Attack on Pearl Harbor (46 page)

It is hard to estimate the immediate effect of this loss on Pacific Fleet operations. Fuel certainly limited operations west of Hawaii, but this was because of limited fuel transportation and forward area storage, not a lack of the commodity itself. The main problem with far Pacific operations was a lack of tankers bringing fuel forward from Pearl Harbor, and fast tankers equipped for underway replenishment of the far-ranging carrier task forces.

A real measure of the impact of the destruction of the tanks and fuel would be how long it would have taken to restore the damage.

Oil tanks are simple constructs—a steel shell, a floating top, and a roof. The shell was essentially shaped sheet metal, something easily handled by the shipyard. It would have taken about 5,000 tons of steel to reconstruct the damaged or destroyed tanks. That amount of metal could have been provided by one cargo shipment from the West Coast. The consequences might have been on the order of imposing a two-month delay in the construction of two destroyers.

Replacing the fuel stockpile would require allocating sufficient tankers to provide the cargo lift needed. The table shows the number of tankers that would have to be assigned to the West Coast–Pearl Harbor run to replace the lost stockpile in the stated time.

At the end of 1941 there were about 120 tankers under US registry, with another 80 in Allied service under Panamanian registry and other flags of convenience. Ships were there—it was a matter of which tasks had the highest priority.

On December 8th, 1941, tankers could have been diverted to the Pacific without disrupting the war effort. Over the following January, February, and March, 43 tankers were sunk along the American eastern seaboard, the Caribbean, and in the Gulf of Mexico by U-boats.
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Many of these ships were engaged in the US domestic trade delivering oil and gasoline to cities in the northeast. Even with the loss of these ships to the Germans’ Operation Drumbeat, and dozens more in the following months, the American European war effort in 1942 was not hampered by fuel shortages. This indicates that some fraction of these 43 lost tankers could have been diverted to the Pacific in December 1941 without affecting the course of the war.

Sending tankers to the Pacific when Admiral King had yet to establish adequate ASW defenses along the Atlantic seaboard would likely have preserved them from the Germans. The Japanese were never effective in interdicting sea lines of communications, even in the opening days of the war when they deployed more than a score of their best submarines to surround and isolate Hawaii, so the ships would have been relatively safe in the Pacific.

The Japanese could have destroyed a significant part of Pearl Harbor’s stored oil. However, the consequences of these losses would not have been as bad as represented by Kimmel and Nimitz. The idea that the fleet would have to withdraw from Pearl Harbor is nonsense. Tankers could have served as temporary storage until the surface tanks could be restored, or alternately, the construction of the underground tanks could have been accelerated. As for delaying the war for two years, that idea is hard to accept when the storage tanks could have been rebuilt and the stockpile restored in only a few months.

This analysis indicates that Kimmel’s and Nimitz’s statements were wrong. There are three reasons why their statements should be taken with the proverbial “grain of salt.”

The first is the magnitude of the mental trauma that had been inflicted on them. They had grown up in the service with the feeling of absolute superiority over the Japanese. The sight of sunken American battleships was indeed the shock that Yamamoto expected it to be. It communicated despair thousands of miles away. On 8 December 1941, in Washington, Admiral Nimitz absorbed the news of the attack:

In other words, admirals, even brilliant admirals, can be hit by the emotion of the moment.

The other difference appears to be the context that the Admirals were considering. If the entire Pearl Harbor fuel storage was destroyed and not restored, and the United States Navy fully deprived of its mid-Pacific refueling station, then the fleet certainly would have to fall back on its fuel supply at the continental United States, and the war might very well have been extended. If things had remained with the same level of tanker resources assigned to the Pacific, the Admirals’ assessments might have been accurate.

But had the admirals considered what could have done to mitigate the problem their answers would have been different. Neither were men to accept setbacks passively. Both would have seen ways to overcome the destruction of the fuel storage tanks. The fact that such informed individuals would have considered it so significant is an indication that corrective measures would have been afforded the highest priority. Tankers would have been diverted from the East Coast and replacement storage tanks shipped to Hawaii and assembled rapidly, with little impact on the course of the war.

Lastly, there was the Red Hill Underground Fuel Storage Facility. This facility was classified “Secret.” Nimitz’s statement could have been made as “cover” for this facility. If needed, the project could have been accelerated. Indeed, while most documents indicate that the first of 20 tanks was officially placed into service in September of 1942, tour guides at the facility state that on 7 December 1941 there were three completed tanks, one full of fuel.

The idea that the destruction of the fuel tanks would have forced the Pacific Fleet out of Hawaii and extended the war by two years is a myth.

4)
Blocking the Channel

Fuchida briefed the Japanese aviators to be alert for an opportunity to sink a ship in the channel to “bottle up” the fleet. During the raid
Nevada
got underway and was passing by the naval shipyard when the second-wave dive-bombers arrived. About 14 dive-bombers went after
Nevada
, while seven others went after two underway destroyers,
Dale
and
Helm. Nevada
took five hits.

Historians think this was a worthwhile effort. Willmott states, “Had [
Nevada
] been sunk in the channel, especially if she had been sunk in the channel between Ford Island and the gate, the ability of Pearl Harbor to function as a base would have been seriously imperiled.”
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Goldstein, Dillon and Wenger claim that “If a large ship should sink in the narrow channel, it would close the harbor for weeks, perhaps months, not only trapping any ship in the harbor but also denying entrance to those outside.”
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Slackman, showing how these assessments are propagated in the historical community, cites Prange when he claims that the attackers “could turn
Nevada
into a cork which would bottle up Pearl Harbor for weeks, perhaps months, to come.” He goes on to make the rather remarkable assertion that “Rendering [the channel] unusable, even temporarily, might well have allowed Japanese forces to drive the U.S. Navy from the Central Pacific and jeopardize American control of Hawaii.”
⁷⁹

The channel in 1941 was approximately 400 yards (1200 feet) wide. If a battleship with a 100-foot beam sank in the exact middle of the channel, 550 feet of clearance on each side would remain, more than enough for any ship to pass. If the ship was sunk off to the side of the channel, the remaining channel width would have been even greater.

The greatest blockage would come if a ship was at a right angle across the channel. But even if a 600-foot long ship was sunk broadside across the middle of the channel, there still would have remained 300 feet on each side for ships to pass.

The chances that a ship would sink in this way were miniscule. Ships do not sink instantly. A ship’s commander would recognize that his ship was sinking and take the ship to the shallows and beach her along one side of the channel, as was done during the attack by
Nevada
and
Vestal
. If she lost power, there were yard tugs available. When
Nevada
was beached off Hospital Point, it was in a controlled manner assisted by a yard tug and a minesweeper.

The solution to any channel blockage would be to dredge a channel around it. Pearl Harbor had a soft bottom of loose silt which required constant dredging. Dredging around a wreck could be done in short order. Aerial photographs taken during the attack show two dredges working the harbor, one that
Nevada
dodged in her sortie.

Getting ships in and out of the harbor might be tricky, but ships routinely transit narrower gaps. At Oran after the North Africa landings 27 French wrecks littered the harbor, with six scuttled in two lines with the intention of blocking the port. There was a gap between two ships that could allow liberty ships to pass with only a few feet of clearance.
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This took seamanship, but was accomplished. Navy shiphandlers routinely transit the Panama Canal where the channels vary between 500 to 1000 feet wide with two-way traffic. The author navigated the Canal at 40 knots aboard
Pegasus
(PHM-1).

Cutting the channel width to 300 feet would not have eliminated Pearl Harbor’s usefulness as a base. The historians are wrong. More significantly, the Japanese attack planners were wrong. Their instructions to try to sink a ship in the channel resulted in wasting over one-fourth of the second-wave dive-bombers.

The only possible excuse for this error was that the planners thought the channel was narrower. In 1941, charts of Pearl Harbor were classified, so this information was not readily available. Even so, an experienced shiphandler could have helped the aviators come to a better decision.

5)
The Tardy Diplomatic Message

Much has been made of the Japanese failure to deliver on time a diplomatic message that was scheduled to be placed in the hands of the Secretary of State by Ambassador Nomura Kichisaburo at 1300 Washington time, 0800 Pearl Harbor time—the famous “Fourteen Part Message.” Delivery was delayed until 1400 Washington time, an hour after the attack had begun.

Historians have explicitly stated that the message was a formal declaration of war.
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Yamamoto’s biographer states that Yamamoto thought a declaration of war was to be delivered, and issued strict orders that the raid should not begin until after war had been declared.

The message delivered by Ambassador Nomura was not a declaration of war. It first reviewed the issues and the status of the negotiations from the Japanese viewpoint, provided an amazing apologia for several Japanese positions, and accused the Americans of not negotiating in good faith. Then, the last part of the message stated:

This message was not a declaration of war. It chided the Americans for the developments during the negotiations between the two nations and stated their view that an agreement was impossible “though further negotiations,” which returned relations to the
status quo ante
conditions prior to the beginning of negotiations. There was no intimation that the next step was war—there was no mention of resorting to war in the note. The note terminated negotiations, but did not break diplomatic relations or announce the recall their ambassador.

The idea forwarded by historians that the message “signified Japan’s intention to resort to war to achieve its aims”
⁸³
cannot be supported anywhere in the text. Certainly the American President did not think so: in his address to Congress on 8 December 1941(the famous “Day of Infamy” speech), Roosevelt referred to the 14-point message, saying that “While this reply stated that it seemed useless to continue the existing diplomatic negotiations, it contained no threat or hint of war or armed attack.” Certainly Japan’s ambassador to the United States did not interpret the note as signifying war. After delivering the note Nomura was informed of Pearl Harbor. The news of the attack “both surprised and stunned him.”
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