Bogart took care of that.
You could be correct, but I don’t think it is of much importance. The loss of the battleships was probably thought to be a bigger loss at the time than it really was.
The battleships lost (sort of) were 1920’s vintage and although powerful enough in main armament were (as mentioned) slow and lacked modern anti aircraft defence. The fast battleships, starting with the North Carolinas, were commissioned from 1941 and were obviously a large improvement.
Realistically, if the battleships hadn’t been sunk at Pearl Harbor, what could they have done? Surely not slug it out with the Japanese Fleet and I can’t see their presence as much of a deterrent to any Japanese actions (take a line through the Repulse and Prince of Wales)
Artillery for island hopping. Provide Mahan’s “Fleet in Being”.
They did eventually provide that artillery support, but the USA was not in a position in 1941 to undertake island hopping. (Of course they would have been might handy ay Guadacanal a little later). I understand the Nevada supplied firepower at Normandy on D Day.
“However it is doubtful if the Pacific Fleet could have moved to contest the various Japanese moves in in the Pacific…Any American fleet gathered would have possessed a local superiority… But in terms of numbers and quality no force the Americans could have gathered from units in the Pacific could have offered battle on the basis of equality, still less superiority, and with any real prospect of success” Quoted from the book Pearl Harbor.
And as Little Nemo has touched on, even if the Japanese had managed to sink every single unit of the Pacific Fleet, and had not lost a single ship in the next 30 months, they would still have been outnumbered at Leyte Gulf.
As Mahan said, if you have a fleet that does not offer or accept battle, the bad guys still have to worry about you coming over the horizon at an inopportune moment. 
Yep- you just need to look at the “fleet in being principle” with the Tirpitz.
Just as a brief aside, the USA still had the Atlantic fleet although it was really not very strong. Main units were 3 slow battleships and 3 even older dreadnought types that were really training ships.
Dreadnaughts?
I thought they had a bunch of coal burning WWI destroyers that were lent/leased to the Brits.
This was the USA Atlantic Fleet which was essentially offering merchant ship protection- the lend lease destroyers were mothballed WW1 vintage vessels, although I think they were all oil fired. They were given for bases on a 99 year deal - although it seems pretty clear that Churchill expected far more for the bases than 50 worn out destroyers(ie active participation from the USA). Strangely enough, few of the old destroyers were lost to enemy action- some ended up in the Soviet Union and others were crewed by the Canadian Navy (which did an immense amount of valuable work in the Atlantic).
Yet another aside- the Texas is the only surviving dreadnought. And she served in WW 2.
The problem with questions like this is that it really takes books to explain them, as any simplification doesn’t do justice to the complexities of the actual situation.
Just as the roots of the European theater were planted in the defeat of Germany in The Great War, several decades prior, one must go back to an even further history in Japan, and look at the completely autonomous role granted to the military in the Meiji Constitution of 1889 and the too quick and painless wars she won against the fading and weaken powers of the Qing Dynasty and the Tsars.
For it was in these wars that first, the Imperial Japanese Army started its path which inevitable lead to an all out war with at least one, if not all of the major powers in Asia. Secondly, the IJN’s easy victory over the Russian navy solidified the navy doctrine of the deeply flawed kantai kessen Decisive Battle Doctrine which remained essentially unchanged through the effective end of the IJN even prior to the surrender of Japan.
Within the Japanese military, there were those, primarily within the army, who were the “Strike North” faction. Those who believed that they should continue expanding their conquests into Siberia. In contrast, the Strike South faction wanted to go after the natural resources in South-East Asia. The ass-spanking by the Soviets in the undeclared border incident as well as the fact that oil was not yet discovered in Siberia were other factors in the decision to go south.
Japan’s conquests in China, all out war in all but name, eventually lead to Washington’s crippling sanctions against Japan. In addition to severing the well-known dependence of Japan on US oil, the freezing of assets and other sanctions were stringent enough that the many predominant US leaders opposed them as they feared that these sanctions were tantamount to declaring war. Among those opposed to the sanctions were the Secretary of State and the Secretary of the Navy, who wanted more time to prepare for the inevitable war.
Many within the IJN understood that if there were to be a war with the US, it must happen sooner than later, and even they understood that they could not win a total war with a country which lead them by a factor of more than 10 times in industrial strength. America was arming rapidly, and with the 1940 Two Ocean Navy Act, the US would have rabidly overtaken Japan as the strongest force in the Pacific.
By the summer of 1941, America was actively preparing for the upcoming war with Japan. The Philippine and other Pacific islands defenses were being strengthened, although the US army believed it had until the spring of 1942 before war would break out.
The Japanese military believed that a war with the US would be as quick and painless as with the Tsars. Yamamoto apparently was genuinely surprised that the US hadn’t offered concessions by late spring of 1942.
The Japanese military simply did not plan for a total war nor a long one. They didn’t have sufficient oil production for a long war and even the oil fields captured in the Dutch East Indies wasn’t sufficient as they were not able to bring production on fast enough. Equally bad for them was their insufficient transports. About 50% of their peacetime shipping requirements were supplied by foreign flagged ships. They gain about 25% back with captured ships in late 41 and early 42, but this still left them in a deficient.
The Japanese didn’t strike at the US oil reserves on Hawaii because they weren’t considering their own reserves. Blinded by their decisive battle strategy, all of their moves, including their disaster at Midway, stemmed from the irrational belief that the war would simply go in their favor.
Strategically, the loss of the Philippines hurt the US far worse than the sinking of the obsolete battleships in Pearl Harbor. The IJN and IJA obtained their early war objectives far quicker and at a much lower cost than they had dreamed of, but nothing they could have done would have made a difference. The US had a simply far too powerful edge in industrial might and victory was inevitable.
For a fictional account of the Japanese take-over of Hawaii after Pearl Harbor, try Harry Turtledove’s Days of Infamy and End of the Beginning. He touches on the problems of trying to garrison a group of hostile islands so far from your supply lines.
There needs to be a critical distinction made here in the types of carriers. See my notes below.
This problem was not that Japan could never imagine what the US industrial power could do. In fact a number of prominent military leaders, most of whom were navy, were well aware that they could not compete with the US in a total war because of the US industrial power and abundant natural resources. It is that they believed that the war would be short in nature and that their “fighting spirit” would prevail over the weaker willed US.
Certainly, even the Japanese who did appreciate the US industrial edge failed to understand that the more than 10:1 ratio of industrial might was only the beginning. While Japan had pretty much devoted as much of its industrial capacity before the war with the States, the US was able to grow its industry tremendously during the war. The
For carriers, Wiki gives a lower number, for the number of carriers commission, which is still impressive. The more important distinction, though, is that this number is mostly escort (“jeep”) carriers, which lacked the firepower to take on fleet carriers.
Here.
As I understand it, the carriers were the target. Battleships were already obsolete. However, not destroying the carriers led directly to their defeat in the Battle of the Coral Sea and ulimately to their overall defeat.
Had the Americans not been able to gain the first step to Japan, they would have been forced to abandon the Pacific.
While this is correct in retrospect, from what I’ve read this was not a widely-held belief at either the American and Japanese high commands. In fact, other than Yamamoto, who understood the power of carriers, all of the other Japanese admirals and generals were aiming for a replay of the Battle of Tsushima as the “decisive battle” of the war.
Yet even Yamamoto didn’t fully understand the changing nature of the war at sea. He sent damn nearly every ship in the combined fleet out for the operation, including seven battleships and four heavy cruisers in addition to the carriers for a total of 75 ships to Midway, not including the four battleships, several other carriers and the another huge armada sent up to Aleutians.
The plan was to have the decisive battle right there at Midway. After the aircraft carriers had weakened the US fleet, the IJN battleships and cruisers were going to finish them off.
The combined operation burned a peacetime year’s worth of fuel and yet none of the battleships or cruisers fired shots at the US fleet.
Yes, the escort carriers were small in comparison to the fleet carriers but 122 of them add up. Their existence meant that the USN could essentially station them everywhere. Every operation, every base, every task force, and every convoy could have air cover.
I’m actually a little surprised the Navy built these carriers. There’s always been the tendency among admirals and naval planners to focus too much attention on the big ships - ships of the line, battleships, and carriers - and ignore all the little ships - frigates, destroyers, escort carriers, and submarines. The big ship battles are dramatic but the little ship actions are the real day-to-day routine of naval warfare. Trafalgars and Tshushimas and Jutlands and Midways are the exceptions not the rule.
That’s what happens when you let little boys decide which toys they want to play with.
The thing about escort carriers is that a plane launched off them is just as effective as a plane launched off a fleet carrier. It’s not like a battleship carrying bigger guns than a cruiser. All carriers carried the same “munitions”, regardless of their size.
Just not the same amount of them.
But 122 carriers, however big they are, is a buttload. As Stalin put it: “Quantity has a quality all its own.”
Japan was fighting mostly for oil. Japan was fighting a war of conquest in China. They wanted to defeat the Chinese, kick the British out of indochina and have all of Asia to themselves. They had no oil of their own and were dependent on the US. The US did not want them to conquer Asia so they stopped selling them oil. The oil the Japanese needed was in Indonesia. The Phillipines was between Japan and Indonesia so the US could stop the oil getting to Japan whenever they wanted. So Japan had to choose between its dreams of an asian empire and war with the US.
The Japanese were counting on the Americans just not caring enough about Asia to fight a huge war over who gets to control China.
For comparison’s sake, a WWII fleet carrier could carry around a hundred aircraft. A WWII escort carrier would carry around twenty-five.