?

When Layton returned and relayed the gist, Kimmel “looked at me in the way he could look—right straight through you—and he snorted.” He did that, “snorted like a horse,” when he heard some- thing of dubious validity, Layton knew. Once upon a time, the admiral believed what Pye did about America’s being too intimidating to fight, but the snort suggested he now felt as Layton did, that the Japanese would indeed hit the Philippines to defuse a danger to their southern operation.

Of course, the Pacific Fleet was on the Japanese flank, too—much farther away, yes, but also much more powerful than anything in the waters of the Philippines. The Americans had advanced their great armada to Pearl to serve as a holstered threat, a curb on distant imperial aggression, never having wondered whether the Japanese might instead regard it as a bull’s-eye they had to hit, an impediment to be overcome, just as the depth of the harbor was.

Kimmel and his men still possessed no incontrovertible evidence of onrushing Japanese raiders. Sound Military Decision urged commanders to credit the enemy “with the possession of good judgment,” not rash instincts, and an attack on Oahu still seemed an astonishingly dangerous, if not logistically impossible, thing to try. The admiral’s threshold still had not been met. An attack did not seem “probable,” only remotely possible. The war was still going to open elsewhere.

At the meeting at the Submarine Building on Saturday, the leading officers of the Pacific Fleet opted to stand pat, to keep training in anticipation of their offensive missions. Kimmel encouraged and expected dissent, and “I had no advice from any one of them—I think I am fair in stating that—to take any measures other than the ones that we had laid down,” he said. He was a man who liked things to stay as he had planned them. And so, the long-distance patrols that civilians on the mainland had been told for months were flying from Oahu did not now begin, not even in a limited way, thereby leaving the admiral blind by his own choice. The battleships and cruisers remained inside Pearl rather than sailing to safety. The level of readiness aboard anchored ships was not elevated.

It was a gamble, as much as Roosevelt’s gift of American planes to other countries was a gamble, as much as Yamamoto’s thrust to Oahu was. The memory banks of those at Pearl—and those in Washington—contained no solid images or estimates of the harm that could be inflicted on the fleet’s men and their ships if the Japanese caught them inside the harbor. Martin and Bellinger had spoken of the damage possibly being great enough to threaten planned operations in the Western Pacific, and Frank Knox had suggested it could be a “major disaster.” But nothing systematic had been compiled, no tables of projected losses if this many or that many battleships or carriers were surprised at their moorings. To estimate such damage, the size and potency of an attacking force must be estimated first, and while one report during the summer had mentioned six carriers, no American could really imagine the destructive punch of hundreds of warplanes delivered from the sea, because there was no precedent for such a thing. Navy minds weren’t there yet. Taranto, after all, had been raided by only a single British carrier. And while torpedoes were dangerous weapons, they needed water deeper than Pearl’s. Or so the fleet believed. All in all, there was a sense that nothing truly bad could happen under the sun of Oahu, even if the Japanese did show up. “I never believed that an air attack on Hawaii, on Pearl Harbor, would result in the destruction of the Fleet,” Kimmel said.

Besides, he felt he held an ace. Washington, through its code breaking and other means, would know if probable danger was out there. “I felt that before hostilities came that there would be addi- tional information, that we would get something more definite,” he said. But to assume Washington would always know of the enemy’s approach was to assume the empire could keep no secrets and could pull off no surprises. By definition, a surprise is what its recipient never sees coming.

Steve Twomey began his career in journalism as a copyboy at the Chicago Tribune when he was in high school. After graduating from Northwestern University, he began a fourteen-year career at The Philadelphia Inquirer, during which he won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, and then worked at The Washington Post for the next thirteen years. More recently, he has written for Smithsonian and other magazines and has taught narrative writing at the graduate schools of New York University and the City University of New York. The ghostwriter of What I Learned When I Almost Died and author of Countdown to Pearl Harbor, Twomey lives in Montclair, New Jersey, with his wife, Kathleen Carroll.

Image: The U.S. Navy battleship USS California sinking after being torpedoed at Pearl Harbor. Wikimedia Commons/Public domain