Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King
Chief of Naval Operations
Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, December 7, 1945
To think that all these poor boys died for something as stupid as this war. If the Japanese had a lick of sense, they wouldn’t have attacked in the first place, ‘cause they certainly didn’t have any chance of winning when they started it!
Sure, they hit us hard at Pearl, and if they caught Halsey’s carriers that day we wouldn’t have been able to act as aggressively as we did in 1942. With our building program, all that would have done was to delay “Midway” to sometime in ’43 or ’44.
And while that was going on, our submarine blockade would have been drawing the noose tighter and tighter around their necks. Their anti-submarine capability was a joke throughout the war, their merchant shipping construction rates even worse. Even with defective torpedoes and poor pre-war training and doctrine, we were already sinking more tonnage than they were building in 1942.
Thus it didn’t matter when our hammer blow fell, ‘cause when it did, they would never be able to recover from it.
Could they have stopped us from building that hammer? Not a chance. Hitting Pearl was already a stretch for them, there was no way that they were going to hit the yards on the West Coast. There was no way they could have taken Pearl either, certainly not after we reinforced it.
Could they have stopped us from tying the noose then? I admit it’s possible, but their high command seemed oblivious to the need to protect the ships carrying those vital supplies they started the whole war over in the first place! And they ignored it while constantly pushing outwards, towards the Solomons, the Aleutians, Australia, all efforts that would have drained even more resources for little gain.
Now, I’m not saying the Japs didn’t have a powerful Navy at the start, they certainly did! In a straight up fight, Mahan-esque Battle Fleet versus Battle Fleet we would’ve lost, no question. But as they say, it isn't how big it is, it's how you use it, and to paraphrase our dear Secretary of the Navy, or at least what I think good ol’ Frank Knox wanted to say, “These guys had no idea that they had no idea what the hell they were doing!”
