Bad idea;
I rest my case.
No, it was a good idea.
They missed the fuel tanks.
They failed to return a third time that morning to destroy what was not already blown up.
They failed to STAY around Pearl harbor and get the carriers when they did come back on Monday or Tuesday that week.
That the carriers were out at sea on that Sunday morning could not be predicted - they tried, but failed to get the message out. Would Monday have been successful?
By the way, at that time, battleships WERE still the sea power. carriers were not yet proven. Close to be being effective, as Europe showed, but Brit carriers were NOT impressive early on! (As shown by the Brit carrier sunk by gunfire!) One swordfish hitting the Bismark rudder on one lucky shot after dozens of other torpedoes missed, does not a campaign make.
That the Brit carriers WERE successful in shallow water harbor attacks on moored battleships is what the japanese learned from the Med fighting.
According to Saburo Sakai, the Japanese did fear the B-17 early in the war. He said it was the only plane they feared until they learned it was much less effective against ships than they had thought.
I think the main reason they proved ineffective was they tried to bomb at high altitude. Those B-17s were one reason they did not stick around.
” ... They failed to return a third time that morning to destroy what was not already blown up.
They failed to STAY around Pearl harbor and get the carriers ...
... battleships WERE still the sea power. carriers were not yet proven. ...”
VADM Chuichi Nagumo, commanding the IJN strike force that hit Pearl Harbor, was known among colleagues as cautious and methodical and measured; he was not air-minded in the least. He had no inclination to the run the risks that a third wave of IJN aircraft against Hawaii’s defenses might have entailed. Very lucky for the Americans, as they had no organized air defense - no way to alert, launch, direct, recover, rearm, and otherwise coordinate any fighter force that might have been assembled. Not even in peacetime.
A bolder, more innovative Japanese commander might have risked another throw of the dice, causing far greater losses to American forces.
ADM Husband Kimmel, commanding US fleet at Hawaii, was an equally conventional thinker, one of a long line of what were later called “battleship admirals” who knew little about air power.
LTGEN Walter Short, commanding US Army forces in Hawaii (including Army Air Corps units, where the feared B-17s were assigned), was no less a stereotypical ground-forces commander. His lack of understanding of air power (a power still mostly theoretical in 1941, as Robert Cooke pointed out) rivaled that of Kimmel and Nagumo.
Even the briefest of excursions through the written orders and correspondence originating from the offices of Kimmel and Short reveal that both were indeed concerned about a Japanese attack. But the former thought only in terms of a naval (surface) attack, while the latter was preoccupied strictly with an amphibious landing and subsequent ground campaign.
Neither was air-minded, making them the chiefly responsible for the non-existent US response, as the late Gordon Prange showed conclusively in _At Dawn We Slept_. And under the less-than-imaginative leadership of Nagumo, the IJN scarcely knew what to do with the complete surprise they achieved.
Brilliant tactical execution, driven by poor grasp of the US national character and insufficient strategic depth to truly exploit the sweeping victories racked up by Imperial Japanese forces during the first six months of US involvement in the war, or to consolidate gains made. A drawback of protracted war, foreseen by Admiral Yamamoto.
Bad idea;
I rest my case.