The 1941 Pacific Fleet and Naval Aviation
A common belief about the 1941 Pacific Fleet was it did not value aviation; that aircraft carriers and aircraft took a back seat to battleships. After all, the 1941 Pacific Fleet was America’s last mighty battleship fleet. It even says so in the book’s title. This offers an easy explanation for the surprise at Pearl Harbor, that the battleship types had ignored the threat naval aviation posed. The US Navy’s brown-shoe aviators tacitly encouraged this belief. They profited by laying the blame on the black-shoe surface warship types. It also deflected attention from naval aviators’ failure to detect the approaching Japanese fleet until too late.
