The Second Pearl Harbor That Cost Japan Midway | Operation K

Three months after Pearl Harbor, Japan came back to bomb it again. Almost no American has ever heard of what happened in the early hours of March 4, 1942 — the night two Japanese flying boats crossed nearly five thousand miles of open Pacific, refueled from submarines at a coral atoll no one had ever fought a battle over, and dropped four 550-pound bombs on what they thought was the U.S. Navy's busiest repair yard.

They missed.

This is the story of Operation K: the longest unescorted bombing mission in history at the time, the codebreakers who saw it coming, the short story that predicted it almost word for word, and the chain of institutional self-deception that turned a brilliant tactical idea into one of the most consequential failures of the Pacific War.

PRIMARY SOURCES & FURTHER READING:
— Edwin Layton, "And I Was There" (1985)
— Wilfred Jasper Holmes, "Double-Edged Secrets: U.S. Naval Intelligence Operations in the Pacific During World War II"
— John Costello, "Pacific War 1941-1945"
— U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, multiple articles on Operation K (1953, 1983)
— Pacific Wrecks online database

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Allied Soldier Stories covers the parts of the Second World War that did not make the textbooks. Cinematic documentary, primary-source research, the institutional failures and forgotten campaigns that shaped how the war was actually fought.

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#WWII #PearlHarbor #PacificWar