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Pearl Harbor Bombing Effect

Decent Essays

On December 7th, 1941, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, causing it to become one of the most infamous days in American history. Although numerous Americans grieve the event each year, many people do not know what caused the tragedy to occur. In 1937, Japan invaded China, where many Americans had gone to be missionaries. Quickly, Japan seized much of Indochina and was planning on acquiring more (“History of Pearl Harbor”). The Japanese began bombing and hit a U.S. Navy ship. As a result, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt moved the Navy’s Pacific Fleet from California to Pearl Harbor to keep a better eye on the Japanese (Allen, 11-12). Afterward, a few of the Allies, U.S., Britain, and the Netherlands, ended all trade with Japan. Declining …show more content…

In Washington, D.C., U.S. codebreakers were slowly cracking the Japanese code. They learned that Japan was planning an attack and there was a Japanese spy on Oahu. In January of 1941, the U.S. ambassador to Japan, Joseph C. Grew, informed the nation’s capital that Japan was organizing a bombing on Pearl Harbor, yet nobody believed him. Three months later, the codebreakers finally decoded the messages, and Admiral Kichisaburo Nomura informed his superiors, but Japan was so confident in their code that they did not believe that the U.S. could decrypt it (“A Pearl Harbor Timeline”). Although Pearl Harbor’s bombing seemed to astonish civilians, those who followed politics would not have been surprised (“Failure of …show more content…

After much training, the pilots knew the plan: hit the warships Nevada, Arizona, Tennessee, West Virginia, Maryland, Oklahoma, and California (Sullivan, 4). One hundred eighty-three planes and eighty-nine bombers arrived that morning with the goal of causing so much damage to the Pacific Fleet that the US would be forced to once again initiate trade (Allen, 25). Deployed weeks prior, submarines had been awaiting the arrival of the planes for many days. Looking for a reported submarine, the USS Ward was the first to see the planes fly in(Sullivan, 2). Dropping torpedoes and bombs, planes went for their targets, and the Oklahoma capsized first. Although the Japanese celebrated a naval victory, their submarines, called midgets, did not strike anything (Allen,

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