from #222:
"The entire battle line was in Pearl on 12/7/41 because the carriers weren't around." Then you missed my point -- or more likely I didn't quote enough to give a good sense of what was going on.
Kimmel claimed afterward that he had not been told of the coming attack. However he certainly suspected enough TWO WEEKS AHEAD OF TIME, to send the Pacific fleet to the precise area where the Japanese would launch their aircraft:
page 146: "On Sunday, November 23, the Pacific Fleet was at sea north of Hawaii looking for a Japanese carrier force. Officially the sortie into the north Pacific waters was named Exercise 191."The object of the exercise called for Force Black (Japan) to conduct an air raid on Force White (USA). Exercise 191 would prove eerily similar to Admiral Isoroku yamamoto's Operation Order No. 1 which set forth japan's naval plans for the Hawaii raid.
"Both Exercise 191 and OPORD 1 called for a Japanese carrier force to advance on Hawaii from the North Pacific in an operational area between 158 degrees and 157 degrees west longitude -- the approach to Oahu and Pearl Harbor.
In a bizarre series of coincidences, Yamamoto and Kimmel selected the identical launch area -- the Prokofiev Seamount, and extinct underwater volcano about 200 miles north of Oahu. Their timing and planning borders on mutual clairvoyance...
Stinnett goes into many curious details about Kimmel's exercise, but the important point is that it was soon canceled by orders from Washington which, as you suggest, ordered the carriers away from Pearl Harbor. Therefore the other ships returned to Pearl.
Very important point: it wasn't JUST the carriers ordered away from Pearl. It was EVERY ONE of the more modern warships stationed there -- more than 20, all told.
In other words, what the Navy sacrificed at Pearl Harbor was it's oldest most obsolete vessels. The good stuff was all sent away to safety.
However he certainly suspected enough TWO WEEKS AHEAD OF TIME, to send the Pacific fleet to the precise area where the Japanese would launch their aircraft:
That area North of the islands was a Navy favorite for holding wargames. Reason: it was off the commercial shipping lanes (especially during Winter, when it was considered borderline suicidal to run ships through the North Pacific), and therefore there was less risk of a liner or cargo ship blundering into the middle of a maneuvering fleet. Which is also the reason why it was chosen as the launching point for the Japanese.
The USN had also been running exercises involving carrier strikes on Pearl all the way back to shortly after Lexington and Saratoga joined the fleet. Analyses of these had been widely published in public-source material, including USNI Proceedings - which was mandatory reading for Japanese officers - and which pretty much provided the blueprints for the attack. The issue wasn't that the US didn't know of that location as a "good spot" for launching an attack, they just didn't think that anyone would haul a carrier strike force into that position in December across the Northern route.
Very important point: it wasn't JUST the carriers ordered away from Pearl. It was EVERY ONE of the more modern warships stationed there -- more than 20, all told.
This is a combination of factually inaccurate and misleading manipulation of statistics.
First, there were plenty of "modern" warships present in Pearl on 12/7/41, as can be seen
here and which included the Heavy Cruiser San Francisco, the Light Cruisers Phoenix, Honolulu, St. Louis (which almost ate a torpedo from a Japanese minisub) and Helena ... and a bevy of the newer destroyers.
Second, any overall analysis of the age of the ships would be skewed by the fact that ALL the Pacific Fleet's (with the exception of Colorado which was on the West Coast) WWI-era battleships were in the harbor, as were older cruisers (the two Omaha-class lights) and destroyers (WWI-era four-pipers) that were dedicated to defense of the islands and protection of the shipping lanes back to the US.
Although still a "Battleship Navy", the USN had two high-value assets loose in the Pacific at the time of Pearl: Lexington and Enterprise. Carriers don't run alone, and it would make logical sense that they'd be escorted by newer ships because, at the very least, the older ships (Omahas and four-pipers) would have had a hard time keeping up from either a speed or an endurance perspective.
As it was, Enterprise was due back into Pearl on Saturday December 6th, but got held up due to weather of the kind I've mentioned in this and my previous posts. Some of her planes actually flew, unarmed, INTO the attack as it was occurring. And had she actually made it back into the harbor on the 6th, she would have been parked in the same area as USS Utah was. Utah, you may recall, was an old de-armed battleship that was planked over with wood and used as a mobile target. The Japanese, seeing her wood decks, mistook her for a carrier and went after her with a vengeance. She ended up being a bomb/torpedo magnet that probably saved other ships (much as the Nevada did with her run to Hospital Point). Enterprise, had she been on schedule, would certainly have been destroyed.
I haven't read this book, but with every passage I see posted from it I become increasingly convinced that the author started out with his conclusion and then cherry-picked the facts that would support it.