AFAIK, even Cassin & Downes, in dock, were fit to sail in an emergency. If the choice was "finish the work" or "lose the ship"...CalBear said:the DD would all be able to get out, assuming that their boilers weren't in pieces being repaired.
Also, the handful of subs could conceivably sortie against Nagumo. And there were 3-4 boats at sea in the vicinity. (Yes, I know, the Mk 14 sucked.
A good three hours...CalBear said:The Irony is, of course, that the base HAD this amount of warning time if it had begun to react to USS Condor's sub sighting.
Agree on all points.Just to quickly address a couple common misconceptions that have come up here.
The U.S. was not under a set of ROE that flatly required that they wait until the enemy fire the first shot. This is best illustrated by the Ward's prosecuting the 03:45 sub sighting to a kill. There were also the well known engagements between KM subs and U.S. destroyers in the Atlantic.
While there were many sailors on liberty, most were aboard ship (cheaper to sleep on the ship than in a hotel, unless you got lucky). This is most easily shown by the fact that USS Arizona, with a overall complement of ~1,800 had 1,500 men aboard when the attack started (1,177 of them being killed), including the ship's Captain and Rear Admiral Kidd, Commander Battleship Division.
There were plenty of men aboard to fight the ships. They might have been hung over as all hell, but they were there.
I'd add, you don't even need all the crew back: just the gunners & the support people. (And in a pinch, you can shanghai cooks or stewards or black gang.) You do need at least one boiler lit to provide power to magazine lifts & turret drives & such, but as I understand it, the heavies & cruisers did that anyhow just for housekeeping; probably stoking one boiler high enough for it could be done, while you light a couple more. In the cans, I think they used diesel generators; I also think the boilers would start faster from cold.