The Japanese missed the really important target in Hawaii: oil storage facilities.
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I have ‘always’ thought they left the storage tanks alone because they believed we would have turned tail and run back to the West Coast, and they could steamed back into a pretty decent Naval and Air facility with fuel in place.
They must have calculated that the U.S. would destroy the facilities before we left. Capturing the Phillipines, Wake and other western Pacific outposts was of much less strategic value than Hawaii. Without U.S. control of Hawaii, Australia is pretty much out of the War, the western Aleutians cannot be held and the U.S. starts the War on it’s own goal line.