What was the main point of the pearl harbor?

Answer 1

To try to destroy the US fleet, especially the carriers, forcing the US to agree they would leave the Pacific to Japan and not interfere. However the carriers were not in the harbor, so all they did was get the US very angry.

Answer 2

Pearl Harbor was a US Navy base for fifty years before the attack. It was originally acquired as a "coaling station". Navies ran on coal back then. There were a lot of anarchists around, especially among the working men, in that era, the sort of men who might be employed to load coal onto ships. Anarchists liked to try to slip a dynamite bomb disguised as a lump of coal into a navy ship's coal bunkers. When it was shoveled into the fire it would explode and possibly sink the ship. (This may be what sank the USS Maine in Havana Harbor in Cuba in 1898, setting off the Spanish-American War). So all navies wanted a network of coaling stations around the oceans, where they could control their supply of coal, rather than taking the risk of buying coal from some commercial operation in whatever harbor they might be in.

Up until 1940 the US Pacific Fleet was based on the west coast of the mainland US. Every year the Fleet went to Hawaii and had maneuvers. After the 1940 maneuvers President Roosevelt ordered the Fleet to remain in Hawaii. Roosevelt thought that keeping the Fleet based at this forward base, 2200 miles from the West Coast, would have a "restraining influence" on Japanese aggression in Asia. It seems very doubtful that the presence of the Fleet in Hawaii restrained the Japanese the least little bit from their aggressive conquests. The Commander of the Fleet at that time protested keeping the Fleet in Pearl Harbor, because he did not believe the Fleet could be properly defended there with the equipment then in Hawaii. Little was added to this equipment before the attack. The Admiral also worried that if one ship was sunk in the narrow channel leading into Pearl Harbor, the entire Fleet might be bottled up there for months, until the wreckage could be cleared away. The Admiral felt so strongly about this that late in 1940 he went to Washington and met with Roosevelt to argue the Fleet should be returned to its usual bases on the west coast. He argued so strongly that a couple of months later Roosevelt relieved him of command, after only a year in command of the Fleet. Normally an Admiral kept this position two years.

Answer 3

US Navy Base.