It’s one of the fortunate accidents of history that all three Pacific Fleet carriers were away from Pearl Harbor on the 7th December, 1941 - and thus entered the war against Imperial Japan without a scratch.
But what if they had been at Pearl Harbor during the attack? Would it have been a huge setback in the Pacific campaign or would it be realistic to expect the carriers to get some planes airborne and fight back, mitigating the damage?
This question belongs in IMHO or Great Debates. However, the answer to this question is here : Grim Economic Realities
In short, it didn’t matter. Japan has no chance at all of keeping Naval dominance for long. Let’s assume a worst case scenario : bolstered by the missing U.S. carriers, in a series of battles, they wipe out the entire Pacific fleet. They can now do…what?
Harass the West coast, maybe bomb it a bit with medium range bombers? Sure. Land troops? Good luck with that, they’d be slaughtered by vastly superior numbers of American defenders.
In the meantime, the U.S. would be frantically building new warships to take back the Pacific, using shipyards on the East coast that are far out of raiding range. In a year or 2, the U.S. would be able to return to the Pacific with an overwhelming number of new warships (due to the economic advantage). They’d retake the ocean and the war would more or less go like it did.
The assumption was that the U.S. would decide to respect Japan more after they destroyed their fleet and let them keep their new empire? That actually sounds utterly ridiculous, surely they weren’t that stupid. This would be like trying to take over a small town by murdering several of the Sheriff’s deputies so that he will “respect” you, even though the Sheriff can quickly call in reinforcements to get superior numbers again.
Just go from the chart linked at that site. Assume that exactly the same numbers of warships were produced as they actually were in the real history. (in reality, production would be shifted to producing more warships and less stuff to fight Germany with) You can see that even if the Pacific fleet were wiped out to the last ship, the U.S. navy would outnumber Japan’s by some time in 1943.
No, they could not launch any planes while in port. Carriers did not have catapults and needs to be moving into the wind in order to get enough airspeed for the aircraft.
The carriers would have been sunk by torpedo bombers, a number of which were specifically gunning for them.
Although there were four carriers in the Atlantic fleet at the time, they would have had a hard time sending any over.
1942 would have be a very much worse year for the US. Naturally, Midway would not have happened, so the Japanese would not have lost those carriers at that time.
The Essex class carriers weren’t commissioned until starting in December, 1942. By the end of 1944, there were 14 in service, and in addition a number of smaller carriers.
The original pre-war Orange plan had been to simply wait for a couple of years to build up strength and then go on the offense. That would probably have been what would have happened.
ETA: Yeah, what they said.
Good link. Something that gets mentioned in passing in the article but really deserves more weight is the quality of R&D of the US compared to Japan. For example, the US learned to manufacture better steel which allowed, among other things, more powerful aircraft engines. This led to superior aircraft designs that could take advantage of the powerful engines.
And then, of course, is the Manhattan Project. Losing everything at Pearl Harbor wouldn’t have slowed down the bomb.
Would they have had any effect on the attack itself? Seeing as they were equipped with 1.1"/75 cal AA guns, would any Japanese aircraft likely be shot down, even if they couldn’t launch the planes?
Aren’t the airwings on carriers relocated to land facilities when in port? I think this is specifically to allow them to take off in emergencies instead of being stuck useless on anchored ships. In which case, they’d have been strafed and bombed along with all the other planes on the ground at Pearl.
Sure. A few more Japanese attack planes would have been shot down.
According to wiki 414 planes attacked, so if we’re talking just a handful out of that I guess it wouldn’t have made much difference. Thanks for the replies so far.
Supporting what others have said, if I recall, The Price of Admiralty by John Keegan has an excellent chapter in the back analyzing the United States’ ship production capabilities and comes to the conclusion that losing the carriers at Pearl Harbor still wouldn’t have made much of a difference in the Pacific Theater (though obviously there would have been a lot of timeline changes). It’s worth a read and the rest of the book is excellent as well.
I read an interesting alt-history where Japan sunk all 3 carriers at Midway. In that alternative future Midway is saved from invasion only by a desperate bomber attack (cant remember if it was B-17s or Mitchells) that used ‘skip bombing’ which sank some Japanese transport ship and scared the rest off. The US nuclear program is similarly stymed which leaves the nuclear option off the table in 1945.
However it only affects the outcome of the war by like 6 or 18 months. The US eventually prevails through sheer attrition. At least in 1940s tech, if you can make more of X than your opponent can sink/kill/destroy, and its not significantly worse in quality, you’ll win eventually. Neither Germany’s jet planes nor Japan’s carrier fleet allowed them to win- they were fortresses built on foundations of sand.
I had made a post years ago speculating that Japan’s navy wasn’t all that hot. While everybody remembers Pearl Harbor, I take particular interest in battles like Coral Sea and Midway where Japan still had the ships present. Because we cracked their naval code, we had an advantage in terms of anticipating battles. Coral Sea was an example (actually the first) of pitched battles between carriers. Even though Japan sunk more US ships, they lost a lot of planes. One of their carriers was too banged up for carrier operations, and the other had gotten so many of her planes shot down she needed to replenish her air wing. The IJN was built with a lot of disadvantages. Coral Sea, Midway, and many other battles were planned in advance in meticulous detail, often conducted in radio silence and yet the initial plans were intercepted by US Naval intelligence.
Something Coral Sea also really illustrated that people don’t realize is that in a pitched carrier action, you’re going to lose a lot of planes. You find the enemy carrier group, send out your carrier group, they intercept with their CAP and AA fire, they send their strike force, rinse, repeat. I assume that naval combat aviation was extremely skilled; it would take exceptional pilots to take off/land on a carrier, and be skilled enough to destroy enemy ships (which, unlike ground targets, are in uncertain locations, are small, and tend to be moving. Japan simply couldn’t replace those pilots quickly enough; even in the best of circumstances they would have run out of experienced pilots eventually.
The problem is that as the US was caught by surprise, so the air defenses were not manned. The carriers were the number one target, and there there 18 torpedo bombers (IIRC) assigned specifically to them. Torpedoes were designed to sink battleships, so the carriers would not have stood a chance, and would have been the first to sink.
The lack of AA guns was not the problem on that morning. It was the lack of preparation. The ships could not have completely defended themselves in port, but had the USAAF gotten more fighters in the air and manned the air defenses which they should have, Japan would not have had the lopsided victory.
Good point, and this exactly.
Japan didn’t have an effective training program and the lack of skilled pilots did hurt them at the end. While sinking the carriers at PH would have postponed the war somewhat, this is yet another factor which would have doomed Japan regardless of what happened along the way.
And another point is the logistics, which combinedfleet.com points out. Japan simply didn’t have the ships to handle their basic needs and would have still been starving at the end of the war.
Related thread (Why did the American Aircraft Carriers depart Pearl Harbor shortly before the attack?) from a couple of weeks back. Having the Saratoga at Pearl Harbor would be extremely unlikely; she had just completed a scheduled overhaul at Puget Sound Navy Yard, Bremerton, Washington and was just entering San Diego harbor on the morning of December 7th. She had terrible luck early in the war, so it might not have mattered all that much anyway; she was torpedoed by the submarine I-6 420 nautical miles (780 km; 480 mi) southwest of Pearl Harbor on 11 January 1942 and missed the Battle of Midway as a result, arriving back at Pearl Harbor after state-side repairs on 6 June 1942, the final day of the battle. She missed much of the Guadalcanal campaign as well, being torpedoed by the submarine I-26 on 31 August 1942. So while the US would be down two carriers, the Yorktown, Hornet, and Wasp would all still transfer over from the Atlantic fleet as they did historically, and perhaps the Ranger as well if two carriers were knocked out so early on. As it was carriers suffered heavy attrition in the first year of the war anyway; Lexington was sunk at Coral Sea, Yorktown at Midway, Wasp and Hornet at Guadalcanal. With Saratoga undergoing repairs again, at one point during the Guadalcanal campaign the Enterprise was the only functional carrier the US had in the entire Pacific, and she was operating in a damaged condition having taken two bomb hits whose damage had not been repaired and one of her elevators wasn’t working. She had pulled into Noumea on 30 October 1942 to begin repairs but was ordered back to sea in her still damaged condition on 11 November 1942 due to Japanese battleships being sent down to shell Henderson Field, resulting in the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal.
I’m positive your aware of this, but for the home readers: pre-war Japan had a very effective training program for turning out a very small number of very highly skilled naval pilots each year. What they lacked was the ability to expand it to produce enough decently trained naval pilots to be able to keep anything like the pace of normal attrition, much less disasters such as the loss of pilots at Midway and Yamamoto’s later decision to assign his carrier’s pilots and planes to Rabaul in the attempt to interdict Henderson Field.
The only question I have about this is what I stated above. At what point would the US punt on an active defense, keep on their plan (Rainbow 5, Orange was an earlier plan) to really put Germany first while they sit tight and develop a greater strength for taking on Japan.
With two or three less carriers to begin with (hey, if we are rewriting history, then let the Saratoga be there as well) then would the Navy have been that much more timid?
Not that it really matters, as the consensus is that Japan lost before she began, but it could have changed how things got there.
I think we’re quibbling over the definition of “effective.” Turning out a trickle of top notch pilots when they needed a flood of adequate ones is not, IMHO, effective. They made the wrong – as we know in hindsight – choice on using their best pilots on the front lines instead of in training, while the US concentrated on the schools.
From combinedfleet.com
Also, there are questions about how effective was the training. Certainly they were very skilled in individual fighting, but their tactics seemed to lag that of the US. The USN drilled in deflection gunnery, which allowed US pilots to attack from any angle. While IJN pilots had some training in that tactic, the preferred a high side rear or frontal attack.
Superior US tactics and flexibility in adapting new strategies, combined with far greater numbers and resources sealed the fate of the war.
I think the big Japanese problem was their admirals succumbed to victory disease. They were like a gambler who can’t walk away from the table. Every time they won, it just made them want to fight another battle. So they were going to keep fighting battles until they lost.
Let’s say Japan did better in the first year of the war and captured New Guinea and Midway. Would they have stopped? They had already gone beyond their original pre-war stopping line. If they had won more victories they would have just tried to go further - maybe trying to invade Ceylon or Australia or Hawaii. They had apparently lost the ability to tell themselves “Okay, we’re going to stop now. We’re going to switch from an offensive strategy of capturing more territory to a defensive strategy of preparing for a counter-attack.”
And the long term was against them. They couldn’t keep winning. The United States had a huge advantage in production and code breaking. No matter how badly America was damaged in the opening week of the war, they were going to recover. If Japan kept launching new offensives, they were eventually going to fight a superior American force and lose.
I think you could make a case that that was the only viable strategy. Japan was not going to win a long war for reasons already discussed. The only chance they had, as small as it was, was to be decisive and make the US believe that they (the US) couldn’t win against Japan and Germany and sue for peace with the Japanese.
I am currently reading “Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway” right now - I’m just getting to the actual battle, having read all the lead up to Midway starting with PH.
The US had 11 carriers under construction at the time of the Pearl Habor attack which were due to be commissioned in '42-'43. Japan had only 1 or 2 under construction. I think one was finished shortly after PH, with the second much more early in the build.
The primary reason Yamamoto wanted to attack Midway was because those carriers weren’t anchored at Pearl during the attack and not destroyed. Yamamoto pushed the Midway operation because he wanted a decisive mid-pacific battle to destroy the carriers as he know they were a risk to the Japanese. Nagumo (their army general) wasn’t keen on the Midway attack because he thought it would stretch their supply lines too far into the Pacific but relented only because the original attach plan didn’t call for the use of any army troops. Yamamato planed to use their version of the marines (navy soldiers) to take and hold Midway. This only changed after the Doolittle bombing of mainland Japan where Nagumo offered up regular army troops to land at and hold Midway.
The plan before Midway was to expand south into New Guinea and Port Morseby, which was also attempted to some degree at the same time as the Midway attack (along with the attack on the Aleutian Islands). But their main attack force in the Pacific with the five carriers (collectively known as Kido Butai) likely would have joined the attack to the South instead of Midway, and probably would have expanded the attack to include Samoa, etc. in order to sever the communication link the US had with Australia.
To sum up - net result about the same. Midway is never attacked. Australia is cut off in mid-1942, but not attacked directly, because the Japanese had no desire to try to take and hold any part of that continent. They estimated a minimum of 12 divisions to do so and their army didn’t have enough personnel.
All of the above taken from the book I’m reading.
In many ways, this was the legacy of the Doolittle Raid. By penetrating Japanese waters and hitting the Home Islands, the US shamed the IJN into expanding their perimeter beyond any ability to hold it.
The Midway attack was approved 2 days before the Doolittle raid. The only change was Nagumo offered up regular army troops to hold Midway. Before this, Yamamoto planned on using Navy ground forces (their version of the Marines).
If the Enterprise were at Pearl Harbor, it could have raised its shields and shot down all the attacking Japanese planes with its phasers.
(Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)