Date Of The Attack On Pearl Harbor – Sunday, December 7, 1941, was supposed to be a day of rest for military soldiers at the Pearl Harbor naval base in Hawaii, on the island of Oahu. But at 7:55 a.m. m., Japanese fighter planes approached without warning and attacked the United States Pacific Fleet, or warships, moored in the harbor. Thousands of lives would be lost that day.
It was, as then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt would call it, “a date that will live in infamy.”
Date Of The Attack On Pearl Harbor
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president of the United States at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Pearl Harbor: Attack, Deaths & Facts
The sudden attack on Hawaii (at the time a United States territory, not a state) might have taken many by surprise, but the Japanese had been planning the operation for months.
Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander in chief of Japanese naval forces and architect of the attack on Pearl Harbor, did not want to fight with the United States. But much of Europe and Asia, including Japan, were involved in World War II at the time. Yamamoto wanted to take over certain Southeast Asian countries and use their oil to help fuel Japan’s military vehicles and naval fleet.
But because the American base in Hawaii was relatively close to these countries, the Japanese were concerned that the United States would send soldiers from Pearl Harbor to defend the nations if they were attacked. By destroying the US military presence in the region, the countries Japan wanted to attack would be left vulnerable. Yamamoto then decided to press ahead with a surprise attack on the American fleet in Hawaii.
Thus, on November 26, 1941, 31 warships carrying fighter planes and bombers left Japan for the North Pacific. They moved in silence until they approached the Hawaiian Islands. A small Japanese plane circled the target and radioed back, “Pearl Harbor sleeps.”
The Attack On Pearl Harbor: Dec. 7, 1941
In the early hours of December 7, 350 planes took off in two waves from Japanese ships. The bombers dropped bombs on the American warships below, while the fighter planes targeted the American planes on the ground so that they could not defend themselves.
Following both attacks, 19 American warships were sunk or damaged; 188 aircraft were destroyed. In total 2,280 soldiers died and 1,109 were wounded. Sixty-eight civilians (people not in the military) also lost their lives. The attack lasted just under two hours.
Repair crews went to work on the ships. Except for the US Arizona, Utah and Oklahoma, all damaged ships returned to sea.
The day after the attack, the United States declared war on Japan, officially entering World War II. Over the next nearly four years, the United States Navy sank every Japanese aircraft carrier, battleship, and cruiser that participated in the attack on Pearl Harbor.
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The United States and its allies (Great Britain, France, and Russia, among other countries) ultimately won the war, defeating Japan and its allies, Germany and Italy.
Today, visitors can tour the Pearl Harbor National Monument, built over the water on the remains of the U.S.S. Arizona, one of eight battleships attacked and damaged during the war. From there you can still glimpse the remains of the sunken ship 40 feet underwater, a monument to the brave men who fought in this important battle.
TEXT ADAPTED FROM PEARL HARBOR: A RETURN TO THE DAY OF INFAMY, OIL AND HONOR AT PEARL HARBOR, AND A CONCISE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHICAL HISTORY OF THE WORLD: AN ILLUSTRATED TIMELINE The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands on December 7, 1941 marked the official entry of the United States into World War II.
During the 1930s, Japan, which had already annexed Korea in 1910, sought to further expand its empire, particularly to obtain natural resources. In 1931, the Japanese invaded Manchuria, a small, resource-rich province in northern China, and established a puppet state called Manchukuo. In 1937, Japan invaded the rest of China and, by some estimates, killed up to 300,000 people during the infamous Nanking massacre. China would lose up to 14 million people at the end of World War II.
The Attack On Pearl Harbor: ‘a Date Which Will Live In Infamy’
Western powers were concerned about Japanese expansion, particularly because it violated the “open door” policy supported by the League of Nations (forerunner of the United Nations), which had been implemented to ensure equal trade opportunities with China. The League of Nations reprimanded Japan, but this did nothing to stop its expansion.
As Japan had limited natural resources, 55.4% of its imports at the time came from the United States (Rhodes 39). Beginning in 1937, the United States began embargoing supplies of oil, steel, and scrap metal. In December of the same year, Japanese planes sank the
, an American gunboat, in the Yangtze River, killing three Americans. Although Japan said it was a mistake and paid reparations, it sparked even more sympathy toward China and anger against Japan in the United States.
In 1940, Japan became part of the Axis Alliance with Germany and Italy and occupied parts of French Indochina (modern Vietnam) with the permission of the Vichy government, the puppet state created after the fall of France. In response, the United States imposed a complete embargo on all trade with Japan. President Roosevelt also moved most of the United States Pacific Fleet from the West Coast to Pearl Harbor.
Pearl Harbor Attack In Photos
The embargo created a dilemma for Japan. The Japanese relied on American resources to fuel their war effort and ultimately concluded that they needed to conquer the resource-rich territories of Southeast Asia to continue. In July 1941, Japan moved into southern Indochina, on the doorstep of colonies controlled by Western powers such as India, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, and the US-controlled Philippines. Japan knew that this measure risked war with the United States.
The attack on Pearl Harbor was the idea of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander-in-chief of the Japanese combined fleet, who argued that it would “deal a fatal blow to the enemy fleet” (Rhodes 392). In October 1941, the attack was approved by the Japanese Naval Staff. Commanded by Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, the Japanese fleet included six aircraft carriers, 24 support ships, and a group of submarines.
The United States expected an attack. The ongoing negotiations to end Japanese expansion were not yielding results, especially since the start of the American trade embargo. Just hours before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Admiral Husband Kimmel, commander of the US Pacific Fleet, received a message from the Navy: “This dispatch should be considered a war warning. Negotiations with Japan aimed at stabilizing conditions in the Pacific have ceased and an aggressive move by Japan is expected in the coming days. “Execute an adequate defensive deployment preparatory to carrying out the assigned tasks” (390). However, the message did not mention Pearl Harbor as a possible attack site, as the United States expected an attack on the Philippines.
The first sign that the Japanese fleet was heading toward Pearl Harbor came at 7:00 a.m. m. on the morning of December 7, when two US Army privates on the Hawaiian island of Oahu were about to shut down a mobile radar station they had manned since 4:00:00:00 a.m. A slight disturbance on the screen caused their actions to stop: a large but confusing patch of light, which seemed to the men to come from 50 planes, seemed to be heading towards the island. Confused, one of the soldiers called the island-wide information center and contacted an Army lieutenant who assured them that the light was simply a fleet of American B-17s. The lieutenant had heard Hawaiian music on the radio station earlier that morning, a signal that typically indicated that an American plane was approaching Hawaii, and determined that the spot on the radar oscilloscope screen must be the incoming fleet.
Why Did Japan Attack Pearl Harbor? A Comprehensive Analysis
Careful Japanese precautions and comprehensive planning allowed the attack on Pearl Harbor to be completely shielded from American intelligence. For nearly two weeks before the attack, Japanese battleships and destroyers had escorted 43 fighters, 51 dive bombers, 49 high-level bombers, and 40 torpedo planes from six aircraft carriers floating 200 miles north of Pearl Harbor. The plane had traveled in complete radio silence to surprise the Americans.
At 7:58 a.m. m., the Ford Island command center finally sent out a radio alert: “AIR RAID PEARL HARBOR. THIS IS NOT A SIMULACRUM”. Arriving at Pearl Harbor, Japanese torpedo boats skillfully maneuvered into the harbor in groups of two and three in a sudden and forceful attack that lasted only a few minutes. Within an hour, a second fleet of 167 additional Japanese aircraft bombed the site.
American residents watching the attack from afar watched in horror as the screams of the men on the sunken battleships rent the air, smoke rose from the sea, and the wounded and dead swam in waters bloodied and slippery with burning oil. As the effects of the attack subsided, the grim casualties became known: 2,403 American civilians and military personnel had been killed and 1,178 wounded. Two battleships and 188 aircraft were destroyed.
The attack took American military personnel by surprise and was certainly costly, but it did not cripple the US Navy.
Attack On Pearl Harbor: History, Date, Map, Casualties And Facts
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