A Day that Will Live in Infamy

Rescue operations on the U.S.S. West Virginia after the attack on Pearl Harbor Dec. 7, 1941

December 7th 1941, a date that will live in infamy.    Those words uttered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during his address to Congress have resonated in the 70 years since the attack on Pearl Harbor Naval Base in Hawaii.


Americans were shocked out of their inclination to isolationism during the 1930s by what was understood as being a sneak attack by Japanese forces.

Recent scholarship calls into question how much of a surprise the Japanese strike was to the American government.  In his new book December 1941: 31 Days that Changed America and Saved the World, Craig Shirley points to a recently declassified FBI on Franklin Roosevelt.  On December 4, 1941, a memo from the Office of Naval Intelligence warned the President that:

In anticipation of open conflict with this country, Japan is vigorously utilizing every available agency to secure military, naval and commercial information, paying particular attention to the West Coast, the Panama Canal and the Territory of Hawaii.

Unlike Loose Change 9/11 conspiracy mongers, Shirley does not purport that FDR knew of the attack and did nothing or blew the response. Instead, the author of December 1941 suggests that there were more pieces to the puzzle.

This was certainly true on the diplomatic end.  American and Japanese diplomats  had been engaged in a tense series of negotiations over a US embargo of oil shipments to Japan in the three months prior to December, 1941.  FDR’s Secretary of State Cordell Hull had presented Tokyo with a 10 point ultimatum on November 26, 1941 which stunned Japanese diplomats who had just suggested a 90 day cooling off period.

Most American history books key on the difficulty of translating the Japanese cable that delayed delivery of the demarche, which was supposed to have been handed over just as the attack on Pearl Harbor began. But American sources had intercepted a Japanese Foreign Ministry draft memorandum that was tantamount to a declaration of war. But FDR saw nothing new in the message and took no further preparations.  In addition, Japanese researcher Takeo Iguchi debunks the myth that war was caused by a misunderstanding, as internal Japanese government documents indicated that Japanese Army and Navy prevailed over the Foreign Ministry to keep their war aims secret.

Another interesting angle of the Day of Infamy is why President Roosevelt only asked Congress for a declaration of war against the Empire of Japan.  On the evening of December 7th, FDR was shaken as he expected America to be hit but not hurt in any conflict with Japan. Historian Shirley pointed out that FDR and his War Cabinet considered declaring war against all three Axis powers, Japan, Germany and Italy.  But in the end, FDR only chose Japan, as America was still healing from the Great War and isolationism.  Oddly enough, it was German Führer Adolph Hitler who declared war against America in self written speech before the Reichstag on December 11, 1941. There might have been a markedly different outcome had America kept its attention towards the Pacific and Europe had to fight for itself aside from Lend Lease with the British Empire.

Seeing the Attack on Pearl Harbor Through New Eyes

When the Japanese attack on the American naval base on December 7, 1941, Honolulu Star-Bulletin reporter Elizabeth MacIntosh wrote an account of the attack that was so graphic that it was not published.  The Washington Post has now published this first hand reportage.

Her editors assigned MacIntosh to cover the Emergency Room in Honolulu–

The vision of death became reality when I was assigned to cover the emergency room of the hospital.

The first victims of the Japanese-American war were brought there on that bright Sunday morning.

Bombs were still dropping over the city as ambulances screamed off into the heart of the destruction. The drivers were blood-sodden when they returned, with stories of streets ripped up, houses burned, twisted shrapnel and charred bodies of children.

In the morgue, the bodies were laid on slabs in the grotesque positions in which they had died. Fear contorted their faces. Their clothes were blue-black from incendiary bombs. One little girl in a red sweater, barefoot, still clutched a piece of jump-rope in her hand.

Firefighters from the Hickam Air Force Base carried the victims in. The men had a red T marked on their foreheads, mute testimony of the efficiency of first-aiders in giving tetanus shots to ward off lockjaw. The body of a man with a monogrammed shirt, H.A.D., was marked DOA (dead on arrival), trundled off to make room for victims who were still breathing.

MacIntosh’s piece is worth reading in its entirety to show how the reality of what Europeans had faced in World War II was immediately understood by this first hand witness to expansionist aggression by Axis forces on America.



History buffs should also be interested in seeing a  documentary “Pearl Harbor Declassified”  for  the Military Channel (now known as the American Heroes Channel) which uses modern stabilization techniques to give a frame-by-frame account of the first 15 minutes of the attack on Pearl Harbor.





The stabilized images more clearly shows the carnage and the tactical successes of the Imperial Japanese attack.  However, Admiral Chester Nimitz pointed out many of the missed opportunities of the surprise attack.

The timing of the attack spared many American lives.  The Japanese attack was at 8 AM on a Sunday morning, so nine out of ten sailors were on shore leave.  Had these same ships been at sea and sunk, the casualty count would have been 38,000 instead of the 3,800 servicemen.

Japanese bombers targeted the battleships which were arrayed in a row.  But these Imperial Japanese attackers never bothered to destroy the dry docks.  Had the docks been bombed, it would have required towing each of these ships to sea to repair them. But since the ships were in shallow water and could quickly be raised rather than requiring them to be towed to America.

It is ironic that the attack may have been prompted by an American oil embargo to the Japanese but the Imperial air attack failed to target the Pearl Harbor fuel depot.  If Japanese bombers strafed the tank farm near the submarine base, which were just five miles from the docks of Pearl Harbor, it would have destroyed every drop of oil America had for the Pacific Theater.




[The piece originally ran on District of Calamity on December 7, 2014]