Bo Rearguard
Posts: 492
Joined: 4/7/2008
From: Basement of the Alamo
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quote:
ORIGINAL: DeZanic
AND what if these carriers would have been spotted in time, would the US intervene? Would there be any war declaration anyway. What was the Japanese plan B in case the task force got discovered? I mean certainly the US would have increased the presence of patrols around Pearl Harbor to prevent the Japanese trying to come close again if this first attempt would have failed. So what would have happened if the carriers got discovered?
Lets discuss.
It's important to note several things about Pearl Harbor: the Japanese did not fully expect the attack to be a surprise. They anticipated the possibility of facing an alerted enemy. They figured to lose two carriers. In that regard, they were surprised themselves. There's always been speculation that had the US battleship fleet received adequate warning that getting underway and out into deep water might have resulted in a greater loss of life had the Japanese found them. The shallow depth of Pearl Harbor ensured many ships would fight again.
Equally importantly is that most of the conspiracy theories about Pearl Harbor display a lot of ex post facto knowledge. The idea, for example, that FDR would sacrifice what were later seen as outdated warships (second-generation battleships and older destroyers). At the time, carrier operations were entirely new, and very few nations had mastered them. Not even the Japanese conceded the seas to carriers...the plan for Midway six months later called for the coup de grace to be delivered not by Nagumo's carriers, but by Yamamoto's powerful battleship division, led by the Yamato. If a war was going to be fought, the planners of 1941 expected it to be fought by those second-generation battleships lined up at Pearl Harbor, with the carriers in a supporting role.
There's also the point that tethering the battleships at Hawaii without torpedo nets was not as stupid as it sounded. The torpedoes the Japanese used in the attack were new and highly secret. The potency of Japanese torpedoes came as a shock to the US throughout the first months of the war.
And if Pearl Harbor is the subject of so many conspiracy theories, then the Battle of Savo Island, on August 8/9, 1942, should be even more controversial. Four Allied cruisers sunk, 1,000 bluejackets drowned, with no damage inflicted on the Japanese in return. That was nine months into the war, and the US Navy still was operating with a complacent mindset nine months after "The Day of Infamy." You see the same comedy of errors, missed intelligence and luck as at Pearl Harbor, but you never hear conspiracy theories on how the Japanese got the drop on the USN in the midst of an important counteroffensive.
The bottom line to me on Pearl Harbor is that the Americans underestimated the Japanese in 1941 as diminutive yellow men in buck teeth and spectacles who bowed a lot and made cheap imitation goods. In the racial environment of the 1940s the idea of an Asian people striking the USN in a safe port thousands of miles from the expected area of conflict was inconceivable. It took many months for that mindset to dissipate, which is why a lot of the conspiracy theories which popped up right after the attack inferred German planning or even outright participation in the attack.
I do feel that General Short and Admiral Kimmel got a harsher deal from Washington than they deserved. MacArthur lost all of his planes in the Philippines the following day, and became a hero. Short and Kimmel were not colorful characters or brilliant leaders, but they were unfairly treated when compared with MacArthur and Brereton. Their talents -- and Kimmel's were pretty considerable -- should not have been left to waste. As Prange wrote, "There was enough blame to go around at Pearl Harbor."
< Message edited by Bo Rearguard -- 1/7/2015 2:30:44 PM >
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"They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist ...." Union General John Sedgwick, 1864
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Lets talk about conspiracies - Pearl Harbor - 
Classic neo-nazi stuff 
) ... *Just in case* They are paid to do that.
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