“I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”
Although a movie line from
Tora,Tora,Torah (1970),
and not confirmed as Yamamoto
having actually saying this,
the giant did wake up.
These men did an amazing job.
It must have dawned on them early on the only way to cause us serious damage would be to attack on our east coast, most of the population and industrial capacity was east of the Mississippi, while Japan’s cities were mostly coastal. Doolittle’s Raid was a big humiliation, and the realization that we could do that again and again probably had them reaching for the antacids every day from then until the end of the war.