7 December "not one of all these chances fell aright"

A Fateful Series of Mischances - army.mil link
War had come, not merely the "active hostilities" in China where an American volunteer group of individuals in China's services was already pitted against Japan, nor a "shoot-on-sight" directive in the Atlantic in which General Marshall himself had cynically observed a deceptive resemblance to actual warfare, but at last open and declared war. For over two years World War II had been under way in Europe and for over a year the United States had been sending from its own military supplies allegedly surplus materiel to the aid of the forces fighting the Axis. War now had come, however, not in the Atlantic but in the Pacific, and in its first explosions not in the Far East where Army and Navy had confidently expected it, but in the mid-Pacific where the watch was poorly kept. The succession of errors and mischances that brought to Pearl Harbor something close to total disaster rivals the succession that Hugo recites in the memorable apostrophe of Les Miserables to explain Waterloo. Had the planners, in discerning Japan's several intentions in the Far East, only reasoned that none of these intentions would be undertaken until the U. S. Fleet was immobilized, Pearl Harbor must automatically have been recognized as the certain first target of Japanese attack. Had that been fully recognized, surely the defenses at that point would have been built up to a maximum, regardless of perils elsewhere; Army and Navy commanders would have been freed of the training responsibilities that diverted much of their attention and their resources from defense tasks. Had the implications of Frontier Defense needs been fully grasped, the shortage of patrol planes required for a continuous 360° patrol would have been remedied, at whatever sacrifice. Had the imperative character of the 27 November "war-warning" message been grasped, General Short would not have believed that his first concern was with sabotage. Had Message 473 never been sent, he would not have been thus encouraged to do so. Had his odd and inadequate acknowledgment of the warning been scrutinized carefully in WPD -or elsewhere- it would have been instantly recognized as inadequate, and new and imperative orders issued. Had General Short and Admiral Kimmel, granting the insufficiency of their resources, employed those resources to their maximum for defense purposes, or acted with full enlightenment on the information that actually was supplied them, they must have prepared a much more alert front than was actually in operation on 7 December. Had the "1 o'clock message" of 7 December impressed itself upon other minds as surely and as swiftly as it did upon General Marshall's mind once he saw it, there would have been an earlier dispatch of the final warning message that arrived hours too late. Had the radio officer at the War Department given a hint of the temporary break in direct Army communications, either telephone or Navy facilities could have been used instead: there was still time for a belated manning of all defenses in Oahu. Had all of these circumstances, many of them wholly adventitious, taken the opposite course, a magnificent defense could have been interposed, sufficient to inflict on the raiders a proper penalty. Had any one of them taken the opposite course, the appalling extent of the disaster could have been greatly reduced. Because not one of all these chances fell aright, the attack was a resounding success for Japan and a staggering blow not only to America but to the whole Allied cause.