True, but even simply having the ships' crews on alert during that fateful morning might save at least a couple ships from taking lethal damage. I hold no illusions that BB row won't still take a beating, but it may be survivable.
The Navy's final analysis of Pearl Harbor indicated that
Utah, Oklahoma, Arizona, and
West Virginia would have sunk no matter what watertight condition the ships had set before the attack (
Utah, Oklahoma, and
West Virginia were opened up by too many torpedoes, and
Arizona... well, a magazine explosion is pretty much fatal for any armored ship), but the other two battleships sunk in the attack (
Nevada and
California) would have stayed afloat had they not been opened up for inspections. Likewise, the destroyers
Cassin and
Downes were definitely going to be destroyed there in the drydock with
Pennsylvania; there's just not much that can be done when a bomb rolls one ship onto another and the two then burn themselves out completely.
Ironically, of the four ships that were going to sink no matter what, there likely would have been little difference, long-term, in the results of the attack.
Utah was basically not going to be economical to salvage and return to service under any circumstances, and having been demilitarized, there was a lot less that her crew could do to protect the ship.
Arizona took a "golden BB" hit that, through some chain of events, detonated her forward magazine, basically blowing her in two. (The exact mechanism is still up for debate, though I personally think Norman Friedman's summary, based on the official Navy reports of her loss, to be the most likely--a bomb that didn't penetrate her armor deck started an oil fire, and burning oil poured down a non-watertight hatch to cook off the black powder magazine for her catapult, which then caused sympathetic detonation of the adjacent smokeless powder magazine for her main battery.)
Oklahoma likely would have capsized, even if Condition Z had been set before the attack, because she took so many torpedoes on the same side in such a short period of time that there wouldn't have been time to counterflood her so she sank upright, like was done with
West Virginia. WeeVee probably would have still sunk upright due to the amount of her side that was opened, but with enough time between hits to allow for counterflooding. Thus you'd have ended up with
West Virginia sitting on the bottom, upright, and completely burned out, but relatively easily salvageable,
Arizona blown up,
Oklahoma on the bottom and belly-up, and
Utah in a similar state.
Utah wouldn't have been worth salvaging for anything other than scrap,
Arizona was beyond hope of salvage, and while
Oklahoma was salvageable, it would have taken enough time and done enough further damage that, as in real life, the only value in salvaging her would have been to clear the berth; even if she could have been repaired by the end of the war, she would have been of only marginal value at that point--hence why, in our timeline, she was simply shoved into an out-of-the-way corner of the Harbor until the end of the war, then towed away to be scrapped. (Her salvage involved cutting away
everything above the weather deck except her turrets and barbettes, even the stuff that wasn't damaged by being crushed against the bottom, to lighten her enough to refloat.)
This, of course, does not take into consideration the effects that being alerted to the raid would have had on air defense during it, and any reductions it might have made in the number of weapons successfully delivered--merely points out that two-thirds of the capital ship losses at Pearl were unavoidable given the damage suffered, regardless of the ships' alert status during the raid.
