This is Chapter 3 of our book club for Samuel Eliot Morison's The Two-Ocean War, a history of the USN in WWII. It's finally time for the real action to kick off, with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor:
One point I think Morison doesn't cover is the sheer improbability of the attack. It was a massive logistical stretch for the Japanese to pull off, with the carriers barely having practiced the necessary underway refueling techniques before departing, and the torpedoes arriving only two days before the attack. And it was only a few months earlier that the Japanese had even gotten enough carriers to pull off the attack. While it's easy to draw comparisons to Taranto, the British there were attacking at night, which meant they didn't have to worry about Italian aircraft, either over the target or attacking the carriers. The Japanese didn't have the ability to make a night attack like that, which meant that a lot of their force was going to have to be dedicated to hitting the American airbases, and Shokaku and Ziukaku didn't join the fleet until the second half of 1941. Without their airgroups, it would have been impossible to both hit the airfields hard enough to protect the carriers and do significant damage to the fleet.1 And the whole plan was insanely risky, and could have basically come unglued if, say, the duty officer had taken the radar operator's warnings more seriously. Ships would have been buttoned up and AA guns manned, and while we can't say for certain what would have happened, the vast majority of the damage done during the attack happened in those critical first few minutes.
All of this makes a lot more sense of the focus by Kimmel and Short on keeping safe from sabotage and being ready to support a war further west. It's fairly common for people to assume that the enemy won't do something extremely stupid and risky, which means these plans succeed more often than they probably should. (For another example, see the Fall of France.) I do appreciate that Morison did his best to be fair to Kimmel and Short, and personally think there's a lot less excuse for commanders in the western Pacific, who we'll come to in the next chapter.
The narrative of the attack is pretty good so far as it goes, although with a few mistakes for reasons I don't understand at this remove. Notably, the bombs that sunk Arizona came from level-bombing Kates and not dive-bombing Vals, and she was formally decommissioned in three weeks after the attack. Also, for some unaccountable reason, he describes California as being the youngest ship there, even though West Virginia was two years newer. One thing I was expecting that didn't turn up was a longer discussion of the potential for an attack on the base facilities, which is often cited as a major mistake made by the Japanese. Morison himself indulges in some of this in Rising Sun in the Pacific, but here, it's relegated to only a sentence or two. I don't find the theory particularly convincing, as it relies on both a complete misunderstanding of Japanese strategic thought and a lot of worst-case theorizing about the effects of an attack, which more sober analysis shows would have taken maybe a few months to repair, not years.
I was also somewhat surprised by the lack of discussion of a "third wave", often cited as another mistake due to its presence in the movie Tora, Tora, Tora. In fact, it was entirely a myth created by Mitsuo Fuchida, and between the risk of American carriers appearing and the time required to recover, rearm and launch the planes, it would have been night when the planes returned, and the Japanese were not trained for night landings. But it turned out that Fuchida didn't even start talking about the third wave until 1963, when this book was written, so it was able to evade several decades of dubious history.
And then there's the weirdly long section on responsibility, which makes little sense at this remove. I suspect that it's here because "FDR knew about Pearl Harbor" was the 1963 equivalent of "9/11 was an inside job" today, and Morison doesn't seem shy about tying the history he's writing into the demands of the present day. This is made entirely obvious at the end of the chapter, but there are flashes elsewhere in what we've read so far. In retrospect, this tendency probably also explains the semi-conspiratorial tone of Chapter 1, and will hopefully not dominate other sections in the same way, even if he makes brief asides about it.
Also, for those interested, I wrote my own account of the battleships during Pearl Harbor as well as the aftermath.
1 This is something almost everyone who discusses previous attacks on Pearl Harbor in wargames misses. Those were done with fewer planes carrying lighter weapons, and couldn't realistically have done all that much damage to the fleet unless they wanted their carriers to be murdered by defending aircraft. ⇑
Comments
What I found to be most interesting is the sclerotic reaction to any intelligence garnered by the various intelligence agencies. It appears from my point of view that the entire intelligence apparatus was completely overcome with the need for secrecy as well as a good dose of serious bureaucrat-ism.
From Morrison's section about how intelligence got handed around after decrypting, it seems apparent that anyone with any kind of desire to get the job done and the information gleaned to the appropriate people was either moved out of the job or never took the job in the first place.
Of course, we're also dealing with a military at peace and one that had been at peace for the vast majority of the careers of the vast majority of the people involved. Yes, I know there were the banana wars between WWI and WWII, but those were not "real" wars to the vast majority of the services, with the possible exception of the Marine Corps. Virtually no one understood viscerally how to fight a war when it came time to have the war. Since they didn't understand how to do it, they didn't prepare for it, and didn't expect it.
Hence, the amazing series of events that led to the Japanese having a clear shot at the Pacific Fleet.
Belushi TD
"But it turned out that Fuchida didn’t even start talking about the third wave until 1963, when this book was written, so it was able to evade several decades of dubious history."
Fascinating catch.
I enjoyed the narrative about the improbability of the attack coming off. A warning being sent by Western Union and delivered hours after the attack was particularly memorable, along with the duty officer ignoring the radar operator.
In Chapter 1, Morison talks about leave and other quality of life policies required to keep volunteers in the Navy. Here "officers and CMOs to whom juniors expected to look for guidance" were on regular weekend leave. Wasn't the September 1940 draft filling the Navy by December 1941?
So why didn't the Japanese kill the fuel oil depot?
Debunking "FDR knew" sure takes excessive space for a 30-page chapter. The other conspiracy theory, which Morison breezes over in a couple of paragraphs, is the fear of spies/traitors of Japanese descent. "Every one of these rumors was later found to be false, and not one disloyal act was committed" (page 67). But higher on the same page, he tells an anecdote about one plane crash landing on Nihau, where the pilot teamed up with "a local Japanese" to "terrorize the unarmed populace for a week" until "a burly Hawaiian ... managed to kill him with bare hands and a stone." (an oversimplification of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ni%CA%BBihau_incident )
@Belushi
Sharing intelligence is always a balancing act, because there’s a very real need to keep things to as few people as possible to avoid leaks. It’s almost always possible to piece together “we should have known” in retrospect, even if that may not be fair to the people at the time. And in this case, they were also having to do all of this on paper, which makes things a lot harder than they are today.
I also think he's occasionally flat-out unfair. In particular, he brings up "the Japanese asked about fleet dispositions at Pearl, and this wasn't passed to Kimmel", but admits that they asked about fleet dispositions everywhere, which basically destroys that as a source of any sort of signal. The obvious conclusion of that is that they're gathering strategic intel, which tells you very little about where they're likely to attack.
@Le Maistre Chat
Actually, no. The Navy didn’t start taking draftees until the beginning of 1943. (I suspect in many cases, the volunteers were people who otherwise would have been drafted, but that’s beside the point.) Also, culture can take a while to change after it stops making sense.
Because it wasn’t their doctrine. This is the navy dominated by the cult of the “decisive battle”, and the enemy’s fleet is the target. Logistics aren’t. This was so deeply entrenched that never attempted an anti-shipping campaign with their submarines throughout the entire war, despite the US demonstrating how effective that could be.
And yeah, technically speaking there was one disloyal act, but I don’t blame him for the phrasing given just how unique Nihihau is in retrospect.
Also, it's actually not easy to destroy oil fuel tanks with (relatively) light weapons -- they come with lots and lots of anti-fire and anti-explosion measures to start with, and even if you managed to land a bomb on every one of them... they're basically sheet steel. It would not have been difficult to replace them with a few freighter-loads of sheet steel and some more tankers on the California-Oahu run.
The big problem with Oahu's air defense system was that nobody took it seriously. 15 months after the Battle of Britain and we still just have one lieutenant in charge of the center, with no defined alert procedures, no checklist for whom to call, no one coming up with lists and vectors for incoming flights... and this is directly on Kimmel and Short, whose job it was (among other things) to prioritize defense measures.
To be fair, I don't think anyone in the US Navy knew that the Japanese had developed their own at-sea refuelling techniques just so they could make this attack work, either.
I read the firm assertions about Japanese American loyalties as trying to toe the line between "of course the detention camps were bad" and not criticizing FDR.
The intelligence storyline also feels like a bit of snipe hunt, too wrapped up in trying to preserve various reputations and fend off the conspiracies of the day (maybe useful, but not helpful history to my eyes). It would have been interesting if he could have talked through changes in the intelligence community after the outbreak of war, but I think that's a)solidly outside his intensedy remit and b) probably still classified at time of publication.
It does leave me wanting to read more detail about the reassertion of command/control during the event, particularly with the anecdotes of someone being on the ball enough to order ships not to make for the harbor entrance to avoid the risk of a sinking closing the harbor.
I find myself irritated to a perhaps irrational extent by Morison confusing the roles of the D3As and B5Ns in the first wave. But this should have been an easy thing to catch, from a lot of different angles. Anyway...
Re: at-sea refueling, AIUI it did not occur to anybody in the USN that the IJN had that capability because they knew how difficult and time-consuming it had been to develop the capability for themselves, and they were pretty sure the IJN hadn't spent that kind of time and energy solving those problems. And that was true, as far as it went. But it didn't go far enough, because nobody in the USN seems to have imagined that the IJN would settle for a much cruder, more limited capability that would allow them to launch one-off raids at eye-popping distances, but would not let them operate at sea for weeks or months the way the USN would need to do.
@Tony
I think the underappreciated aspect WRT air defenses (and I'm not quite sure how one would study this) is that the US military was expanding really fast, and some balls were going to be dropped. In 1940, the USN had 17,723 officers. (I think at the end of the year, although I am not 100% certain.) On December 7th, 1941, that number had grown to 35,760. In other words, half of the USN's officer strength was new, and the experienced people were undoubtedly stretched really thin. (I'm not going to look up Army numbers, but suspect that similar things happened there.) If Short only has three competent Majors and six things to cover, then maybe Air Defense ends up shortchanged. And in retrospect, obviously the wrong decision, but no way of knowing that ahead of time.
@ryan
That's a good way of putting it.
Re the intelligence storyline, I think this is one of the things that comes from this being a condensation of the longer book. The Pearl Harbor chapter in Rising Sun is about 65 pages, of which about 10 looks to be spent on those kind of questions. And in that context, it doesn't feel particularly out of place. But it's a lot higher fraction here, probably because he had all of that material, and wanted to stick it to the conspiracy theorists.
There's a lot of books on the subject. I have Alan Zimm's book, which is recent and quite detailed.
@Philistine
I haven't gotten the impression that this book was proofed all that carefully, and after doing a bit of digging, it turns out that Two-Ocean War was basically written for financial reasons. Morison remarried in 1949 and was rather lavish with his second wife. Two-Ocean War was part of the result, along with the John Paul Jones biography and some time on the lecture circuit. Fortunately, Morison was a good enough writer that even his knocked-together cash-grab projects are worth reading, but it does make a bit more sense out of some of the weird choices he made in terms of what to cover.
I did say that the degree of irritation I felt might not be entirely reasonable. And I've also noticed a lack of proofing - like Hiryu being spelled "Horyu" in the first footnote of the chapter.
However, it did bring a question to mind. At what point do small but avoidable factual errors early in a book, before the author even gets to the meat of their subject, prejudice your appreciation of the book as a whole? I'm also reading Rick Atkinson's "An Army at Dawn" about the US Army's campaign in North Africa, and during the prologue, while he's setting the stage for the story he intends to tell, he states that RAF fighter pilots fended of a German invasion of Britain in 1940. Which is... not something I expected to see in a book published in 2002. (The RAF fought bravely and well, but by 2002 I would have expected wider diffusion of the knowledge that RAF resistance wasn't the only, or even necessarily the main, factor in staving off Unmentionable Sea Mammals. At least among authors working in military history.) So now I find myself approaching the rest of the book with more skepticism.
It depends on how close the error is to the meat of the subject, and I don’t think I’d hold that particular case against Atkinson at all. Doing that sort of setup work is hard because you’re trying to cover a lot of information at a very high level in a small space, and I know that I will fairly frequently put things in the first or last paragraph that are less true than the stuff I put in the body of a post. Not lies, but I’m a lot more willing to simplify by sanding off some detail, even just to make things flow better. And I’m not producing physical books, so there’s no word limit and no editor asking if we can cut two sentences that are completely irrelevant to the thesis of the book.
To be clear, this only applies to that sort of intro/outro stuff where it would be extremely weird to cite this book on this topic because this book is obviously not about the thing you’re citing. If you’re learning about the Battle of Britain from An Army At Dawn, you are doing something catastrophically wrong.
This makes me want to re-read Gordon Prange; there's a strong sense of deja vu from when "At Dawn We Slept" was first published.
@bean It’s fairly common for people to assume that the enemy won’t do something extremely stupid and risky, which means these plans succeed more often than they probably should. (For another example, see the Fall of France.)
In many ways this is the entire axis military history of about the first 2 years of the war. The from the Sudetenland to about the start of Barbarossa, the German invasions were often at the very edge of what they should have been capable of... so they kept catching everyone by surprise. Likewise with Japan up until the fall of Singapore or beyond, they kept pulling "works in fiction" type tricks out of a hat and getting away with it.
Then, arguably starting with Crete in Europe, there was just one too many potholes for the sheer "good luck" to continue, and once the momentum was lost it came down to aggressive middleweights in a slugging match against 2 heavyweights (British commonwealth and USSR) and a superheavyweight (USA)... and a slugging match goes to the biggest and strongest.
@Phillistine:
In addition to Bean's comments about background explanation versus key arguments, I am not sure it is entirely wrong to say that the RAF prevented an invasion of Britain: 1) This view was rather widely perceived at the time (i.e. Churchill's "so many owed so much to so few" speech*) and while popular opinion of the people involved is not always accurate, neither should it be disregarded. 2) Although we know now that the Germans really didn't plan to actually invade or think they had any chance of success, if the RAF had been defeated there is the chance that Hitler would have taken yes for an answer and ordered the invasion anyway. The German Navy's official WWII historian felt this way. In this sense you could say very accurately that the RAF 'prevented' an invasion, even if they did not 'defeat' one. 3) While the absolutely overwhelming British naval superiority made the invasion a non-stater ** WWII was first and foremost an air war, from Stuka's leading the initial Blitzkreig to the final flash of light over Nagasaki. If the Germans did get air superiority, there is always a risk that they could have pulled a 'Repulse and Prince of Wales' at an order of magnitude greater and thereby gained naval superiority as well, or at least prevented British naval superiority from closing the channel, thereby allowing supplies to make it to the landing forces.
*On the other hand, in his history of WWII Churchill said that German chances of invasion were so low some people hoped Hitler would order the invasion because of how much of the German Army they could have destroyed. **In the 1974 Sandhurst wargame, the German invasion was defeated when the Royal Navy brought 17 cruisers and 57 destroyers to the fight - and that was just the forces in the vicinity of the Channel, the Home Fleet with all of the heavy ships was still coming down from Scapa Flow.
I am skeptical of this. Attacking ships was, at the time, a specialized skill that most of the Luftwaffe hadn't acquired. At that point, I believe it was just X Fligerkorps, which in early 1941 (easiest numbers to find) had 80 Ju 88s, 26 He 111s and 80 Ju 87s. Even if they performed as well as the Japanese did against Force Z, that's going to be physically unable to sink more than 4 or 5 heavy ships at a sortie, and you're not getting that many sorties a day. And I doubt they would do that well, even if there wasn't some degree of fighter cover available.
I’m skeptical too, but it is a factor to consider. Even if X Fligerkorps could only sink 4-5 capital ships in one go, the Home Fleet generally only had 4-5 battleships/battlecruisers and 2-3 aircraft carriers assigned. At the beginning Sep 1940 (with Nelson off Norway, Rodney under repair, and Barnham at Gilbralter) it was just 2 battlecruisers and 2 CVs, so well within your hypothetical. Plus, even if the Luftwaffe only had 106 medium and 80 dive bombers specialized in ship attack, they had another 890 medium and 180 dive bombers serviceable in the Battle of Britain. Place whatever loss of efficiency you choose (50%, 80%, 90%) and you are still looking at anywhere from 3-5 more heavy ships sunk. How does this equate to losses among the 100+ cruisers and destroyers, I don’t know. Plus, there are time/space factors at play. Special training is not needed to sink ships stationary at a pier. Just forcing the British to pull all ships from the Nore, Dover, Portsmouth, Humber and Channel commands back out of range of German bombers (plus the attrition before the move) cedes de facto control of the Channel to the German first few waves, and then the Royal Navy is running the gauntlet when they have to respond to the invasion. Even if they reassert control of the Channel, now they are under constant air attack. Even if it’s just 4-5 heavy ship equivalents per sortie and one sortie per day, things become critical for the RN quickly, and effectiveness drops as ships have to rotate out for repair (not every ship will be sunk), refueling and resupply of AA ammo. Does the German Army in Sussex and Kent run out of supplies before the RN must pull back ships due to unacceptable losses? Not a question Britain wants to answer. There is also the logistical issue that keeping all of these ships running without use of the dockyards at Plymouth and Portsmouth becomes an issue. Is any of this a slam dunk for the Germans if they did to RAF what Israel did to the Arabs at the beginning of the Six-Day War? No. But I wouldn’t discount the importance of the Battle of Britain in preventing an invasion, if the invasion was ever serious to begin with (which it likely wasn’t.)
@Onux
Also, even if the invading force is lost, the invasion succeeds if it forces the RN into attrition which makes it possible for the Kriegsmarine to starve the country into submission. Capturing London isn't the point, keeping the RN at sea under constant attack is. The SLoCs were the country's Achilles heel, not the beaches.
To be clear 4-5 heavy ships per sortie is an absolutely worst-case scenario, assuming that X Fligerkorps performs as well as the Japanese did against Force Z. This is unlikely. Phillips, in command of Force Z, had based his plans for AA defense around experience in the Med, including against X Fligerkorps. Besides lesser operator skill, there's also the probability of having more ships and more AA guns around (keep in mind that off Norway, X Fligerkorps managed to sink Gurkha and land a hit on Nelson, nothing more) and of having at least some fighter cover, which is generally very disruptive to these kind of attacks. And it's not like the British need heavy ships to disrupt the landing. Even if every battleship in the fleet is sunk, they have more than enough cruisers to blow the barges to matchwood, to say nothing of destroyers.
All that said, I think the Germans probably lose even without the RN's intervention. Amphibious landings are hard, and Germany fundamentally did not have the skills to pull something like this off. They got incredibly lucky in Norway, and I strongly suspect that made them think this was vaguely possible. But most of the Norway landings could have been easily thwarted by an alert infantry battalion, and the British were ready for them.
Task Force Z probably isn't a good fit here, among other things because Germany didn't have long-range torpedo bombers nearly as good as Japan's. But also because the Japanese had to hunt down the British across a great distance.
A better match would be the battle of Crete. The Luftwaffe managed to sink three cruisers and five destroyers, mission-killed a carrier, two battleships, three cruisers, and three destroyers, most of this during two ~24 hour periods. Granted, some of the "mission-killed" ships would probably have stayed on mission for the defense of Britain, but at reduced effectiveness and increased vulnerability to follow-on attack.
That was done by Fliegerkorps XI, which didn't specialize in maritime operations and didn't have any torpedo bombers or aerial minelayers. So it seems quite reasonable to expect that Fliegerkorps X operating close to its bases, with postulated air superiority, and against an enemy confined by the Channel, would have neutralized at least five heavy fleet units per RN "Channel Dash". And there would likely have been more than just Fliegerkorps X assigned, plus S- and U-boats.
That's a good point on Crete. That's not a battle I have studied closely, and I should probably rectify that when I have time to dig into the various books I have covering it.
@Philistine: my own copy of the TOW (which is 90s? reprint) infamously has a chunk one chapter at the end repeated a dozen times (I'll see if I can find it when the basement is done and I can unpack, but I don't think I'm actually exaggerating). I guess it's just a tradition that all the prints have to have errors in them.
Also, there's probably a really interesting thesis to be written (or has been written?) about TOW as historiography, which on some level is more interesting at this remove than it as actual history.
While the "Third Wave" may have been a creation of Fuchida, it was absolutely a strategic error for the Japanese not to order additional attacks on Pearl Harbor facilities and oil storage, even to the point of sticking around and continuing attacks on December 8th. Amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics. While the damage may have only taken months to repair, some of the most crucial US Navy actions in WWII (Doolittle Raid, Coral Sea, Midway) took place within 6 months of Pearl Harbor. It is easy to see how damage to docks and loss of the fuel farm could have influenced those events to Japan's favor (not going to the Coral Sea because of the distance/fuel involved, or Yorktown being un-repaired after Coral Sea and not making it to Midway).
The US carriers arriving was of course a risk, but not a large one. Although the Japanese could not know it, only Enterprise was in position to counter-attack, with Saratoga in San Diego and Lexington on its way to Midway. But even if the three carriers had been together, their airgroups at the time averaged 65 aircraft each, which would have combined for less than half of what the six Japanese carriers had. Even after losses the Japanese could have launched a third wave (or fourth and fifth the next day) the size of the first two while retaining enough aircraft to fight the three US carriers on equal terms. If they had focused all their aircraft on the US carriers combined it probably would have been a disaster for the US. Again, in reality, fighting Enterprise then Lexington piece-meal would have been no issue.
Why does everyone think a third wave would have landed in the dark? The first wave took off at 6:10 and began its attack at 7:55, the second wave was an hour behind and broke off its attack around 9:45-10:00 and should have been back to its carriers around 11:00. Sunset would have been at 5:50. Assuming 4 hours round trip (1 hr form up, 1 hr to Oahu, 1 hr attack, 1 hr return), that means the Japanese would have had 4 hrs to prep the first wave to attack again, and 3 hrs for recovery of the second wave before needing the flight decks to start launching a third. That doesn't seem impossible.
@Tony Zbaraschuk. The oil tanks may be sheet steel, but to make a fuel farm work requires other things like pumps and manifolds, all of which can be damaged by bombs or fire. Even if the tanks could be replaced easily the rest of that equipment perhaps not. Also, as noted above, the key thing was not the tanks but the fuel in them. Amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics. Burn up all of that fuel and even if you rebuild the facility and refill it in a few months, the US Fleet is immobilized in the meantime.* Those first few months were critical.
The failure to launch further strikes was just the first of a pattern where the Japanese would score a major tactical victory, then suffer an operational or strategic defeat by not following it up. This was particularly evident in the Guadalcanal campaign, where the Japanese Navy inflicted several defeats on the US Navy at night, only to withdraw during the day and leave control of Ironbottom sound to the Americans. As a result, the Japanese were constantly short on supplies, while the Americans could resupply at will (Amateurs study tactics…).
*Technically not totally immobilized. The US capability in refueling at sea was unmatched, and oilers could have come from the West Coast. However, the longer transit time would have seriously affected strategic mobility (compared to regular tankers bringing the fuel from the US to Pearl Harbor, and the dedicated oilers only shuttling from there.
Yes, but the Japanese were rank amateurs by this standard. It shows up all throughout the war. (That said, I'm not sure they were wrong here. Everyone loves that Nimitz quote about an attack on the facilities, but frankly offhand quotes by flag officers do not good history make.)
No, not really. You just pull tankers into Pearl and fuel in harbor. It would be more annoying than using the tank farm, but it wouldn't "immobilize" the fleet.
Yeah, that's not how carriers worked before radar. The expectation was that the first side to get a blow in would win because without radar, you can't really run an effective fighter defense against early 40s planes. If Enterprise had found them before they found her, then the likely result is a couple of Japanese carriers badly damaged at the very least. And there was also substantial risk from land-based planes on Oahu getting their stuff together.
Because it probably would have. I don't have the resources to hand to get deep into the timeline, but Fuchida himself was one of the last to land, coming aboard Akagi around noon. So at that point, even assuming that they can land planes right up until the last bit of the sun dips below the horizon and that it's only a 4-hour round trip (I am not sure either is a good assumption) the deck crews have less than two hours to get the next strike set up. Probably not impossible if they're carefully prepared for it, but they hadn't, and it's going to take time to issue orders and get bombs prepped and so on.
Your understanding of the situation at Guadalcanal is no better. The Japanese didn't follow up their nighttime victories because Henderson Field existed and they didn't really have a suitable base to provide air cover to any forces operating in Ironbottom Sound in the daytime. And the US had to withdraw at night because they couldn't win surface actions against the Japanese reliably, which meant the Marines were also short on supplies.
Forget landing in the dark. The first wave caused most of the damage and the second wave cost the japanese most of their losses. A third wave would have had more american AA and fighters, more smoke (a big reason for the lower effectiveness in strike 2), and more tired Japanese pilots.
If you accept the risk of a third wave, fuel tanks are large, partially buried, and not nearly as explosive as movies have taught us. the US is industrially dominant in pretty in world war 2, but it's especially dominant in petrochemicals. The US makes 2/3s of the world's oil in 1940. When it comes to capital goods (oil rigs, pumps, refineries, ect.) we're even more dominant. Kicking the US in the oil is like trying to stab a knight through the breastplate, almost anywhere else is a better target. And construction on a much bigger tank farm was already ongoing.
Now, it's true that blowing up the tanks would help japan the first half of 1942, but they already run the table in the first half of 1942. Where they need help is the second half, around the solomons, so there are just better targets for the third wave. The 8 cruisers and 30 destroyers at pearl that morning were barely touched, despite being a lot more vulnerable to air attack than battleships. Eliminate half of them and the US has a MUCH harder time around guadalcanal. That's a massively more valuable get than preventing the mostly minor stuff the the US does between pearl and midway.
The Japanese were absolutely wrong, because as you note they were amateurs when it came to logistics and strategy. This shows up dramatically in the failure to launch follow up strikes on the facilities. They focused narrowly on elements of combat power (ships) not the ability to develop, deliver, and sustain combat power (logistics). Nimitz's quote should absolutely be given credence, the Pacific War was the key event of his entire life. Nimitz, unlike the Japanese, was also a master logistician, stretching back to when he basically invented underway refueling in 1917. His comment that the Service Squadrons which established forward bases were his secret weapon (they were perhaps the ultimate historical manifestation of deploying and sustaining combat power) and the fact that he had his change of command upon a submarine (the US sub campaign against Japan was perhaps the ultimate historical manifestation of destroying an enemy's ability to develop combat power) support this.
Just "pulling tankers" into Pearl is a non-starter for practical operations. First, Red Hill held 250M gallons. It was obviously still under construction and I don't know the exact capacity of the existing above ground tanks, but if similar, it was equivalent to 50 Cimarron class tankers (which held about 5M gallons before they were jumboized in the 60s). In Dec 1941 the Navy had a total of 12 Cimarrons in service and 18 other oilers of all types worldwide, all smaller, including one used off of Guam as floating fuel storage. But it gets worse! Oilers sitting in Pearl to provide fuel cannot accompany the fleet, which means your ships are not doing much to defeat the Japanese unless the Japanese come back to attack Hawaii again. Plus, logistically with fuel the key thing is throughput, not necessarily fuel on hand. A tanker that arrives, offloads to onshore facilities, then heads back out is more beneficial than one that arrives and sits in port waiting to fuel a ship - the former will make more trips and so provide more fuel. You can send the tankers back before they are totally empty, but that still reduces throughput because the tanker didn't fully unload, and it also causes other problems because total capacity on hand is limited with tankers too, even if less important. They can't all be present at once because some have to be traveling back to refill, and if the ones you do have in harbor are 2/3 empty from sustaining ongoing operations then you might not have enough fuel to fully fuel a large sortie when needed.
@cassander, your comments on US industrial capacity are getting into the realm of Kennedy's 'Rise and Fall of the Great Powers'. There is a very good argument that with the US possessing 62% of total world refinery capacity that it didn't matter what Japan did, they were going to lose. That said, while fuel tanks do not explode they certainly can burn, and in 1941 in Pearl they were not buried. And while by late 1944 the US had enough tankers to classify some as IX 'miscellaneous vessels' for floating storage at advance bases (while also having many dozens of oilers to accompany the fleets and hundreds more cargo tankers to supply it all) in late 1941 the situation was very different. Basically all fuel available for USN ops in the Pacific were in those tanks. The US did not do minor stuff before Midway. Coral Sea was the first defeat of a Japanese invasion attempt (they didn't quite run the table) and also took two carriers out of the fight at Midway. The fuel farm was not the only shore target, the drydocks were also key. And as you note further raids could have just sunk more ships too.
It was more likely the Japanese would have found Enterprise first, given that they had about 7 times as many aircraft. Even if the Big E got a strike off, at Midway it took at least twice as many squadrons as she was carrying to sink three carriers with a lot of luck. The number of aircraft the Japanese had in reserve for fleet defense was about as large as Enterprise's whole air group. By herself a couple of damaged carriers may have been the best to expect, not the least. And then the rest crush her. Land based aircraft are negligible, by the end of the second wave there were only about 40 undamaged military planes on Oahu.
A four hour round trip is not a good assumption - it is fact! Fuchida landed at noon with the last of the second wave, which launched starting at 7:55. And the Japanese could have lessened this time by sailing toward Pearl before recovery, knowing that they could gain distance shortly after under cover of darkness. Same for landing until the sun dips below the horizon. The amount of light available at sunset is effectively the same as the middle of the day. Civil twilight (when you can do outdoor activities without artificial light) lasted until 6:14 that day, and nautical twilight (when you can still see the horizon) until 6:41, giving 25-50 minutes of buffer. The first wave had left two hours earlier so the Japanese would have had four hours to order and prep a third wave, with at least two hours just for deck spotting after the last landing from the second wave (more if you factor in closing with Oahu or making use of twilight). Again, this does not seem unreasonable. Japanese deck handling procedures at this point were very good, at Midway they launched 108 aircraft in 7 minutes (yes, I realize the time to set up on the deck prior to launch is much more than this, but Enterprise and Hornet took about four times as long per aircraft per ship). Also at Midway, Hiryu launched three separate waves, while Enterprise was able to launch a wave about 5 hrs after its first wave attacked, despite having to also recover aircraft from the damaged Yorktown, which lines up with the first wave 8am attack on Pearl being able to launch again around 1 or 2pm. Also, to be clear, I am advocating that the proper Japanese action would have been to capitalize on their complete air superiority and not just launched a third wave but stuck around and launched further attacks the next day. If a third wave had to be slightly smaller than the others due to prep and spot time so be it, they had all night to get ready for a next day's attacks too.
Yes, I get that. But he's not a historian and hasn't done any careful analysis. Also, what is the purpose of arguing that the Japanese should have done something different? With Belgrano, you at least put forward an interesting alt-hist, but this is an area where we know exactly what the Japanese would have done. They wrote it down themselves, and it's not the thing you're advocating.
To be clear, I said "pulling tankers", not "pulling oilers". The ships doing this are the same civilian ones that would normally be carrying oil to Pearl, but instead of dumping their fuel in the tank farm, they stick around till empty. Yes, this reduces how much fuel they carry, but it's hard to see how that's the end of the world.
They also had no idea at all where she was, while a radio message from Pearl in theory could have given Enterprise a much smaller search box. (I say in theory because they screwed this up. But the Japanese wouldn't know that.)
And precisely none of that matters if those planes are sitting on deck when the Dauntlesses appear overhead because the Japanese had no warning they were coming. Keeping a CAP up takes a lot of planes relative to what you get, and it would also have been pretty disruptive to the act of launching the strike. And for things like dive-bombers, you may just find that the CAP is out of position if you have no radar.
And the Japanese are sure of this how?
No, you confused the time the attack started with the time the second wave started launching, which was a little after 7, an hour after the first wave.
As for twilight, saying there's the same amount of light as in the middle of the day is obvious nonsense. It's harder to see, and that matters when you're trying to do something as complex and critical as a carrier landing. Not to mention what happens when you get back just a bit before sunset and the wind is from the west...
I think I'm done here. You've made several obvious mistakes of fact and seem fundamentally confused about what alternate history can and can't do.
"But he’s not a historian and hasn’t done any careful analysis."
One might argue that the person directly involved in making the decisions might have done much more careful analysis at the time and would have a much better idea of strengths and weaknesses than a historian removed in both time and responsibility. This is not to say that historians do not have a valuable role, but to suggest that Nimitz(!) of all people didn't understand Pearl Harbor and the war in the Pacific is a bit much.
"Also, what is the purpose of arguing that the Japanese should have done something different?"
Because that is a huge part of discussing history, especially military history. Yes, we know what the Japanese did and would have done, just as we know what the Argentinians did after the Belgrano. In neither case was the correct decision made. To say 'This is what they did so it must have been the right choice for them' is to miss the whole point of studying and discussing history, which is learn from incorrect decisions by others. People do this all of the time (should Lee have stayed south of the Rappahannock after Chancellorsville, etc.)
Fair point on tankers vs oilers, but it doesn't really change the equation on strategic mobility. A tanker sitting in Pearl is not moving fuel whether or not it is waiting to fill an oiler or fill a ship directly. And in 1941 there were not that many tankers; many of the oilers used in the early part of the war (Kennebec & Mattaponi classes) were civilian tankers snapped up the government. The massive T2 tanker program didn't start until 1942 and didn't allow the kind of tankers-as-a-floating-fuel-farm for fleet operations you are describing until mid 1944. I noted from the start that tankers from the West Coast could provide some fuel and that literally every ship would not be immobilized, but the prospect of meaningful fleet operations by the USN in 1942 without the Pearl Harbor fuel farm is severely diminished if not prohibited in the Western Pacific. That covers Coral Sea, Midway, Guadalcanal...
Yes, they didn't know where Enterprise was (or Lex or Saratoga for that matter). But they had plenty of aircraft to find it if was close enough to launch a strike, plus all of the floatplanes on surface ships for search as well. But lets say VB-6 and VS-6 show up at perfectly the right time, undetected, with no attrition from CAP and no aircraft gone astray like VB-8 at Midway - historical precedent suggest that this would have resulted in two carriers hit. The attacking squadrons would have been mauled if the other carriers got fighters up, and by following stragglers home the Japanese would have found Enterprise and been able to launch a four carrier strike and sink her. Midway was 3 carriers vs 4 and still a near run thing. Given that Hiryu was able to sink Yorktown with a couple of partial strikes, with two more carriers its probable the Japanese could have sunk the other two US carriers and Midway ended with three Japanese carriers afloat to zero US (assuming the Japanese counter-attack got to Enterprise before it launched the late day strike that got Hiryu). This suggests that even if the US had all three carriers together the odds favored the Japanese. When it is one on six it is no question. The risk runs both ways. In the worst case (for Japan) where 3-4 carriers are sunk or disabled Japan still has a credible task group to continue the fight. A similar worse case for the US (a strike on the way to Pearl finds Enterprise, or Lexington stumbles onto the Combined Fleet without warning while rushing back from supplying Midway) and the USN is crippled.
I could see arguing that without the element of surprise a third and subsequent strike should have been smaller, leaving 2-3 airgroups in reserve to deal with the threat of US carriers appearing (as Nagumo so famously and disastrously failed to do at Midway), but not that a couple scattered US carriers represented some existential threat to the entire Japanese Fleet such that it had to withdraw for safety.
"And the Japanese are sure of this how?"
Because they have the battle damage reports from the first two waves explaining how they wiped out entire airfields worth of aircraft parked wingtip to wingtip? The threat was surely greater to be discovered on approach and risk attack from the combined air power on Oahu before most of it was bombed or strafed.
I stand corrected on the launch time of the second wave. I do not think a 5 hour round trip changes the fundamentals though. The historical examples in no way suggest that carriers which launched a strike or two in the morning were then incapable of operations in the afternoon. At Coral Sea both the US and Japanese turned around and were ready to launch or actually launched a strike within an hour of recovering aircraft. A five hour round trip means the last of the first wave lands at 11 and needs to take off by 1 to be back before sunset. That's two hours, with even more time to ready the first aircraft back since they obviously don't all land at once. That's before reducing flight time 20-30 minutes by sailing closer to Oahu for a few hours.
I didn't say there is the same amount of light at twilight as in the middle of the day, I said that about sunset. The moment of sunset doesn't throw some switch and everything goes black, flight operations during dusk (until civil twilight) are certainly possible. Until natutical twilight is absolutely risky, but by definition until nautical twilight you have a horizon line to see. Getting back "just a bit before sunset" leaves you 20-30 minutes before things start getting dark (Also, wouldn't the concern be if the wind were from the east? Sailing into a wind from west means you are sailing toward the sunset, which means a glowing horizon for reference; sailing east would mean flying into a darker sky). Nor were carrier night operations some unheard of impossibility. Takagi turned on lights to guide aircraft back for a landing at 10pm at Coral Sea, Spruance did the same at Midway.
Once again I could see a detailed analysis showing a third wave should have been smaller, requiring less time to prep/spot/launch and then later less time to land, to eliminate the risk of night ops. But even the small afternoon waves the Japanese launched without any planning under more arduous conditions (35 at Coral Sea, 24 from just Hiryu at Midway) when multiplied over six carriers would represent a third wave of 100-150 aircraft, which is quite large.
As a final consideration, quite frankly, the risk of losing the last few returning aircraft because they ran out of light and had to ditch was well outweighed by the destruction a third wave could have inflicted. Same for attrition from anti-aircraft fire or in battling US carrier(s) by continuing strikes for a few more days. The Japanese Navy held all of the cards at noon on Dec 7th, and failed to take advantage of any of it, instead just sailing away.
If you're waiting on not just collecting but processing the BDA from the second wave to decide if you should commit to a third wave, that's going to slow things down, assuming you can trust the data (Era standard being: we definitely sank the Lexington, for sure this time); the report from the second wave also has "A lot fewer of us came back, as they've started to get defenses up" and you could much more easily trust that trend to continue. Safer to leave once surprise was lost, prevent them from responding, than it would be to try and push the advantage far past your intel/planning without the benefit of hindsight.
As for why trying to land west would be worse than east near sunset: it's quite hard to see important things like the carrier deck if you're staring into the sun.
One might argue that. One would be wrong. I’m drawing here on Alan Zimm’s book Attack On Pearl Harbor, where he carefully analyzes the potential of a Japanese attack on the fuel tanks and finds it wanting. Offhand quotes from Nimitz are not going to beat that.
If you’re talking about the strikes on the 7th, neither Japanese strike was all that big, and I think they were different planes. (Also, that didn’t work very well for them.) On the 8th, when both sides made a maximum effort, neither one got off an afternoon strike.
As for Hiryu, I believe her afternoon strike was made of planes that had not gone to Midway that morning, and which were famously in the process of having weapons switched out on the other three carriers when the Americans attacked.
Really? That’s the example you’re going to use? Takagi launches a strike of 27 planes and per Morison, recovered 7 or 8, with 11 operational losses (the balance being shot down by the Americans). That seems to make my case far more strongly than yours.
@ShasUi
One does not need to fully process the BDA (as in "we think we hit this many planes at Hickam, and this many planes at..."), one only needs to know that the raid was hugely successful and a large number of planes destroyed on the ground, crippling US airpower. Fuchida had already signaled 'Tora, Tora, Tora' hours before - the code for complete surprise achieved. It shouldn't have taken much to understand by the time the second wave landed that the Japanese had complete air superiority.
Why does everyone seem to think a third wave would have had to be planned for in Japan weeks ahead of time? Coral Sea and Midway saw multiple instances of Japanese commanders getting information, making a decision, and launching a strike within an hour or so. At Pearl Harbor they would have had a few hours from the first wave returning.
The second wave did not have "a lot fewer" come back, total Japanese losses over both waves were very low compared to the battles to come. If anything a second wave report of "they got their defenses up but we only lost 20 planes" is an argument FOR further attacks - if everything they got with surprise lost is only 11% attrition then you are running the board with them (at least as far as air combat in WWII went). The US experienced attrition of 10% just in ferrying aircraft across the N. Atlantic to Britain in 1942. If your combat loss rate is the same as a non-combat transport operation you don't need to run away from the combat.
The scenario was arriving a few minutes before sunset and wind from the west. If that happens and the sun is in your eyes . . . you wait a few minutes for the sun to set below the horizon and land with the same amount of available light and no sun in your eyes. I want to reiterate again that sunset is not the start of night. Some people do not even consider it the end of day (civil twilight is the end of day for people with that view, although others consider civil twilight the end of dusk).
Or Zimm is wrong. I am going to stay on the trunk and say that Nimitz very carefully considered the impact of attack on the fuel tanks, as he carefully considered many logistical considerations throughout the war. The fact that he spoke about it doesn't make his comments offhand.
Yes, the strikes on the 7th were not that big, but they came from only two carriers. Hiryu's strike was about the same size from one. There were six at Pearl Harbor, hence my evaluation that even a limited size launch in aggregate would have been big enough to have a major impact (100-150 planes should have been enough to destroy the 26 above ground fuel tanks at Pearl Harbor, or knock out the three existing drydocks at the time, or just sink some of the cruisers and destroyers still around.
The second strike on the second included both some planes that were not on the first strike as well as some that were (long day for some of those dive bomber pilots). The last US strikes from the morning landed at 1:40 and by 2:20 Fletcher thought he had a second strike ready to launch against the transports. Landing aircraft and refueling/rearming them for follow on operations in an hour or so wasn't some crazy thing that never happened. Again, I can accept that maybe they could not have sent up all 180 planes from the first strike again, not that they couldn't get a major third wave at all.
As for Hiryu, yes, the planes were from the reserve force that had not gone to Midway, but they too were having their weapons switched out when the American attack arrived (it's not like Nagumo gave separate orders just to Hiryu) and then were ordered to switch back to anti-ship weapons as the first wave returned. The time taken for the back and forth doesn't seem much different than refueling and re-arming the returning strike. Its not like Hiryu's afternoon wave was planned in advance. Once again, carrier ops have constraints but were not that rigid.
The Coral Sea was the worse case scenario: all planes not just landing at night but having to navigate to and find the carrier fully at night (remember, 10pm landing not 6pm). And given an active enemy carrier force, its not like Takagi could close the distance for a shorter return flight, while at Pearl Harbor the IJN fleet could have certainly moved 50-75 nm closer to Oahu, either before or during a third wave. The issue is would a third wave flying home during the day and arriving near sunset have been a disaster in the making; it would not, a dusk landing is not a night landing. If they even arrived that late, there were many opportunities for the Japanese to ensure a third wave arrived before it was too dark (a slightly smaller attack would take less time to rearm and spot, so launch sooner; a smaller strike would take less time to form up, and so actually start flying to Pearl sooner; moving the carriers towards Oahu could have reduced the flight time out, and continuing moderately south after launch would make the the return leg shorter still; the smaller strike would take less time to land, etc.)
@Onux Regarding losses: note that you need to track not only planes completely lost, but also those sufficiently damaged; I don't have a good source, but wikipedia lists that as another 74, which adds up to around a third of participating airframes being out.
Now, perhaps even that was "very low compared to the battles to come." I struggle to understand how the Japanese would have been able to make comparisons to battles specifically noted as not yet having occurred.
Please provide evidence that the Nimitz quote is the result of careful consideration and not him thinking for 30 seconds when someone asked him "what would have happened if the fuel tanks got hit?" (Also, note that the Red Hill fuel complex was almost complete, so replacement was a matter of months, and there definitely was not 2 years of fuel in those tanks.) If Nimitz lays out his case in great detail, I will consider it, but flag officers, even really good ones, are not infallible. And I have serious doubts you've actually read the case Zimm makes.
And the vast majority of planes in question were already prepped for a strike, they just didn't know where they were going yet.
OK. I pulled out The First Team, and you're sort of right on this, but only sort of. Most of the group that hit Neosho and Simms looks to have been aboard by 1330 or so. But the last group didn't arrive over the carriers until 1515. It was 16 Vals, of which 14 landed safely. Six of them were assigned to the strike, which completed launching at 1615. I suspect that was how many they could get turned in that hour, and the deck crews would have been ready to turn the planes as fast as possible, in a way that they weren't at Pearl because a third strike wasn't planned.
American experience is of limited relevance because the Japanese didn't do arming or refueling on deck. Planes had to be struck down for that, which lengthened the cycle a lot.
I have not read Zimm, so I did some research. As I understand it his general thesis on the fuel tanks is that they were not vulnerable because: -They were made of thick steel 0.75-1.5" thick -A random distribution of bombs across the two main tank farms would not have hit that many tanks. -The berms would have contained any spills of burning fuel -It would have taken at least an hour for radiant heat from one fire to ignite an adjacent tank and there was a water spray system to cool the tanks in the event of fire and prevent radiant ignition -There were pump systems that could move fuel from damaged or burning tanks and berm containments
Again, I am getting this second hand, so I welcome corrections since you have the book.
These points run into several problems: -The tanks were actually made of 0.5" riveted steel (source:https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/master/pnp/habshaer/hi/hi0500/hi0540/data/hi0540data.pdf). Either direct hits or near misses should have easily blown these open, especially with the pressure from thousands of tons of fuel inside them (most sources agree that the tank farms were mostly full on 07 Dec.) -There is no reason to assume hits would have been randomly distributed. The Val divebomber had a CEP of 90' (at least according to Zimm) and most of the tanks were 106' diameter. Some were 160' diameter. And except for three (?) camouflaged prototypes, they were painted white, making nice easy targets. Even then, Zimm assumes 22-35 tanks hit directly, and 3 breached by blast or fragments. That is 46-69% destruction, which is A LOT higher than the % of ships hit in the harbor that day. And I would argue assuming only 3 tanks breached by near misses is probably low, 0.5" riveted steel is easily failing from nearby blasts.
-Shortly after the attack this source (https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/master/pnp/habshaer/hi/hi0600/hi0642/data/hi0642data.pdf) states that a layer of clay was added to the berms to lessen the risk of fire from oil leakage.* This suggests the berms would not have necessarily contained everything. Same source says that bullet holes were sealed with wooden plugs, which again suggests that tanks were not so strong. Also this photo (https://www.history.navy.mil/content/history/museums/nmusn/explore/photography/wwii/wwii-pacific/us-entry-into-wwii-japanese-offensive/1941-december-7-japanese-attack-on-pearl-harbor/before-the-attack/80-g-451123.html) suggests that the lower tank farm by the drydocks did not have berms (or perhaps low berms for leak containment, but not for containing a full tank) unlike the tank farm at Merry Point/the subbase, which appears to have much larger berms (and also had the prototype camouflaged tanks). Finally if the berms were designed to hold a fully ruptured tank with just a few feet of clearance, then any "miss" that hits a berm and blows a hole allows a river of burning fuel to spill up to an undamaged tank. -Some sources (Prange) say that only the AVGAS tanks had water spray systems. Even then, such systems are often designed (via flow rates at monitors, pump rate of system, etc.) to contain a fire in one tank/berm from spreading (i.e prevent an accident at one tank affecting all). If there were dozens of such fires (22-35 of them, perhaps) would the system have been able to protect the remaining tanks surrounded by burning lakes of millions of gallons of fuel? To say nothing of damage to the systems piping from the bombing itself. Also Pembroke Docks (detailed below) suggests that water spray isn't as effective as we might wish. -Pumping fuel from a burning tank doesn't really seem like a practical solution. The tanks held some 2.1M gallons each; if the fire could heat an adjacent tank to combustion in an hour, you would need a 35,000 gpm pump (I'm sorry, 22-35 of them) to drain it in time, which i'm guessing was not part of the spill containment system (some upper farm tanks were 6.3M gal - 100,000 gpm pump anyone?) Plus if the fuel farm is full and/or 50% on fire, where are you pumping the fuel to?
There are multiple historical examples of air attack setting fuel storage tanks on fire, the two most relevant being the Japanese attacks on Darwin in Feb 42 and Dutch Harbor in June 42. The Italians also did it at Haifa, and the Germans at Pembroke Dock in Wales in 1940. For heavens sake SMS Emden set fuel tanks on fire at Madras in 1914 using 130 rounds of 105mm - with that as an example I'm tempted to just disregard anything anyone says about fuel tanks not being vulnerable. The Pembroke Dock fire started with one single Luftwaffe bomb (one!) hitting a fuel tank and ended 18 days later with 11 tanks destroyed despite round the clock work of 650 firefighters. On the one hand Pembroke Dock isn't an exact example because the tanks did not have individual berms like at Pearl, on the other hand the untold gallons of water they used was pretty ineffective at preventing a single tank fire spreading to ten others, so I think that any water spray cooling system would not have fared well against multiple tanks on fire at once. Also, that fire drew on resources from across southern England; Pearl Harbor was not going to get mutual aid response from LA or San Diego, and of course there were already fires all over the place to deal with.
Regarding the impact if the tank farms had been destroyed. This source (https://faculty.cc.gatech.edu/~tpilsch/INTA4803TP/Articles/Oil%20Logistics%20in%20the%20Pacific%20War=Donovan.pdf) states that in the 9 days after the attack the USN used 750,000 barrels at a time when the 11 oilers/tankers available to the Pacific fleet had a combined capacity of 760,000 barrels. This suggests the "replace the fuel farm with tankers afloat" is a non-starter. It's about 2,400 mi from Oahu to Richmond, which is 9.5 days round trip in a 18kt/21mph Cimarron class, not factoring loading time. Other classes were slower, at about 12 days - again just in transit. If you can move 760,000 barrels in 10-12 days (plus) and you use 750,000 in 9 days then you cannot sustain your operations. And this is before we factor in the time sitting around Pearl waiting to refuel something because you can't offload into a destroyed fuel farm. I know the response is to use ordinary tankers not fleet oilers, but Allied tanker availability was in crisis in early 1942. The USN was snatching up civilian tankers for conversion to fleet oilers, German submarines were sinking them at a high rate during the second Happy Time, and the T2/T3 programs (like Liberty ships, but for fuel) were not yet in full swing.
Is every ship now a harbor queen? No. There were fuel oil tanks at the civilian port of Honolulu the Navy would have commandeered. The diesel tanks for subs were separate and may have been missed. Apparently the under-construction Red Hill facility had a few tanks finished and one full. That's fuel to use and some limited capability to offload tankers. But millions of barrels of fuel go up in smoke the US Pacific Fleet has a problem.
No one said there were 2 years worth of fuel in the tanks. The claim was losing the fuel prolongs the war 2 years. If the US cannot fuel carriers to get to the Coral Sea, the Japanese take Port Moresby. If they cannot get an amphibious task force to Guadalcanal, then Henderson Field is Fuchida Field and together with holding Port Moresby Australia is beginning to be cut off. Instead of taking the offensive in mid-1943 the Allies are fighting just to get to where they actually were at the end of 1942. The Manhattan Project means that the war would not have actually lasted two more years, but no one knew that at the time.
"Six of them were assigned to the strike, which completed launching at 1615. I suspect that was how many they could get turned in that hour,"
Ok, lets take six planes per hour as the turnaround time. The two waves at Pearl Harbor averaged 30 planes per carrier, which would have required about an hour of landing time (2 min per landing). If the second wave finished at 12, it started landing at 11ish, which means the first wave started landing at 10ish. For a five hour round trip, planes have to start launching at 1 to be back by sunset and have dusk as a buffer. 6 planes an hour times 3 hours times six carriers means 108 planes are ready for the third wave. Figure 36 fighters and 72 bombers, or 75% of the non-torpedo bombers on the first wave. That's more than adequate, 1 bomber per oil tank and 24 to cover losses/misses or go after the dry docks. Factor in that 108 planes need less round trip time than 183 planes (less time to spot, to form up, landing takes 35-40 minutes not 60) and I once again see nothing impossible here time wise.
"the deck crews would have been ready to turn the planes as fast as possible, in a way that they weren’t at Pearl because a third strike wasn’t planned." The Japanese did not wake up on May 7th and tell their deck crews 'At 1515 this afternoon our Admiral will realize he's been attacking an oiler not a carrier and order a quick turnaround for another strike.' If the Japanese at Pearl Harbor considered there to be any risk of the US carriers attacking then the deck crews would have been ready for some kind of refueling/rearming.
*Being fair to my own standards, just because they thought this way doesn't mean it is true. It could be the berms were adequate as is and they did extra work because someone in charge wanted to be extra safe.
You seem to have gotten the bulk of the argument correct, I'll have to check specifics later.
First, I'm not sure that all the tanks were the same, and second, the document actually says "All three tanks were constructed by riveting 1/2 inch thick by 66 inches high by 19 feet wide steel plates" and in the 20s, it wouldn't have been unusual for something like that to have been built up from multiple smaller plates, particularly on the lower side where the pressure was higher. (Also, Zimm's main point in that section was that you couldn't really do much by strafing the tanks, which is absolutely true even if they're just .5".)
I read that as being more about minor leaks slowly getting through the berms and into places where the leaking oil can build up.
Assuming they aren't hidden by the smoke of a nearby tank burning. Unless the pilots are ludicrously disciplined to always start on the downwind side of the tank farm (unlikely in the extreme) then each burning tank protects a lot of its neighbors.
I am not sure that's a good example. Oil is a really complicated thing, and they didn't understand it very well in 1914. For instance, most of the avgas used by the Allies in WWI came from Indonesian sources and was about 70 octane. The US version was only about 50 octane because the base oil was different. I have no idea what was in the tanks at Madras, but it seems very plausible that it was a lot easier to ignite than 1941 bunker oil, which is very heavy and hard to ignite.
I think the author is getting confused between "ships under the control of PacFlt" and "ships available to the US government in an emergency". There were definitely more tankers on the west coast than he gives credit for, and if we need to use them to keep the fleet going and Seattle gets a bit cold, so be it. And yes, I know about the tanker crisis triggered by the U-boats. The distribution we saw was a result of real-world priorities, and could have changed in different circumstances. (Also, there's an aerial picture in that article which clearly shows the berms around the lower tanks.)
I have definitely heard the former at times. As for the latter, that's pretty obvious nonsense, even without the Manhattan project. Losing Port Moresby would be bad but not catastrophic, as would the longer routes we'd have to take to avoid planes based on Guadalcanal. But there were other routes to Australia, and nothing discussed here pushes out the point the US fleet is available in overwhelming strength by one minute. Maybe it adds a couple months because we're starting from slightly further back, but I'm not sure it even does that much.
That's a fairly silly strawman. Lundstrom is extremely clear that plans for the second strike were made well before the last bombers showed up at 1515, and while I don't have the book in front of me, it might well have been before the first group started landing two hours earlier. And, yeah, that means that by the time the last bombers show up, the deck crews are probably standing there ready to do their best impression of a pit stop and get the planes out as fast as possible. It's going to take a lot longer if you need to round up the deck crews and tell the armorers to start building bombs. More broadly, in every single carrier battle case you cite, it's clearly the optimal answer for the admiral to say "get ready to rearm the returning strike as fast as you can in case we can get it out again today". But Pearl wasn't a carrier battle, and those orders were never given.
A lot of the question here is what is our point of departure. If it's the Fuchida one, where he argues for it starting at noon, then the whole thing is obvious nonsense because no preparations have been made, and even under the best case, the planes need to be in the air in two hours. If there had been a contingency for a third wave in their plans, and preparations had begun once the first two waves flew off, then I will admit that it probably could have been done. But that would, among other things, probably lock them out of the possibility of putting together an anti-shipping strike if one or more of the US carriers suddenly appears. More broadly, it would require a fairly extraordinary degree of success in the attack for the third wave to be viable. That did indeed happen, but I don't think even the Japanese were arrogant enough to count on it, and in that case, the chance of the third wave going very badly is much higher. (For that matter, the effectiveness of American defenses was visibly rising even in the later part of the first wave.)
Ok, finally read the third chapter. I'll be honest, i scrolled past most of y'all's argument here about a third wave strike. :-)
I agree with he comments here about how out-of-place all the blame-analysis felt (half the chapter, give or take!) felt. This gave me a good chuckle though:
"Let us not forget that we were surprised by the North Koreans in June 1950; surprised when China entered the war later that year; surprised in 1961 by discovery of the attempt to overthrow Castro in Cuba....."
I mean, I get that Bay of Pigs (or at least our involvement in it) was probably still deeply classified. But it made me laugh anyway.