As touched on previously, the preferred protection of aircraft carriers changed post-WWII. Look no further than the USS Midway. When commissioned in 1945 its sponsons bristled with anti aircraft guns. When its first major modification took place (1955), and the angled deck replaced the straight deck, most (if not all) were removed). And, unless I am mistaken, much of the hull armor was removed as well. Both reflect how the carrier now relied on its air wing and accompaning ships for protection.
Doesn’t anyone obey The Prime Directive anymore? No matter what, that chick’s gotta get run down.
The Prime Directive has always been more of a Prime Mild Suggestion.
And binding on Starfleet officers, not U.S. Navy officers.
The Japanese Fleet being that close to Hawaii would be a casus belli all by itself. The only reason to have the fleet there would be to attack the Americans. The stranger’s claims along with the subs sunk and captured would probably be sufficient. And when the Japanese start attacking everywhere else and deliver their declaration of war, I imagine gratitude would be the only response. Given that the Japanese embassy had already destroyed their coding machines, and most of the army and navy were operating on radio silence, even if the folks back in Japan realized what happened to the fleet at Hawaii they wouldn’t be able to do anything about it in time to prevent the war from starting.
Those are very good points.
Sink the bastards!
The Japanese declaration of war would have reached Washington, hours before word that some strange ship had appeared out of no where. The Japanese embassy was in the process of destroying all the diplomatic and secret stuff that would have fallen into American hands.
Declan
No it wouldn’t have. Japan did not deliver a declaration of war to the US until the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. If you are referring to the 14-part message, it neither declared war nor even broke off diplomatic relations. The meeting to write the Japanese declaration of war didn’t even convene until 12:44pm Dec 7th Hawaii time, after the attack was already over. The imperial rescript declaring war was only first made public at 4pm Dec 7th Hawaii time when it was published in the evening edition of Japanese newspapers.
I still dont think this really contravenes what I said. In historical terms this would obviously be correct, but a 1941 condition where a Japanese carrier fleet gets at the very least mauled, by a warship from the future, then Washington gets the declaration of war first, before findiing out about the boon from the future.
In historical times, Washington gets a cable from Hawaii, saying the Japanese had attacked, this time around, there is no attack, only that for some reason the US miltary at the time on the islands has gone into red alert mode for no particular reasons, to the untrained eye.
Declan
Man, if any educated military men from the Nimitz could survive, even without the ship, the knowledge they would have about how the war would unfold and how to fight it would be invaluable. “Here’s how to beat the U-boats in the Atlantic”, and “Germany is going to invade Russia, trust me”, and so on. That alone would change the course of the war.
Like a soothsayer from the future could convince the members of the Hampton Roads Shooting Club that their Mk 14 torpedoes with the magnetic exploders were crap?
The only problem is the more they influence the events of the war the greater the divergence between what they ‘know’ and what actually happens. Though some it, such as various technical knowledge if they’re trusted, would be useful all the same.
(my bolding) Ummmm. That would not have been hard to “predict” in December, 1941. More useful in June of that year, though.
There is some knowledge which would have been game-changers. Knowledge from the future, delivered on December 7th could have allowed the US to keep at least the Bataan, if not all of the PI. Combine this with the changes to the torpedoes, the air power that the US could bring to the PI to protect the USN, and Japan would be cut off from its oil. The clock starts ticking on the countdown to the war.
It was not just knowledge of the events or the technology. It was the methodology for the war for such things as strategic bombing, which the US didn’t understand in the winter of 1941. A lot was gained during the war and much more after the was when they were able to conduct survey and fact finding on what had been effective.
The Japanese (and Germans) were able to maintain aircraft production far into the war. With a better understanding of target selection, for example by attacking transportation, they could have disrupt this manufacturing much earlier, resulting in a positive feedback loop of reducing the number of aircraft defending the targets and allowing them to bomb more effectively.
eta: The war was a often a series of slow progress and then sudden changes, often brought forward by new technologies or tactics which then would become less effective as the enemies would be able to adapt. Having all of the hard-earned knowledge in one fell swoop would have overwhelmed the Japanese.
Yeah well the guy just got fished out of the water after hopping off a burning, sinking, time-travelling aircraft carrier. He deserves some slack if he mixes up the sequence of events a little.
This disregards the Japanese attacks on US possessions at Guam and Wake, the bombing and invasion of the US possession of the Philippines, the invasions of Thailand and the British possessions of Malaya and Hong Kong, all of which occurred the same day that the attack was launched on Pearl Harbor and before the Japanese bothered to deliver a formal declaration of war to Washington the next day.
I would love to listen in on some of those conversations, with relatively junior navy officers telling Bomber Harris and Ira Eaker and even George Marshsall just how wrong they are and how they will waste tens of thousands of lives and millions or billions of dollars because the strategies and tactics they’ve developed over long careers are WRONG! Fortunately for the Allies, I think both Churchill and Roosevelt were both smart and flexible enough to listen and change course, even against the united opposition of the high command. Stalin, not so much.
Also an interesting question – if these guys from the future become powers behind the throne in the West, or at least very respected advisors, what happens to the Cold War after the hot one. Does it play out relatively unchanged because no one can think of better options? Or is there some game changers there too? For instance, we would know just how weak the Soviet nuclear arsenal really was, so maybe we could push them much harder than we did. Maybe we would even preemptively strike at Soviet nuclear facilities, to take them off the superpower list. Maybe this question is worth a thread of its own.
There’s always the assumption on these thread, that people would actually take advice, and a lot of which are things which they don’t want to hear. Unified combat commands, for example. All fine in principle but does Marshall support it if MacAurther isn’t the guy picked?
This is large enough of a topic to deserve its own thread.
There are a number of potential game changers, the most obvious of which is the nuclear bomb and Klaus Emil Fuchs which would give us another several years before they developed their own.
Another would be the respective positions of how the war ended what concessions would have been granted to Stalin. Had the US been able to defeat the Japanese without the necessary for the Soviets to join the attack, less concessions would have been required. Same thing in Europe if the knowledge of the future where to give more comfort to Churchill.
The third would be that the US would have known prior to the end that there would be a cold war coming, and made better decisions. There were differences between how they handled the end of the war in the Pacific and in Europe because the US knew better what were the Soviet intentions.
One point I’ve read that sounds plausible is that one of the most important aspects of the ULTRA/MAGIC decrypts was not necessarily the actionable intelligence they provided, but the enormous sense of psychological comfort found in being able to see the other side’s plans at least partially. Certainly the decrypts did not give the Allies total military advantage – they were incomplete and sporadic, and necessarily could not reveal things not trusted to encipherment in the first place – but the peek into Axis plans and operations removed a great deal of the oppression of the unknown from the minds of Allied planners.
Assuming that’s true, “knowledge from the future” would have had a similar effect, emboldening the recipients and removing some of the tentativeness from their planning.
You are forgetting the date line.
The Pearl Harbor attack occured on December 8th, Tokyo time.
I’m not, all the times I listed are in Hawaiian time, not the local time in Washington or Tokyo. The meeting to come up with the language for the declaration of war did not occur until 12:44pm Dec 7th Hawaii time, the imperial rescript was published on the front page of the evening edition of all Japanese newspapers at 4pm Dec 7 Hawaii Time, and a formal declaration of war was not delivered by the Japanese to Washington until the next day, Dec 8 Hawaii time.