Hornet was only there for her shakedown cruise. After that, she's headed to take on B-25s. ITTL she'll have Yorktown as her escort rather than the sunken Enterprise.
Not TOO livid, as he had not yet been skunked by the Admiralty over the usage of any of the RN carriers in the Western Indian Ocean. The Wasp could be used as a special favor for the British to help save Malta (making the Admiralty's refusal over their carriers all the more enraging from King's POV). As to the new BB's, they weren't up to quite keeping up with the Yorktowns and at this point in the war lacked a decent destroyer screen, with so many Atlantic Fleet DDs fighting the U-Boats.
They couldn't know this was going to happen. Having the Tirpitz as a threat in being worked to the better.
No. You're talking about a redeployment of what? 13,000 miles? And that's assuming after they'd seen action against the Tirpitz. By the time they got to the Coral Sea, they'd be needing a refit!

Smilies are your friend. BUT, I'm going to pretend you're serious.
The "Europe First" Admiral Stark was lucky he wasn't cashiered himself post-PH rather than being kicked downstairs to commanding the Tenth Fleet. As a Japan First admiral, politically King's sacking would have sent a signal of defeatism to the Japanese, telling them that they could expect to have free reign in the Pacific. And canning King so quickly after the "semi-canning" would be hard to justify. Its not like anyone foresaw that America's entry into WWII would happen because Japan suddenly threw any sense pf grand strategy out the window. And there were many good reasons beyond King's inability to recognize the threat (like his not understanding that the U-Boats could reach the US East AND Gulf Coasts) for the early failure to deal with the U-Boat menace. Among them was a lack of dedicated land-based ASW aircraft and the failure to immediately enforce a strict lights out policy on the US East Coast shoreline (though that was very tough to do since the Bos-Wash region is the brightest single area on Earth).
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