What was the effect of the attack on Pearl Harbor for the U.S. Navy

Hello Indy and crew, I am curious what the effect of Pearl Harbor were on the US. Specifically in regards to Naval doctrine being based around the battleship and not the aircraft carrier. With their main fleet of battleships knocked out, how did the U.S switch doctrines so fast and adapt so quickly to using them.

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At the end of the day the rapid change in doctrine came about because of necessity. Most of the pre-war plans and strategies (War Plan Orange covered a theoretical Japanese-American war if I remember right) assumed that there would be one massive climatic fight in the central Pacific between the battleships of the two opposing navies. This line of thought originated from the Russo-Japanese War and the Battle of Tsushima. With American battleships no longer in play the remnants of the American fleet based at Pearl had to adopt a hit and run strategy against the more far flung Japanese outposts and conquests. For the first six months of the War in the Pacific the American navy didn’t have the numbers to use battleship tactics against the Japanese. Rather the carriers Enterprise and Lexington, later joined by the Yorktown and Hornet, sailing with relatively small escort fleets (mostly destroyers and a cruiser or two) would launch plans at a target and then quickly withdraw before the Japanese could muster a counterattack. Farther west the survivors of the Asiatic fleet in the Philippines combined with Australian, British, and Dutch fleets to try and salvage the situation in Indonesia. This ABDACOM fleet would be decimated at the Battle of the Java Sea and the survivors would spend the next months consolidating in Australia. There’s a documentary series called “Battle 360” that covers World War Two from the prospective of the USS Enterprise. The first two episodes do a good job covering the US Navy’s shift in tactics in the first six months of the war.

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