The attack on the naval base at Pearl Harbor is arguably the significant event of the 20th century with regard to US and, to a large extent, world history. Though America had 8 aircraft carriers in 1941, with only a handful based in Hawaii (fortunately, they were at sea the morning of the attack and suffered no damage), the idea that the battleships, those castles of steel, were still the preeminent naval war fighting machine as they had been in the first world war was still the dominant orthodoxy in the Navy high command. Losing most of its dreadnought fleet on December 7th forced the US Navy to shift its strategic and tactical thinking (after all, they'd just had a disastrous lesson in the lethal capabilities of carriers and the vulnerability of battleships) and center future operations around the carriers. During the war, the US built around 28 new carriers (excluding small "jeep" or escort carriers) and only 8 battleships. With the exception of shore bombardment during amphibious operations, battleships played only a minor role in the naval war after Pearl Harbor, while carriers have been the core of naval battle groups and an extension of American diplomacy to this day.
The American people, remembering the slaughter of the trenches in The Great War of 1914-18 (no one called it WWI at the time since WWII was still just ramping up) were reluctant to get involved in yet another European conflict. Neutrality was the mood of the nation and the official policy of the Roosevelt government, albeit a very one-sided neutrality. The attack on Pearl Harbor changed all that. Though there had been severe diplomatic tension between the US and Japan for over a decade, there was no declaration of war or even the imminent threat of war. Japan was a growing military power but lacked natural resources of its own. It needed the resource-rich (rubber, oil and other vital needs) regions of the south Pacific and southeast Asia to support its ongoing war in China and feed its growing military machine. The attack on Pearl Harbor - and other smaller US bases in the western Pacific (like Guam and the Philippines) - was intended to check the ability of the United States to counter Japan's moves against those regions and buy time to consolidate their conquests. Most in the Japanese government and military did not look on the American people as a warrior class, and certainly not a people who possessed bushido. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the mastermind behind the attack, upon hearing of its unbounded success was said to have lamented, "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve." (this quote is apocryphal and has not been reliably documented) and the attack did just that. American men of military age flooded local recruiting stations, FDR addressed Congress the very next day to declare war and American industries very quickly began retooling the nation's underutilized production capacity (the Great Depression was still a very recent memory) to become the greatest and most prolific industrial and military machine the world had ever known. The US continues that military superiority to this day (though it may be ill-suited to the asymmetrical tactics of its current foes) and is still the largest economy on the planet, despite gains made by other countries.
Admiral Yamamoto would not live to see just how terrible that resolve would become.
Back in 1985 I was on temporary assignment to Pearl Harbor and wound up staying at a transient barracks on Ford Island for about 3 weeks. Ford Island is the former home of "Battleship Row" and Ford Island Naval Air Station. If you've seen footage of planes being bombed on the ground during the attack, that's mostly where it happened. There were motor whaleboats and a ferry that would shuttle personnel from the main Island and Ford Island in the middle of the harbor and back (and they've built a bridge now, apparently). The shuttle's path would take you right down Battleship Row past the marker piers for the USS Oklahoma, USS West Virginia and other ship that were berthed there that day, almost to the USS Arizona Memorial. It's been 25 years or so but I still remember the bullet holes in the stucco of my barracks, and visiting the memorial - about the only things I do recall from my visit there. I remember the suffocating quiet and uneasy sense of trespassing. It's the same feeling I felt when I was at the Vietnam War Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. There's a power in those places that's hard to put your finger on.
There are many more great photos and other resources over at the US Navy's history pages.
"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." from US Navy History site
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| Pearl Harbor survivors observe the U.S. Naval Sea Cadets Concert Band of the West perform at the Pearl Harbor Memorial Museum & Visitor Center during Kama'aina and military appreciation day at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, Dec. 4, 2011. This year marks the 70th anniversary of the 1941 attacks on Pearl Harbor in which more than 2,400 people died. U.S. Navy photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Daniel Barker |
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