SaltyWaffles
I am dissapoint, son
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You're talking out of your ass. Nothing in that order contains stuff about unethical human experimentation. It explicitly says that informed consent is required for every paritcipant, for starters, and that the only way to avoid that is a waiver (which only lasts a year) to be requested by one of the Cabinet Secretaries and approved by the President.
Also, the document is from 1999, so what the fuck are you even doing.
The Japanese committed a LOT of war crimes in and before WW2, but they also committed a number of humanitarian atrocities with no justifications behind them. To try and equivocate the United States and Japan in terms of war crimes and atrocities in WW2 is a damn joke.
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Anyway, I'm really liking this story so far. It's an interesting premise, and so far it's well executed.
A few things to bring up, which might be helpful:
1) If Admiral Thompson is trying to make a difference ahead of time (via preparations), one of the biggest (and safest) things he can do is to kick-start the badly needed revamping of the USN's torpedoes. While I can't really comment on the surface-warship-launched torpedoes, the air-dropped and submarine-launched torpedoes were fucking atrocious. As in, 90% of them (at least in the air-dropped torps' case; the sub-fired torps were maybe a bit better) would, even in a perfect deployment/launching, either veer off-course, run substantially deeper than they were set to, or just flat-out fail to detonate even when they hit the target dead on. There is at least one case that comes to mind--an entire squadron of torpedo bombers performed perfect torpedo runs on slow-moving, sizable, vulnerable targets...and every single torpedo failed to hit the target or detonate upon contact with the target (the torps were well-aimed, btw). Submarine commanders noted cases where they'd launch a torpedo at a target and their instruments would pick up the dull thud of it hitting the target dead on, but failing to detonate. Eventually, a crash program was launched to figure out the problems and come up with solutions for them, and it succeeded quite well--after the small changes to the design, the torpedoes became extremely reliable and even more effective than anticipated.
So, one way to jump-start this process would be to run some live-fire torpedo tests of his own. Maybe he'd need permission from Richardson to conduct it, but it shouldn't be hard to convince him to do some kind of such testing. Given how pervasive the problems were, they'd become apparent pretty quickly.
Another way to help his own preparedness is to have his own crews run drills for putting up a coordinated air strike group in an efficient time frame, such that you'd have a mix of dive-bombers, torpedo-bombers, and escort fighters traveling to the target together and attacking as one group. USN practice early in the war was to put up entire squadrons together before sending them out, which lead to a 12-16 torpedo bombers arriving at the target alone, without any escort, to get cut down by the enemy CAP. He should also practice having his radar operators and flight control directors relay navigation instructions to fighter/bomber wings, with regards to vectoring them to the target. In particular, practicing radio communications discipline and vectoring CAP for intercepting incoming enemy attacks.
And I'm not sure if he could reasonably get it, but he could try to advocate for torpedo blisters to be installed onto the carriers. One of their biggest vulnerabilities was against torpedoes.
Oh, and lastly...he might want to suggest some additional training/preparation for night-fighting. Emphasize the enormous advantage that radar--and equally importantly, taking maximum advantage of whatever radar capability you had--would give you in night-fighting.
2) This:
Is a fairly good point, though a slight exaggeration. American military leaders were worried that the American public might not be motivated to see a prolonged war with Japan through to the very end; there was never any fear about the public not putting up with anything more than a token effort. The attack on Pearl Harbor shattered those concerns anyway, as it was a blatantly illegal, very premeditated, and very shocking massive attack on US soil and American citizens.
Ironically, the attack on Pearl Harbor was about as good an outcome to the event as the American military could have reasonably asked for, as shattered any notions about underestimating the enemy and completely galvanized the United States for the war, while at the same time sped up the realization and adoption of aircraft carriers, submarines, and destroyers as the main elements of naval warfare. I could go on about this for a while, but I hope you get the idea: Thompson should not look to thwart the attack utterly, but rather mitigate the devastation it would bring to the battleship fleet just enough to avoid having any of them sunk.
Regardless, he absolutely cannot rely on the assumptions that everything surrounding Pearl Harbor will be the same. A slight change now could easily affect the patrol patterns and dates of the carriers, ensuring that some of them are in port at the time of the attack...or that one of the carriers stumbles onto the approaching strike force before it launches its planes (in which case, that carrier is going to have a really hard time not getting annihilated, being outnumbered six-to-one and out-gunned by superior Japanese fighters and torpedo bombers).
If Thompson wants to press the point home to the battleship girls just how futile a sortie against the strike force would be, he need only mention that the enemy carriers will be escorted by battleships and submarines--meaning, they'd have to fight through their counterparts while damaged before the fighting even starts, all while risking getting torpedoed by submarines they can't even fight back against. He could also mention how there were no cases of fleet carriers being sunk by battleships in the entire war--they were sunk by either other aircraft carriers, land-based aircraft, or by submarines--but there were plenty of cases of battleships being sunk or decisively crippled by aircraft carriers and land-based aircraft.
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EDIT: A quick search showed that the Mark 15 torpedoes--the ones which most destroyers used in WW2--had the same basic design problems as the more notorious Mark 14 torpedoes, and thus, were also horrendous.
And yeah, Admiral Thompson should probably know a lot of this stuff. As an admiral, he would certainly have studied the largest example of naval warfare in history. A lot of its lessons are still very applicable today, to say the least. I'd be very surprised if he hadn't studied/been taught the entirety of the naval aspect of WW2 in detail.
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