The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

by Daniel Yergin

Yamamoto and his colleagues, who had endlessly reviewed America’s preponderant position in oil, all failed to grasp the significance of the supplies on the island of Oahu. An assault on those supplies was not included in their plans. It was a strategic error with momentous reverberations. Every barrel of oil in Hawaii had been transported from the mainland. If the Japanese planes had knocked out the Pacific Fleet’s fuel reserves and the tanks in which they were stored at Pearl Harbor, they would have immobilized every ship of the American Pacific Fleet, and not just those they actually destroyed. New petroleum supplies would only have been available from California, thousands of miles away. “All of the oil for the Fleet was in surface tanks at the time of Pearl Harbor,” Admiral Chester Nimitz, who became Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet, was later to say. “We had about 41/2 million barrels of oil out there and all of it was vulnerable to .50 caliber bullets. Had the Japanese destroyed the oil,” he added, “it would have prolonged the war another two years.”