Attack on Pearl Harbor (55 page)

The calculations indicate that the American command decision blunders before the attack had a huge impact on the results of the action. In the best-case scenario where the Navy and Army were at the level of alert of the previous weeks, and the Air Information Center activated, the Japanese strike would have encountered massive resistance. Perhaps half the Japanese aircraft would have been shot down, a result calculated in the Japanese wargames, the US Naval War College Maneuver Rules, and through historical data analysis, and is not far off the loss rates experienced in the first four carrier vs. carrier actions. An American counterattack with the available land-based bombers might have succeeded in sinking or damaging one or more of the Japanese carriers. Losses to the Pacific Fleet battleships would have been much more limited.

Coming out of this action would have been a much different concept of naval warfare, one more balanced between employment of battleships and carriers than what was experienced in the war. A battleline action could very well have been seen earlier than the historic battleship confrontations at Guadalcanal and Surigao Strait.

In spite of these differences, there would likely have been little difference in the course of the Japanese Phase One program of conquest. The American countermoves were dictated more by logistics than availability of forces—historically, the Americans had plenty of battleships in the Atlantic that could have been transferred to the Pacific, but were not, as what governed Allied action was the availability of fuel and food, and the transportation needed to get these commodities to the western Pacific. The Japanese would have had to rebuild their carrier air wings earlier than what were historically required, meaning that the skill and lethality of the Japanese carriers would have been reduced from the skill levels encountered in the Coral Sea and at Midway. American domination of carrier exchanges would have come earlier than the Battle of the Philippine Sea. Whenever the Americans created the required logistics base, the course of the war, until Japan’s defeat, would have been accelerated.

Probably the most significant impact of the attack was on the professional worldview of key American naval officers. In the aftermath of the attack, the perception must have been communicated that the battleship force was a weak reed. Yes,
Oklahoma
and
West Virginia
were sunk, but no battleship of the period was expected to withstand so many torpedo hits in so short an interval. It was
Nevada
, sunk after only one torpedo hit and a few bombs, and
California
, sunk by two torpedoes, and
Arizona
, blasted into flinders by AP bombs, that stunned the naval establishment. Battleships were expected to take this kind of punishment and survive.

The American battleships’ design philosophy purposely sacrificed high speed in favor of survivability. Were the designs wrong? Was the concept wrong? If
Arizona
succumbed to a few AP bombs made out of battleship shells, would not other battleships succumb to a few plunging armor-piercing 16-inch gun rounds? Would American battleships replicate the performance of the British battlecruisers at Jutland, where ship after ship disappeared in awesome magazine detonations, causing Admiral Beatty to lament that “something is wrong with our bloody ships”? Is this, perhaps, the reason why the investigation into the
Arizona’s
detonation concluded that her loss was attributable to open hatches, rather than admitting that their battleships were vulnerable to armor piercing bombs and exploding magazines?

Granted, there were qualifiers. The American battleships were not ready for battle, but the intellectual understanding that the battleships were in an unusually vulnerable condition would not overcome the emotional blow of the photographs on newspaper front pages worldwide showing smoking hulls lying in the mud on the bottom of Pearl Harbor.

Probably the most significant reaction must have been in the mind of Admiral Chester Nimitz, who became the Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet after the debacle. In the first months after the attack Nimitz sent the battleships to the West Coast, where they could be overhauled, repaired, modernized, fueled, fed, and trained without straining his logistical resources. For a few months, battle damage kept the battleships out of the front lines. Then, logistics kept the battleships where they were.

Later, when the logistics strains eased and the battleships were cocked and ready, Nimitz hesitated. As a submariner he was not an official member of the “Gun Club,” in spite of a tour as commanding officer of a battleship, so he did not have the professional and emotional commitment to the battlewagons and nowhere near as much faith in their capabilities as the True Believers. Although pressed by the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral King, to get the battleship forces into combat, Nimitz was hesitant—there were always reasons to keep them out of the theater, and when he finally sent them forward, reasons to keep them out of the fight. They were too slow. They were ill-suited for combat in the constrained waters of the Solomons. They sucked up too much fuel.

The battleships that did get to the Southwest Pacific mostly swung at anchor, their combat edge deteriorating as their crews idled.

Overall, one suspects that the Pearl Harbor attack influenced Nimitz’s perceptions of the utility and survivability of the Treaty battleships in the early months of the war. It was not until the end of 1943 that these ships came to take a more prominent place in the war. They were afforded a place in the 5th Fleet’s surface action plans during the Gilbert and Marshall Islands campaigns, perhaps an essential place. They eventually displayed their ship-to-ship combat capabilities in the constrained waters of Surigao Strait. Perhaps they could have done as well in the constrained waters of the Solomons in 1942.

So, perhaps the greatest impact of the Pearl Harbor attack was in its influence on how the war would be fought. Overall, a change in the results of the Pearl Harbor attack would have resulted more in a change in the characteristics of combat in the Pacific war, with little change in the pace, and no change in the outcome.

At the same time, the Pearl Harbor attack distorted the Japanese view of war. Commanders take the results of every battle and subconsciously build internal mental models of how modern war is fought, including the expected results when different forces are pitted against each other. Pearl Harbor contributed to these mental models. Out of it, the Japanese would have found a renewed faith in the concept of a decisive battle. They saw how a relatively small force operating far from home could attack the hub of the enemy’s power and inflict debilitating losses at little cost. If this could happen, perhaps the Japanese could be victorious in a later decisive battle as well. The Japanese victories at Pearl Harbor, Darwin, the Java Sea, and the Indian Ocean not only contributed to “Victory Disease,” that fatal underestimation of American capabilities, but also to a mental model of warfare that held out the hope that all the losses of 1943 and 1944 could be reversed in one powerful blow supported, as was the Pearl Harbor attack, by chance and the favor of the gods. The Pearl Harbor attack not only forced a long war strategy onto the Americans, it added hope to the Japanese that they could win such a war.

At Pearl Harbor, the efforts of tens of thousands of Japanese culminated in the skills and dedication of the aviators on 15 torpedo bombers, men who successfully “dedicated their life to that one torpedo.” Had they faltered, the history of the Pacific War would have been dramatically different.

Ship
(Hull number)—# of Bombs; reasons and sources

Aylwin
(DD-355)—1

Solace
(AH-5)—1

Dobbin
(AD-3)—3

Raleigh
(CL-7)—3

Tangier
(AV-8)—5

Curtiss
(AV-4)—6

Helm
(DD-388)—2

Dale
(DD-353)—5

Shaw
(DD-373)—8

Nevada
(BB-36)—14

Pennsylvania
(BB-38)—9

California
(BB-44)—3

Helena
(CL-50)—4

Neosho
(AO-23)—2

Pyro
(AE-1)—1

Navy Yard—10