William Halsey could not hide his dismay and anger. Surveying the wreckage from the bridge, Adm. The first of them to return, the Enterprise, sailed into Pearl Harbor the day after the attack. Just as important as the oil facilities were the American aircraft carriers, which were at sea when the Japanese attacked.
One can only imagine how much more costly the conquests of Tarawa, Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa would have been had the Japanese had another year to fortify them. Their loss would have delayed the American counterattack in the Pacific by as much as a year. Foremost among these were the huge oil-storage facilities on Oahu. Pacific Fleet, the Japanese had missed a couple of crucial targets. In those dark first months after the Pearl Harbor disaster, it was not apparent to many that Japan had already lost the war. Capping this run of victories, the Japanese seized New Guinea and Indonesia and launched devastating air raids on northern Australia. Furthermore, the British Army in Burma was in full retreat toward the Indian border. By the time Corregidor was lost, 120,000 British soldiers had already surrendered Singapore to an inferior Japanese force. Fortress Corregidor, in Manila Harbor, withstood a brutal siege for another month before it too fell, but only after the soldiers of the 4th Infantry Regiment fought off several attacks in hand-to-hand combat. Wake Island fell two weeks later, after a truly heroic stand, and only five months after Pearl Harbor the half-starved “battling bastards of Bataan” also surrendered. At the time, he could not have known that the attack on Pearl Harbor was only the beginning of a Japanese offensive that would conquer most of the Western Pacific. The following day, President Roosevelt went before Congress and asked for a declaration of war against Japan.
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