-—how quickly defenses were raised-—? It’s a bit of a foot note now but the geniuses at Fort Schafter, up the hill from Pearl where Pacific Command was housed, recognized very quickly that they dodged a big bullet by not losing their fuel storage.
Within weeks they had a plan layed out to tunnel under Red Hill, from Pearl proper, and bury the fuel storage in really large underground tanks. There are five of them, 100 feet in diameter and 300 feet tall. The tanks are buried so deep that in later years they were/are considered nuke-safe. Tunnel boring gear got to the island within weeks. All the delivery piping, including to Hickam AFB is in tunnels. From the air one can’t see anything except the gas pump.
Another aspect not easy to find is that those tanks are re-filled from an off-shore pipe dock. Fuel tankers are not allowed inside Pearl Harbor unless they are empty. They’re slow learners but they did learn to keep bigass loads of fuel out of the base.
Thank you for that elaboration. I enjoy hearing “the rest of the story”.