Because he devoted a chapter of his book to busting myths like this. Zimm points out that, even if the Japanese could do serious damage to the tank farm, which he doubts, a tanker shuttle from the West Coast could make up for the shortfall. These would be slow tankers, so it shouldn’t come at the expense of the precious fleet oilers.
Third Wave at Pearl Harbor: American Pacific Fleet relocates to California?
- Thread starter Polish Eagle
- Start date
Bunker C is the viscosity of cold molasses, just a bit above tar or asphalt. You actually have to heat it up to pump it or even get it to ignite. A friend of mine was in the Navy and told me as part of his safety briefing they would put a match out in a bucket of bunker c, He said they had to use either a road flare or propane torch to actually heat the stuff up and ignite it.
Ordinary tankers can be rigged to refuel ships in harbor. Not rocket science, or even cutting edge technology.
Like everything logisticians prognosticate... in PEACETIME, the fuel usage rate for fast carrier task forces was 1/3 what was predicted. Nobody thought that running flat out at 20 m/s 24/7 was the "normal" for the flattops and their escorts. They thought 10 m/s with spurts of 15-20 m/s would be normal aircraft carrier operations. Operational wartime tempo burned fuel at least 2x the wildest peacetime usage estimates. The oil farm was not big enough. AND It turned out that each carrier needed 1 tanker all for herself and even the escorts needed dedicated tankers for themselves. The USN was boloed for Plan Orange even if the 7 December raid had not occurred. Tactical factors; battleships could not keep pace at the new battle speeds, not enough tankers, not enough aircraft, not enough flattops, not enough ammunition and not enough critical skills people in needed specialties. CANOPUS' loss, with her specialists, at Corregidor, was a massive blow to the submarine force that lasted the entire war. Little things like that...
Assuming that Nimitz is foolish to play fleet in being and be bombed out of Pearl Harbor, lose his carriers and the war, yes the oil can be stretched. The whole point of raiding the mandates, was to train up the American navy in wartime tempo operations, get "some experience" and keep the IJN stretched out, guessing and not certain where or what PACFlt was about. To do that, oil had to be burned at a phenomenal rate. US ready stocks burned down to an alarming degree, but the risk was justified by the results of Coral Sea and Midway. The real crunch comes at WATCHTOWER when the various US admirals have to watch their fuel states, hobbling their mobility, due to tanker shortages and low refined stockpiles in theater.
Fletcher, for example, cannot risk refueling in range of the same Rikkos that sank Neosho, so he pulls out of Japanese land based airpower range during the debacle at Savo Island. The Marines blame him for it, but when one knows the prudent reasons, one knows that Fletcher saved their butts later by saving himself then. Shrewd admiral. Lucky we had him.
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Text book case of "wrong place, wrong time" and "buck fever"IJN had a bit of 'Buck Fever' with the attention put on USS Utah.
Utah's big guns had been removed since 1936.
It didn't look like a Carrier.
It didn't even look much like a Battleship, either, just some tubs ontop the wooden boxes where the turrets had been, since it was a AAA trainer
Six Kate pilots from Soryu wasted six Torpedoes on her. Two hit.
She was mooredi n the slot usually occupied by either Enterprise or Lexington, that made the berth a prime target. The flight leader recognized what she was and aborted his attack, the rest of the flight said "Target in right place" and dropped on her. The actually amazing part is that six pilots dropped on a stopped, undefended (at that time) target and only achieved two hits.
Not so amazing. The PID controllers installed on Japanese Type 91 air dropped torpedoes at Pearl Harbor were manufactured poorly and in some batches were defective. Brand new tech, so it should have been expected. The Japanese thought 33% PH was acceptable.
Minoru, Akimoto; "Nihon Gunyoki Kokusen Zenshi, volume 4", Green Arrow sha, June, 1995, pp.383 and 387
Minoru, Akimoto; "Nihon Gunyoki Kokusen Zenshi, volume 4", Green Arrow sha, June, 1995, pp.383 and 387
Correct me if I'm wrong, you do not need fleet oilers to shuttle fuel to Hawaii. Regular commercial oilers can get the oil there. Also, Rebuilding a damaged fuel tank is not that difficult.
Correct, but a 5-5 m/s tanker slows down a fleet and most commercial tankers do not have a hose boom transfer side by side system for ships under weigh. A Yorktown carrier and two cruisers and six destroyers escorts could burn through 2 tonnes of fuel per hour at 5 m/s and close to 8 tonnes on just the carrier alone at battle speed (15 m/s) (10 cruise to 25 knots).
The fast tankers had to pace at least at 10 m/s.
Pretty much. The whole idea of taking out such targets in a third wave misses an extremely important point: If Yamamoto had thought the repair yards and fuel depot were vital enough targets he should have designated them to be struck as part of the first wave. That would have given him the follow on strike of the second wave to strike them again if it were deemed the proper effect had not been achieved. Although even this, as has been noted, probably would not have been enough.
Of course, as it turned out the entire idea of hitting Pearl Harbour was rather predictably counter-productive to Japan's desire for a short-war...
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Loss of a significant chunk of the tank farm would mean that non-critical patrolling functions would have to be cut way back. For example the carriers spent the first weeks of the war at sea on continuous defensive patrols. ASW patrols might have to be curtailed. That sort of thing. But what couldn't be permitted would be for the carriers to not have the juice needed to sortie in defence of Hawaii or Midway.
Not sure how Nimitz gets bombed out of Pearl Harbor when the IJN never returned to Pearl Harbor. If not conducting raids against outposts Nimitz would presumably have to content himself with the training of his carrier wings at Hawaii in anti-carrier operations.
The situation would be rectified by the time of Midway.
Fletcher didn't know Rabaul's G4M's had been chopped to pieces in the battle of August 8th?
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According to Parshall's Three Whoppers the targeting priority was: land-based airpower; aircraft carriers; battleships, cruisers, and other warships; merchant shipping; port facilities; and land installations. Oil tanks are listed 7th, meaning that Yamamoto did not think them as important as 1st priority targets such as battleships and carriers. But, by putting them on the list he did give 1st Air Fleet broad latitude to go after such targets in a follow-up attack.
DougM
Donor
The reason in part, for the “if only Japan had launched a third wave and destroyed the tank farm” is actually pretty simple. It is part of a current fad that basically tries to downplay the US in WW2. There is a lot of folks around who try to downplay the US and make it look like the result of WW2 was more shear dumb luck then anything that the US did. It is not that the US won, the other side simply lost.
So you get a huge number of articles and such in the news, media and even the more historical types that are all slanted in that direction.
So they don’t want to say that Peril Harbor went about as good as it could be expected for Japan in that they did not get detected, they did not have much in the way of mechanical issues, they planed and practiced it in secret, they pulled off the surprise. The US lined up it’s aircraft for them. They did a LOT of damage, they got out with minimal losses and they got away without being counter attacked.
In anyone’s book that was about as good as could be honestly expected. But it was not perfect. Nothing ever is. And hindsight being 20 20 we can speculate what could have gone better. In fact I think there may be a web site that is dedicated to speculating about alternative possibilities (
) So a LOT (most) of things went in Japan’s favor. So much so that on Dec 1 if you had offered that outcome to the Japanese admiralty they would undoubtedly jumped at it.
But a lot of folks for some reason now want to make the US look bad or at least downplay the USs part in the war so they like to play up how it could have been worse for the US and how the US got lucky. Thus we get very very few articles about how it could very easily been MUCH worse for Japan but we get a constant string of articles about how A third wave could have wiped out the tank farm or how the US was luck and the main goal of Japan, the Aircraft carriers were out to see. That kind of thing.
But the reality is that Japan was lucky, a third wave was hideously dangerous to both the aircraft and potentially to the fleat, and Aurcaft Carriers were at the time considered to much much less important the what was hit. Heck the US Navy considered them so unimportant that they were using them as delivery trucks.
But you seldom hear that being said. It is a constant string of “The US was luck”. So much so that most folk by now believe that point of view. Case in point look at how many folks (yes a minority but a surpriseingly large one) believe that FDR planed the whole thing and this is why the carriers were out to sea. Or believe that it was an accident that it was a surprise attack. Or frankly look at how often we get posts here about how the attack could have (or should have) gone much worse for the US and how few we get about how the attack could have gone horribly wrong for Japan.
What you have to keep in mind is that a lot of so called historical articles written in the last 30+ years have an agenda. And as such they are often written to emphasize what supports that agenda and to de emphasize what does not support that agenda. This was true in most of my history classes I took in HS and at University in the Mid to late 80s and it was even more the case for my nephews and nieces in the lat 90s and the first decade of this century. Add in that the US does not produce as much about military history as other countries do (England being an obvious example) and you also have to account for that bias. I have read a lot of articles and books out of England that would make the reader believe that it was England bailing the US out. (Not most, but more then a few, and the TV productions such as seen on the History channel or whatever they are calling the military channel have a tendency to be very, shall we say, “pro England “)
So just because you are reading a history article or book does not mean that it is 100% fact based and without bias or an agenda. And thus you have to start reading a lot of different sources and put the facts together for yourself by weeding out the various biases..
It is a sad truth of the world today (and especially the US) that almost everything and everyone has an agenda. And published historians are unfortunate usually no different. Heck a year or two back I was doing some reasearch in a US National Park and talked to the two Rangers that where the supposed historical experts for the park. And I got two radically different views on a number of things that did not agree with each other. Turns out this was a bias thing. Who would ever expect when talking to a Park Ranger that they would have an agenda and a bias in what they where telling you? I mean come on these are “Smoky the Bears” here. What agenda could they have other then to “prevent forest fires “? But later following up on the research I discovered that the one ranger belonged to a faction of rangers that believe that all national parks should be nature preserves and that any evidence of mankind should be removed from the park to return the park to nature and not let visitors into the park. So much so that in this perticular Park a major park road was closed for over a week while they did a study when a dead tree about 6 to 10 inches in diameter fell across the road and the head ranger would not let the maintenance dept cut the tree up and move it. Something that should have taken less then an hour. (I kid you not) After stumbling across this it suddenly made sense what the one ranger told me. And his views. He was trying to play down the historical significance of the park and the remains that existed in the Park. I guess that it should not have surprised me as the former head of that park used dynamite to blow a perfectly stable building down in the park on the flimsiest of excuses.
So after that experience I don’t fully trust anything anyone tells me or anything I read. I look at it and try and pull out the facts from the opinions. As they say figures don’t lie, but liars figure.
People often have an agenda conscious or not and you get that. I had a coworker that bought an import the same week I bought a US built car. Both 4 door both black. He insisted until the day he died that his import was better. Ignoring that it was in for repairs for over 4 weeks total in the three years we owned/leased these cars and that one day I had to help him close his rear door because it was literally falling off its hinges. Meanwhile other then oil changes I never did anything to my car. Oddly enough that was his last car from that company. But whenever he talked about that car he seamed to forget about the door.... So it is natural that bias creeps in and it takes a lot of effort to try and avoid bias
So that is why you get a lot of different views on things. Oddly enough I see less agenda and bias here then on actual historical sites. I wonder if that is because of the “game” of “what if” that we play on this site. We can’t be biased as this week we speculate about a better victory for Japan at Peril and next we we will speculate about how to get a faster victory for the US. So we have to spend more time looking at both sides of every argument....
So you get a huge number of articles and such in the news, media and even the more historical types that are all slanted in that direction.
So they don’t want to say that Peril Harbor went about as good as it could be expected for Japan in that they did not get detected, they did not have much in the way of mechanical issues, they planed and practiced it in secret, they pulled off the surprise. The US lined up it’s aircraft for them. They did a LOT of damage, they got out with minimal losses and they got away without being counter attacked.
In anyone’s book that was about as good as could be honestly expected. But it was not perfect. Nothing ever is. And hindsight being 20 20 we can speculate what could have gone better. In fact I think there may be a web site that is dedicated to speculating about alternative possibilities (
) So a LOT (most) of things went in Japan’s favor. So much so that on Dec 1 if you had offered that outcome to the Japanese admiralty they would undoubtedly jumped at it.But a lot of folks for some reason now want to make the US look bad or at least downplay the USs part in the war so they like to play up how it could have been worse for the US and how the US got lucky. Thus we get very very few articles about how it could very easily been MUCH worse for Japan but we get a constant string of articles about how A third wave could have wiped out the tank farm or how the US was luck and the main goal of Japan, the Aircraft carriers were out to see. That kind of thing.
But the reality is that Japan was lucky, a third wave was hideously dangerous to both the aircraft and potentially to the fleat, and Aurcaft Carriers were at the time considered to much much less important the what was hit. Heck the US Navy considered them so unimportant that they were using them as delivery trucks.
But you seldom hear that being said. It is a constant string of “The US was luck”. So much so that most folk by now believe that point of view. Case in point look at how many folks (yes a minority but a surpriseingly large one) believe that FDR planed the whole thing and this is why the carriers were out to sea. Or believe that it was an accident that it was a surprise attack. Or frankly look at how often we get posts here about how the attack could have (or should have) gone much worse for the US and how few we get about how the attack could have gone horribly wrong for Japan.
What you have to keep in mind is that a lot of so called historical articles written in the last 30+ years have an agenda. And as such they are often written to emphasize what supports that agenda and to de emphasize what does not support that agenda. This was true in most of my history classes I took in HS and at University in the Mid to late 80s and it was even more the case for my nephews and nieces in the lat 90s and the first decade of this century. Add in that the US does not produce as much about military history as other countries do (England being an obvious example) and you also have to account for that bias. I have read a lot of articles and books out of England that would make the reader believe that it was England bailing the US out. (Not most, but more then a few, and the TV productions such as seen on the History channel or whatever they are calling the military channel have a tendency to be very, shall we say, “pro England “)
So just because you are reading a history article or book does not mean that it is 100% fact based and without bias or an agenda. And thus you have to start reading a lot of different sources and put the facts together for yourself by weeding out the various biases..
It is a sad truth of the world today (and especially the US) that almost everything and everyone has an agenda. And published historians are unfortunate usually no different. Heck a year or two back I was doing some reasearch in a US National Park and talked to the two Rangers that where the supposed historical experts for the park. And I got two radically different views on a number of things that did not agree with each other. Turns out this was a bias thing. Who would ever expect when talking to a Park Ranger that they would have an agenda and a bias in what they where telling you? I mean come on these are “Smoky the Bears” here. What agenda could they have other then to “prevent forest fires “? But later following up on the research I discovered that the one ranger belonged to a faction of rangers that believe that all national parks should be nature preserves and that any evidence of mankind should be removed from the park to return the park to nature and not let visitors into the park. So much so that in this perticular Park a major park road was closed for over a week while they did a study when a dead tree about 6 to 10 inches in diameter fell across the road and the head ranger would not let the maintenance dept cut the tree up and move it. Something that should have taken less then an hour. (I kid you not) After stumbling across this it suddenly made sense what the one ranger told me. And his views. He was trying to play down the historical significance of the park and the remains that existed in the Park. I guess that it should not have surprised me as the former head of that park used dynamite to blow a perfectly stable building down in the park on the flimsiest of excuses.
So after that experience I don’t fully trust anything anyone tells me or anything I read. I look at it and try and pull out the facts from the opinions. As they say figures don’t lie, but liars figure.
People often have an agenda conscious or not and you get that. I had a coworker that bought an import the same week I bought a US built car. Both 4 door both black. He insisted until the day he died that his import was better. Ignoring that it was in for repairs for over 4 weeks total in the three years we owned/leased these cars and that one day I had to help him close his rear door because it was literally falling off its hinges. Meanwhile other then oil changes I never did anything to my car. Oddly enough that was his last car from that company. But whenever he talked about that car he seamed to forget about the door...
. So it is natural that bias creeps in and it takes a lot of effort to try and avoid biasSo that is why you get a lot of different views on things. Oddly enough I see less agenda and bias here then on actual historical sites. I wonder if that is because of the “game” of “what if” that we play on this site. We can’t be biased as this week we speculate about a better victory for Japan at Peril and next we we will speculate about how to get a faster victory for the US. So we have to spend more time looking at both sides of every argument....
Misread of Parshall (^^^) the bulk of the first strike was counter-air to blast attack lanes open for the antiship element to have clear runs on the ship targets. The counter-air caught the US defenders on the ground so it was strafing instead of fur-balling. Mistakes like this are easy to make if the reader is not careful.
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And the G4Ms (31 of them) were able to sink the USS Jarvis with no trouble on 10 August after Savo Island and were able to POUND Lunga Point on 11 August during the transport bugouts, so I would hardly consider them or the rest of the air garrisons at Lae and Rabaul "cut to pieces" at all.
The rest? TL/DR. Only commented on the biggest mistakes.
But:
Tank farm would take mere days to repair, The berms serve TWO FUNCTIONS; bomb blast deflectors and catch basins. The oil would not be lost. It would have to filtered, but easily recovered. So much for that.
What was the overflight by the Emilys in late May and the BOMBING RAID if not a return visit? So much for that, too.
Finally, say what? Tankers were being torpedoed in the Atlantic, Tankers were being shifted from the Pacific to the Carribean; furthermore there were 21 tankers scattered all over the Pacific not all of them fast underway fleet replenishment types. I think 15 of those might have been fast oilers.
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Agreed. to blast a facility like Pearl Harbor into ruin, required sustained activity, at least four raids like the one of 7 December 1941.
Let me give a couple examples:
Karachi 1971
I regard this attack as unbelievably successful, however the Indians had a bit of luck in that the oil tanks were filled with highly flammable "light oil" the tanks were poorly sited and extremely vulnerable and the Styx missile warheads, which were large and extremely powerful, were peculiarly suited with explosive fill to set such tanks on fire.
Rabaul 1943
More akin to the infrastructure of Pearl Harbor (seriously; the 8th Fleet had a pair of air bases and a fleet anchorage every bit as formidable as Chu'uk (Truk) in that drowned volcano.), once the USAAF 5th Air Force was able to mount air strikes, it turned into a BRUTAL four month air campaign that represented in miniature the kind of operations the 8th Air Force was bungling over Germany and France at the same time. Prior to that four month campaign; SWPOA and SoPac (Cactus) had spent a good nine months beating on Rabaul trying to diminish it without success. Those who have read me describe the Alternate History Battle of the Coral Sea in Those Marvelous Tin Fish, will recognize Colonel Ralph Carmichael from that battle. Rabaul was never satisfactorily reduced from the air. It wound up surrounded besieged and more or less isolated as MacArthur bypassed it during CARTWHEEL.
It should not be surprising that punching holes in ships is easier than demolishing a fuel tank farm or knocking out a drydock through aerial bombing. The infrastructure is tougher than it looks, especially when you see it close up.
Just like bomb dumps. Bermed.
Rabaul is an example I have used on a number of these threads. A large wide area facility that was visited by Allied aircraft numerous times over the course of a couple years and it was never close to being shutdown. Pearl Harbor and the surrounding facilities were a much larger target and were not going to get shutdown by a couple of carrier raids.
Even if they managed to set off a few bombs, it's not going to do a lot of long term wide area damage for the same reason another air strike wouldn't. You need constant re-visits to keep the facility down.
The reason in part, for the “if only Japan had launched a third wave and destroyed the tank farm” is actually pretty simple. It is part of a current fad that basically tries to downplay the US in WW2. There is a lot of folks around who try to downplay the US and make it look like the result of WW2 was more shear dumb luck then anything that the US did. It is not that the US won, the other side simply lost.
So you get a huge number of articles and such in the news, media and even the more historical types that are all slanted in that direction.
So they don’t want to say that Peril Harbor went about as good as it could be expected for Japan in that they did not get detected, they did not have much in the way of mechanical issues, they planed and practiced it in secret, they pulled off the surprise. The US lined up it’s aircraft for them. They did a LOT of damage, they got out with minimal losses and they got away without being counter attacked.
In anyone’s book that was about as good as could be honestly expected. But it was not perfect. Nothing ever is. And hindsight being 20 20 we can speculate what could have gone better. In fact I think there may be a web site that is dedicated to speculating about alternative possibilities (
But a lot of folks for some reason now want to make the US look bad or at least downplay the USs part in the war so they like to play up how it could have been worse for the US and how the US got lucky. Thus we get very very few articles about how it could very easily been MUCH worse for Japan but we get a constant string of articles about how A third wave could have wiped out the tank farm or how the US was luck and the main goal of Japan, the Aircraft carriers were out to see. That kind of thing.
But the reality is that Japan was lucky, a third wave was hideously dangerous to both the aircraft and potentially to the fleat, and Aurcaft Carriers were at the time considered to much much less important the what was hit. Heck the US Navy considered them so unimportant that they were using them as delivery trucks.
But you seldom hear that being said. It is a constant string of “The US was luck”. So much so that most folk by now believe that point of view. Case in point look at how many folks (yes a minority but a surpriseingly large one) believe that FDR planed the whole thing and this is why the carriers were out to sea. Or believe that it was an accident that it was a surprise attack. Or frankly look at how often we get posts here about how the attack could have (or should have) gone much worse for the US and how few we get about how the attack could have gone horribly wrong for Japan.
What you have to keep in mind is that a lot of so called historical articles written in the last 30+ years have an agenda. And as such they are often written to emphasize what supports that agenda and to de emphasize what does not support that agenda. This was true in most of my history classes I took in HS and at University in the Mid to late 80s and it was even more the case for my nephews and nieces in the lat 90s and the first decade of this century. Add in that the US does not produce as much about military history as other countries do (England being an obvious example) and you also have to account for that bias. I have read a lot of articles and books out of England that would make the reader believe that it was England bailing the US out. (Not most, but more then a few, and the TV productions such as seen on the History channel or whatever they are calling the military channel have a tendency to be very, shall we say, “pro England “)
So just because you are reading a history article or book does not mean that it is 100% fact based and without bias or an agenda. And thus you have to start reading a lot of different sources and put the facts together for yourself by weeding out the various biases..
It is a sad truth of the world today (and especially the US) that almost everything and everyone has an agenda. And published historians are unfortunate usually no different. Heck a year or two back I was doing some reasearch in a US National Park and talked to the two Rangers that where the supposed historical experts for the park. And I got two radically different views on a number of things that did not agree with each other. Turns out this was a bias thing. Who would ever expect when talking to a Park Ranger that they would have an agenda and a bias in what they where telling you? I mean come on these are “Smoky the Bears” here. What agenda could they have other then to “prevent forest fires “? But later following up on the research I discovered that the one ranger belonged to a faction of rangers that believe that all national parks should be nature preserves and that any evidence of mankind should be removed from the park to return the park to nature and not let visitors into the park. So much so that in this perticular Park a major park road was closed for over a week while they did a study when a dead tree about 6 to 10 inches in diameter fell across the road and the head ranger would not let the maintenance dept cut the tree up and move it. Something that should have taken less then an hour. (I kid you not) After stumbling across this it suddenly made sense what the one ranger told me. And his views. He was trying to play down the historical significance of the park and the remains that existed in the Park. I guess that it should not have surprised me as the former head of that park used dynamite to blow a perfectly stable building down in the park on the flimsiest of excuses.
So after that experience I don’t fully trust anything anyone tells me or anything I read. I look at it and try and pull out the facts from the opinions. As they say figures don’t lie, but liars figure.
People often have an agenda conscious or not and you get that. I had a coworker that bought an import the same week I bought a US built car. Both 4 door both black. He insisted until the day he died that his import was better. Ignoring that it was in for repairs for over 4 weeks total in the three years we owned/leased these cars and that one day I had to help him close his rear door because it was literally falling off its hinges. Meanwhile other then oil changes I never did anything to my car. Oddly enough that was his last car from that company. But whenever he talked about that car he seamed to forget about the door...
So that is why you get a lot of different views on things. Oddly enough I see less agenda and bias here then ont actual historical sites. I wonder if that is because of the “game” of “what if” that we play on this site. We can’t be biased as this week we speculate about a better victory for Japan at Peril and next we we will speculate about how to get a faster victory for the US. So we have to spend more time looking at both sides of every argument....
I would also say it's part of basic human nature to look for easy solutions to complex problems - If the Japanese had only bombed the fuel tanks, if the Germans had only taken Moscow, if the USAAF could have taken out the oilfields at Ploesti, if Johnson had only let the USAF bomb everything they wanted to in North Vietnam, if I was only smarter, taller, and better looking...
So basically, what I said. He didn't prioritize them enough and so they weren't hit by the strikes the Japanese did have the time and resources to carry out.
Nimitz himself speculated on the outcome. You're telling me he was trying to downplay the role of the United States in WW2?
Actually on this site whenever things go even slightly outside the historical bounds at Hawaii, it's the IJN that tends to get its clock cleaned. Hundreds of planes shot down like it's a bloody Marianas Turkey Shoot 1944.
Right, the Japanese can win at sneak attacks but not at straight up battles. Because, if Halsey with one carrier and Nagumo with six swap strikes on December 7th or 8th, who could possibly think that Halsey will not win that one? Or, if the IJN returns to bomb Pearl Harbor in a third wave, perish the thought that the results would be pedestrian - the bombing wouldn't be particularily crippling and nor would the defenses.
The targeting list placed the oil tanks (naval infrastructure) 7th on the prioritiy list. Since the first 3 items on the list could be expected to absorb the full attention of the initial attack, this meant that Combined Fleet did not want any resources used for this purpose in the first attack, (ie, 1st or 2nd waves). The reason why naval infrastructure appears at all is because when it was drafted it was considered quite possible that Nagumo would hit Oahu any number of times over a number of days before withdrawing.
My question was whether Fletcher was or was not aware that the Rabaul torpedo bomber unit had been devastated to little effect before he took the decision to withdraw? Because such knowledge surely should impact the commander's decision to support or withdraw the vital air cover at the vital moment? Did Fletcher think that Nimitz's intentions were to uncover the transport force to air attacks? That is to say, if Fletcher thought that Rabaul was a peril to his well protected carriers, then he must have thought it was an even greater threat to the landing forces, correct? Alternatively, if Fletcher thought that the results of the attack were such that the defenses were effective against twin engine torpedo bombers, then he really can't have believed his carriers were under as great a threat as one might have imagined before that action took place?
I don't think a third wave would have been particularily effective for either side. I don't buy that the IJN increases its return by much and I don't buy that the defenders shoot down loads of IJN aircraft. This is where I tend to differ from many posters - the majority of what if's have one side or the other suffering once-in-a-hundred-years catastrophes. Up here in Ontario a 3rd Wave at Pearl Harbor is like the Maple Leaf fans talking in October - they're going to win the Stanley Cup.
You said Nimitz might be "bombed out" of Oahu. I was trying to think of the big return attack of the IJN against Pearl Harbor. But you're actually talking two seaplanes dropping a scatter of bombs randomly into the sea and mountains. That's what you are saying is the attack that could drive the USN from Hawaii?
Yamamoto's staff knew it might be a one-off, or that Nagumo theoretically might make up to as many as six or eight big attacks over about 7 days before withdrawing. They simply didn't know. If the former, Yamamoto wanted everything on the airpower and big ships. If the latter, then he wanted the base worked over too.