Any interest in a sim on Pearl Harbor Attack?

[breadcatcher101]

I don't think a sim is out there about this but it would be interesting if history could be re-written.

You could have the attack as it happened of course, but also factors could be thrown in such as the radar indication resulting on a air attack on the strike force, the force being discovered by a sub, air patrol, or a ship.

Depending on how soon the task force was discovered the fleet at pearl could have sortied to met them in a battle at sea.

Also the American carriers could play a role as well, many possibilities exist in having such a sim, has anyone else given this any thought?

It is just that so many factors were overlooked that allowed the Japanese to pull it off as they did, would be interesting to have a chance to replay it in the "what if" format.

[Torplexed]

Interesting scenario. Even if the US had been able to react to the Japanese attack hours before it struck it might have still been a disaster of sorts. The US battleship fleet was hit at anchor in shallow water which meant all but two of them were salvaged. If they had been at sea they might not have been sighted, but if they had, they would have been sunk in deep water with greater loss of life. I always thought the wisest first move for the Japanese would have been to hit the Oahu airfields with everything they had, waited for the US fleet to sortie, than hit the fleet at sea with only minimal air cover left to oppose them. Given the average slow speed (21 knots) of the US battleships there is no realistic way they could have caught the faster Japanese carrier fleet in a surface action given the 200 nautical miles between them. Their best bet would have been to elude them by steaming south. Given the superior range of Japanese planes Nagumo's carriers could have stayed way well out of the range of an effective US land-based air strike.

Another thing to bear in mind is that the Japanese had a cloud of submarines posted around Oahu. They might have gotten in a few potshots at a departing US battlefleet, although I doubt if they would have scored many hits.

There were two US carriers in the area, Lexington and Enterprise, They were Admiral Nagumo's nagging worry. But stacked against six Japanese carriers the odds wouldn't have been good. Unlike Midway the Japanese knew there were US carriers in the neighborhood.

Probably the best "what-if" would have been if the Japanese planes arrived to find the harbor emptied of ships and the skies full of waiting fighters and AA defenses active. Would have given the US a chance to knock off a little of the cream of Japanese naval aviation. At that point Nagumo probably would have started sending out search planes to find the US fleet and then it gets speculative.

[Platapus]

Well if I were to play the Japanese, I sure as hell would have hit the fuel tanks and the repair yards. Never understood why they were not hit during the real attack.

By leaving the fuel tanks and the repair yards, we were allowed to get our ships up and ready a lot faster.

The attack on Pearl was planned nicely but not implemented the best (which was good news for our side)

[Torplexed]

Although not a popular decision with his pilots, I think Nagumo's retirement from the scene after the Pearl Harbor attack was probably the best move under the circumstances. A third Japanese strike had a very good chance of suffering considerably greater losses against a fully alert enemy. The second wave of the actual strike was moderately torn up, even given the shambles made of the defense in the first wave. With her overly rigorous naval aviator training program, Japan had only a limited cadre of elite pilots and needed to husband them for the battles ahead.

The oil tank farm gets mentioned a lot as a missed opportunity, but was far less vital than many think. Even if the Japanese had planned from the outset to strike up the oil tank farm and brought along the requisite thermite explosives and incendiaries,(which they didn't) there was nothing in the tank farm that could not have been replenished by 1% of the existing US tanker fleet of the time. Not to mention all the fuel that could have been easily siphoned from the sunken but still intact US battleships, or from non-combat ships like tenders and auxiliaries. Even in the worst case scenario, the Pacific Fleet would only have been low on fuel for the time it took to ship in more from the West Coast.

The US Torpedo arsenal is often brought up as a suitable target but that facility was substantially protected by concrete. Plus, given the poor reliability of US torpedoes you could argue that they would have been doing us a favor.

Machine shops and repair facilities are often touted. Maybe. But in fact there is not a great deal you can do to a machine tool that can't be repaired rather easily. The US 8th Air Force tried hard enough at Schweinfurt against the ball bearing factories with far more force and only modest success.

Dry dock doors and locks are also often mentioned as a missed target. Barring problems of targeting (you'd need a direct hit to do any damage at all), there's the fact that similar targets in Lorient, and along the Kiel canal, were systematically and repeatedly struck by USAAF and RAF heavy bombers applying far more firepower than the Japanese single engine planes could muster and to little long term effect. That's why the British ended up resorting to a full-blown commando raid with an old destroyer packed full of explosives to knock out the large dry dock at St. Nazaire in 1942.

In terms of infrastructure there was nothing at Pearl Harbor that the US could not have repaired in a few days to a month. Similar targets in Europe often took multiple strikes by massed bombers over time to knock out.