“Of course, if the Japanese did attack, it’s only sensible to imagine that they would try to strike a knockout blow in the first round to US Pacific military operations.”
The Japanese originally did not think so at all. Yamamoto had to put his reputation and credibility on the line and demand the adoption of his own Pearl Harbor strike plan contrary to decades of pre-war planning for a decisive battle with the U.S. Navy somewhere at sea and close to the Japanese naval bases.
“There weren’t many other realistic options for how the story would play out.”
On the contrary, there were numerous other Japanese naval war plans which did not have anything to do at all with attacking the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. Yamamoto’s strike plan for Pearl Harbor was an innovation Japan had been incapable of performing until special measures were taken to acquire the technical capabilities to make the raid possible. These included among many other special preparations Japan’s first underway refueling of a carrier task force, developed specifically to attack Pearl Harbor; and special aerial torpedoes capable of being dropped and operating in the shallow waters of Pearl Harbor.
“However, if top US leadership prepared adequately and the attack damage was minimized, i.e., the battle was relatively “even”, US public opinion would not have been so cranked up over retribution in the coming war. Having such a disaster happen provided the carte blanche the planners were looking for from the American people, paving the way for an all-out war effort.”
That is a myth, because the American public opinion would also have been sufficiently inflamed by the Japanese atrocities in the Philippines to have served the same purpose as the attack upon Pearl Harbor. So, the Japanese war of aggression against the territories of the United states would have left no alternative but the kind of war we experienced whether or not the U.S. Pacific Fleet was forward based in the Hawaiian Islands.
Also, the worst part of the Japanese attack upon Pearl Harbor were the casualties we suffered and the loss of the military and naval aircraft. The loss and damage suffered by the Pacific Fleet’s battleships and cruisers caused no serious damage to the strategic and tactical capabilities of the U.S. Navy in the war. The sunk and damaged battleships were obsolescent and could play no important roles in the first year or two of the war.