I’ll listen to this, but from all I know, if the Japanese had launched the third wave and hit the fuel storage and/or ship repair facilities, we would have had to withdraw our forces to the West Coast.
A subsequent landing force could have occupied Oahu. West coast cities could have been subject to shelling to terrorize the population. We still would have beaten them, but it could have taken years longer. And what if the additional effort needed to recover and fight back had caused a lessening of the effort we put into the “Germany first” policy? What if D Day had been delayed another year? What more breathing room would have given the Germans the chance to develop the A-bomb?
Or perhaps they would have come under attack from our carriers?
Occupying HI was outside of their ability at the time. I read an account of just the logistics required to supply an occupying force. Japan couldn’t have taken HI and the other areas she did.
Japs had trouble dealing with 450 Marines on Wake Island. Dealing with 30K troops in the Hawaiian Division would have been beyond their means, especially since their nearest combat troops were in the Marshall’s readying the attack on Wake. Their plane losses were small but gasoline and ordnance for their aircraft was limited. US submarines and Enterprise and Lexington and the arriving Saratoga would have been a big problem for Nagumo. The loss of fuel depot and repair facilities would have forced the Navy to operate from San Diego, but Hawaii would not have gone under. Though Harry Turtledove did a nice job describing it in his two volume alternate history.
That overstates the threat.
Tank farms aren’t that easy to take out, since the tanks were spread out and in revetments to prevent damage from one tank from spreading to another.
Also the Japanese were in no position to invade and occupy Oahu. We still had two over strength divisions on the island.
Kido Butai was at the end of it’s tether having just enough fuel to get to Hawaii and back. It did not have near enough fuel to hang around the islands launching the repeated attacks needed to prepare for an invasion.
And the IJA never launched a successful opposed landing during the war. Their landings were in remote spots with few defenders.
Furthermore, the shipping needed to move enough troops to launch an opposed invasion of Oahu alone, did not exist in Japan. Especially since the ships they had were needed to carry troops to the Philippines, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies.
Finally, the Imperial Japanese Army, the vast bulk of which was committed to the war in China, would have flatly refused to participate in a operation so far removed from the main theater of war.