This is abject idiocy that has been refuted by an infinite amount of scholarship, including "At Dawn We Slept."
Among other things, that Japanese had absolutely NO provision or plans to call off the attack if they were discovered, or Pearl Harbor was alerted. They actually EXPECTED to have to fight their way in, and were only HOPING to achieve complete surprise if they could.
And it's not like we wouldn't have went to war if they only damaged a couple of battleships and killed a few hundred Americans. And we would have gone to war if the Japanese only attacked the Philippines.
Short and Kimmel received clear war warnings; The idea that they had to be specifically told they were going to be attacked to be prepared is ludicrous.
And as a practical matter, if Pearl had been ready the effects of the attack would have been worse. The fleet would have been at sea and every battleship probably would have been sunk in deep water.
Your comments about the battleships being sunk at sea is interesting as some military historians said that their being sunk at Pearl Harbor was a blessing in disguise. It gave us a chance, behind the cover of the tragedy, to rebuild our fleet in secret, while the aircraft carriers carried the war to the Japanese fleets (an unthought of offensive tactic in the early 1940’s).
Also, we were able to get the fleet out into the Pacific undetected because the Japanese thought that the fleet was beyond repair and that any new construction would take years.
Historians noted that if the original fleet had been saved at Pearl, they would have had to go throw the Japanese submarine fleet, literally from Hawaii to the Philippines/Leyte Gulf, Midway, the Marianas, etc., taking heavy losses along the way to the point that they may not have remained an effective fighting force. There is a book on the Japanese fleet entitled “SUNK”.
As it was, the newer battleships never got into a one-on-one encounter with the main Japanese battleships and cruisers. It was the older, often WW1 battleships/cruisers who dealt the Japanese heavy ships a major defeat somewhere in/near the Philippines.
History is more complicated than one thinks which is why it is so fascinating to work on.
IIRC, the war warnings to hort and Kimmel arrived late..after the attack. But of much greater import, the Ultra messages..we’d cracked the Japanese Naval Code, which warned of the preparations for war, and the attack plans..were NOT disseminated to Short and Kimmel, nor other area commanders....i.e. the Phillipines, because of fear that the Japanese would realzie that we had broken their code...the Japanese believed that it was impossible fr us to crack a code that was based on the original underlying Japanese ideographs in the message..
this is bs. i agree. there were problems and egos in the intel community in dc vs the other sites. a major paradigm in intel is to look at intentions more than capabilities. given how much damage we did to the second wave just think if they would have heedded the sub sightings and been on full alert when the first wave hit.
Moosake!
In those days the ability to target an individual moving and maneuvering ship at full battle stations was far less that that required to hit a tight cluster of stationary, liberty staffed targets.
BTW, please remind us: what battles in the Pacific War were won by battleships?
Started my day off with a laugh there!