A more successful attack on Pearl Harbor?

[CountofDooku]

What if all three of the U.S. Pacific Fleet's aircraft carriers (Enterprise, Lexington and Saratoga) would have been in Pearl Harbour and at least two were sunk or damaged beyond repair on the attack. How dramatically would this change the course and maybe even outcome of the Pacific War?

 

[Anaxagoras]

The loss of the carriers at Pearl Harbor would have made the disaster at Pearl Harbor considerably worse than IOTL. Without those carriers, Japan does much better in 1942. I would hazard to guess that they would end up seizing Port Moresby and established a much stronger position in the Solomon Islands.

But it almost certainly would not change the ultimate outcome of the war. Say the American counter offensive is delayed until early 1943 rather than mid-1942 and they have to dig the Japanese out of more strongholds than was the case IOTL. Okay, but it only delays the inevitable. Japan will still be a firebombed (and nuked) wreck by New Year's Day 1946. The only appreciable change is that more people will have died.

Many butterflies are possible, of course. Does this mean that more men and material are diverted to the Pacific from Europe than IOTL. If so, how does this impact events in Europe? Might the Soviet Union end up occupying northern Japan, and how would that impact the postwar world?

 

[mack8]

As this subject has been discussed before, from the given POD the TL can be taken anyhwere reasonably possible. One of the "best" (so to say) scenarios for the japanese following this POD could be that as the americans would have a rougher 1942, and they'd probably starting their offensive in second half of 1943 and advancing slower, then perhaps when the atomic bombs are ready in 1945 the firebombings of the japanese civillian infrastructure have not started yet or did so only recently, so it means much fewer civillians casualties and less destruction. Alternatively, to further cause harm to american interests (if only unintentionally), perhaps they last one month longer thus allowing the soviet and chinese offensive to take Korea and Indochina (is that a realistic scenario?), this having significant postwar effects.

 

[nbcman]

See the Grim Economic Realities page on Combined Fleet:

http://www.combinedfleet.com/economic.htm

Short answer is even if those 3 CVs were lost, the US would still have more decks in late 1943. Plus the US could produce more CVLs and CVEs plus they could do some of the planned but not executed cruise ship conversions. IJ was doomed when they started the attacks at PH and other locations in December 1941.

 

[Asp]

The U.S. would build more and proceed as in OTL.

 

[Mike Stearns]

If you want a more successful Pearl Harbour, the Japanese need way better intel. They bombed a baseball diamond thinking that there were underground fuel tanks at that location, not realizing that that said fuel tanks were never built and bombed the Officer's Club thinking that it was the base admin building.

 

[Bobsalt]

Japan deciding to take on the United States in 1941 was about the closest thing to a Kobayashi Maru scenario you’ll ever see in real life. Japan was defeated from the moment she decided to go to war (see the link to Combined Fleet posted above). If you’re Japan, no matter how successful you are at Pearl Harbor, the war is still going to end the same way – at some point down the road you’ll be signing surrender documents on the deck of an American battleship anchored in Tokyo Bay. The only variable will be the timing.

 

[Theoretical_TJ]

The only way you get the US to be stalemated is if Japan successfully gets the Bomb and an appropriate delivery vehicle or if their or Germany's bioweapons research creates a vastly more successful and weaponized disease than OTL, especially something like rinderpest or foot and mouth disease. The biggest "deep risk" to the isolated Continent in WWII is something like this. Of course, this is how you ensure Japanese is only spoken in Hell.

Basically, you have to have some massive internal crisis that fractures the nation's political will or Japan gets a proper deterrent somehow and ahead of everyone else. Anything else, and post-PH, you get the same fate. If they only attacked the Philippines naval and air military facilities, with a declaration of war it'd be so much harder to build the kind of gritty resolve to "crush the Jap" there was IOTL. But, on the other hand, Japan is much easier to crush by strangulation via blockades.

 

[Look More Closely Later]

What if all three of the U.S. Pacific Fleet's aircraft carriers (Enterprise, Lexington and Saratoga) would have been in Pearl Harbour and at least two were sunk or damaged beyond repair on the attack. How dramatically would this change the course and maybe even outcome of the Pacific War?

Umm. Do the Japanese launch an extra wave to hit these USN carriers as well as all their original timeline targets, or do some of their original timeline targets get a pass because the carriers are getting hit instead?

Edit:
Not that I see any of this making much difference to the eventual outcome of the Pacific War, other than in maybe putting a few more lines in the terms and conditions when it comes around to post-war reparations that post-Imperial Japan has to cough up.