If America has prior knowledge of Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbour, would it still be a success?

Answer 1

We aready had that prior knowledge. In 1932 the U.S. fleet sailed from French Frigate Shoals at the northern end of the Hawaiian island group and ran a series of mock aerial attacks on the military installations which existed on Oahu. A report on that exercise was printed in "Proceedings", a proffesional journal published by the U.S. Naval Institute, in 1936. A copy of that made its way to Minoru Genda who planned the attack on Pearl Harbor, using the French Frigate Shoals exercise and the actual attack on the Italian Fleet at Taranto, Italy by the British as tactical models.

Answer 2

If, a big word. We will never know what took place regarding America's prior knowledge of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The truth is that it was a success. Thus, whatever was known did not affect the outcome of the sneak attack.
In regard to the first answer to your question, obviously from a non-christian. May the next sneak attack by Japan be targeted against the place where the person who first answered lives. And oh yes, Allah Akbar my friend.

Answer 3

Quite possibly so. We, arguably, had knowledge. We did not effectively use it. The Japanese were successful. They were able to achieve the three levels of surprise despite our knowledge. Tactical, operational and strategic.

Consider other operations where this has occurred when the enemy possessed knowledge that did not help them defeat the attacker.
France 1940. The allies knew the Germans were coming, but were practically powerless to stop them.
Yom Kippur War 1972. The Israelis reasoned, perhaps at a late hour, that the Egyptians and Syrians were coming. Israel made some blunders, but bounced back.

Midway, June 1942. Even though we knew where the Japanese were going, victory was not a sure thing.

There are plenty of other examples. The problem rests with the fact that the attacker gets to choose the place of battle. The defense typically only gets to react. Many factors go into reading the intentions and capabilities of an enemy, but more often than not, the signals are cloudy and guesses are often wrong.
Regards

Answer 4

If America had prior knowledge of the attack on Pearl Harbor it would have resulted in a greater victory for the Japanese. The US Navy would have sortied out to meet the Japanese fleet and subsequently lost its ships at sea. In this case the ships and sailors would have been lost forever. All the battleships damaged at Pearl Harbor except the Arizona where returned to service during the war. Loss of life was lower than if the ships had been sunk at sea. The US carriers were not involved and not harmed by the attack. It is probable that more of the Army airplanes would have survived in this instance.

Answer 5

i am on lunch break so I can't run home and look up the references to site the specifics, but yes, the united states, admiral Redman for 1, Franklin Roosevelt for 2 knew of the attack.

in early 1939 or there abouts, the germans took a freighter in the indian ocean with a dutch diplomat aboard. In his possession was a letter saying that unless Australia was attacked, the british would not become involved in the pacific war.

The japanese came storming down the coast in search of oil and took a large number of forts.

Meanwhile, 1941. the russians are lent a number of tanks and weapons and are loaded on a ship out of california headed to a port up in the extreme north of russia, not all that far from the aluetian islands.

In late Nov, the freighter was ordered to steam north, for about 27 hours, while the japanese fleet was ordered to steam south for 27 hours (to avoid running into each other).

The carriers were ordered out of pearl while the rest of the fleet sat like ducks along ford island.

A japanese intercept was taken just a few days before the attack, (called the bomb plot) where the ships, and the positions of each was noted. Also, a japanese business man was detained, in his posession was a photograph of pearl harbour, with what appeared to technical data.

for some 30 years, the japanese did "operation Orange" where they attacked pearl harbour.

YES, the powers that be, knew the attack was coming, and they let it happen anyway.

to be honest, it is not known if they fully knew the target was pearl harbour or if it was some point close by...look at a map, that is a vast ocean.

and you have your kennedy assassination theory, and your tradetower theory and

but yes, we did know the attack was coming

Answer 6

It is thought that some people knew and they let it happen so that the American people would want to inter the fighting during WWII. That is getting into conspires theories and proof is what is needed.

The truth is our govorment asked for an attack and they underestamted the Japanese military.

The Flying Tigers was the nickname of the American Volunteer Group (AVG), a group of United States Army Air Forces (USAAF), United States Navy (USN), and United States Marine Corps (USMC) pilots and ground crew, recruited under a secret Presidential sanction by Claire Chennault, that formed a fighter group with three squadrons that trained in China and defended the Burma supply line to China prior to the American entry into World War II to fight against Japanese forces.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Tigers

Since the Tigers received favorable assistance and approval from President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself before Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, one has to wonder if FDR wanted war.

Answer 7

America had more than a decade's warning before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The Japanese equivalent of Annapolis required a plan for attacking Pearl Harbor as part of their final examinations, not one year, but year after year after year.

The only thing we didn't know was when the attack was going to occur.

Answer 8

THe Battleships that have been at Pearl Harbor have been WWI out of date, and have been in basic terms nonetheless afloat because of the fact of treaties that pushed off construction replacements. 8 Replacements have been first ordered in 1937 and began to get commissioned in 1940/a million, The older ships ought to no longer save up with the service fleet and quickly cruisers at 32 Knots 23 knts nominal. they had a max sprint of 21 knts and frequently ran at 15-17 for gas intake. in addition they did no longer have the gap. All that have been refloated have been as much as date to lots larger standards, yet have been then retired ASAP after the conflict. They have been expendable, besides the incontrovertible fact that it became no longer theory they might go through that lots harm. the eastern got here up with a 1750 lb Armor piercing shell. torpedo fins that allowed them to apply in a shallow harbor (40 5 ft vs 60 ft). in addition they deployed D3A dive bombers (a marvel) and the A6M whose specs have been doubted by using the army while Flying Tigers suggested. sure FDR wanted the conflict, and likely lots extra harm became finished than estimated. in certainty, the information interior the states till the tip of the conflict became that a million BB and a couple of small boats and in basic terms some hundred lives have been misplaced.

Answer 9

I'll say first that chessale has a point when he says that things would have likely gone worse for us had we known that the attack was coming. In those days, both the Japanese and American navies had largely bought into the naval theories of Mahan, who in his book, The Influence of Seapower on History, championed the notion of battleship-heavy fleets meeting in decisive engagements. The influence of Mahan's ideas on the prewar naval planning of both sides cannot be understated. His ideas continued to hold sway in the Japanese navy throughout the war. The Japanese never really understood how outdated Mahan was despite the evidence of Pearl Harbor itself. Yamamoto was a great exception among senior naval commanders of both sides in that he understood from the beginning that air power was the future of naval warfare. His planning of the Pearl Harbor and Midway campaigns reflects this understanding, but that understanding was not shared by the bulk of senior Japanese naval planners. The Japanese spent much of the war attempting to lure the US into exactly the sort of battle advocated by Mahan. Had the Japanese, rather than committing scarce resources to build bloated battlewagons like the Yamato and Musashi, instead built escort carriers and aircraft, Japan would have given us a lot more trouble at sea than she did.

For our part, the destruction of the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor made it impossible for us to engage them in a decisive fleet battle for a couple of years and in fact may have helped us win the war by removing our ability in the short term to engage them with large main battle fleets, creating the necessity to learn how to rely more heavily on our carriers.

I think that chessale is exactly right that had we known about the impending attack, we would have sent the fleet out to meet it. Such a response would have been virtually dictated by the American naval doctrine of the time. The Japanese would have been made aware of this as soon as the fleet left port, and had they decided to hang around and engage the fleet with all those carriers, they likely would have still crippled or destroyed the Pacific Fleet, and our capital losses would have been irreplaceable in the short term because the ships would have been unsalvageable. The principal tactical differences would have been that our own carriers would have been a wild card had we had enough advance notice to get them into position and the Japanese pilots would have been attacking prepared and moving targets. However, the Japanese would have had a good deal better knowledge of our fleet's postion, heading and disposition than we would have had of theirs. Absent a great deal more of the sort of dumb luck that brought us victory at Midway, the superior aircraft of the Japanese would almost certainly have won the day long before the main fleet even could have sighted the Japanese, and we may well have lost the carriers in the bargain. What of Midway then?

Additionally, because the battle would have taken place on the open sea, our own casualties among ordinary seamen and lower grade officers would likely have been far worse than they historically were. For that matter, imagine what the loss of so many command grade officers would have meant.

I therefore have to agree that had we known of the attack in advance, the result would probably have been far worse for us than it historically was.

However, there is a caveat. Everything I said presupposes that Nagumo would have decided to hang around and attack the US Pacific Fleet with half a dozen carriers. He was a cautious guy, so that's a big IF. It may well be that he would have simply decided to bug out when he realized that the jig was up, but had he decided to attack and otherwise behaved intelligently, I think that he'd have won big.

BTW, the notion that we "knew" that the Japanese were going to attack us on the morning of December 7, 1941 is patent nonsense. Saying otherwise is a hindsight judgment based on the assumption that the president, his cabinet and most senior naval commanders understood that a fleet of battleships could be destroyed by a carrier based air assault. What is painfully clear is that this was not well understood at the time, and our naval planning barely acknowledged the possibility. At the time, it was widely believed that the proper use of carriers was to protect capital ships and conduct scouting missions rather than to carry out primary strikes.

What we knew was that hostilities were imminent. Yes, there were a few voices crying in the wilderness back in the twenties and thirties like Gen. Billy Mitchell who believed that air power was going to be the great weapon of the future and who also understood that Pearl Harbor could be successfully attacked by the Japanese, but one who insists that we knew that that attack was coming or would necessarily come is one who knows dick about the strategic planning of the period. The truth is that our strategy presumed that the Japanese would open hostilities against our interests in the Pacific by attacking the Philippines and that they would do so with a conventional fleet based around battleships. We figured that they'd likely use their carriers to support ground operations during an invasion, and that we'd see them coming in time to get our fleet there from Hawaii. In this, we grossly underestimated them.

Answer 10

Most definetly, supposedly America had knowledge of the 9/11 attacks and look what happened. Our government is too proud to accept the fact that our enemies can hurt America.