The Hawaii option

If they could have made it, they might have forced Marines and soldiers on Oahu to surrender.

That's the point; they couldn't. And in this scenario, even if we assume that the oil of SE Asia gives them the reach, their chance of surprise is long gone. Their outmoded army, if it even reaches shore (which I don't believe) in the teeth of American air and naval forces, would be assaulting a thoroughly alerted and prepared Hawaii.
 
My thought on this was that since they had so much good luck in the first 6 months of the war it would work the same way here.

I mean has anyone had a run of luck like the Japanese did from 7 Dec 41 through the 8th of May 1942?


Concentrating all their power on Malaysia and DEI, they should be able to crush Singapore at least as quickly and with more supplies available maybe even quicker. So all is taken by the end of March at the latest. That has given the US only 4 months to strengthen. Then take a month to get ready and strike at Hawaii. The IJN had more tankers by then; and with careful thought on it could do it if just barely. They would have had the transports and freighters they needed. Most likely they would not have as many losses in ships and such by that time either.

Did some checking on the Combined Fleet site and the IJN had some auxiliary oilers capable of 18 knots- that would have been fast enough to use to support the fleet. I counted 8 more that could have been used for the invasion. Capacity looked like about 120,000 tons of oil which would have been enough with their regular fleet tankers to get it done.

Even if they manage to get on the fumes they would be running on, then what? You've committed a HUGE chunk of your Pacific fleet to an invasion of what is a heavily fortified Island. Also remember that Japanese soldiers, while extremely well motivated were not as well equip as their American counterparts. Hawaii isn't going to fall easily, if it all, you have strong American divisions and a large fleet protecting it, that fight is going to be bitter and I don't think Japan is going to come out on top in the long run, even if they had the element of surprise (which is just ASB, a fleet that large and that slow is going to be detected).
 

sharlin

Banned
Could Japan invade Hawaii

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Seriously read the below link:

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

It explains fully why it was simply impossible without devine/ASB intervention.
 
The two pieces of this: (1) Japan doesn't attack the US in Dec 1941, but does attack the Brits, etc. That's a reasonable what-if. There are reasons why the Japanese didn't go that way, and they're good ones, as you'll see in a few paragraphs. (2) The Japanese invade Hawaii in mid-1942. It's not entirely impossible that they might TRY, or at least seriously consider it, given the victory disease that they might be experiencing after a series of easy victories in the Far East. Succeeding is another story, simply not possible for a long list of reasons.

Piece one: No attack on the US in Dec 1941. The US will not stand by idly while Japan grabs up 90+ percent of the world's natural rubber supply. Roosevelt may not be able to get a declaration of war, but he can do a good job of making life difficult for the Japanese without one. (a) Continue the buildup in the Philippines. There was a gigantic pipeline of stuff on the way or sitting in the docks waiting for shipping in Dec 1941. Get that stuff to the Philippines and even with MacArthur in charge, the Philippines becomes a very hard nut to crack. They also sit across the sealanes the Japanese would have to use to extract oil, rubber etc. from their new acquisitions. The US was already sending B17s and subs to the Philippines to threaten those sealanes. Given time to build infrastructure to defend that stuff, the US would undoubtedly start aggressively patrolling the sealanes around the Philippines, maybe even declaring a three or four hundred mile exclusion zone for Japanese warships or maybe even ships carrying loot from the new conquests. What are the Japanese going to do about it? Declare war? (b) The US will have 7 more usable battleships. What will they do with them? There are a variety of possibilities. Aggressive patrolling in the Pacific to keep the Japanese off-balance and cause them to lose face is a possibility. If Roosevelt is really sneaky, he can move three or four of them to the Atlantic to replace British battleships, which are then freed up for the Pacific.

On the Japanese invasion, there are a horde of good reasons why it wouldn't work, but I'll focus on just one. Okay, let's say that somehow the Japanese still pull off a Pearl Harbor-scale surprise six months later, with the US that much more on the alert and with the US having six more months to get radar reporting procedures in place. Somehow the Japanese overcome their issues with shipping enough to get carriers, part of a battle line and some divisions to the vicinity of Hawaii (not at all likely, but let's say they did). Let's say they even land their troops (even more unlikely--extremely so, but let's give them that for the sake of argument). Their carriers give them air superiority, striking US targets--until the carrier run out of avgas, bombs and even ammunition for strafing. How long does that take? No more than four or five days at the absolute most, and likely about three. After that, everything has to be replenished from Japan. Oh, and unless the Japanese have risked bringing their scarce oil tankers within range of US Hawaii-based air power, the Japanese carriers and especially their destroyers, have long since lost their ability to go back to Japan due to lack of fuel.

How long do the divisions they've landed have food and ammo? Probably not much longer than three or four days. At that point, we have a very unequal contest: can the Japanese build up faster in Hawaii than the US in spite of having essentially no spare shipping capacity even without the Hawaii adventure?

Bottom line: Not striking the US while going after the Allies was possible, but a bad idea. Going after Hawaii with an invasion in mid-1942 was simply not possible due to logistics constraints, though the Japanese would probably have thought about it because many of their top military people were clueless on logistics.
 
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