Uncontrolled fire and flooding are the two mechanisms of ship loss emphasized here. Some aerial torpedoes could run correctly if dropped at a suitable height, but shallow water made their entry behavior a concern. The proposed alternative is to reduce the torpedo-bomber allocation and take more dive bombers. Crews attending church or taking Sunday leave would be slower to organize damage control, making fire an attractive means of disabling ships. This is a recommendation about how the attack could have been planned, rather than a demonstrated result from a different strike. It reinforces the criticism that detailed routing received more attention than the particular weapons problem inside the harbor.
Notable Point · 45:01-47:35
Fire kills and the case for more dive bombers
For ships caught at rest on Sunday morning, more dive bombers might have exploited fires more reliably than shallow-running torpedoes.