Another YouTuber, Drachinifel, has a naval history channel that is top notch. He has an excellent several part series on the battles at Guadalcanal that shows how the early battles finally killed off the most incompetent Admirals from the prewar period and taught the USN vital lessons.
Thanks: https://www.youtube.com/@Drachinifel/videos
We were blessed with some great admirals, and first line commanders. Mostly I doubt that the Japanese had any idea how hard we were going to fight back.
And 2 or 3 months after they started it, the little punch in the nose that was Doolittle’s Raid must have made them think, uh, y’know, all our cities are on the coast...
Meanwhile, the bulk of our industrial plants and population was well off our west coast, and protected by a range of high mountains and altiplano about 1000 miles wide. They couldn’t do anything about it.
Parshall’s numbers are something like, the US prewar economy was about 5 times as large as Japan’s, and by the end was about 8 times. Meanwhile our sub fleet immediately went after their shipping. By the end of ‘44 US fleets and planes rarely found any shipping to sink.
They were taken quite by surprise by the surprise attack on their occupation of Guadalcanal, and even more surprised when their naval superiority and (even after the loss of their four big decks at Midway) better flight radius to give them cover out of land bases in the Solomons wound up not working and they had to retreat.