On the morning of December 7, 1941, the mobile SCR-270 radar unit at Opana Point, Oahu, famously tracked a massive blip of incoming aircraft—only for the warning to be famously dismissed as friendly B-17 bombers. However, the fact that the radar was operational at all that morning was an improbability born of military red tape. The remote radar site relied entirely on a gasoline generator for power, an engine that required routine maintenance and fresh filters to survive Oahu's humid climate.
In late November 1941, requisitions for replacement oil filters were stalled in a San Francisco quartermaster depot, held up by peacetime paperwork and lower surface-shipping priorities. Operating on borrowed time, radar operators had to clean and re-use a degraded filter that was past its service life just to keep the generator running during their scheduled 4:00 AM to 7:00 AM operating window. Had the filter completely clogged and seized the generator engine an hour earlier, Privates George Elliott and Joseph Lockard would never have detected the incoming Japanese strike force at 7:02 AM, removing the sole electronic warning the U.
S. military received that day.