Many of you know this, sadly I just found out.
Hope the link opens.


http://www.minotdailynews.com/...ons-on-pearl-harbor/

Interesting comments.

I strongly suspect that most observers at the time would have thought hitting moving ships at sea would have been far harder than when they were stationary at dock. At the time it was still believed by virtually all naval authorities that the most valuable targets were the battleships. How effectively they might have defended themselves against aerial attacks at sea with no prior experience in doing so is a question, but certainly better than when no one was expecting an attack and many of their crews were either ashore or (I assume) asleep. In addition, as was demonstrated countless times during the war, ships moving at sea can be very difficult to even find, much less attacked successfully.

I believe it’s generally agreed that it was extremely fortunate that the aircraft carriers weren’t at Pearl and escaped destruction; why didn’t the Japanese attack them? Answer: See above about battleships being the targets of choice and not being stationary at a location they could easily be found. As it was, the Japanese were delightedly surprised that the battleships were all there.

It’s often been mentioned that it was also fortunate for the U.S. that the fuel dumps and other facilities weren’t hit during the attacks. But the part about its being lucky that all the ships were tied up as sitting ducks may have been a way of trying to make the incident seem less of a debacle than it was: “Yes, it was bad, but just think how much worse it would have been if the commanders had had any inkling of what was about to occur and had done the usual thing of dispersing their ships out of the harbor like the aircraft carriers were.”

The aircraft carriers were out to sea at the time. The Japanese would have had to send out search planes beforehand to find them, if they even knew they weren't there, and that would have given away their presence.
Intelligence and surveillance were at a much different technological level in 1941.

quote:

Originally posted by 220-9er:
The Japanese would have had to send out search planes beforehand to find them, if they even knew they weren't there, and that would have given away their presence.

Yes, seeing a search plane always led to the assumption that one’s forces had been spotted and its location relayed to an enemy force. Even though the U.S. forces wouldn’t have known for sure that the spotter was relaying information for a subsequent attack, they would have at least been aware of interest by a likely hostile force. Many warnings that war might break out between the U.S. and Japan had been relayed to our forces prior to 7 December. One would hope that despite what happened at Pearl Harbor, a commander at sea who was aware of a scout plane in an area where no Japanese forces were known to be operating would have taken some action to defend his command.

Just the presence Japanese search planes several thousands of miles from Japanese territory would have led to the obvious question. How did they get here? Obviously from a nearby aircraft carrier.

There were Japanese mini subs stopped by the netting of the harbor and attacked but just before the attack, not enough time to figure out who they were and why they were there.

Dan Carlin is doing an excellent podcast series “Supernova in the East” (part 2 was just released) discussing the build up of Japan and the years before we entered the war all the way through the end.

In it he discusses the interest that the Japanes took in the British raid on the Italian fleet at Taranto. If anyone at this point in history understood the value of carriers it was the Japanese. That said, they were so rooted in tradition that they continued to build their super battleships because they could. So while they were undoubtedly happy to see all the battleship, they were also disappointed not to have been able to neutralize the US carriers. Though they had a plan to lure the carriers out into a trap in the event they weren’t at Pearl Harbor.

Supposedly a Japanese scout plane did fly over Pearl earlier in the morning but reported the carriers as being there (mistakening several training ships as carriers).

U.S.S. Neosho

My father in-law was on the Neosho they came into harbor the day before and fueled up it was full of fuel at the time of the attack. During the attack they left harbor while Under fire. Got the ship out and on the back side of Ford Island. If they would have been hit the entire harbor would have gone up in flames.

Nothing that hasn't been reviewed and analyzed. The obvious of course is no carriers in port. Secondly, what-if, Adm Nagumo continued with the third attack.

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Destroying our dry docks would have forced the Navy to tow every ship to America for repairs. Instead the Navy was able to raise, repair, and man the ships for battle in the time it would have taken just to tow the ships to America.

The saving grace to those stricken ships was they were sunk/damaged in shallow water, rather than open ocean, which made raising and patching possible. Of the nine battleships, all but three were patched-up to make sail to Puget Sound or, San Francisco for modernization.

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The Japanese failed to destroy the ground storage tanks for fuel that were just five miles away. Those tanks stored all the fuel in the Pacific Theater of the war.

Its believe that there was some cultural hang-ups to why the IJN didn't make this attack, I believe Carlin's podcast identified it as Japanese being too dogmatic to their warrior ethos. Attacking a simple fuel facility theoretically was seen as weak and not warrior-like. The irony is one of the major reasons for Japan's attack, was to keep the US at-bay while the oil reserves in Indonesia could be exploited given the US's oil embargo and Japan's lack of reserves. Throughout the war, this continued to mystify American strategists as to why Japanese submarines choose to attack our surface warships, instead of replenishment ships; meanwhile US submarines wrecked havoc on the entire Japanese economy and war machine by sinking every cargo/freighter/oiler it could come across, while avoiding conflict with surface warships.

We were EXTREMELY fortunate that Japan decided on the aerial 'sneak attack' vs a conventional surface battle. Had the US Pacific Fleet engaged the IJN in a Jutland style battle, they would have wiped us out, and our casualties would have been at LEAST 10 times as many as we suffered at Pearl. All ships sunk in deep water would have been irretrievably lost (unlike 6 of the 8 battleships at Pearl that were salvaged and saw war service).

It took us over a year before US surface units could meet the IJN on anything approaching equal terms. Our experiences at and around Guadalcanal prove this.

"Centers of Gravity"

You must correctly identify and destroy the other side's COG in order to win a war. Ours was by far, our industrial might. They should have hammered the dry docks, the POL storage, and found a way, any way, to disrupt our factories or failing that (because it was unlikely they could), our supply ships.

Ditto for Germany, we simply "out-stuffed" them. They had superior (combat experienced) soldiers and equipment...they just didn't have enough and couldn't replenish either.

The Japanese made one other critical mistake on that fateful day, one often overlooked even now: They did not attack the submarine base or the submarines in the harbor. They had cause to regret it. Our submarines commenced offensive patrols the following week, and by war’s end had sunk more than 5 million tons of Japanese merchant shipping.

Pacific Crucible War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942 by Ian W Toll is an excellent perspective. What doomed the Japanese was their in ability to replace manpower and material loses. They simply did not have the industrial manufacturing capability and their training methodology could not replace air crew loses that occurred. In the beginning their air crews were much more experienced in carrier operations and their surface fleet was better trained in night fighting and torpedo warfare.

quote:

Originally posted by lowflash:
Pacific Crucible War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942 by Ian W Toll is an excellent perspective.

That's a great book!

quote:

Originally posted by lowflash:
Pacific Crucible War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942 by Ian W Toll is an excellent perspective. What doomed the Japanese was their in ability to replace manpower and material loses. They simply did not have the industrial manufacturing capability and their training methodology could not replace air crew loses that occurred. In the beginning their air crews were much more experienced in carrier operations and their surface fleet was better trained in night fighting and torpedo warfare.

Further, Ian Toll makes the point in Pacific Crucible that it was the attack on Pearl Harbor that accelerated the change over from battleships to carriers as the dominant naval ships.

Toll says that when the Navy's battleships were taken out, the U.S. was compelled to shift its offense to its carriers. And while that shift was inevitable, the Japanese made it happen much sooner than it would have otherwise.

To condense the point, I believe Japan screwed up when they attacked a free people.

And the majority of those free people chose to, push everything aside and do whatever it took, to set them on their ass.

And history says, on their ass, and then some...

I don't think Japanese society and culture was developed enough to fight a modern, industrial war.

Strangely enough, their leaders choked at the critical moment, over and over. Leyte Gulf, in particular, could have turned out very bad for us if the Japanese commanders had the guts to follow through on their plans.

I would guess it was the same a Pearl Harbor.

V.

Japan's success at pearl harbor exceeded their expectations. Their one big question was where were the US carriers? Without that knowledge, Yamamoto was unwilling to launch a third wave of aircraft which would have destroyed the repair and fuel depot areas of Pearl Harbor. We should be thankful that Japan had no true visionaries as we might have seen a ground invasion of Ohau. Had that happened it might have been game over from the start.

quote:

Originally posted by SgtGold:
Japan's success at pearl harbor exceeded their expectations. Their one big question was where were the US carriers? Without that knowledge, Yamamoto was unwilling to launch a third wave of aircraft which would have destroyed the repair and fuel depot areas of Pearl Harbor.

As I recall from my reading, it was the task force commander, Vice Admiral Nagumo, who made the decision to call off further attacks despite urging from members of his staff. Yamamoto wasn’t with the attacking force as far as I remember.

quote:

Originally posted by SgtGold:
Japan's success at pearl harbor exceeded their expectations. Their one big question was where were the US carriers? Without that knowledge, Yamamoto was unwilling to launch a third wave of aircraft which would have destroyed the repair and fuel depot areas of Pearl Harbor. We should be thankful that Japan had no true visionaries as we might have seen a ground invasion of Ohau. Had that happened it might have been game over from the start.

Admiral Nagumo was the one who decided against a third wave. His pilots recommended it, but he declined. He was the overall task force commander, and it was his call. He had good reason to decline the third strike. Pearl was just the opening shots of a major war. After Pearl, Nagumo took his carriers and aircrew across the Pacific to conquer all the territory they wanted. He already had lost 35 aircraft and 55 men in the first 2 waves, and had lost any sense of surprise. He felt it necessary to preserve his force for the coming fights.

He was right at the moment. His mission was to negate the US battle fleet. That job was done, and any other strikes carried increasing levels of risk (against an alert and aware enemy with many surviving land-based aircraft). Of course, we now know that the Japanese would have benefitted from taking out our repair facilities and oil storage (causing us to retreat back to the US west coast). Nagumo did not have the benefit of that hindsight.

The USN entered into WW2 with (6)?? aircraft carriers. The Saratoga and the Lexington were built on converted battle cruiser hauls due to naval treaties. The Ranger was built from ground up as a carrier but the design was flawed and was unsuitable for use in the Pacific. Thus the other three were then of the before war modern design. The air crews were not as experienced as their Japanese counter parts and the USN aircraft fighter, dive bomber and torpedo were in transition out classed to a certain degree by the Japanese counter parts.