@Young:
Why not an American battleship off Washington? What are the 1940 US numbers for those?
US Battleships in July 1940:
Wyoming, Massachusetts, South Dakota, Washington, Colorado, Texas, Maryland, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, West Virginia, Arkansas, New York, Arizona, California, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexoco.
These battleships were either completed or so far in the construction process that it would be unfair to not count them as finished. In reality it took 2 years of construction to build a battleship (same for a CV), but in A&A they are built in just 1 turn, which I don’t think equals 2years. More like 6 months max.
That’s 19BB, about 7 more than Japan. So if you’d want a more historical representation of the numbers of these mighty beasts, the USA should start A&AG40 with 3BB total.
Because Japan had no real fleet superiority against the USA, Yamamoto launched ‘Pear Harbor’ in the hope to destroy enough US warships so that Japan would gain superiority. We know how that went for the IJN… Japan did a lot of damage to the USN, but no CV was hit and of the Battleships only the Oklahoma and the Arizona were permanently lost. The IJN had failed to gain superiority and only awoken the US’ resolve to fight Japan.
But Yamamoto was right to go for the gambit: he correctly judged that the USA would not stay neutral for long, if Japan was to attack the Commonwealth, France and the Dutch (not to mention the Chinese, who were already suffering).