At five minutes to eight o’clock, on a Sunday morning, Dec. 7, 1941, in Hawaii, Japanese planes attacked the United States military base at Pearl Harbor.
An hour later, a second wave of Japanese planes continued the attack. By 9:45 a.m. (local Hawaii time), the attack was finished, with all but 29 Japanese planes returning to the safety of their aircraft carriers.
The attack on Pearl Harbor wiped out approximately half of America’s military airpower in the Pacific Theater; severely damaged eight Navy battleships, three destroyers and three cruisers; demolished the battleships U.S.S. Oklahama and Arizona; and killed more than 2,300 American servicemen.
Pearl Harbor also spurred an isolationist America into World War II. Directly and indirectly, the attack, during the course of the next three-plus years, led the United States to enlist 11.2 million soldiers, 4.2 million sailors, nearly 670,000 Marines, more than 240,000 members of the Coast Guard (the U.S. Air Force had not been created at this time and airpower was under the Army’s purview). American manufacturers produced 296,000 planes, 102,000 tanks, 88,000 ships and landing craft during the course of World War II.
Of the attack on Pearl Harbor, historian Paul Johnson writes, “Thus America, hitherto rendered ineffectual by its remoteness, its divisions, and its pusillanimous leadership, found itself instantly united, angry, and committed to wage total war with all its outraged strength.”
Speaking to a joint session of Congress, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called Pearl Harbor “a date which will live in infamy.” America declared war on Japan. Soon, Germany’s Adolf Hitler officially drew the U.S. into the European conflict by declaring war on America.
Though committed to the task of winning the war, there are myths about the consequences of Pearl Harbor.
Despite anger concerning the attack, every able-bodied, American male did not immediately rush to enlist to wage war. There was a surge in recruitment following the attack, but “contrary to much later mythology, the nation’s young men did not step forward in unison to answer the trumpet’s call, neither before nor after Pearl Harbor (and) deferments were coveted,” writes historian David M. Kennedy on America’s Selective Service process of the early 1940s.
Read the Remainder at Military.Com
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