Pearl Harbor
...ing it from the U.S. Army and Navy in Hawaii. They said that he blinded the commanders at Pearl Harbor and set them up by denying intelligence to Hawaii, misleading the commanders on November 27th into thinking that negotiations with Japan were positive and leading away from war and by having false information sent to Hawaii about the location of the Japanese carrier fleet. They say that many men knew about the attack but made sure not to notify the commanders at Pearl Harbor until their 1pm deadline from Washington. FDR was going after Germany and the attack on Pearl Harbor was his way to get into World War II. He felt that if there was an attack against the U.S. and Hitler saw that the U.S. army wasn’t strong Germany would be willing to declare war on them. So he contacted Japan and set up the attack, he knew the actual placement of all the Japanese carriers and knew when the attack was to occur. He withheld the information from the men at the Harbor because he thought if they knew that the Japanese would have no chance and that would ruin his chances for war against Germany. Also in November FDR secretly ordered the Red Cross Disaster Relief director to prepare for massive casualties, the director protested, Roosevelt told him that “the American people would never agree to enter the war with Europe unless they were attacked within their own borders.” So according to the article Roosevelt had full information about the attack and was eager to go ahead with it so he could go to war against Germany. According to The Navel Historical Center’s article on Pearl Harbor the tension between the U.S. and Japan started long before Pearl Harbor. It began with differences over China, Japan kept taking over Chinese nations even though the U.S. was allied with China and was sending over their natural resources for Chinese use. The U.S. was shocked over all the territory Japan was taking so they built up their military on the pacific and cut off the shipment of raw materials to Japan. The commander of the Japanese fleet, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, devised a plan for a surprise attack on the U.S. where it would hurt then the most. The Key elements for this plan were the use of aircraft carriers and naval aviation on a large scale and the element of surprise. The Japanese began training in the spring of 1941 and by October of the same year the naval staff general gave Yamamoto full financial approval to run the mission. At 6:00 am on December 7th six carriers launched the first wave of one hundred and eighty-one planes over Oahu, and the U.S. forces realized that this was not going to be a normal Sunday morning. At 7:00 am an alert operator of an Army radar station spotted the first wave of planes but did not consider them significant enough to take action on. By 8:30 eight battle ships were either destroyed or severely damaged, killing and wounding at the point almost 2,000 men. However Japan was not finished just yet. Around 9:00am the second wave of one hundred seventy planes made their way to the harbor trying to sink the USS Nevada to block the narrow entrance to Pearl Harbor, Nevada got to a safe harbor and was not destroyed, however the Japanese made sure it wasn’t going anywhere after it docked. The attack ended shortly before 10:00 am, less then two hours before it started, sinking eighteen battle ships and killing and wounding just short of 4,000 men. The attack was unknown to anyone however the shock and anger caused by the attack translated into a wholehearted commitment to victory in World War II. According to an article from the library’s online data base it was the Japanese take over of Indochina and the alliance with Germany and Italy that made the U.S. cut off the natural resources to Japan which sprung the idea for the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. On November 28th six aircraft carriers, two battle ships, three cruisers and eleven destroyers set sail some two hundred and seventy-five miles north of Hawaii and launched over three hundred and sixty planes. The first plane appeared around 7:55 local time, after it’s appearance another two hundred planes were located but ignored due to the fact that a group of B- 17’s were supposed to be flying over. Most of the damage was done within the first half hour. The USS Arizona was sunk, th...