Pearl Harbor and the Great Pacific Blitz: Could the US have done anything better?

Half_Life_Expert#4276

Its been a while since the last What if/Could it? thread, I've been swamped by school work, but thankfully I am almost done with that, im stopping right now only to post this. My Pre-WWII Aggression thread kind of touched on this, but no one really examined the Asia Pacific aspect of it much: http://forums.totalwar.com/showthread.php/132135-Pre-WWII-Agression-Could-the-Allies-have-preemptively-stopped-the-Axis

Also, this is different from another thread I made on the Great Pacific Blitz, as that one was primarily from the Japanese perspective, this one is primarily from the Allied perspective: http://forums.totalwar.com/showthread.php/113518-The-War-in-the-Pacific-How-Far-could-Japan-have-gone

I waited until today to post this one due to this day's special significance and a special way to put up my 4,000th post.
Today is December 7th, 2014. 73 years ago, the Imperial Japanese Navy launched it's legendary surprise attack on the US Navy's base Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and the surrounding military facilities. I do not need to go into much detail here as this event is legendary and I think almost everyone here is probably familiar with at least the basic events.

One of the key reason's for the attack's devastating tactical success was the failures by the US Military and Government in the weeks and days leading up to that Day of Infamy. Missed warnings, bad decisions both in Washington and Hawaii, etc. These will undoubtedly be discussed in detail in the discussion so I wont go into detail here.

I will say right now that, in my personal opinion, the course of events that actually happened were probably the best possible outcome for the United States.

I know it sounds crazy for me to say that, but considering the social, political and psychological trauma that the US suffered following the attack, combined with the key targets that the Japanese missed for various reasons, gave the American people and government the proper motive to throw out their isolationist attitudes and finally join the war to stop Fascism (I consider Imperial Japan in the 1930s and 40s to be under a form of Fascism.)

So anyway, this thread is to discuss the Attack on Pearl Harbor, as well as the events leading up to the attack and the events in the first few months after it.

NOTE: The latter, the timeframe from the start of the attack until the Battle of the Coral Sea, I personally refer to as The Great Pacific Blitz.

Consider these questions:

A) "Could the United State Military forces in Hawaii have done anything differently on December 7th, 1941 to improve their situation? Also, could the Japanese forces have done anything differently to have made their attack not succeed to the level that it did?"(with the latter, it would obviously be unintentional errors)

"Could the United States government have done anything differently in the days, weeks, or years prior to Pearl Harbor to prevent or even preempt such a surprise attack?"


This is not about preventing the start of war, as I think it was going to happen one way or another, it is about the US entering the war without suffering a near fatal blow at the outset.

The set timeframe for this question will be any time from the Japanese Invasion of China in 1937 until the Day before the attack, December 6th, 1941.

Also, as with my Pre-WWII Aggression thread, we will hypothetically factor out US isolationist sentiments and look at this from a practical military perspective.

C) "Following the opening attacks, not just in Hawaii, could the United States, with the available European colonial forces and Australia and New Zealand, have done a more effective job holding off the Japanese onslaught? If not that, then perhaps preventing such disasters as the mass surrenders of Luzon and Singapore, which were the worst single military defeats in the histories of the US and UK respectively."

With this one, I think it is pretty safe to say that the dominant military power on the allied side would be the US, as Britain had already much of it's forces pinned down in Europe and other colonies like India and Egypt.

I think France was already out for the most part both with the 1940 official surrender and the Japanese annexation of French Indochina. If there were any Free French forces in the Pacific, feel free to factor them in.

Same with the Dutch, I know that a number of Dutch Warships were in the fight on the allied side.

And of course Australia and New Zealand must be factored as well.


Finally, with all of the above questions:

"If the answer is no, what hypothetical conditions would have to have been met to make a different outcome?"

For Example, with the first question: A better alert system on Oahu so that when Private Elliot at the Opana Point Radar station called in about the "large formation of planes coming in from the north", an effective scramble could be launched.

So there you are, I sincerely believe this could be a very interesting discussion thread, don't disappoint me, I know you guys can do it!

Discuss!

PS: Post number 4,000 for me! (in case you didn't notice it above).

daelin4#9896

During 1941, the United States' military attitude towards other powers was not perceived in the backdrop of previous wars: today we have experiences of attacks like Pearl Harbour, the Gulf, Korea, and such, but at that time, the US had never waged a war against another industrial power since WW1, a very different political and technological situation; there was no threat of an air attack from anything, military naval aviation was not experienced in battle until Pearl Harbour, and that was on the receiving end. It is hard to improve a situation you know or have experienced very little with.
There is also the fact that the James Richardson, then admiral of the Pacific fleet in 1939, was against placing the US Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbour since it was the most logical place to strike in the event of war against an enemy power in the Pacific: although there were other US strongholds such closer to attack by the Japanese, these lacked a decisive concentration of naval power as was the case with all the ships together anchored in Hawaii: Wake Island and the Philippines were the most forward areas and competed for the most likely targets of attack (side note, the carrier USS Lexington was ferrying planes to Wake Island during the attack and was therefore not present during that Sunday).
One journalist quoted in wikipedia describes Richardson as having taken notice the Japanese mentality of surprise and undeclared war- Pearl Harbour happened just as Richardson predicted. He was replaced by Kimmel in February in the same year.
Another side note: the Pacific Fleet's base prior to Pearl Harbour was at San Diego, California, an obviously much farther base of operations (another side note, the larger battleships were anchored in San Pedro, just so you know if you find conflicting generalized reports).
Kimmel was in command during Pearl Harbour, and ten days after was relieved, and of course bore much public responsibility. But his defense claims that important political information was not relayed to him in time for necessary preparations. For his part, the US and Japan were then-currently in negotiations, and intelligence has failed to locate the Japanese fleet when it was made clear that the Japanese were preparing for war; again, this sudden change was not relayed in time to Hawaii. This isn't exactly a situation that should be held accountable by a military commander; alerting the fleet on too many occasions at the wrong time is logistically and psychologically exhaustive, and could also become unintentionally provocative to your rival- unnecessary and/or unintentional displays of power could heighten tensions to a dangerous level, the US navy can't just become alert at every paranoid instance.
On the topic of declaration of war the Japanese message to the embassy was meant to deliver to Washington was deciphered and transcribed by US intelligence hours before the Japanese themselves were able to do so- on the intelligence side the US forces ought to have been aware of this diplomatic change, even if this didn't require alerting the fleet and going on patrols.
The general intelligence effort of the Americans would have one belief, without hindsight, that an attack on Allied possessions in Southeast Asia would have been more logical, especially given intelligence about the concentrations there, much more than the Combined Fleet that sailed in late November from northern Japan- if anything this fleet could have well appeared in SE Asia for any hostile movements. Further intelligence on IJN activities strongly imply the Japanese were counting on a decisive battle dotcrine, but one fought in a defensive manner, such as close to Japan, where the terms of battle were much easier to sway towards the Japanese, and this doctrine was in fact true to the end of the war- the Japanese attacking Pearl Harbour was in fact never really meant to be a decisive naval battle anyways, it just occurred to allow those forces back East to do what they can do with less pressure. What made Pearl Harbour such a tactically successful move was simply because it was radical and unorthodox in execution, but unfortunately for Yamamoto also didn't do much about the general war situation.

Anyways to answer the specific questions:

Half Life Expert wrote: »

A) "Could the US forces in Hawaii have done anything differently on December 7th, 1941 to improve their situation? Also, could the Japanese forces have done anything differently to have made their attack not succeed to the level that it did?"(with the latter, it would obviously be unintentional errors)

Whatever the US could have done for benefit would not have been strategic military, it wasn't like the US has ever experienced being attacked or even coming to battle with another naval power boasting close industrial scale in aviation. Compare this with Japan, which from prior to 1914 up to December 7 was fighting wars with neighbours. Naval aviation was used in combat prior to Pearl Harbour, so the Japanese knew what they were doing and it was all drawn from previous combat experience. This is the reason why they went for their decisive battle concept in the first place: their standing naval power was pretty closed to terms with that of the US pacific fleet, and in any case they have previous battles like Tsushima to learn from. In fact, falling on the US fleet at sea with the same level of surprise would have been far worse, in fact I'd say if the Combined Fleet waited to pounce on the carriers and logistical bases (ie fuel dumps) the strategic initiative would probably have lasted far longer, though this doesn't necessarily mean the Japanese would certainly have been well off, they certainly didn't improve their situation after Pearl Harbour.
I think if the Japanese committed to a third wave and focused on fuel dumps and hunting their carriers, they would have sacrificed relatively little for what could be huge gains- after Pearl Harbour all they did was booked it back to Japan. Sticking around to make a mess of things even after the Americans were reeling from such an attack would have been far more devastating: continuous attack on areas around Hawaii would have kept the area under denial of use, especially for the US carriers, those they definitely should have targeted if they wanted to make a serious long term impact on the Pacific fleet's ability to stop the Japanese.
I actually think there is little more the Japanese could have done to make their situation worse. The Japanese immediately took the East Indies with swift success but this could have been done without Pearl Harbour, and in any case the Japanese failed to make good use of the resources they acquired; the riches they would have gained didn't immediately flowed to Japan to relieve economic constraints. More importantly, Pearl Harbour did not target its logistical base like repair shops and docks, so surviving and serviceable American ships were still able to advance into the East to cause trouble- shipping lanes were vulnerable to predations from US submarines, for example, and US carriers even with a large escort would have been less resourceful in comparison, especially if you take into consideration the Japanese' emphasis on decisive battle.

"Could the United States government have done anything differently in the days, weeks, or years prior to Pearl Harbour to prevent or even preempt such a surprise attack?

In my opinion definitely: the Roosevelt government was largely rejective of proposals offered by Japan during negotiations throughout the last several years and US intelligence on Japanese activities had every reason to believe an attack on Pearl Harbour, and yet alert caution was given only to places like Guam and Wake and the Phillipines rather than Hawaii, the most logical place for the IJN to strike since it housed the concentration of the Pacific fleet. That Pearl Harbour also housed significant naval installations in addition to the number of capital ships also made it all the more logical to have kept the place under high alert level even if the location of the IJN's Combined Fleet was confirmed to have been going somewhere else, it would have been worse if Pearl Harbour was targeted not for it's ships but for it's installations, a fact that remains even today, because a fleet can't really go anywhere even if seaworthy if it can't rely on being patched up or replenished once arriving to dock. Bombing drydocks and shipyards and ammo or fuel dumps is just as devastating to an enemy, and even more so since Hawaii is an island chain so far away from the continental US. Places like the Philippines were logical places to expect an attack, but losing a strategic position like Pearl Harbour- not from enemy conquest but from destruction and incapacitation of services- would have been a lethal headshot. Imagine all your battleships sitting there but no fuel or munitions. That's alot of steel and mouths to feed waiting for reconstruction of damaged docks and storehouses: coastal US and smaller logistics facilities would have to supplement a Hawaii. Being able to steam back to Pearl Harbour for any repairs or replenishment made it a very obvious target, it's a complete miracle that rather than these critical facilities it was just the warships that were specifically singled out for attack, and targeting them in the aborted third wave was certainly worth the risk of up to a mere hundreds of pilots and aircraft.

C) "Could the United States, with the available European colonial forces and Australia and New Zealand, have done a more effective job holding off the Japanese onslaught? If not that, then perhaps preventing such disasters as the mass surrenders of Luzon and Singapore, which were the worst single military defeats in the histories of the US and UK respectively."

Now this was a good question since pre-war preparations by the Japanese were obvious months before Pearl Harbour occurred. But for the European Allies there wasn't much they can do about it, Germany was a much closer threat and the US sparing it's naval forces to SE Asia would have made them more vulnerable to destruction. The British and their colonial forces did all they could with what little they had, but the US should have been pretty aware of such dire events unfolding even at a stand-off distance.

[/U]"If the answer is no, what hypothetical conditions would have to have been met to make a different outcome?"

For Example, with the first question: A better alert system on Oahu so that when Private Elliot at the Opana Point Radar station called in about the "large formation of planes coming in from the north", an effective scramble could be launched.

The way I read it, air defense was the Army's job, so whatever detections radar would have found was primarily for the Army to deal with.
There is also the fact that the army was expecting planes coming on during that time, so scrambling a defense against a fleet of what would most likely have been friendly bombers isn't something any officer wants to be responsible for.
In any case, an alert at Opana would not have made much of a difference since Pearl Harbour is just on the other side of Oahu. Delays in confirmation and relaying of messages would have made scrambling a defense less immediate than it seems, and that includes aborting the scrambling if it turns out to be friendlies. However neither the direction or the size of this approaching flight was relayed to LT. Tyler, who was not aware that such a large detection could never represent six bombers, especially approaching from a suspicious northern direction. If such information was made apparent a scramble would definitely have been in order, it would sure spook the hell out of me!

Also off topic fun fact: the USS Idaho had a soda bar, there was even a menu that had soda sold at five cents, which according to some inflation calculators range from 70-90 cents today.

Half_Life_Expert#4276

I don't have time to give a full response at the moment, so ill give my thoughts on daelin's intro and the first question now:

In my opinion, the US forces in Hawaii did have one chance to go on alert with some time before the First Wave arrived. I do not mean the Opana Point Radar detection, by then it was too late.

I am referring to the Action of the USS Ward, when she spotted, fired upon, and sank one of the five Japanese midget Submarines off the harbor entrance. This occurred over an hour before the arrival of the first wave. In fact, I read not that long ago that a US ship spotted one of the Midget Subs as early as 3:42 AM.

If the alert sent out by the Ward had been properly reacted to, since the incident occurred so close to harbor entrance, then at the very least, I think, the men best in position to go on alert could have at least been woken up an put on standby. That way there could have been some AAA already firing when the first wave came in.

It is not a great chance for an alert, but I think it could have been enough to at least wake people up so that no one was asleep when the planes arrived.

But back to the Radar station. One thing that always bugged me about that part of the story is that Pvts Elliot and Lockhart, the men at the Radar station when the First wave came into range, should have been informed of the incoming B-17s.

That way, they should reasonably have been able to judge the difference between a few B-17s (a medium size blip I would think), and a massive force of over 100 aircraft (the large blip they saw).

This was simply an unacceptable bureaucratic and chain of command failure on the part of the US forces in Hawaii. Even if the Japanese didn't attack, informing the radar operators of planned arrivals would obviously help to cut down false alarms.

Even Lt. Tyler, the man who said the infamous line "don't worry about it", was not informed about the B-17s.

I saw an interview with him once, and he said that he made that judgment on his own because when he was driving to his shift earlier that morning, he noticed that Hawaii radio was still on the air. He said that a pilot friend of his told him that the only time Hawaii Radio would be broadcasting that late/early is when planes are coming in from the US, so that they can follow radio signal.

Lt. Tyler dismissed the call from Pvt. Elliot based on his own judgment, which was also a massive bureaucratic and command failure of the US forces.


I also agree that Kimmel really cannot be blamed for the disaster. He was not given any information about what was going on in Washington, and if he had any knowledge of the collapsing talks, he probably would have ordered more alertness IMO.

It think it's also worth debating the merit's of the fateful decision to bunch together planes that were not on patrol alert to protect them from sabotuers. This obviously made bombing the airfields a lot easier.

The Great Pamphlet

Surprisingly, the aircraft carriers had gone for a walk, in the time of the attack...
I suspect that the Japanese were trolled.

Half_Life_Expert#4276

As Daelin said, the Lexington was ferrying planes to Wake at the time,

The Enterprise, the other carrier stationed at pearl at the time, was on its way back from Midway ferrying planes. It was actually pretty close to Pearl Harbor on the morning of the 7th. In fact, a flight of it's scout SBDs approaching the island was engaged by Japanese Zeros.

The Enterprise steamed into Pearl that evening


After some thought, I thought of another thing to consider, this time from the Japanese perspective

I think there is an argument to be made that Japan may have actually been better off if they did not attack pearl harbor, or any US locations for that matter, at least not at that time.

Think about it. If in the Great Pacific Blitz, Japan does not attack Hawaii, the Philippines, Wake, Midway etc. They never declare war on the US.

They bypass all of those and just attack the Dutch and British. They had already taken Indochina from the French. If the US wasn't attacked, I think it is possible that the US may not have intervened, and if it did, public support may not have been very high.

The shock and anger that came out of the Pearl harbor attack was the thing that killed isolationism in the US. If no such attack occurred, maybe the US would not have stopped Japan, at least not for a couple more years.

Then Japan, perhaps a year or two later, after taking all of the oil and such from Dutch East Indies and whatnot, perhaps they could have recovered from the US Oil embargo.

Thoughts on this scenario?

daelin4#9896

Half Life Expert wrote: »

I am referring to the Action of the USS Ward, when she spotted, fired upon, and sank one of the five Japanese midget Submarines off the harbor entrance. This occurred over an hour before the arrival of the first wave. In fact, I read not that long ago that a US ship spotted one of the Midget Subs as early as 3:42 AM.

If the alert sent out by the Ward had been properly reacted to, since the incident occurred so close to harbor entrance, then at the very least, I think, the men best in position to go on alert could have at least been woken up an put on standby. That way there could have been some AAA already firing when the first wave came in.

The USS Ward was not aware that it was firing on a Japanese submarine, I believe it wasn't actually until 2002 that this detail was confirmed by discovery of the IJN's Ko-Hyoteki sub, designated as No. 20, on the sea floor close to Oahu. Hull damage verified that this was indeed the same ship, but of course that was until 61 years after the fact, not a few hours.
Reports of unidentified (if not hostile) submarine activity have also been going on for a long time, so it's not like this particularly event stuck out like a sore thumb wrapped in the Rising Sun. Without firm proof that the target was an actual submarine, and a Japanese one, there is very little reason to alert the Americans at Pearl Harbour. This is not so much a result of lax security, but the result of acclimatization to high security levels: false positives will pour in and you cannot always know if they are false positives.

But back to the Radar station. One thing that always bugged me about that part of the story is that Pvts Elliot and Lockhart, the men at the Radar station when the First wave came into range, should have been informed of the incoming B-17s.
That way, they should reasonably have been able to judge the difference between a few B-17s (a medium size blip I would think), and a massive force of over 100 aircraft (the large blip they saw).
This was simply an unacceptable bureaucratic and chain of command failure on the part of the US forces in Hawaii. Even if the Japanese didn't attack, informing the radar operators of planned arrivals would obviously help to cut down false alarms.
Even Lt. Tyler, the man who said the infamous line "don't worry about it", was not informed about the B-17s.

I encountered an interesting tidbit in a documentary where the narrator claimed the radar arrays were shut down after 7AM due to the intelligence perception that the Japanese never attacked later than that time of day. Stroke of luck, the single array manned by Elliot and Lockhart remained functional after 7AM, around the time they detected the blips. This tidbit may have been part of LT Tyler's judgement where such a blip, and at around a time he'd be expecting friendlies inbound, had little reason to presume they were enemy planes. But mind you, neither Elliot nor Tyler were experienced in their stations, recently posted there. And these weren't venerable radar technology either: unfamiliarity with such technological work or how to perceive their use under usual circumstances makes for a situation where the enemy can either game the system for an exploit or, in this case, was more or less blind luck that the detection was not interpreted as a hostile threat.
In any case, the time between detection and the actual attack, a mere hours, would only really have ensured higher number of lost planes, not less number of ships sunk. And as history shows, the tactical success of Pearl Harbour was ultimately of not much strategic value, regardless of how many lives were lost that day. Even some of the battleships sunk were (eventually) returned to duty: not attacking the dock and yard facilities means the Americans could have lost ALL the ships there and would still have been able to remain a threat to the Japanese, especially if the Japanese turned tail and focused everything into South-East Asia.
In any case I don;t agree that Tyler's judgement call reflects the bureacratic failure. From an inexperienced officer's point of view such made sense and it would only have been a punitive result if he called it in without reasonable doubt that a handful of B-17s requires the greeting of the entire anchored fleet deployed at arms.

After some thought, I thought of another thing to consider, this time from the Japanese perspective

I think there is an argument to be made that Japan may have actually been better off if they did not attack pearl harbor, or any US locations for that matter, at least not at that time.

That would have been really hard. Like trying to vandalize your enemy's house while knowing that A) his neighbours are very close friends to your enemy, and the neighbours are living in a physically connected building, so you end up vandalizing them as well. You're going to be fighting more enemies than you want. The Allies will certainly leverage US presence in the Southeast regardless of the Japanese fighting the Americans, much like the British were benefiting from American cooperation in the Atlantic, however Not-at-War the situation was, it was practically everything but a formal state of war anyways.

Logistics and strategic is very important in a place like the Southeast Asian islands. American presence just existing is a real dent in Japanese expansion efforts (otherwise they'd not bother about American protests towards their expansions). The Philippines is a great place to cut a wedge into the Japanese holdings when their army and navy are trying to take over Singapore and Indochina. It makes as much sense as the Germans bypassing Leningrad or Stalingrad: it's not going to work, not unless you have such a generous logistics system that you can literally afford to let such a thorn exist.
The United States' industrial activity was also becoming closely linked with the war situation of other countries, it would be almost impossible to try to live a parallel peaceful existence with countries that were at Total War footing. Before Pearl Harbour the Germans were making headway into Russia, so unless a series of separate events prevent further non-combat participation into WW2 (ie the Americans refuse to aid the Russians via Lend-Lease), American involvement that lead into hostilities is almost a certainty.
Not just on the political or economic side, but American personnel were becoming involved in the wars as well: US ships in the Atlantic were in direct threat of being attacked by Germans, the same had happened prior to Pearl Harbour what with things like USS Panay in 1927. I've little reason to think the IJN will take their sweet time to make sure warships they come across were not American so as to not stoke unnecessary hostilities. And who's to say these neutral warships aren't operating against their interest? The Japanese would have simply declared unrestricted warfare.

Taking the oil fields from the British and Dutch proved far more problematic in real life, I doubt the Japanese would have altered their strategy simply due to not being at war with the US. Even if we're to assume taking control of these resources did not result in any damage to infrastructure, the military necessities required in holding these possessions would have prevented the Japanese from taking full (peacetime-level) advantage of these industries, you can't just seize some land and expect the riches to start flowing as if a war is still not going on. If the Allies can't keep them, they'll either destroy them or make life hell for the Japanese trying to ship resources back to Japan. Like with Germany taking over the East, Japan benefited very little from taking over these colonies: the objective was to just make sure they were in Japanese hands once peace was negotiated with a battered America.

daelin4#9896

I was reading a book on Midway and I learned that the US Naval intelligence was effectively handicapped by chasing allyways in cracking the Japanese coded messaging; it can be argued that the intelligence covering the Japanese embassy and their communiques with Tokyo would have been either a huge help for the US Navy to perceive Japanese intentions, if not provide information that Pearl Harbour would be subject to attack. Apparently even after the bombing, the US Navy was still not given these resources.
The weaknesses of the Japanese Foreign Office's codes, named Purple by the US, was in fact made known to the Japanese through the Soviets, but remained in use well into the end of the war. In fact much of Allied intelligence of the Germans were gleaned from reading Japanese messages since the latter were given access to details regarding the former and sent this back to Tokyo. Stalin also learned through the Soviets' cracking of the codes that the Japanese would not be attacking from Manchuria, allowing Far East forces to be moved to fight the Germans after Barbarossa. There was even a congressional hearing on the matter.
If the decrypted codes, which were used for diplomatic purposes, was viewed with a military strategic lens, one can argue that Pearl Harbour would have been the prime target for any Japanese actions.

So to answer the OP question: yes they could definitely have done better, their method of making use out of decrypting the codes was horribly inefficient.

Clover

It's easy to look back in retrospective and say "They should have done X", but at the time there where a lot of unknowns. My Great Grandfather was in the navy from 1940 - post Korean War and he said the primary concern was protecting the carriers after war broke out. He was under no impression from the officers that the fleet could match the Imperial Japanese fleet and instead should kept away from the Pacific until it could. For the first year his carrier, the Lexington, was busy ferrying aircraft to Montgomery in Africa. He said they even turned around on the rumor that a small Italian force was trying to intercept them and destroyers would always be sacrificed to potentially save them. The Coral Sea, as I understood it, was a desperate operation. Japan had swept through the South China Sea with frighting speed and with impunity thanks to their victories at Pearl Harbor and Java. Without interdiction against the Japanese invasion force it was thought that Australia and New Zealand would fall just as quickly and the war all but lost.

Of course we now know that Japan had struggled to achieve what it did and the damage suffered at Pearl Harbor was nothing close to what was reported to generally believed by both sides. The invasion force, if one could call it such, was actually a skeleton force that had no prospect of occupying Australia or New Zealand. We also know that much of the overall naval operations had been done to lure the UN fleets into battle where they could be destroyed.

I think both sides did everything they could to secure the advantage. Realistically speaking we would have never risked our fleet to protect against the Japanese advance. We simply did not have the logistics in place, the experience needed, or the time to do so. It would have just been another Java. At Midway the Japanese pilots proved to be far more experienced and made a good account of themselves against the repetitively green American pilots. With the Japanese experience and momentum it was inevitable that the war would favor them greatly at first, but the resources and production capabilities meant the long-term advantage lie against them.

[Deleted User]

The Coral Sea battle was important, if not conclusive, simply from the viewpoint of showing that confrontation was occuring. The Japanese were attempting to create a chain of bases across the island periphery from the Indon archipelago through to the south/central Pacific.

The force heading towards Australia was actually heading to the north coast of PNG, and largely underestimated the nightmare of trying to cross the Owen Stanley mountain range, as did MacArthur's headquarters during the actual campaign...the term Kokoda 'trail' or 'track' was seen as something more than it was, which in reality was a series of disjointed dirt paths linking villages over the mountain range. One of the US 32nd Division regiments attempted to cross over later in the campaign using eastern tracks, and lost a battalion in the process as casualties, with the rest being combat ineffective for weeks afterwards...and that's just from crossing with no opposition.

However, Pearl Harbour was no US sin, when you consider that MacArthur lost pretty much all of his air transport and heavy bomber air fleet at the Phillipines in one airstrike, which they had been warned to expect. That was repeated at the Seven Mile Strip at Port Moresby during the Owen Stanley's campaign, when most of the transport fleet and bomber fleet was again lined up on the aprons in nice orderly rows with no dispersal.