Pearl Harbor: A Brief Summary

History has taught us that Pearl Harbor was a cold-blooded attack from out of the blue, but that event, as President Franklin D. Roosevelt put it, “a date that will live in infamy,” was predicted and expected by the U.S. Ambassador Japan as well as other several different times within a span of a few years preceding the attack. Shortly after Japan’s invasion into China, the United States buffed up the military and began putting into place a series of trade restrictions against the Japanese Empire. Magic, a decoding machine that deciphered Japanese diplomatic messages, intercepted an inquiry about ship location and berthing positions at Pearl Harbor and though it was decoded, the government official responsible for forwarding the message was

It lasted for two hours and 20 minutes. The Japanese had 353 fighter planes, bombers, and torpedo planes that were launched from six aircraft carriers. There two waves of the attack; the first wave’s primary focus was important ships and aircrafts. torpedoes made especially for the shallow waters of Pearl Harbor were used to bomb the significant battleships. The torpedoes were made with an anti-roll mechanism and an extension on the rudder that allowed them to navigate the shallow waters of Pearl Harbor. The aircraft pilots were told to attack the ground targets heavily, especially the U.S. aircrafts. If they took out the fighter planes and bombers, the U.S. wouldn’t be able to fight back in the air. Only eight of the forty-nine bombs that were meant for the battleships actually hit their intended target, which was not uncommon in that era. Thirteen of the forty torpedoes hit a battleship, which was their target. Four other torpedoes hit different ships than their initial target. The soldiers, airmen, and sailors were very unprepared. A very large majority of them were still sleeping or in their pajamas yet as it was a Sunday, their relaxed day. The planes, for fear of sabotage not an air raid, were placed tip to tip, making it an excessively easy bull’s eye for the Japanese pilots to hit. Although they were unprepared, the military personnel responded rather

All eight of the battleships that were at Pearl Harbor were damaged, four were sunk. The U.S.S. Arizona was hit the hardest as a bomb was dropped from the air and fell into the ammunition magazine room, which resulted in the battleship being tore in half, and eventually exploded. When the magazine exploded, it killed half of the crew aboard. Out of all of the casualties that occurred during the attack on Pearl Harbor, over half of those were from the sailors who were on the U.S.S. Arizona. After the attack was over, those who weren’t injured went around to collect the bodies of those who were either too badly injured to move or those were dead. While they were cleaning up the bodies, they could hear those who would be entombed forever in the U.S.S.