Misremembering Pearl Harbor

Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness

It was largely Yamamoto’s enormous ego, his tactical genius, and his strategic ineptitude,

along with Japanese hubris, that explain the strategic idiocy of a brilliant but short-lived victory at Pearl Harbor. To be fair, no student of military preparedness, economic resources, or social organization could have ever believed that a relatively vulnerable and isolationist United States would respond to the attack the way it did 80 years ago.