History has a way of not going quietly. When I looked for a suitable name to attach to my award for dilatory performance from our intelligence agencies, I chose Kermit Tyler’s, that of the young army officer who was on duty near Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941. Famously, he received a call from the operators of a radar station saying that something large was approaching Hawaii and told them to “Forget it.” The something large was the first wave of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.''It turns out that Tyler died within a week of my announcement of the Kermit Tyler Award for America the Unready. He was 98 years old.
His daughter, Julie, told of my use of her father’s name, is -
understandably - upset. She wrote to me: “He was a fine outstanding man
who had a distinguished career in the USAF for 24 years. He served his
country with integrity and pride.”
In my defense I have to point out that I was careful in my explanation of Tyler’s place in history to say that he had a bum rap--that there were many other examples of dereliction that left America so unprepared to meet the sneak attack from the Japanese that Sunday morning.
That, however, was not enough to lessen the impact of my choice on Tyler’s family and friends.
So here is a bit more background that I hope puts his actions in a broader perspective.
I first came across an account of Tyler’s role, some years ago, in the Hawaii Army Museum in Honolulu. (This is a museum that every visitor to Hawaii should visit. Apart from other virtues, it conveys a sense of the hardships suffered by the people of Hawaii during the war, a story too seldom told.)
After that, I checked out the story of the radar station and its almost accidental interception of the approaching Japanese bombers in other sources. Sure enough, Tyler’s role featured in all of them.
What was more startling, though, was the way in which the picture of Pearl Harbor’s defenses being unprepared for war fed into a burgeoning industry of conspiracy theories. All these theories, no matter how preposterous they were, led to one prevailing belief, that President Roosevelt, abetted by others in his Administration, had deliberately ignored numerous clues and warnings that Pearl Harbor would be attacked before any formal declaration of war by Japan.
Why would that be?
Because FDR, by then under the intoxicating (literally) spell of Winston Churchill, a frequent whiskey-imbibing guest at the White House, had been persuaded that only the entry of the United States into the war could ensure the defeat of the Axis powers--Japan, Germany and Italy. Britain stood alone as an outpost of liberty in Europe, but was perilously exposed. Should Britain go down, fascists would rule the world and America, in the end, would have to play along.
In one popular scenario supporting the idea of Roosevelt binning inconvenient truths, the United States had cracked the Japanese codes and had, via an intelligence gathering outfit in San Francisco, learned of a massive naval armada sailing in the Pacific that could have only one target: Pearl Harbor. Although the Japanese fleet had maintained radio silence to avoid detection, the San Francisco intercepts had, it was said, correctly detected its departure and purpose. (This issue of code-breaking becomes doubly conspiratorial because the British had, in fact, cracked crucial German codes but didn’t want to take any action, including warning America, if it carried the risk of the Germans realizing that their codes were useless.)
Other intelligence from Switzerland, where both spies and diplomats were tracking Japan’s increasingly belligerent games with U.S. diplomats, suggested that the Japanese diplomats in Washington were - acting in bad faith - deliberately stalling until the bombs fell on an unprepared American fleet in the harbor. And that FDR had been suckered by this tactic.
On a more immediate and concrete military issue, there were reports that U.S. warships patrolling the ocean immediately beyond Pearl Harbor had detected - and sunk - one or several miniature submarines sent by Japan to penetrate the harbor and torpedo some of the battleships at anchor there. (In fact, new research proves that at least one of these miniature subs did actually make it into the harbor and was sunk there.)
The truth is inconvenient to the heroics of Michael Bay’s 2001 epic movie, Pearl Harbor, which suggests that if the flyboys had been able to respond to the radar warning that Kermit Tyler dismissed they could have been airborne in sufficient numbers to decimate the attackers. In fact, such was the status of the air defenses on December 7 that it would have taken as long as two hours to have got all the U.S. fighters into the air. (They were all parked in long lines together, and therefore far easier to destroy, rather than being dispersed as they should have been over several airfields and in small batches, the device that had helped to save the R.A.F. in the Battle of Britain a year earlier.)
The scapegoat essential to the myths of both Pearl Harbor and Tora Tora Tora, a better and older movie (1970) telling the story from the Japanese viewpoint, is the radar episode. And so at the center of this myth stands the hapless Kermit Tyler, who has been used not just as the fall guy but as the dominant metaphor, to embody in one person and bite-sized image the idea of a defeat snatched from what might have been the jaws of a victory -- a successful defense of Pearl Harbor.
Unfortunately myths of this popularity are almost impossible to kill. They possess the universal appeal of utter simplicity. Far simpler than what was actually responsible for the Pearl Harbor debacle, a pervasive complacency and sense of security in the top brass, even though war was by then inevitable. Add to this all the deceptions and conflicting motives of the key players and you begin to see the scale of the plot that Kermit Tyler found himself trapped in and was traduced by.
And the scary bit? That today’s war games are just as real, just as complex and just as likely to produce scapegoats as those of December, 1941.
Related Stories on CliveAliveTruth.Travel
The Bomber Who Got Through
Announcing the Kermit Tyler Award for America the Unready
In my defense I have to point out that I was careful in my explanation of Tyler’s place in history to say that he had a bum rap--that there were many other examples of dereliction that left America so unprepared to meet the sneak attack from the Japanese that Sunday morning.
That, however, was not enough to lessen the impact of my choice on Tyler’s family and friends.
So here is a bit more background that I hope puts his actions in a broader perspective.
I first came across an account of Tyler’s role, some years ago, in the Hawaii Army Museum in Honolulu. (This is a museum that every visitor to Hawaii should visit. Apart from other virtues, it conveys a sense of the hardships suffered by the people of Hawaii during the war, a story too seldom told.)
After that, I checked out the story of the radar station and its almost accidental interception of the approaching Japanese bombers in other sources. Sure enough, Tyler’s role featured in all of them.
What was more startling, though, was the way in which the picture of Pearl Harbor’s defenses being unprepared for war fed into a burgeoning industry of conspiracy theories. All these theories, no matter how preposterous they were, led to one prevailing belief, that President Roosevelt, abetted by others in his Administration, had deliberately ignored numerous clues and warnings that Pearl Harbor would be attacked before any formal declaration of war by Japan.
Why would that be?
Because FDR, by then under the intoxicating (literally) spell of Winston Churchill, a frequent whiskey-imbibing guest at the White House, had been persuaded that only the entry of the United States into the war could ensure the defeat of the Axis powers--Japan, Germany and Italy. Britain stood alone as an outpost of liberty in Europe, but was perilously exposed. Should Britain go down, fascists would rule the world and America, in the end, would have to play along.
In one popular scenario supporting the idea of Roosevelt binning inconvenient truths, the United States had cracked the Japanese codes and had, via an intelligence gathering outfit in San Francisco, learned of a massive naval armada sailing in the Pacific that could have only one target: Pearl Harbor. Although the Japanese fleet had maintained radio silence to avoid detection, the San Francisco intercepts had, it was said, correctly detected its departure and purpose. (This issue of code-breaking becomes doubly conspiratorial because the British had, in fact, cracked crucial German codes but didn’t want to take any action, including warning America, if it carried the risk of the Germans realizing that their codes were useless.)
Other intelligence from Switzerland, where both spies and diplomats were tracking Japan’s increasingly belligerent games with U.S. diplomats, suggested that the Japanese diplomats in Washington were - acting in bad faith - deliberately stalling until the bombs fell on an unprepared American fleet in the harbor. And that FDR had been suckered by this tactic.
On a more immediate and concrete military issue, there were reports that U.S. warships patrolling the ocean immediately beyond Pearl Harbor had detected - and sunk - one or several miniature submarines sent by Japan to penetrate the harbor and torpedo some of the battleships at anchor there. (In fact, new research proves that at least one of these miniature subs did actually make it into the harbor and was sunk there.)
The truth is inconvenient to the heroics of Michael Bay’s 2001 epic movie, Pearl Harbor, which suggests that if the flyboys had been able to respond to the radar warning that Kermit Tyler dismissed they could have been airborne in sufficient numbers to decimate the attackers. In fact, such was the status of the air defenses on December 7 that it would have taken as long as two hours to have got all the U.S. fighters into the air. (They were all parked in long lines together, and therefore far easier to destroy, rather than being dispersed as they should have been over several airfields and in small batches, the device that had helped to save the R.A.F. in the Battle of Britain a year earlier.)
The scapegoat essential to the myths of both Pearl Harbor and Tora Tora Tora, a better and older movie (1970) telling the story from the Japanese viewpoint, is the radar episode. And so at the center of this myth stands the hapless Kermit Tyler, who has been used not just as the fall guy but as the dominant metaphor, to embody in one person and bite-sized image the idea of a defeat snatched from what might have been the jaws of a victory -- a successful defense of Pearl Harbor.
Unfortunately myths of this popularity are almost impossible to kill. They possess the universal appeal of utter simplicity. Far simpler than what was actually responsible for the Pearl Harbor debacle, a pervasive complacency and sense of security in the top brass, even though war was by then inevitable. Add to this all the deceptions and conflicting motives of the key players and you begin to see the scale of the plot that Kermit Tyler found himself trapped in and was traduced by.
And the scary bit? That today’s war games are just as real, just as complex and just as likely to produce scapegoats as those of December, 1941.
Related Stories on CliveAliveTruth.Travel
The Bomber Who Got Through
Announcing the Kermit Tyler Award for America the Unready
If Clive Irving was to really understand the attack on Pearl Harbor and the events surrounding Kermit Tyler, he would then see how ridiculous his original comments were re: "Kermit Tyler Award for America The Unready" (including this requiem piece)and the injustice he has done to the memory of this long serving Air Force officer. Lt. Tyler was officially exonerated of any wrong doing.
If Mr. Irving feels the need to create some sort of award he should then be willing to accept the "Golden Foot in Mouth" award himself. He's earned it while trying to be "cute" with the facts and with history.