Hi, I am currently making some last minute updates to a paper I have due tomorrow on the intelligence failures of Japan and the United States surrounding the attack on Pearl Harbor. I was wondering if it is acceptable to use a non-scholarly article as a source? The article mentions how news of the sinking of a Japanese midget submarine worked its way up the chain of command, and its significance as the first shots fired in the Pacific War. I have been unable to find sources for this info in the article, or a different scholarly option that has the same information. Would it be appropriate to simply use the article as a source in my paper? Thank you!
So, if you were writing this essay for one of my classes, I'd be concerned about you using that source. I can even give you the feedback macro that I would use!
This is not an appropriate source to be using here. Specifically, the sources you use (apart from primary material) should almost always be scholarly in nature - i.e. an academic journal article or book.
There's a very good reason for this, and it's not because academic historians are always right and everyone else isn't, or even that some websites aren't reliable. It's because academic texts are required to tell you what the basis of their claims are (and have gone through peer review to ensure that they actually do). They need to provide enough support for their claims that you can make an informed judgement about whether they've come to the right conclusion. Ultimately, the point of referring to another historian's views in an essay is not to find historians who agree with you and blindly trust their conclusions, but to interrogate what they're saying, and you can't do that unless you know what their claims are based on.
Of course, you (almost certainly) aren't writing this essay for me. I have no idea what your university is like, or what level this course is. These are the kind of questions that can only really be answered by the person setting the assignment - in future, leave yourself enough time to speak to them about what they expect from your essay.
Unless it cites the evidence, it's best to stick to scholarly articles. While articles like these may be accurate and may even be written by historians, they haven't gone through the more rigorous research and peer review process that articles in a journal have, and so are not reliable as sources.
It might be worth looking up the author of the article and seeing if they have published anything in a journal on a similar topic.