Upon hearing that no carriers were destroyed in his Pearl Harbor attack, Yamamoto said that Japan had just lost the war.
First of all, even if they had gotten all our carriers, out production advantage -- highlighted in the article -- would have still carried us to victory. Maybe an extra year would have been tacked on to the length of the war, but probably not. After all, the loss of our carriers would not have changed the release-date of the atomic bomb.
But secondly, if our carriers had been in port on December 7, wouldn't our planes have been able to defend against the Pearl Harbor attack?
“wouldn’t our planes have been able to defend against the Pearl Harbor attack? “
It was SURPRISE attack. The idea was to bomb the carriers before any planes could take off, not to mention we had no way to find the Japanese carriers. Besides, there were airfields full of hundreds of planes at Pearl then that never got off of the ground either and got bombed and strafed on the ground. Only a hand full of our planes ever made it off the ground.