Pearl
Harbor, 7 December 1941
The 7 December 1941 Japanese raid
on Pearl Harbor was one of the great defining moments in
history. A single carefully-planned and well-executed
stroke removed the United States Navy's battleship force
as a possible threat to the Japanese Empire's southward
expansion. America, unprepared and now considerably
weakened, was abruptly brought into the Second World War
as a full combatant.
Eighteen months earlier, President
Franklin D. Roosevelt had transferred the United States
Fleet to Pearl Harbor as a presumed deterrent to Japanese
agression. The Japanese military, deeply engaged in the
seemingly endless war it had started against China in
mid-1937, badly needed oil and other raw materials.
Commercial access to these was gradually curtailed as the
conquests continued. In July 1941 the Western powers
effectively halted trade with Japan. From then on, as the
desperate Japanese schemed to seize the oil and
mineral-rich East Indies and Southeast Asia, a Pacific
war was virtually inevitable.
By late November 1941, with peace
negotiations clearly approaching an end, informed U.S.
officials (and they were well-informed, they believed,
through an ability to read Japan's diplomatic codes)
fully expected a Japanese attack into the Indies, Malaya
and probably the Philippines. Completely unanticipated
was the prospect that Japan would attack east, as well.
The U.S. Fleet's Pearl Harbor base
was reachable by an aircraft carrier force, and the
Japanese Navy secretly sent one across the Pacific with
greater aerial striking power than had ever been seen on
the World's oceans. Its planes hit just before 8AM on 7
December. Within a short time five of eight battleships
at Pearl Harbor were sunk or sinking, with the rest
damaged. Several other ships and most Hawaii-based combat
planes were also knocked out and over 2400 Americans were
dead. Soon after, Japanese planes eliminated much of the
American air force in the Philippines, and a Japanese
Army was ashore in Malaya.
These great Japanese successes,
achieved without prior diplomatic formalities, shocked
and enraged the previously divided American people into a
level of purposeful unity hardly seen before or since.
For the next five months, until the Battle of the Coral
Sea in early May, Japan's far-reaching offensives
proceeded untroubled by fruitful opposition. American and
Allied morale suffered accordingly. Under normal
political circumstances, an accomodation might have been
considered.
However, the memory of the
"sneak attack" on Pearl Harbor fueled a
determination to fight on. Once the Battle of Midway in
early June 1942 had eliminated much of Japan's striking
power, that same memory stoked a relentless war to
reverse her conquests and remove her, and her German and
Italian allies, as future threats to World peace
credits: US Navy History Center
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