(03-16-2015 10:38 AM)NIU007 Wrote:  Yea Barbarossa had nothing to do with it, but it was at least a bigger mistake, IMO.

I often wondered myself what would have happened if Japan had tried to invade Hawaii. I think there was a thread on here about that some time back.

IMHO Hitler's biggest mistake was declaring war on the United States when he didn't need to. Roosevelt had even less chance of getting a war started with Hitler after the Pearl Harbor attack then before. Germany hadn't attacked us so there would be no increase in the already low public demand for war with Germany, especially when we had just been attacked by another power. The American public would have questioned Roosevelt even continuing Lend-Lease during a war with Japan.

As for Japan invading Hawai'i, there were two options for them, neither all that great. They could invade Oahu directly, but there was still substantial American ground forces on the island. It would have been bloody and only netted some really old battleships that Japan couldn't invest the resources to repair and frankly didn't even fit into Japan's battleship naval beliefs (Japanese battleships of the teens and 20's were designed more toward speed, American battleships of the same period, the "standard battleships" which all the PH battleships were part of, were intentionally short and slow since we wanted more armor protection).

The other option was to invade the other, less well defended, islands around Oahu; and bring in bombers to pound US forces on Oahu or threaten any American counter invasion attempts.

Assuming the success of either operation, the Japanese would have had to garrison and supply the islands at the end of a very long supply chain and would have found the waters crawling with US submarines. Japan had a terrible record on anti-submarine warfare so the subs would have had a field day against Japanese supply ships.

The Kido Butai would have had to commit at least two carriers to stay in Hawai'ian waters during and after the invasion until substantial land based planes reached the area; risking valuable carriers against hungry US subs and potential US carrier counter-strikes; and also denying two valuable carriers against capturing Malaya/Singapore, The Philippines and the oil rich Dutch East Indies.