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Pearl Harbor


It didn't mean anything to us until a large group of planes came near the ship and we could see, for the first time, the rising sun emblem on the plane wings .a deafening roar filled the room and the entire ship shuttered. It was the forward magazine. One and a half million pounds of gun powder exploding in a massive fireball disintegrating the whole forward part of the ship. (Schaaf) .
             This is just one of the eyewitness accounts from those who survived the attack. The consequences of the attack were devastating. There were "2,403 dead, 188 destroyed planes and a crippled U.S. Pacific Fleet that included 8 damaged or destroyed battleships" (Ibis). The U.S.S. Arizona and the U.S.S. Utah were completely destroyed and the U.S.S. Oklahoma capsized. President Roosevelt called December 7, "a day which will live in infamy." If some of the people in power-position in Washington would have realized the merit of analyzing Japan-United States relations and Japanese behavior in the years preceding the attack, then Pearl Harbor, and all who perished there, may have been spared or at least warned. .
             One indicator of the possibility of Japanese aggression should have been their behavior in the years preceding 1941. Before 1941, the Japanese had been behaving very imperialistically. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, Japan had been invading and seizing territories on their conquest for what they called the "Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere," but what the rest of the world came to know as total Pacific domination. In 1895 Japan seized Formosa, in 1910 Korea, in 1914 the Marshall, Mariana and Caroline Islands, the list continues (Shapiro 91). In July of 1941, the Japanese Empire invaded the remainder of French Indochina. The publicized reason was: with the complete embargo, the Japanese forces badly needed oil, rubber and other raw materials to support their conquests. It was theorized by some of Roosevelt's staff, however, that realistically, they did this to get ever so closer to the American outpost at Pearl Harbor, to gain a strategic area that would be very instrumental if Japan ever decided to expand towards the Hawaiian Islands and other south Pacific territories.


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