Oahu invasion plan

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GarethC

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One of the major failures of the Pearl Harbor raid was its failure to destroy the infrastructure and ability of the US to continued to operate from the facility and repair the sunk/damaged ships.

Short of a full-scale invasion of Oahu aimed at "permanently" occupying the island (which seems a logistical impossibility in the long run) would it have made any sense for the Japanese to consider landing sufficient forces on Oahu temprarily to complete the destruction of the harbor facilities, oil depots, "sunken" but refloatable battleships, sow mines and block the channel in a way that would render Pearl Harbor completely unusable for a long time? Even if this was a one-way mission with surrender or fighting to the death the intended end, would this be worth it? Or possible?
I think the answer is no, it's neither possible nor worth it.

Japan is critically short of uncommitted troops and sealift for a Dieppe-style raid in Dec 41, as it is already trying to take the Philippines, Wake, Malaya/Singapore, and Hong Kong while holding Indochina and not disengaging in China. Many of the troops intended for those operations are already double-booked, as they are intended to be withdrawn from their initial targets to take part in the successor attack on the Dutch East Indies. The DEI is the single most important goal of the initial war plan - without the oil from there, Japan will lose the war by running out of fuel for its ships and planes within the year. Jeopardizing the DEI campaign by risking a division and the transports to carry it to Pearl seems like a poor trade, and a worse one if those troops don't come back.

And that ignores the strong likelihood that Pearl's defenders would slaughter such a force. There's a big difference between getting an airstrike to hit PH and sailing fat slow targets like troop transports right up to the door, past all those destroyers and cruisers which weren't targetted in the air strikes.
 

sharlin

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Whilst the ammount of detail supplied is staggering he's also missing the vital fact that the Japanese were lacking in several areas that make an opposed landing viable. They had NO ship to shore radios allowing for troops to call in fire support, their troops would have been outgunned by the US defenders, a Japanese soldier, although brave and willing to endure incredible hardship is still basically as well equipped as a WW1 soldier, their machine guns were RUBBISH and their artillery inadequate.

The IJNs carriers would need to maintain constant aircover over the islands to even ensure a chance of success and this would resut in a lot of wear and tear on the aircraft as well as them gobbling aviation fuel and ordinance like a fat kid in a cake shop. If the Yamato went along she's a fuel hog as are the IJN's destroyers, their range may say X miles but thats in a straight line at a set speed. Something that warships don't do in hostile waters, they would be zig zagging, speeding up, slowing down, being called to positions all over the place and ripping through their fuel.

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

is a very good counter for this well thought out and detailed invasion. In theory the Japs could pull it off. In theory, if they were willing to utterly forget their war aims and try and grab a massively populated island and devour most of their fuel supplies to do so as well as use up a huge portion of their surface ships, military and civilian, a massive ammount of precious fuel that they are now not going to be able to initially get as they have just sent damn near everything that floats and carries a rifle into the pacific instead of west into the European colonies to capture what they needed which was oil.
 

CalBear

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Please tell me you didn't join just to take credit for this POS.

Locked.

It was a boring day at work last week, so I was snooping around the internet and boom, I stumble across this thread on this site. I haven’t been here before. This apparently banned ‘Fairfax’ chap has ripped off my old ‘Tinkerbell’ thread from Axis History Forum back from May of 2007, passing it off on this site as his own,

http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=120787



IMO, Yamamoto’s Pearl Harbor attack fell between two stools. It was not forceful enough to achieve a strategically decisive result, but at the same time it took the greatest material and political risks imaginable. To stake Japan’s premier striking force for a passing blow was the worst possible calculation of risk/reward; either make an attack all-out, or do not attack at all.

The original idea was to make a model on how alternative history proposals should be presented, not necessarily to convince anyone of anything. It was to apply Mahan’s principles of decisive battle to Japan’s situation as of December 1941. The purpose to ‘Tinkerbell’ was to create conditions for a decisive battle by threatening Oahu, using this to leverage the USN into battle under unfavourable conditions. Sink the carriers and the whole of the Pacific falls into Japan’s lap. If Oahu fell too, then that was just an added bonus.
 
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