On December 7, 1941, hundreds of Japanese planes suddenly flew over Pearl Harbor in the United States, and immediately dropped a large number of armor-piercing bombs and torpedoes on the battleships and cruisers of the Us army, for which the US soldiers were defenseless, they had to wake up in the loud sound of the explosion, and then rushed to defend themselves, but with the loss of air supremacy, the US planes stuck on the airfield could not take off to meet the battle, and could only be bombed by Japanese aircraft on land. And Admiral Kimmel, who witnessed all this with his own eyes, also became very confused at this moment, and his mouth kept muttering repeatedly: "Why don't you kill me?" After the end of the sneak attack, because self-blame and guilt have been accompanied by Kimmel, and this sluggish spirit has also made him unable to work normally, until the arrival of Nimitz, Kimmel was able to "retire", but in addition to his dismissal, the official general was directly swept to the end, and finally retired with the rank of major general, so is Kimmel "deserved" or has become a "scapegoat"?
Speaking of Kimmel, although his name is not as loud as his successor Nimitz, he is also a senior general who has experienced the baptism of war, he participated in the First World War, starting from the ordnance officer of battleships and cruisers, step by step to the commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fleet and the Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Fleet. But war is cruel, it will not change its course because you are a professional officer in a high position, but if it is because of this only one defeat that makes a general "discredited", such a punishment is undoubtedly deliberately aggravated, and in this regard we can get confirmation from the later MacArthur, who left tens of thousands of American soldiers in the Philippines to slip away on his own, indirectly causing these soldiers to be abused and massacred by the Japanese army, killing many times more than Pearl Harbor, but all this is not pursued. The reason I believe the discerning people know (the MacArthur family has a lot of friends and interests in the MILITARY and political circles in the United States).
If I want to talk about Kimmel's greatest crime, I personally think that the first is a command error, because he did not immediately issue combat orders when all this happened, resulting in the paralysis of the entire command system, and the lower-level officers and men could only fight for themselves, some of them took up their cannons and counterattacked against the Japanese planes, while others just blindly fled, causing the Japanese planes to become more rampant, and after dropping all the bombs, they began low-altitude strafing, prompting a large number of US soldiers, medical personnel, and civilians to die one after another under the guns of the Japanese machine.
The second is a strategic mistake, as early as 5 months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Kimmel had received a Japanese telegram intercepted by the intelligence department of the US Pacific Fleet and reported it to Washington, and even Admiral Stark, the Chief of Naval Operations, had sent a telegram to remind Kimmel, but Kimmel was completely unaware that he was the commander at the forefront of the war, completely ignoring the war crisis. If he had paid attention to the information sent by the intelligence department at that time, taken the initiative to make a judgment that a commander-in-chief should have, achieved the effect of early warning, and raised the alert level, I believe that in the end, even if it ended in failure, the result would not be as miserable as it is now.
Finally, there is an analysis, but also a very "conspiracy theory" statement, that is, Roosevelt and others knew of Japan's intentions in advance, but suffered from no excuse to participate in World War II, so they wanted to use this sneak attack to "wake up" the Americans, so that the United States could smoothly enter the war, so based on the influence of such conditions, Washington deliberately withheld this information from Kimmel, resulting in Kimmel not having any preparation at all, in other words, others estimated that they would not have the ability to turn things around. It can only be said that Kimmel's luck was extremely bad, and he eventually fell into the "victim" of this "political game".
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