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"Invade and Occupy Hawaii" Topic


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©1994-2025 Bill Armintrout
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Personal logo Editor in Chief Bill The Editor of TMP Fezian10 Dec 2024 10:23 p.m. PST

Japan's greatest strategic mistakes of World War II were its sneak attack on Pearl Harbor and failure to follow up that attack with destruction of the Pacific Fleet's oil supplies, submarine base, shipyard, and drydocks. But was its failure to invade Hawaii a third strategic blunder? And could it have successfully carried out such an invasion?…

Naval History Magazine: link

Kuznetsov11 Dec 2024 4:26 a.m. PST

Harry Turtledove has a couple of alternate history novels about this: link

Tortorella Supporting Member of TMP11 Dec 2024 4:33 a.m. PST

Tully and Parshall are right, I believe. No logistical capacity to pull this off. Too far to go, impossible to hold. The Army and Navy did not play well together, as we learned later. No real strategic consensus.

Kido Butai was the key to early Japanese success, best carrier force in the world for a short time, but the country did not have the capacity for a sustained operation in Hawaii. Look at the wacky makeshift ways they tried to keep Guadalcanal supplied a year later.

Also, they did not get the use of subs for a war on commerce, no heavy air power, core group of elite pilots could not be replaced under their system, lack of radar tech or sufficient search capacity, aircraft on the verge of obsolete with little new in the pipeline. Too many deficiencies.

Eumelus Supporting Member of TMP11 Dec 2024 5:24 a.m. PST

Tortorella is quite correct – neither by a seizure of Hawaii nor by any other strategy did Japan stand a chance, once Pearl Harbor was attacked and American implacable ire raised. (I leave open the possibility that had Japan not attacked the U.S. but confined herself to picking off European colonies, whether she might have in that case in the probably inevitable war with America obtained a negotiated peace on not wholly unfavorable terms.)

The major wartime strategic decision America had to make was to identify the minimum level of resources required to defeat the Japanese empire, in order to devote the maximum effort (including material support of the USSR) to overcome the far more dangerous Germany. Obviously the decision was correctly taken, although arguably too great a proportion of Army divisions were used in the Pacific.

SBminisguy11 Dec 2024 9:15 a.m. PST

Tortorella +1

Greylegion11 Dec 2024 11:03 a.m. PST

Tortorella +2

Eumelus +1

Personal logo enfant perdus Supporting Member of TMP11 Dec 2024 11:59 a.m. PST

lack of radar tech or sufficient search capacity, aircraft on the verge of obsolete with little new in the pipeline.

There is a very good book on Leyte Gulf (can't remember the title) that discusses the disparity in technology intelligence work. The US and British/Commonwealth excelled at this; the Japanese did not. One result was that the Japanese, even at higher command levels, were continually surprised and often incredulous at the steady appearance of new and better technologies and capabilities in the Allied forces. The author attributes much of this to the Japanese not having much interest in the theoretical and brainstorming aspect of the work, whereas the Allies had teams of people doing just that.

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