World History - Pearl Harbor

Pearl Harbor

On December 7, 1941, Japanese carrier-based bombers struck the American naval base at Pearl Harbor. Japan’s military planners hoped to cripple the U.S. Pacific Fleet in order to buy time to capture and fortify the region they sought to control, then negotiate an armistice from a position of strength. War had not been declared between the two nations before the attack; the Japanese embassy in Washington, D.C., took too long decoding the 5,000-word message from their homeland; however, the plan was to deliver it just 30 minutes before the bombs were to start falling anyway.

America’s president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, had long wanted the U.S. involved in the war on the side of Great Britain. There have always been questions about how much Roosevelt knew of the Japanese plans and whether or not he allowed the attack to occur in order to get into the European war "through the back door."

The plan to cripple the U.S. fleet failed—although a number of battleships and other vessels and facilities were severely damaged or destroyed—primarily because none of the American aircraft carriers based at Pearl were in the harbor that Sunday morning. They were on assignments at sea, including an assignment to find the Japanese fleet that was known to have sailed days earlier.

In addition to bombing Pearl Harbor, Japan swept through British Malaya in a "bicycle blitzkrieg" and captured "impregnable Singapore," seizing more territory in a shorter amount of time than any nation since Napoleon’s France. It was now at war with China, the United States, the United Kingdom and Commonwealth nations (notably Australia, New Zealand, India and Burma), and the Netherlands. (In 1938, Japanese forces had been decisively beaten by those of the Soviet Union in the Battle of Khalkin Gol, and those two nations signed a non-aggression pact that would last until the final weeks of World War II.)

In the Philippines, a U.S. protectorate, American and Filipino forces put up a valiant, months-long defense against a Japanese invasion, but the numbers against them were too great and they could not be resupplied. After Bataan, the last holdout in the Philippines, fell in April 1942, the Imperial Army forced 64,000 Filipino and 12,000 U.S. soldiers to march for over a week to reach a prison camp. Many died along the way, often shot, bayoneted or beheaded when they fell from exhaustion. It became known as the Bataan Death March.

Although the United States switched from a peacetime to a wartime economy very rapidly, the transition still required time, as did the training for hundreds of thousands of new troops. Unable to launch a sustained attack against Japan, war planners settled for a dangerous mission to boost homefront morale: the Doolittle Raid on Japan. On April 18, 1942, sixteen B-25 bombers launched from the carrier Hornet and, led by Colonel Jimmy Doolittle, bombed the Japanese capital of Tokyo and the city of Nagoya. Though the bombing caused little damage, it succeeded as a morale booster in America, and it embarrassed the Japanese High Command. Determined to eliminate further raids, the Imperial Navy sent a fleet to locate and destroy American aircraft carriers a month and a half later.