December 7, 1941 is a day in history that will never be forgotten. Targeting Battleship row, Japan Made its first attack. The U.S fleets Pearl Harbor base was reachable by any aircraft carrier force. Because of this, Japan sent one of its aircraft carriers across the Pacific and at about 7:58am the planes began to hit their targets. Shortly after, 5 out of the 8 battleships at Pearl Harbor were either sunk or sinking, several other ships and most Hawaii based combat planes were also knocked out and over 2400 Americans were killed. Could the U.S have been more prepared for what was coming? Could they have prevented all of the casualties and damages?.
The second attack wave of planes revisited some of the ships already hit, and also spread destruction in the Navy Yard, where they bombed a dry-dock battleship and three destroyers. The other dive-bombers went after the Nevada, which had left the dock and was heading to sea.
The raiders of both attacks had no opportunity to hit American aircraft carriers, all of which were at sea, and did not target fuel storage, most cruisers and destroyers, submarines and most maintenance facilities. But, in just under two hours they had wrecked the U.S Pacific fleet's battleship force, ensuring that it would not interfere with Japans plans for destruction.
" Everything that the Japanese were planning to do was known to the United States-(Army Board, 1944). Many people believe that President Roosevelt provoked the attack and that he knew about it in advance and covered up his failure to warn the Hawaiian commanders. Roosevelt needed the attack to sucker Hitler to declare war, since the public and Congress were overwhelmingly against entering the war in Europe. Roosevelt blinded the commanders at Pearl Harbor and set them up by denying intelligence to Hawaii. Also on November 27, he mislead the commanders into thinking negotiations with Japan were being made when really he was continuing to prevent them from realizing the war was on.
