Southside Judge Smails
a day ago
I didn't know any of that...any specific books recommended?

anon-y2mh Southside
a day ago edited
Probably the biggest one I can think of off the top of my head was "At Dawn We Slept" by Gordon Prange.

However, something to think about - the USN actually wargamed an attack where the US had 24 hours warning. Pacific Fleet was able to sortie, and they met Kido Butai some four or five hundred miles north of Pearl Harbor.

Where they proceeded to get their asses kicked (it hurts to say, but I say that as a veteran myself - call Pearl Harbor what it was) as badly as they did in real life. There were only 2 carriers available in PacFlt at that point. One was off delivering aircraft to someplace (Midway, I believe). Don't remember where the other was, but they were not in any shape at all to contribute to a battle with 6 Japanese carriers.

The gotcha was where they were. In the real world, Pearl Harbor was only something like 60 - 100 ft. deep. The Navy was able to salvage and patch many of the ships initially sunk or mangled. Had they met the Japanese navy 500 miles northwest of Pearl, they would have been in multi-thousand foot deep water. Any ship lost there would have been lost permanently.

The point is that Pearl Harbor has on several occasions been called the most "successful defeat" in USN history. Had they been warned, the death toll would have been higher and the permanent destruction of PacFlt (minus the two carriers) would most likely been almost total.

anon-y2mh Mrs. deWinter
2 hours ago edited
Hat tip!

First, I owe Mrs. deWinter and mopani an apology. When I wrote my original post, I had a false memory and used an incorrect number. There were 3 carriers (not 2) in PacFlt's order of battle. The carriers were Enterprise, Lexington, and Saratoga. Enterprise was returning from a mission to send a Marine fighter squadron to Wake Island. On the morning of 7 December, the task force was about 215 miles west of Oahu. Lexington and her task force was returning from a similar mission to Midway, and was, on the morning of 7 December, 500 miles southeast of Midway. She alone, of the 3 carries, was in a position to do something about Kido Butai. However, the smart money would have been a direct order to her commander telling him to run for it. There was no way on the face of this planet that Lexington was in a fit state to go up, effectively by herself, against any two of the 6 Japanese carriers present. Had she attempted to do so, she would almost definitely been sunk, losing a significant number of her sailors.

The third carrier (the one I'd forgotten about because she wasn't present in theater that morning) was Saratoga who was just pulling into San Diego when the attack started in Hawaii.

One other thing I touched on but didn't really go into depth on was the death/injury toll. Of the 8 battleships present in Pearl Harbor that morning, 5 were either sunk outright or damaged badly enough that they would be expected to sink had that damage occurred in deeper waters.

Of those 5 battleships, only two (Arizona and Oklahoma) were completely written off. The remaining three (Nevada, California, and West Virginia) were ultimately moved to Puget Sound, WA for repairs and refit.

Being the only ship to successfully get underway, Nevada was hit by at least one torpedo and 6 bombs, forcing her crew to turn out of the channel and beach her near the mouth of the harbor (had she sunk in the mouth of Pearl Harbor, the harbor would have been utterly useless until she was cleared out of the way). After repairs, Nevada, was used for convoy duty in the Atlantic and provided fire support for 5 landings (Attu, Normandy, Southern France, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa).

California was hit by two torpedoes and a bomb. However one of the hits started a fire which disabled part of the electrical system that powered the pumps. So she slowly sank over the next 3 days. After she was refloated and repaired, she took part in the Battle of Suriago Straight, she was hit by a kamikaze during the invasion of Lyangen Gulf. Following repairs, she was again present and providing fire support during the invasion of Okinawa.

West Virginia sank after multiple torpedo hits. After being refloated and repaired, she was sent to support the invasion of the Phillipines (Gen. MacArthur and his "I Have Returned" moment), taking part in the Battle of Suriago Straight, as well as the battles of Lyangen Gulf, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa.

So I think it's safe to say that those three ships materially contributed to the success of the war effort, and none would have been available had they been sunk 400 miles northwest of Oahu.

Now the men are something different. There were 2,008 sailors killed and 710 wounded during the attack, with roughly half of the fatalities coming from the explosion on board Arizona. We can probably deduct the Army/Army Air Corps casualties (218 killed, 364 wounded) from the totals, as the Army Air Corps couldn't have been present due to range from Pearl Harbor. The Marines would still have suffered some fatalities, but it would come down to whether or not they were deployed on the ships or if they were shore Marines at the time.

Let's start with keeping the Marines out of it, and deducting the Army/AAC totals from the Navy. That would leave us with a floor of 1790 killed and 646 wounded.

This is where it gets really sketchy to determine what a reasonable total should be. If we determine that California, Nevada, and West Virginia were total losses (with only California sinking slowly enough to get more than a tithe of her men off), we'd be looking at 778 casualties from Nevada and 1157 casualties from from West Virginia, assuming that they sank in a similar way in this universe as they did in ours. In our world, West Virginia lost 106 killed and Nevada lost 60 killed and 109 wounded. So, if you take the C-A-T =DOG numbers that we came up with above, my back-of-the-napkin arithmetic raises the casualties from 2043 killed and 1178 wounded to something on the close order of 3450 killed and 646 wounded (the numbers I have access to don't easily differentiate between wounded and killed, so I've been kind of lumping everything into the killed basket).

And this is, frankly, almost more important than saving 3 ships for battle later. Our back of the envelope estimate says we'd lose 1400 or so more trained sailors. And from a human perspective, we'd lose another 1400 or so brothers, sons, and fathers. In Pearl Harbor, these men were able to frequently self-rescue by crawling to other ships via mooring lines. They were close enough to shore that, assuming that they could dodge the burning oil slicks, they stood a passable chance of getting to dry ground. In the middle of the Pacific, they'd have to take their chances that someone would be around to rescue them, as they would be in no position to rescue themselves.

So, yeah. I'll freely admit that the above was a bunch of back-of-the-napkin arithmetic held together by more wild guesses that I should have used, but it kind of puts things in perspective.