Japan had no interest in invading Africa, they knew that UK had that on lockdown and they didn’t have the resources to do it. I am 100% sure that Japanese High Command would of double down on invading Australia over that. The idea behind controlling Indian ocean was to do two jobs. First: Close Burma Road since the Chinese were getting heavy equipment from the US. People forget the bulk of the IJA was in China and China was always the end goal for Japan. Two: Cutting the Persian trade route was more of a request from Germany. People forget that the Battle of Madagascar was the only battle during WWII that had both Germany and Japan in the same battle.
Japanese 3rd Wave at Pearl Harbor
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But the carriers were not a Pearl Harbour, and a third wave would not have changed that. Even if they were, the resources used for the Lend-Lease program and the Iowa class battleships could have been simply shifted over.
Even if the both the naval and army bases were destroyed (I have a hard time believing that much damage could be done in one wave, as it would have been harder with the loss of surprise and even with two waves, only two battleships were destroyed out of seven), and destroyed all that army equipment, those losses could have easily been made good. Army equipment is so easy to make. The Americans alone built over 2 million machine guns during the war, and small arms are much easier to make. More than 200,000 pieces of artillery were also built throughout the war.
The oil problem is easily solved due to continued Allied control of the Middle East, and rationing would have been intensified.
Finally, the small carriers, the Independence class, were built on light cruisers, not destroyers.
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I guess I just don’t see how the third wave sinks the carriers since they weren’t there. At any rate, it’s good they didn’t need to find out.
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Question: How much of the Red Hill Underground Fuel Storage Facility was in use on December 7, 1941?
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I’m not sure.
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@abworsham4 said in Japanese 3rd Wave at Pearl Harbor:
Question: How much of the Red Hill Underground Fuel Storage Facility was in use on December 7, 1941?
Nothing. According to https://www.asce.org/about-civil-engineering/history-and-heritage/historic-landmarks/red-hill-underground-fuel-storage-facility :
Work on the first tank was completed in September 1942
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But there were other oil facilities, right?
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There certainly were. The link I gave before, quotes Admiral Chester Nimitz: “We had about 4.5 million barrels of oil out there and all of it was vulnerable to .50-caliber bullets. Had the Japanese destroyed the oil, it would have prolonged the war another two years…”.
It’s also not too difficult to find a picture of those facilities, which indeed look like very tempting targets:
I suppose AB Worsham asked about the Red Hill Underground Fuel Storage Facility because if a lot of fuel would have already been stored there at the time of the attack, any third Japanese wave would have been unable to destroy that fuel.
When reading up on this, I came across the name of a very interesting fellow: Captain Mitsuo Fuchida. He was the leader of the first wave, and his accounts of what did or did not happen have been highly influential in (re-)writing history. Here are a few more links:
https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2016/december/commander-fuchidas-decision
https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1601&context=nwc-review
And while I didn’t read all of that, it seems that no third wave was launched against the oil containers because (a) the Japanese didn’t think of them as very important, and (b) no third wave had ever been planned to begin with. It was only when Fuchida was questioned by what must have been some amazed American interrogators after the war, that he began to realize that the celebrated Japanese victory had actually not nearly been as devastating as it could have been, and that his own role in the whole affair was not nearly as glorious as he would have liked it to be. So he began to change his story in later years, and the whole affair of him and other Japanese officers urging Admiral Nagumo to launch a third wave, was really Fuchida’s fabrication and never actually happened that way.
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Ya plus the fact the first under ground tank wasn’t complete until end of 42.
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But what if what he said was true? We’re already diving into the “what if” world anyway.
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No, we’re not. He changed his story and kept changing it. Witness accounts did not conform anything he said.
I’m not an expert on this, but what I found seems pretty convincing to me. -
So the story wasn’t true. But as I said, what if, in an alternate timeline, the story was true? And what if it was launched? What would have been the damage?
A “what if” has to be done to make this conversation work (or even have a chance of being “realistic”).
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