Hi, Don. Agreed, there were some good arguments for instituting that trade embargo. That's why I say that FDR knew very well what he was doing and why...and people will judge it from their own level of prejudice, meaning: if they already hate FDR they'll find something bad about it, if they already like him they'll find something good about it.

I think the main thing the US Navy had going against them in '41 was overconfidence and lack of battle experience. The Japanese were conservative in their expectations (they anticipated heavy losses in the attack on Pearl, and were agreeably surprised at how well it went), and the Japanese were also highly experienced and trained to a "T" after several years of fighting in China. They had the most elite, well-trained navy in the World in '41, and they had the finest naval pilots too, and the World's best naval fighter plane at the time. Their torpedo planes were also the most modern then in service and their dive bombers were pretty much equal to the American SBD Dauntless in capability...and way more experienced at putting bombs on the target.

The Americans were still depending too much on the "battle line" (a column of battleships) to decide a naval war. I believe what they anticipated in late '41 or early '42 was a Japanese invasion of Southeast Asia and the Phillipines and the Dutch East Indies. They expected that MacArthur's forces would hold the Japanese to a stalemate on the ground in the Phillipines. Then they figured the American fleet of battleships would sail to an epic confrontation with the Japanese fleet somewhere off the Phillipines, with aircraft carriers simply scouting and making nuisance attacks of minor consequence, while the battleships slugged it out with their Japanese counterparts and sent them to Davy Jones' locker.

This was the naval conflict that had been anticipated in the mid-Pacific ever since the 20's, and numerous wargames were played by the Americans and Japanese both around that assumption. It was called "Plan Orange" in the USA, and the Americans were confident they would win such a battleship duel.

Yamamoto rewrote the book with his new carrier tactics, inspired by the British attack on the Italian fleet at anchor in Taranto, earlier in the war (a paltry force of British biplane torpedo bombers sank several Italian battleships in a night attack and utterly changed the balance of naval power in the Mediterranean in less than an hour).

I don't think the Pacific fleet was "in bad shape", I think they were just going by the outmoded rules of the last war (WWI) and the Japanese got the jump on them by innovating. This was very imaginative on the part of the Japanese, and it netted them an astoundingly cheap victory and an early advantage in a war they were almost bound to lose in the long run.

Japanese invading the West Coast? Naw...I've tried to invade the American west coast with Japanese forces in some pretty realistic WWII simulation games, and it's simply too long a stretch and too big a nut to crack for Japan. It's a fool's errand, fraught with disaster. They might have been able to take Hawaii, if they had absolutely gone all out with everything possible, but even that would have been very difficult to pull off. If they had sunk the US carriers AND taken Hawaii, then they might have been able to make it so costly for America to turn it around in the Pacific as to secure a negotiated settlement giving them what Japan wanted in the Pacific...a secure Empire and key resources in the Dutch Indies.

Just maybe.

In 1943 and 1944 the Americans built so many ships and airplanes that it was just ridiculous from the Japanese point of view. There was nothing Japan could do to stop that. The USA had the capability to outproduce them ten to one.

That was what beat Germany too. That and the vastness of Russia. No one has ever conquered and occupied the whole of Russia, and I doubt that anyone ever will. Only 2 nations have been foolish enough to try. It would be about equally foolish for anyone to try to invade and occupy the USA...in fact, even more so, given that there's an ocean to cross.