You are incorrect. Hawaii had no B-17's the first flight was on their way to Pearl during the attack and got caught.
Kimmel's predecessor was retired early because he insisted that the main body of the fleet be kept on the west coast of California where there were better defenses and dockyards to maintain the Pacific Fleet, and where it had traditionally been.
Kimmel had the fleet on standby pretty much constantly but did not have the fuel or the spare parts for extended patrols. In fact he pretty much used up his flying patrol boats doing that.
As something for you to consider, Kimmel had the fleet out and in position to the north and east of Hawaii (that's where the Japanese fleet came in) just before December 7th, but was ordered by Stark (Roosevelt's CNO) to put back in to Pearl Harbor.
Naval Intelligence (located at Pearl) had all kinds of intercepts including inter-ship traffic from the Japanese fleet that they never shared with Kimmel.
Dig a little more into this and you might be surprised at what you learn.
Regards,
Interesting point. I haven't read anything yet, including Edwin Layton's memoir(....And I Was There), finished posthumously by Roger Pineau (Layton was Kimmel's intelligence officer, the one to whom he directed that famous question, "You mean to tell me, they could be rounding Diamond Head....?"), that addresses the patterns of ship movement around Pearl immediately before the raid.
I recall reading that the USS Lexington was seen leaving Pearl on Thursday before the raid by the Japanese spy Yoshikawa, and Enterprise was out, too, delivering fighters to the Marine base on Wake. So where, indeed, were the carriers? Why did the carriers all "happen" to be out when Admiral Nagumo showed up? And, more to the point, who ordered them out?
This is a very important statement which I've never heard before. Could you source it, please? I'd like to read more. Admiral Stark was "in the loop" which he labored to keep Admiral Kimmel out of.
I also noticed in John Toland's Infamy, on p. 317, that the PBY squadrons flying out of Alaska were stood down on orders from DC precisely one day before the attack; the exhausted crews, glad of a break, threw a big drinking party.
Naval Intelligence (located at Pearl) had all kinds of intercepts including inter-ship traffic from the Japanese fleet that they never shared with Kimmel.
The TBS (Talk Between Ships) traffic was LF- or VLF-band traffic that was copied in the East Indies by Dutch intelligence and by COMTEN's direction-finder facility in San Francisco. An Alaskan army command was also copying the traffic, and it was picked up by the radio crew of the S.S. Lurline, which docked in Honolulu on the 4th and whose radiomen immediately showed their logs to COMFOURTEEN's intelligence officer (who died during the war). The Naval Districts reported directly to ONI in Washington, not CINCPAC, and "Betty" Stark and his bullyboy Plans director, VADM Richmond "Kelly" Turner (who spent the war directing amphibious ops and getting drunk) stuck a cork in the information and never let any of it get back to Kimmel or Layton.
This went beyond General Marshall's or anyone else's professed or inferred "fear" of compromising MAGIC. The raw intercept information from the HF-DF net would not have been as highly classified as decrypts, and the whole premise of traffic analysis is that one can easily infer confidential information from unclassified traffic patterns, secret conclusions from enough confidential information, and top-secret conclusions from secret information. I once, 30 years ago, saw a message classified TS restricted very tightly to a TS/SI reading list on this very principle, because the message was long enough and broadly enough scoped that one could make inferences that were classified at the level of compartmented information. The information from the HF-DF network would probably have been classified secret or (plain-vanilla) top secret back then, but if it had all been provided Layton, he could have made the necessary inference about the location of Kido Butai. The fact that he and Kimmel were denied this information despite its lower level of classification is extremely damaging to President Roosevelt, inasmuch as the actions of Stark, Turner, Marshall, and Marshall's principal staff officers, as well as the service secretaries, had to reflect Roosevelt's wishes and his strategy for receiving the attack he absolutely knew was coming.
Dig a little more into this and you might be surprised at what you learn.
I'm always collecting new Pearl Harbor titles. Wilford's Pearl Harbor Redefined: USN Radio Intelligence in 1941 and Stinnet's Day of Deceit are currently on my wish list.