240 do u have any idea how intel worked back then. They lost an entire fleet, radar was rudimentary, and couldn't detect Carrier launched aircraft let alone several carrier battlegroups. Bud u need to disconnect the net and spend a month reading ur history, military as well as political...and get back to us.
In an interesting bit of alternate universe thought,...if the US Navy had been successful in lighter than air operations.(the Zeppelins) It is thought by some that with a couple of air ships patrolling over the Pacific that the oncoming carrier force would have been sighted. This was the very reason they tried so hard to make the airships work. (Macon, Los Angeles, Akron, Shenandoah,...they all crashed ) It is known that the Japanese force had orders that if they were detected, they were to cancel the attack.
Also there is some telecommunication components to the situation. While it is true that some in Washington had strong suspicions that something was about to happen, (due to decryption) they couldn't just pick up a telephone and ring up Pearl Harbor.
1) There was no telephone cable under the pacific to Hawaii then, they would have had to use a radio link.
2) They didn't want anyone to know that Washington was decrypting the Japanese ciphers.
3) They knew that the Axis Powers could decrypt the
best telephone scrambler the United States had at the time, in real time.
4) So they send the famous encrypted cable gram through Western Union which arrives while the attack is underway.
Because of this Bell Labs develop Sigsally, the first digital phone scrambler in the early months of the War. This is also why the United States military is so obsessed with communications.
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