Why didn’t they hit the fuel tanks or repair facilities at Pearl? Poor planning? Not enough planes?
It seems to me they doomed themselves by not hitting them.
Why? The US had no real shortage of petrol or oil.
As for why, Japanese naval theory said you destroyed the enemy’s fleet and everything else was irrelevant. In a sense they were right, if you do totally destroy an enemy’s armed forces their fuel, oil, tankers, etc, are yours for the taking. But this ignores the reality that those ships are of no use without the logistics behind them, which are often easier to attack.
But it is (IMO) more to do with Japanese military culture. As a warrior your only honourable opponent is another warrior, so attacking supply facilities was seen as slightly cowardly and dishonourable. I suspect it never occurred to them to attack fuel tanks; there were real ships right there to be attacked instead. No pilot would have used his bomb on a dry dock if he could see an intact ship.
They went after the fleet and basically took out all the heavy ships in the pacific with the exception of the aircraft carriers. Actually, this was the reason why submarines started going out on long solo patrols - previously they were just advance recon for a fleet.
Hitting the fuel tanks and repair facilities would not have been quite as big a deal as you might think, or certainly the Japanese didn’t think so. It’s not as if the USA didn’t have more facilities in California, and building more fuel tanks would not have been a difficult task in the grand scope of things.
The Japanese correctly believed that they could not win a years-long war of attrition and had to destroy the U.S. Navy and the Allied will to fight back as quickly as possible. The primary targets were Allied possessions in the SW Pacific; the US Navy simply had to be destroyed to the point that they could not challenge Japan in the SW Pacific for a year. Destroying repair facilities would therefore be not enormously valuable, because they’d be making an insignificant dent in U.S. naval construction capacity. However, blowing up the FLEET makes a really big difference in a 12-to-18 month time frame, because it takes a long, long time to construct a battleship or an aircraft carrier. And since the Japanese believed as 12-to-18 month war was the longest war they could win anyway, they played to it. So the ships and planes were Target #1.
The carrier task force that attacked Pearl COULD have launched a third wave, but chose not to. Remember, they didn’t know where the US carriers were, but they had to assume after two waves that the Americans knew were THEY were. If the US carriers were anywhere near, they ran the risk of being bushwhacked while their own planes were off on a third wave, which would have turned a victory into a bloody catastrophe (as happened at Midway.) Of course, as it happened, the American carriers were not nearby, but they didn’t know that.
I saw an interview with a Japanese pilot that was filmed in the 1950s or 1960s and was included in a Pearl Harbor documentary. He said that the Japanese believed destroying the fuel storage areas would be futile since “everyone knew” that the U.S. had an endless supply of petroleum. Why bother taking it out, when we’ll just replace it immediately?
He was right and wrong. We did have huge reserves of petroleum – on the mainland. Taking out the tanks in Hawaii would have caused a problem (IMO).
There is also a problem with just “hitting” the repair facilities. We tend to think that one 100 pound bomb dropped on a 100,000 square foot facility will destroy it, but it’s plainly not the case. As we found in Germany later on in the war, it’s really hard to effectively destroy a shore based industrial center or facility, even with repeated attacks, so a few small carrier based planes probibly won’t do the trick.
While the repair facilities would have been difficult to knock out in a single carrier-born strike (although any serious damage would have been beneficial to the Japanese), the fuel tanks were actually a target that the Japanese had planned for. It was only Nagumo’s nerves (the best American weapon in the Japanese arsenal) that prevented their destruction, as noted by RickJay.
If I’m remembering Gordon Prange’s At Dawn We Slept correctly, the Japanese air group commander (Mitsuo Fuchida) begged Nagumo to launch another strike, with the fuel facilities as one target. Nagumo refused.
When the Japanese war-gamed Pearl Harbor, they expected to lose 3-4 carriers. That was considered acceptable in return for launching a crippling blow. With the benefit of hindsight, I still think Fuchida was right and understood Yamamoto’s intention better than Nagumo did. To completely cripple Pearl Harbor was worth the risk, even if the American carriers had been in the area.
(Where were the Japanese submarines, BTW? Scouting for things like carriers was one of their most important roles). And how many sorties could the IJN carriers launch before they ran out of fuel?
I don’t know of anything in the Japanese military tradition that says it’s dishonorable to attack anyone but another warrior. Certainly the Japanese in China routinely slaughtered non-warriors.
I’m more sympathetic to Nagumo’s position than most people are. I simply do not think the fuel tanks were worth the risk of losing his carriers; maybe the Japanese thought they might lose three, but at that point they had lost none, so it was no longer a case of losing three carriers to strike Pearl Harbor. He was being asked to risk three-four carriers just to hit the fuel tanks. The raid was largely already over; the fleet had been horribly crippled.
It shouldn’t have gone this way because Nagumo SHOULD have known where the carriers were. But for some reason the Japanese navy failed to figure that out, just as they screwed up at Midway so he was stuck with that decision. He’d already lost 29 planes, most of them in the second wave. You would have to suspect the third wave would be even less effective. I can understand his move.
Pearl Harbor wasn’t a failure, and not hitting the fuel tanks was not the reason Japan lost the war.
I don’t believe the statement the Japanese expected to possibly lose 3-4 carriers could be accurate. There were fewer than 20 in their entire navy and the loss would have meant the direct or indirect loss of many dozens of aircraft.
A potential reason a third wave was not launched were the damage reports, they were thought to be too optimistic and therefore not fully believed. The reports may have actually understated the damage.
It probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do, but Bull Halsey steamed in the carrier Enterprise straight after the attack at Pearl. I’m having trouble citing, but it was either evening of December 7 or the following evening. Enterprise lost the equivalent of a sqadron of her own aircraft to jumpy AA gunners in the Harbor as well as to returning Japanese aircraft, according to many accounts. I’m pretty certain it was the night of the seventh that she arrived, and departed within hours.
She left before daylight, taking on minimal supplies, including fuel oil, IIRC, which should prove that the harbor facilities at Pearl were not destroyed beyond basic functionality. Fuschida may or may not have been right about a third attack, but the fact that Pearl was still operational–to a very limited extent–that very evening or at the worst the following day is a matter of record.
As I said, it’s been a while since I read Prange, but I’m pretty sure that’s what he said. I’ll check it up when I get a chance.
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Fewer than 12, I believe. But America’s carrier strength at that time was even less.
RickJay I agree that destroying the oil facilities would not have won the war for Japan. In the long run, no conceivable military success could have won the war for Japan. I still believe it was the right thing to do. The failure to follow up caused Japan to lose more quickly and decisively than would otherwise have been the case.
Hitting the fuel tanks would have been hard, almost all had prtection so that you needed to hit all, but the smoke from the burning oil would have made it impossible to aim after a short while.
In adition the Red hill underground fuel storage tanks came online with a pipeline to the harbour a few months later.
The canceled third wave was critical. If they had used the wave to hit the reapir facilities, it probably would have been a longer war:
Twenty-one ships of the U.S. Pacific Fleet were sunk or damaged in the attack. How many were repaired and back in action by '43? 18.
Arizona was too badly damaged. Oklahoma and Utah were too considred too obsolete to repair.
http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq66-1.htm
If Japan had used the wave to take out the oil and concentrated on American shipping from the mainland to Pearl, especially stopping the shipment of oil, and Heaven knows how they could have done that after Pearl, but if they tried … it is not completely inconceivable that too might have delayed the inevitable.
jimmmy, I don’t see how Japan could have “concentrated” on American shipping from the mainland to Pearl. They could not have operated a naval force large enough to fend off the remainder of the U.S. fleet that far from Japan. Note that it was six months later that they returned as far as Midway - still a long way west of Hawaii - and they came in force and lost that battle. How could they have maintained substantial naval forces so far east?
The year 1941-42 was a special opportunity for the Japanese. They brought six fleet carriers to Pearl, with half a dozen smaller ones scattered elsewhere around the Pacific.
The United States Navy had only seven aircraft carriers total (and a converted cattle carrier which was considered unsuitable for combat in 1941). The Ranger was too slow to keep up for the rest of the carriers and thus could not be safely used in the Pacific, leaving the Japanese with parity before the war even started.
The Enterprise might have been close enough to Pearl for a third wave to spot the approaching TF-8. As we learned later at Midway, high-level bombers were not effective against naval ships at sea, except to throw the fleet into temporary disarray. The primary danger to the Combined Fleet on December 7 and 8 was therefore American submarines, and they never got close enough to get off a shot.
As far as I know, and I’ll gladly stand corrected if I’m wrong, there were only three facilities on the west coast of the United States which were capable of servicing the two battlecruiser-based carriers–Seattle, San Francisco, and San Diego. Take out those facilities as well and the Lexington and Saratoga have to go to Virginia to repair any damage they incur, as the Saratoga did twice to submarine-launched torpedoes in 1941-42. Blast the locks at Panama and those ships would be gone even longer.
With 20/20 hindsight, we know that the Japanese would have enjoyed local air superiority–qualitatively and perhaps numerically as well–at any point they wished to strike, including the west coast of the United States.
This is all “what if” nonsense, but with just one or two trips home to refit, the Combined Fleet appeared to have the capability to romp throughout the eastern Pacific for as long as it could remain at sea. There were only a few targets to hit–Pearl Harbor, Midway, Dutch Harbor in Alaska, and the docking facilities along the west coast, and Panama. We actually have some evidence that the Japanese could have done it: in April 1942 the Japanese wrecked virtually every important target in the eastern Indian Ocean, sank at least one British carrier and a number of cruisers, and left virtually without loss.
It would have merely delayed the inevitable, but barring an unusual defeat such as that of Midway, the inevitable wouldn’t have even been noticed until the second half of 1943, instead of 1942. That would have created an entirely different and unpredictable war than the one we saw.
Oops. The Saratoga had to go to Bremerton and Pearl Harbor in 1942 after two separate torpedo hits.
As I said I don’t know how they could have, but it seems to me that would be the only way for the bombing of the oil stuff @ Pearl to have mattered big picture. So that was what I said/tried to say however muddled.
I AM NOT SAYING THIS WOULD BE EASY OR EVEN POSSIBLE BEYOND A THEORETICAL WAY
This being the GQ, and since you ask, in point of fact they didn’t need to maintain a substantial naval force to FUBAR the U.S. oil supply situation. In theory they had the capability to attack and damage the the U.S.'s main Pacific oil refinery and transfer point at Long Beach. They could have put 11 planes carrying 340 lbs of bombs at Long Beach on 12/7/41, which if sucessful and combined with the destruction of the oil facilities at Pearl could have impacted timelines.
Here is the cite for that:
Here is a SDMB related article using a different method but same idea
http://www.teemings.com/issue16/michaelellis.html
Japan sunk 48 boats off Alaska, but only 27 off the U.S. West coast. Obviously this was partially due the Japanese feint toward in the Alueltians pre-Midway, but also because the Japanese concentration was defense of the home islands or using submarines in support of the fleet like calvalry. If they had used them more like the Germans or Americans hunting supply … If they had decided to go that way I think they could have done a better job at threatening the supply line to Hawaii. (Again I am not saying they could win – or that this was thier answer, just that it was possible to do more than they did).
Well, I have to eat crow on this one. I’ve found a copy of Prange, At Dawn We Slept, and it confirms that the IJN war games predicted a loss of two carriers in the first test, one carrier in the second (pp. 228-229).
Somehow my memory converted that to 3-4 carriers; maybe I was confusing it with the Midway war games. Anyway, I was wrong.