Pearl Harbor What if?

[chrisswim]

As it was, the only battleship that was fully lost as a result of the Pearl Harbor attack was the Arizona. The others, all of them that were considered worthwhile for combat, were recovered and refurbished.

quote="As I recall the Oklahoma is on the bottom of the ocean. It rolled over at Pearl, righted & floated, towed and then sank.

I claim no particular expertise on naval matters so could well be wrong, but as I recall the OK was indeed re-floated, repaired to the point of being seaworthy, but then determined to be un-battleworthy, struck from the list, stripped and left to rot. It was not so much that she could not be returned to service, but that it was not deamed worthwhile upgrading her to "modern" standards. Not a cost factor (money was almost no consideration), but a waist of shipyard space that could have otherwise been working on ships that the navy could use.
It was post-war, while she was being towed to the breaker's yard, that she sank. /quote]


Because of the attack she wasn't considered combat ready and was sold.... okay, Also, good info on the Utah. Thank you, so three of the 8 battleships at Pearl never sailed under their own power again.

[voltigeur]

I agree that Pearl was not the watershed disaster that American propagandist have made it out to be. I have always felt the real stupidity was the order to drain the fuel and park the vast majority of our P40’s wing tip to wing tip.

I think if the Hickam Field fighters had been dispersed and even 10% armed and fueled for action the first wave would have gone pretty much as it did just with more Japanese casualties. The second wave would have had a hard time fighting their way in.

Despite the P40 bad reputation the truth is that in the lower altitude bands (below 15000) it was a formidable opponent for the Zero. Definitely enough that a few pilots could disrupt the escorts and the rest would have decimated the Vals and Kates. The P40 suffers from comparison to newer American aircraft and miss use when commanders tried to use the P40 as an escort fighter at or above 20,000 feet.

It would make a great Check Your Six game!

Also you have to remember that the idea of keeping a fighter on an alert 2 or even alert 5 status for an extended period of time just wasn’t feasible. You can’t judge their readiness by today’s standards.

Fun discussion tho.

[Gridley]

I recall reading at one point that the losses sustained at Pearl were not officially announced until several years later (for propaganda purposes; wartime censorship). In fact at least one war-time movie I've seen suggested that the losses were mostly aircraft, and that sabotage had played a role. That would be consistent with the round-up of Japanese-Americans.

Anyone who knows more than I about this is free to contradict me. :-}

However if this was in fact the case, the level of damage sustained by the fleet could reasonably be judged irrelevant for wartime morale purposes.

Since we've already concluded that fleet building programs would be unaffected, that fleet losses had minimal impact, that damage to the IJN strike force was unlikely... it seems to me that an increased alert level at Pearl would have had no significant impact to the course of the war.

[Mk 1]

I think that if the Army AIr Corps and Marine Fighters had been armed and a CAP was up over the Oahu then Japanese losses would have been much, much higher.

As I understand it, the doctrine for a CAP at that time would have meant as many as 8 aircraft airborne and waiting, operating in pairs, running racetrack patterns between the ordinal compass points.

I hardly think that would have even been a speed bump to the IJN's first wave.

However, if the US forces had been seriously concerned about an IJN attack, rather than about sabotage, they would have had the aircraft disbursed across/around the perimiters of the major fields and out to the satellite fields. This would have significantly reduced US losses to the first wave, UNLESS the CAP spotted and reported the attack, and the US forces were caught scrambling or climbing out. No way a CAP could have given enough warning for the majority of P-36s and P-40s to get airborne and up to altitude. So best case would have been that they road out the first wave, and then rose to defend against the follow-up wave(s).

The Japanese would not have been expecting opposition as much as we didn't expect the attack to begin with.

Ah but I believe they were. Indeed they were rather pleasantly suprised to find they had completely surprised the defenses.

The first wave had a large contingent of fighters whose primary role was establishing aireal control. If they were opposed they were to fight the defenders. If the defenses were not up they were to strafe the airfields. Rather makes a dangerous scenario for the defending aircrew.

Makes you wonder too if the Japanese had been defeated at Pearl Harbor would Hitler have declared war on the US?

Probably the most interesting "what-if" of the war, at least to me. What if Hitler, rather than declaring war against the US three days later, had instead made a public speach decrying the sneak attack as "un-civilized", and offering humanitarian aid to the US? Would have put Roosevelt and Churchill into quite a pickle!

I think if the Hickam Field fighters had been dispersed ...

I think that would have been the key issue.

... the first wave would have gone pretty much as it did just with more Japanese casualties. The second wave would have had a hard time fighting their way in.

Yep, I think you are pretty much spot-on.

Despite the P40 bad reputation the truth is that in the lower altitude bands (below 15000) it was a formidable opponent for the Zero.

Yep quite agree. Several US fighters at that time were OK at lower altitudes. Even pretty good. The key was whether the combat environment required interceptions above about 15,000 ft.

The P40 suffers from comparison to newer American aircraft and miss use when commanders tried to use the P40 as an escort fighter at or above 20,000 feet.

I think the P-40 (and even moreso the P-39) suffered from the combat requirements of SWPA. At Guadalca-nal they often had to try to intercept Betty bombers that came it at 18-20,000 ft, with Zeros escorting from 2 - 4,000 ft higher. The poor guys didn't have a choice, they had to try to fight at altitudes where their planes were anemic.

In New Guinea they had to climb over the Owen Stanley range to get home, meaning when they got low on fueld they had to go nose up and slowing down with the Japanese defenders in chase. Also a worst case for their own performance.

The key at Pearl would have been getting them up to altitude without Zeros all over them. If they could do that, then they would probably have put up a stiff defense.

It would make a great Check Your Six game!

I'm up for it. What time? Your place or mine?

Fun discussion tho.

Indeed.

[TAMMY]

Oddly enough and in spite of the impression given by the movie "Midway" less than 2000 Japanese were interred in Hawaii. Hawaii, being a territory at the time was put under martial law.

I do not know how many people of Japanese origin lived in Hawaii, but the Executive Order 9066 brought to the internment of 117.000 "Alien enemies" ofJapanese origin on the Western Coast and the Pacific, about 2/3 of them were American citizen.

In 1988 the Congress offered official excuses to the 60.000 still surviving and passed a law for a money compensation.

What about the radar at Opana Point,

The radar SCR-270 was a good radar, the problem was the training of the operators. For example they were unable to evaluate the size of the "blimp". I suppose that the signal of the 183 airplanes of the first wave was larger than that of 12 B-17.
However, even if they were able to do it, this information would have had scarce effect due to the lack of an air control organisation.

In any case the radar did not track the Japanese planes in and out. IThey just sighted "something" coming in, signalled it, the duty officer discounted it and the radar was switched off as foreseen by the timetable.. The sequence of events shown in the movie "Tora, Tora, Tora" is quite correct on this point.

The lack of training and experience of the radar operators was a problem in the first month of the war as it is shown by the false alarms of air attacks in the defence of the
West Coast.

Mk 1 wrote

Probably the most interesting "what-if" of the war, at least to me. What if Hitler, rather than declaring war against the US three days later, had instead made a public speach decrying the sneak attack as "un-civilized", and offering humanitarian aid to the US? Would have put Roosevelt and Churchill into quite a pickle!

The declaration of war of Hitler was more emotional than welll thought of. But if you read the declarations of war of Hitler and Mussolini you wll find a difference. The reasons of Hitler are "the continuous violations of the neutrality by Roosevelt and the action of war carried out against Germany" while Mussolini explixitly quoted Axis and Japan.

In both cases it was a reaction of the moment and not a prepared one. This is well shown by the fact that the first torpedoing of a US ship on the East Coast by an U-Boot was on 16 February 1942 only.

[hauptgrate]

I agree with Mk 1's comments above. Probably any sort of alert status at Pearl would have simply meant more fighters in the air, better dispersment of aircraft on the ground, and more readiness on the ships. So, I would assume that much of the hits on the ships would still have occurred -- perhaps a percentage less do to fighter interception and better AA -- but perhaps less damage due to watertight doors being closed, etc. How would American fighter pilots have performed? Probably not that well -- BUT...they would have been able to bail out or ditch near friendly territory with a good chance of survival while Japanese pilots are lost. We might have learned even quicker the strengths and weaknesses of the Zeke. The loss of even a modest number of pilots might have seriously impacted the first six months of the war for the Japanese carrier fleet and slowed down the takeover of Southeast Asia -- perhaps. Perhaps, too, as Mk 1 noted, it is possible that the Japanese Navy would be required to set up a better pilot training system much earlier than they did and/or push aircraft development faster. I can imagine the official report on Pearl Harbor might include a section on necessary improvements including a larger replacement pilot pool, and aircraft better able to withstand punishment. On the other hand, their whole plan was for a short war with the belief that America would not choose to embark on a long campaign to regain Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific. So much for plans....

[TAMMY]

Thanks for the informations but my comment was on your phrase

They tracked the Japanese in and out

On the "in" I had no objection even if I believed it was a tracking shorter than that you show and i used the reference to the movie just as a ready one not as the absolute truth. Many books on the subject give a similar version: the radar was shut down after the response of the duty officer.

But on the "out" the radar was shut off so could give no information either on the outgoing direction of the Japanese planes or on the arrival of a second wave.

For the internment in Hawaii you are fully right. The difference of treatment in respect of the West Coast was due to the high number of resident of Japanese origin that made impossible the relocation of the "enmy aliens". The official figures I have found gives a number between 1.500 and 1.800 interned on a total of about 150.000 resident of Japanese origin.

On the continental US the interned were around 110-120.000 (practically all those resident on the West Coast) on a total of about 130.000 overall.

[Mk 1]

I am wandering a bit off-topic here, but thought those who enjoy learing the peculiarities of history might enjoy these bits of "local color".

Oddly enough and in spite of the impression given by the movie "Midway" less than 2000 Japanese were interred in Hawaii. Hawaii, being a territory at the time was put under martial law.

I do not know how many people of Japanese origin lived in Hawaii, but the Executive Order 9066 brought to the internment of 117.000 "Alien enemies" ofJapanese origin on the Western Coast and the Pacific, about 2/3 of them were American citizen.

In 1988 the Congress offered official excuses to the 60.000 still surviving and passed a law for a money compensation.

The internment of Japanese issei (first-generation immigrants) and nissei (second-generation, US-born children of immigrants) is well known. As sfcmac has described, though, perhaps less well know is that Hawaii did not relocate or intern their Japanese population as a whole, a move that would probably have crippled the local economy. Rather, in Hawaii only those who were deamed a security risk were interned, as was done also with Germans and Italians on the mainland.

However, less well known in the popular histories today, but probably well known to our Hawaiian member(s), is that the internment order did not come so much as a direct result of the attack on Pearl Harbor, but rather as an indirect result, once removed from the strike at the Navy. The congressional and White House records show that it was the take-over of the smaller Hawaiian island of Niihua by a single Japanese pilot, who ditched when his plane was damaged in the Pearl Harbor raid, that was the primary factor behind the internment order.

On Niihua three members of two families from the local Japanese farmworker community, one issei and two nissei, colluded with the Japanese pilot and held several members of the local Hawaiian native population hostage. Until, that is, the Japanese pilot made the mistake of shooting one of the Hawaiian farm workers, who though slow to anger was genuinely infuriated by this particular offense, and after being shot two or three times by the pilot's little Nambu pistol proceeded to pick him up from the ground and dash him against a rock wall, breaking his back, at which point his wife, also rather angered, proceeded to bash his head in with a stone, killing him.

When some of the workers managed to row over the the larger islands and bring back an army patrol to settle the affair and "re-take" the island, it caused quite a flurry of reports, both through official channels and in the press. Both the US Army and west coast politicians demands to "secure" the issei and nissei populations trace their start to this time, and to the actions of this VERY small sampling of issei and nissie, rather than to the actual attack on Pearl.

(BTW the song "They Can't take Niihua No-How" was rather popular from 1943 all the way up to the early 1950s.)

On the west coast, conversely, exactly the opposite occured, as a small sample of the local issei and nissei farmworker community repulsed the only Japanese military incursion onto California soil. In late February, 1942, the Japanese submarine I-17 shelled the Ellwood oil refinery and storage tanks on the central coast near Goleta. A day later that same submarine sent a small detatchment ashore further up the coast. The party of sailors, armed with rifles and pistols, was met near dawn on the beach by some issei and nissei farm hands who had been working in the coastal strawberry fields.

After greeting the sailors in fluent Japanese, with all culturally proper courtesy and respect, the farm workers hinted that the current circumstances made their visit unwise, that it was in fact an imposition, that they should leave before they got the farm hands in trouble. The sailors, with only a low ranking officer leading them, were so surprised at receiving a polite and friendly greeting by Japanese civilians, whom they had no wish to inconvenience, that they followed the rules of courtesy rather than their orders, and making their apologies immediately put back off to sea and returned to their submarine.

(Found this story fully documented in a small local museum along the central coast. )

However, back on Hawaii, while there was no wholesale interment of the Japanese and Japanese-American population, there were lots of suspicions and predjudices that found their way into the open.

One interesting case in particular is the only captive to be taken in the Pearl Harbor attack. The sole survivor from the 5 two-man midget submarines that also participated in the attack was captured by Japanese-American soldiers of the US Army, as he baled-out of his submarine as it floundered in the surf off-shore later in the day on December 7.

Often not told in that story, though, is the risk that the Japanese-America soldiers took in rescuing/capturing that Japanese sailor. They had been assigned to anti-invasion beach defense duties, had been ordered to dig their fox-holes, and to STAY IN THEM NO MATTER WHAT, as their line of Japanese-American riflemen were "backed-up" by "white" machine-gunners, who had orders to shoot anyone on the beach. Reminiscent of tales of Red Army NKVD "blocking forces" ...

[Donald M. Scheef]

Getting back to the original hypothetical:

I firmly believe that if the US forces in Hawaii had firm knowledge of the impending Japanese attack, the results would have been adverse to the US war effort.

With foreknowledge, it is likely that the US battleships would have left Pearl Harbor.

If they had been located at sea by the Japanese, it is likely that most, if not all would have been sunk with greater loss of life and no chance of recovery. The loss of experienced personnel would have been the greatest loss. Of lesser effect would have been the loss of much of the big-gun fire support available to US Marine and Army personnel during the subsequent advance towards Japan.

Worse than the loss of the battleships is the possibility that the carriers would have returned to the region and attempted to intervene. Without the six months of experience that hardened US carrier personnel for the Midway battle, I doubt that the outcome would have been favorable for the US.

Probably the worst possibility is that the Japanese might not have located the battleships. In this case, the attackers at Pearl Harbor would probably have inflicted greater damage on the submarine base, repair facilities, and fuel depots. This would have had a much greater crippling effect on the US war effort than the actual results. If all the US battleships had survived Pearl Harbor without damage, the US might have followed a policy of surface warfare that probably would have resulted in subsequent loss of the surface forces without inflicting the massive damage on Japanese forces caused by submarine warfare and carrier task forces later in the war.

Don S.

[piersyf]

A quick addition to the thread... a few minutes warning may have changed one thing that I read about years ago... Honolulu was hit 101 times by explosive ordinance; once by a Japanese bomb, and 100 times by US AA rounds that had been fired with the fuses not set. (There was also an account of sailors bashing the fuse caps off the rounds by smacking them on the edge of the splinter shields. As an ex artillery guy, makes me shudder to think)

Further to the P40 elements of the discussion, the P40 was a lowish altitude energy fighter (dive and zoom better than turn), the Zero was a maneuver fighter. Australian P40's operating with 75 squadron (our first to engage Zeroes) had great success with the zoom attacks until they were ORDERED to dogfight by higher command. Our loss ratios changed dramatically, and not in our favour. I'm guessing the ideal fighting zone for P40's over Hawaii would be a touch narrow (altitude wise) if they were to take advantage of their capabilities.

P

[Schwerepunkt]

after the three Mississippi class went to the Atlantic Fleet. Utah was a target ship, not a battleship. The attack on Pearl Harbor eliminated her use as a target ship, not as a battleship while the Arizona and Oklahoma were.
Heavy damage to West Virginia, Nevada, California, and moderate/light damage to Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Maryland and the complete loss of Arizona and Oklahoma meant the USN had only one combat ready battleship in the Pacific on December 8, 1941: USS Colorado which had been under refit on the West Coast.

In Southeast Asia, Britain had HMS Prince of Wales, HMS Repulse and a scattershot of cruisers and destroyers in the region.There was talk at the Admiralty of deploying Force Z with the remnants of the US Pacific Fleet or act in combination with the US Asiatic Fleet but neither was possible due to Japanese pressure. Time was of the essence and Force had to be used quickly or not at all. It was used at once and was sunk by Land Based Japanese Naval Air Flotillas from Formosa. The diffence in casualties between Force Z and two sunken American battleships (Oklahoma and California) shows that not trying to reach deep water under severe air attack was actually beneficial to US war goals. A larger cadre of experienced men were available to man new construction and the rebuilt ones that could be returned to service.