Recall that one of the greatest errors the Japanese suffered at the opening of the pacific theater of combat was to call off follow up strikes at Hawaii which would have struck the petroleum storage facilities there. Among other things it would have hampered our deployment/entry by probably a half year or more.
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There are many people who believe that the US leaked information about the purported weakness of Pearl Harbor to the Japanese and WANTED them to attack. The reasons given are that US citizens weren’t very supportive of entering a new war. People who survived WWI had children by that time and the memory was still too fresh to contemplate sending THEIR children to war. The US needed an event that would invoke that support. If that’s all true and a strike on the homeland would gin up support for entering the war, delaying their entry by destroying the petroleum facilities would have accomplished the opposite, as you correctly pointed out.
I should have added that if the US “arranged” the attack so they could enter a heretofore unpopular war, they may have made certain to adequately protect the petroleum storage facilities. A WWII history buff may know how quickly defenses were raised to protect the area after the attack.
> There are many people who believe that the US leaked information about the purported weakness of Pearl Harbor to the Japanese and WANTED them to attack.
There’s a book about it, I forget the name. I’ll look through my library.
-SB
It wouldn’t have delayed our entry “declaration” wise, but delayed the deployment and out-massing of our material and equipment.
And I’ve no doubt that we “goaded” them into playing their hand early. We cut off oil and scrap steel to them, and they had to replace that post haste AND get things producing materials up o begin to suffer a increasing material deficit.
At that time the US could, on literally a moments notice, out produce the ENTIRE PLANET in “stuff”. The one momentary advatage Japan had was more robust naval air arm, numerically and experience wise. The huge disadvantage they had was a command structure that was very rigid and inflexible to “thinking outside the box” and taking personal initiative.
Roosevelt/admin wanted to get into the European theater to keep Germany from rolling the continent. That idea was pretty unpopular with American citizenry, to the tune of like 70% up until 40/41. They knew that Hitler would uphold his end of the Triple Alliance commitment and declare war on anyone the other alliance members got into conflict with and lo and behold he declared 3 days after.