In his memoir “And I was there,” Edwin Layton, chief of intelligence for Admiral Kimmel and then Admiral Nimitz, says that, had the oil tanks at Pearl Harbor been destroyed, the Pacific Fleet would have had to relocate to California for six months for want of fuel. As it was, the Japanese failure to destroy those tanks allowed Kimmel to start organizing American counter-operations against the Japanese, which Nimitz, Spruance, and Halsey consummated as raids against the Marshall Islands.
What if the Pacific Fleet had had to relocate to California? How badly would this impact the American effort in 1942? Would it make any long-term difference to the Pacific Theater, or would things get back on schedule after the oil tanks are rebuilt and refilled in late 1942?