Japanese Attack On Pearl Harbor example essay topic

Japanese Attack on Pearl Harbor The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor could be considered one of the worst surprise attacks in American history. For every Japanese crewman or pilot killed, almost thirty-eight Americans were killed. Before the attack, the American government had tried to negotiate many times with Japan's leaders to withdraw their troops from China and put an end to the war. Japan had already seized many bases in northern Vietnam and occupied the south in July of 1941, threatening a route to China and theBritish control of Malaya and Burma. President Franklin D. Roosevelt then froze all Japanese assets and put an embargo on all of their trade in oil, chemicals, steel, machinery and other goods, which dealt Japan a devastating blow, because Japan bought more than fifty percent of its imports from the United States. TheBritish and Dutch later put similar embargoes on Japan's goods.

Later that spring, Roosevelt moved the Pacific Fleet's headquarters from San Diego to Pearl Harbor. In late 1941, the Nave Department sent a message to its commanders, specifically Admiral Husband Kimmel, the Pacific Fleet chief in Pearl Harbor: This dispatch is to be considered a war warning. Negotiations with Japan have ceased and an aggressive move by Japan is expected within the next few days. Sixty-year-old Kimmel took the warning as no more than saying that Japan was going to attack someplace.

Many people in Washington thought that the Japanese would attack the Philippines, so General Douglas MacArthur, retired Chief of Staff, over confidently said that he would have 200,000 Filipinos ready for combat soon. On November 26, 1941, Chukchi Nagumo's armada left Hitokappu Bay, bound for Pearl Harbor. There were six carriers, 400 warplanes, two battleships, two cruisers, nine destroyers and a dozen others hips. Its orders were that if there was an agreement made with the United States, then the fleet would immediately return to Japan On December 2 (Tokyo time), Admiral Iso roku Yamamoto sent the message: Climb Mount Niit aka 1208. It meant for the ships to attack Pearl Harbor on 12/08 (December seventh in Pearl Harbor, since they had to cross the International Date Line). At 5: 50 a.m.

Nagumo's fleet was about two hundred and twenty miles north of Pearl Harbor, where the airplanes would take off. There would be two waves of planes to attack. The first wave would consist of forty-nine horizontal bombers, fifty-one divebombers, forty torpedo planes, and forty-three fighter planes, one hundred eighty three planes total. Commander Fuchida had to choose between two ways of attacking, surprise, in which the torpedo planes would go in to attack first, then would go the horizontal bombers, then the dive bombers, while the fighters remained above for protection.

The Japanese attack plan was to drop as many torpedoes as possible before the smoke from the dive bombing ruined the targets. If it would be a surprise lost attack, the divebombers and fighters would hit the airfields and antiaircraft defenses first, then the torpedo planes would come in when the American resistance was crushed. To tell his planes which attack it would be, Commander Fuchida would fire his signal gun once for surprise and twice for surprise lost. The problem was, Commander Fuchida didn t know if the Americans know about them yet or not, so he decided that they would carry out the surprise. He held out his signaling pistol and fired once. The dive bombers went down to 3500 feet, and the torpedo planes dropped so they barely skimmed the sea, ready to lead the assault.

Then Fuchida noticed that the fighters weren t doing anything at all. He thought they must have missed his signal, so he fired another one. The fighters saw the signal this time, but so did the bombers. They decided it was the signal for surprise lost and they would go in first. In a lot of confusion, the main plan for phases of attack was gone; dive bombers and torpedo planes all prepared to hit Pearl Harbor at the same time. That Saturday night in Pearl Harbor was the same party night that it always was.

Hundreds of soldiers and sailors went to Waikiki Beach as usual to go to the bars and shows. Admiral Kimmel went to a dinner party and left early because he had an early morning golf date with Lieutenant General Walter C. Short. Short went to a charity dance at the Schofield Barracks and also left early. As he rode along the coast highway, he admired the lights of Pearl Harbor glowing below him. Isn t that a beautiful sight he said, and what a target it would make!

At 7: 49 a. m., as the Japanese fleet neared Pearl Harbor, Commander Fuchida signaled the attack. At 7: 53, even before the first bomb fell, he was so sure of victory that he signaled the code word for success: Tora (tiger), Tora, Tora. A couple of months earlier, the Japanese had finished their special torpedoes for the Pearl Harbor attack. Normal torpedoes when released would drop underwater to at least one hundred feet before coming back up towards the surface to hit their target.

That would be a problem at Pearl Harbor because the average water depth there was only forty feet. They had to attach wooden stabilizers to the torpedoes, so that they would only drop to 35 feet before coming back up to the target. At 7: 55, the attack began. Bombs blew up all over the place, while torpedoes tore into the sides ofthe ships.

People in Pearl Harbor really didn t know that it was a real attack at first because the Navy would attack them every day for practice. When they finally did figure out that it was a real attack, there wasn touch they could do because out of the three hundred and some planes the Americans had, all but a few were not working or had been damages or destroyed by the Japanese attack force, and most of their ammunition was locked away. Some people on the ships would get machine guns, rifles, or even shotguns to try to fight back. Boatswain's mate Thomas Donahue stood by and threw wrenches at low flying planes.

Then someone yelled up to him and asked what he needed. Powder, he called back, I can t keep throwing things at them. A sailor named Sands ran out of an armory with a Browning automatic rifle and fired at Lieutenant Fu sata Iida, a Japanese pilot. Iida turned around to fire at the sailor, but Sands had already fired another BAR clip (BAR was what they called the Browning automatic rifle), and ducked the bullets that hit the armory's wall.

Iida turned to go after him again, but his plane began to leak gas. He had said before takeoff that any pilot whose plane fails should crash into the enemy, so he turned for one last attack. For the last few moments of his life he and Sands faced each other and fired, Iida from his wounded airplane and Sands with his BAR. A few seconds later the plane hit a highway nose first and smashed into pieces.

Lee Goldfarb was a radioman on the minelayer Oglala when the attack began. This is what he said about the attack: We were outboard of the Helena, a cruiser. A torpedo went under us, slammed into the Helena and loosened our plates. We started to take on water. Several minutes later I copied the famous message, Air raid on Pearl Harbor. This is no drill.

We re tilting-I know this is no drill. An hour later, the Oglala rolled over and sank. Me and Wally Gojanovich, who lives in Florida now, got off together. While we were running, they were strafing us. Little chips of cement were jumping up from the machine gun bullets. I looked up and saw the plane, Saw-saw! -that smiling face.

The mustache, the white scarf and the smiling face that I ll never forget as long as I live. Never. In San Diego, when we were being assigned to ships, I said, What the hell is the Oglala This young kid says, It's an old minelayer. An old tub. I got the battleship Arizona. He's still on it.

His name is Arthur Blais. In all, 354 planes attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. There were 183 planes in the first wave of attack, 171 in the second wave. At the airfields, 188 planes were destroyed and 159 were damaged. The airfields at Ewa and Kaneohe were hit the hardest. Of the eighty-two planes at these two fields, only one was in shape to fly at the end of the raid.

The American ships lost were the battleships Arizona and Oklahoma, destroyers Downes and Cassin, and the target ship Utah. The battleships Tennessee, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, cruisers Helena, Honolulu, Raleigh, destroyer Shaw, seaplane tender Curtiss, and repair ship Vestal were all damaged, while the battleships West Virginia, California, and Nevada, and the minelayer Oglala were beached or sunk but later salvaged. Eighteen ships in all were sunk or seriously damaged. There were 2,008 people from the Navy, 109 people from the marines, 218 from the Army and 68 civilians that were all killed, and another 1,178 wounded. Of the 2,403 Americans killed, 1,102 died when the Arizona exploded. The wreckage of the Arizona still holds the remains of all of the sailors who died in that explosion.

The Japanese lost twenty-nine airplanes in the attack-nine fighters, fifteen divebombers, and five torpedo planes. They also lost one large submarine, five midget subs, fifty-five airmen, nine crewmen, and an unknown number of people on the large sub. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was what brought the United States into World War II. The day after the attack, President Roosevelt spoke to Congress: I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday comma December seventh comma a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire period end.