Re: OFF TOPIC Pearl Harbor etc.

[Stephen A. Lawrence]

Jed Rothwell wrote:


3. Nobody in the administration or the US military had the slightest 
idea the target was Pearl Harbor. If they had suspected an attack was 
coming, they would have sortied the fleet and met the Japanese on the 
high seas. That would have been a disaster. They would have lost 6,000 
men or more, and every ship that sank would have been lost for good. 
(Most of the ships that sank in the harbor were salvaged.) As one 
admiral put it, it was God's mercy that they were surprised.

That is a fascinating point, which I had never encountered before.  The 
Japanese had naval superiority at the time, and had superiority in the 
air, and of course that conclusion would tend to follow.

But then, until I googled the topic during the course of this thread, I 
also never realized that nearly all the ships which were sunk in the 
harbor were raised and returned to service, and used in the war.  
According to a capsule history of the war which I ran across, only one 
ship was put permanently out of commission (the Arizona).