How long did it take to recover from the Pearl Harbor attack?

Answer 1

Not long. Pearl Harbor itself was not damaged very much. The brunt of the attack was on the ships in the harbor and on the Ford Island airfield. The Japanese were not targeting the harbor facilities.

Answer 2

For the most part, the ships were refloated within 6 months. Much of the clean up continued on for another year. They were still cleaning up minor wreckage as late as 1944.

A lot of the clean up was delayed because Pearl was a staging area for some of the ships that participated in some of the Island campaigns.

In 1943 there was an accident that nearly sank several of the LSTs that were staged for one of the island campaigns.

The Oklahoma was the last ship refloated. She was towed out in June 1943 to a scrap yard.

The Utah and Arizona are still there. Arizona was made into a memorial.

Answer 3

From the actual attack, not really very long. The Japanese Admiral who planned the attack, Yamamoto, hoped to obtain six months in which Japan could complete the conquests of territory it had planned and begin to consolidate its hold over the new captures, and this was successful for the Japanese. Almost exactly six months after the attack, though, in early May, 1942, the US Navy was able to forestall a planned invasion of Port Moresby on New Guinea in the Battle of the Coral Sea. One month later, in early June, the US Navy sank four of the six Japanese aircraft carriers which had taken part in the Pearl Harbor raid, and basically won the war, though it would take three more years of bloodletting before the Japanese would admit it, at the Battle of Midway.

The damage done at Pearl Harbor was almost entirely limited to the battleships of the Pacific Fleet. There were eight of these in the Harbor, and all were more or less heavily damaged, and several sunk. But Pearl Harbor is relatively shallow, and all but two of these battlewagons were eventually refloated and repaired, most were updated and modernized, and rejoined the fighting by the middle of 1944. These were all old ships, all completed before the "building holiday" imposed by the Washington Naval Treaty of 1923 ended the building of capital ships for about fifteen years. Before that Treaty US battleships had a top speed of 21 knots, which made them too slow to keep up with aircraft carriers. These old battleships saw duty as part of the "surface bombardment group", which, under Admiral Jesse Oldendorf, fired preliminary bombardments at islands the US forces were about to attack in amphibious landings. This was a valuable and necessary job, but there was little glamor in it. There was at that time a split in the thinking of Navy admirals. Battleships had been the mainstay of naval power for centuries, and many old-fashioned conservative admirals had continued to believe that this would remain the case. This "big gun club" of Naval thinking thought in terms of an eventual toe-to-toe slugfest between the battleships of Japan and the US, which would decide the war - which never happened. The new idea was aircraft carriers, which proved to be the decisive type of ship in WWII in the Pacific. There were no American battleships at the Coral Sea (a tie) or at Midway (a smashing American victory). In those two battles the opposing fleets never saw one another, and were usually about 200 miles apart. All the damage was done by airplanes, most of which flew off of aircraft carriers. No US aircraft carriers were in Pearl Harbor at the time of the attack, which was extremely bad luck for the Japanese.

Of the two battleships which were not refloated which had been sunk in the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Arizona is still on the bottom on Pearl, so, in that sense the US never completely "recovered". (The Utah was also sunk during the attack, and is still on the bottom there. The Utah was a very old battleship which had been converted to a target ship - its guns were removed and its deck was covered over with heavy, thick timbers so other ships could practice gunnery shooting at it. This perhaps made it look like an aircraft carrier to the Japanese pilots, who wasted a lot of effort sinking her. It was not worth the trouble to raise her, so she is still there.) The second battleship sunk on December 7, 1941 which was not refloated in time to take part in the war was the Oklahoma, which turned over and buried its superstructure in the mud of the Harbor bottom. It took until 1947 to get her afloat again, and she was put under tow to be dragged back to the west coast and cut up for scrap (battleships were regarded as completely obsolete by that time, so no thought was given to repairing her). On the way she began to leak badly, and her towships had to cut her loose, and she sank again, this time in deep water between Hawaii and California. More than 400 sailors had died on the Oklahoma (many trapped inside when she turned over) and almost 1200 on the Arizona when she blew up, and together this was about 2/3rds of all the Americans killed in the attack.

The Japanese could have made the attack much worse. Three targets they should have attacked in the Harbor were completely undamaged: the fuel farm, the submarine base, and the drydock. Without the drydock battle damaged ships would have had to go all the way back to the west coast for repairs (this would have prevented one of the aircraft carriers damaged at the Coral Sea from taking part at Midway, and perhaps shifted the margin of victory to the Japanese side). Submarine sailors made up 1% of the US Navy, but sank 55% of all Japanese ships lost during the war, and the Japanese left the sub base with its extensive machine shops and repair facilities alone during the attack. If the fuel farm had been destroyed, the entire Fleet would have had to fall back to the west coast and operate from there, which might have extended the war for several years.

Answer 4

Pearl was back in operation within months of the attack. Warships and airplanes were destroyed, not the facilities.

Answer 5

not as long

Answer 6

50 years...