The carriers were the only major vessels not at port for Christmas, and the rest of US forces were also in a stand down mode. The biggest problem was that all intel went through the State Department. NSA and the rest of DoD’s intel organs were created following that little hold-up. The warning about the Japanese attack was sitting on a desk in the State Department for the entire weekend. Finding it on Monday didn’t make people happy. Kind of like what happened in 2001.

MacArthur took the attack on the Philippines personally because of how much of the nation his family owned, but that didn’t make him take precautions not to lose all of the long range US bombers in the Pacific.