Quote:
Originally Posted by Sheba
The thing about Pearl Harbor is that the Japanese diplomacy was supposed to send the formal declaration of war JUST WHEN the attack was being launched. It just so happened that the japanese embassy staff who were supposed to type it out were on sunday leave, leaving the diplomats, unfamiliar with typing machines, doing it. And when they were done typing it, it was already too late.
Let's not get started on how Japanese neglected to bomb the fuel depots, the dry docks, etc... They could have bought six more months at least if they had done it. Pearl Harbor was definitely not the master stroke that many made it to be.
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I doubt it would've changed anything had they passed the message in time, since in the mind of the people it still would've been a sneak attack. The Japanese just turned the situation from bad to worse when they encountered troubles with their decryption (funnily, the Americans decrypted the message to the embassy faster than the Japanese themselves). Besides, the message was
not a proper declaration of war as stipulated by the Hague Convention and the Japanese knew it. It was a notification that the negotiations were likely to be terminated.
But in any case, with the failure to catch any carriers Pearl Harbor was actually a minor disaster for the Japanese. The battleships there were obsolete in any case and even then they only managed to sink two of them (Arizona and Oklahoma). All others returned to service, Tennessee and Maryland in February 1942, Nevada in October 1942, California in January 1944 and West Virginia in July 1944.
The criticism of Nagumo for not ordering another strike is also overblown. The Japanese already experienced increasing losses from anti-air as the day went on and Nagumo had orders to preserve the fleet. He wasn't going to risk Kidō Butai thousands of miles away from home when messages indicated that the American battleships there had been ravaged.