I've always thought the day of the week chosen, Sunday, was a strategic one by Japan. It seems like an early morning Sunday attack would offer the least resistance. You'd be less likely to encounter units actively training or on high alert. However watching a lot of documentaries lately on the WW2 Pacific theater I've heard historians say it was lucky for America as many Sailors and Soldiers were on leave. Thus loss of life was lessened. But killing Americans wasn't the goal of Japan. This thought process got me thinking today. We got lucky the japs didn't hit the oil refinery or depot for sure but attacking on Sunday was tactically sound IMO.

I'd like other's thoughts. I will say having spent a total of 6 months TDY there it's amazing how chill Hawaiian time is and how disarming it can be to troops. I'd run the old flight line on Ford Island and just imagine the planes coming over the mountains. Surreal.

This may be the most analyzed battle in US history so not sure if we can offer anything new really. That being said, Montemayors video is a fantastic summation of the raid itself and why I love YT for history stuff now. His Midway ones are also must watch.

Yamamoto knew about America because he studied at Harvard and traveled the US. He spent some years in America and saw our capabilities.

Always fascinating to learn about these things after the fact.

ApachePilot said:

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I'd run the old flight line on Ford Island and just imagine the planes coming over the mountains.

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i've run ford many times when i used to tdy there...it's crazy to still see the impact of japanese weaponry where they didn't make repairs. quite surreal.

Great course

Were you in the class where the cadet added the BAFL about not letting a drunk sorority girl put your sunscreen on?

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That sounds right. He had some pipes on him. You couldn't fall asleep in his class because of the way he would describe the battles.

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He also had the ability to fling a piece of chalk sidearm and hit a sleeping CT right between the eyes at 50 feet. Semester I took that class he must have did this at least a dozen times.

Cinco Ranch Aggie said:

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Wrong board?

Japan's entire goal in attacking Pearl Harbor was to knock the US Navy out of the war so that the IJN could do as it pleased in the South Pacific. Of course, the majority of their leadership seriously underestimated how this attack would unleash a pissed-off beast upon them. Yamamoto was one who understood what the likely ramifications of this attack would be (and we put together a mission specifically designed to shoot that SOB down into the jungles of Bougainville Island).

There is a very good reason that, even 50 years later, men such as my maternal grandfather still harbored hatred for any and all things Japanese.

To bring this around to the movies, there have been a number of depictions of this over the years. A decent high-level look at it came most recently in the remake of Midway, and of course there is the much-despised Pearl Harbor. While that movie is mostly a love triangle story, it does feature some great looking airplane battles. The depiction of the attack has some validity to it, but mostly, what they seemed to have done is just combine the entire sequence (there were actually two separate attacks on that morning, with a third that the Japs scrubbed) into one big attack. There were US pilots that did get off the ground that morning to shoot down some of the attackers, but how convenient for the movie that it just happened to be the two primary characters (both of whom would then go on to participate in the Doolittle raid)?

The best of them all is Tora! Tora! Tora! And that is a by-far, there is no debate needed here kind of best.

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I found the new Midway to be worse than Pearl Harbor, probably because the new Midway had a chance to be a great war movie. Instead they made a generic pile of garbage

cbr said:

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the stunning thing is that nagumo (iirc) was such a ***** he didnt send a third and fourth strike. you've bet the empire on one surprise opening battle. then you leave the battle without accomplishing anything at all.

didnt get the carriers
didnt get the oil
didnt get the drydocks
didnt get the planes
(the whole base only had about 300 planes operational)
didnt blockade after the attack with subs
didnt even consider occupation

the whole operation was one of the dumbest things a nation has ever done.

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The carriers were really the biggest miss.

Our naval aircraft were pretty behind at the start of the war. Plus if the carriers had been there it wouldn't matter if they missed the planes. Occupation would've been near impossible imo. Attrition of geography would've made it impossible without supply chain. Look at how long it took us/how we had to island hop all across the pacific

CharlieBrown17 said:

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cbr said:

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the stunning thing is that nagumo (iirc) was such a ***** he didnt send a third and fourth strike. you've bet the empire on one surprise opening battle. then you leave the battle without accomplishing anything at all.

didnt get the carriers
didnt get the oil
didnt get the drydocks
didnt get the planes
(the whole base only had about 300 planes operational)
didnt blockade after the attack with subs
didnt even consider occupation

the whole operation was one of the dumbest things a nation has ever done.

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The carriers were really the biggest miss.

Our naval aircraft were pretty behind at the start of the war. Plus if the carriers had been there it wouldn't matter if they missed the planes. Occupation would've been near impossible imo. Attrition of geography would've been impossible without supply chain. Look at how long it took us/how we had to island hop all across the pacific

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I actually think the oil and docks might have been the biggest miss. But who knows. We only had 2 infantry divisions and 3 marine battallions scattered around the islands. Thats not any kind of insurmountable force in any real sense. The japs generally demonstrated piss poor logistics capability against us. But jesus, if they bet the empire on one morning, and they had the capability to maintain a million man army all over china and the rest of the pacific, then i would think they would have had the ability to move and land a force capable of taking on 20,000 poorly prepared and surprised us troops at pearl in 1941. If they held pearl then backtracking logistics would be easier than projecting.

I expect one issue is that an occupation task force could never achieve surprise...

Strategically, russia was desperate and incapable of threatening japan for the forseeable future (and had signed a pact and moved troops away from the east). China had no power projection ability. The colonial powers had no real offensive capability left in the pacific either.

The us was the existential threat.

Whether they knew it or not, they were betting their whole existence on that day. They should have used at least 2-3 more carriers and probably tried to occupy.

Perhaps if they had the extra carriers and established air supremacy, thye could have lingered long enough for an occupation task force to reach? Never thought about it much but interesting questions.

Japans tactical methods at pearl had little (maybe zero) realistic possibility of accomplishing a strategic victory. They were damned lucky to do as well as they did. If theyd have run a third strike, and taken out pearl as a usable naval base, it would have been able to be considered a strategic win if they had capitalized diplomatically and reached a peace treaty with us (doubtful anyway); if theyd have gotten our carriers too then that might have been more likely. Even if they had lost some carriers and most of their pilots that would be true.

Pearl was pure idiocy. And midway seems even dumber.

I read something that said Japan literally didn't have enough supply ships to keep an occupation force alive in Hawaii, not without giving up many of the other places they held.

With the predicate that Japan needed to attack the US, my plan would be to wait until I knew I could get the carriers, then get the oil, too. From there, an occasional raid on Hawaii, Alaska, or even the west coast just to keep us off balance.

In the long run, there was no way for a nation with Japan's logistical and manufacturing capabilities to beat America. Their best strategy seems to me to have been stay clear and hope we don't get involved.

We still don't have the ability to instantly project an occupation force across the pacific.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2021/04/16/it-took-four-aerial-tankers-to-drag-four-us-air-force-f-16s-to-the-south-china-sea-and-thats-a-problem/

Japan would've struggled to make that feasible or continued in 1941, especially without tipping us off.


We had 7 large carriers in Dec of 1941. A year later we had lost 5 in combat and had 4 total. By 1943 we had 19. So it took 18 months to 2 years to really spin up production of the main fleet carriers.

https://www.history.navy.mil/research/histories/ship-histories/us-ship-force-levels.html#1938

Oil and the storage would've been a huge loss but I think more temporary, we'd still have safeish seas from the US to Hawaii to restore that.

Midway turned the pacific and that doesn't happen if we don't have the carriers they wanted to get at Pearl. A greater oil loss might have prevented us from striking the blow we did at midway as well but I think that's less definite than if we had lost the carriers.

aTmAg said:

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Midway (the movie) was 1000x better than Pearl Harbor (the movie). No stupid love triangle. Was pretty damned accurate (history vs Hollywood called it "the most realistic movie about naval combat ever made"). Great aircraft porn scenes.

My main criticism is that ridiculous landing by George Best where he went under the deck.

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Agreed. Several scenes in the movie, most notably involving the raging fires inside the Jap carriers, made me think the film's writer(s) had read Shattered Sword, the best book about the Battle of Midway I have read IMO. As a nut about WWII in general and its warplanes in particular, I was quite happy to see the film had correct aircraft for the time frame of the battle, i.e., no F6F Hellcats or even that ludicrous crash at the end that was actually a F9F Panther jet fighter that appeared in the original movie.

My biggest complaint of the movie was its singular focus on the dive bomber squadron with nary a reference to any of the fighter groups that operated during the battle. And while it was visually spectacular, the dive bombing was wrongly depicted. They did not dive as a group, but would be spaced out in short intervals. The anti-aircraft was also way over-done.

It's a movie that perfectly meets half way between what old white dudes want to see and what would keep the attention of middle school kids in history class.