Pearl Harbor

Pearl Harbor

BIBLIOGRAPHY

In the 1920s and 1930s, Americans had become strongly isolationist, many believing that America’s involvement in World War I (1914–1918) had been a political mistake. Moreover, the Great Depression focused people’s attention on the economy. Against this backdrop, the U.S. Congress had passed neutrality acts in 1935 and 1936. The tipping point that rallied public opinion toward involvement in World War II (1939–1945) came on December 7, 1941.

The Japanese leadership had sought to drive U.S. and U.K. forces out of Asia. To Japan, the attack on Pearl Harbor was seen as merely a “strategic necessity”—part of the grand strategy to secure the Pacific for oil shipments to fuel the empire’s efforts to dominate Asia. However, as history has shown, the plan backfired.

In the attack, 21 American ships were sunk or badly damaged, 188 planes were lost, and 155 planes were damaged. In addition, 2,403 American lives were lost and 1,178 persons injured. Fortunately for the U.S. Navy, no aircraft carriers were in port. While the attack produced a substantial military loss, the main effect of the attack was to crystallize Americans’ public opinion against the Axis Powers. On December 8, 1941, the United States declared war on Japan.

Prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had battled with Congress to expand American support for England’s struggle against Germany. But once Americans saw themselves as victims, resistance to entering the war melted away. German führer Adolf Hitler’s declaration of war against the United States on December 11, 1941, provided the linkage necessary to associate pro-war sentiment generated by Pearl Harbor to Germany, and the United States declared war on Germany and Italy on the same day.

Public sentiment toward Japanese Americans was low prior to the attack at Pearl Harbor, as evidenced by the 1924 Immigration Act that halted Japanese immigration. The attack on Pearl Harbor sparked war hysteria. In 1942 Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized the internment of 120,000 individuals of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens. These people were removed from their homes along the West Coast and relocated to inland camps.

President Roosevelt declared December 7 “a date that will live in infamy.” As a term, “Pearl Harbor” has come to represent foreign treachery, the perils of U.S. isolationism, and of potential vulnerability of American military forces. The specter of Pearl Harbor helped to fuel the nuclear arms race between the United States and Union of Soviet Socialist Republics during the twentieth century. But Pearl Harbor also constrained U.S. power. Robert Kennedy persuaded his brother, President John F. Kennedy, not to execute a surprise air strike against Cuba during the 1962 Missile Crisis because it would appear to the world as “Pearl Harbor in reverse.”

In Japan, the attack is sometimes viewed as the mistake that awoke a “sleeping giant.” Others associate it with a dishonorable period of aggression in the nation’s history.

Though Pearl Harbor happened more than sixty years ago, the incident carries a great deal of weight in American political rhetoric. Political analysts and media personnel compared the terrorist attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001, to Pearl Harbor. While similar in some respects, the Pearl Harbor analogy, along with other thinly veiled language such as “axis of evil,” permitted President George W. Bush to build support for the War on Terror by framing it in terms reminiscent of World War II.

SEE ALSO Hitler, Adolf; Roosevelt, Franklin D.; World War II

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Jespersen, T. Christopher. 2005. Analogies at War: Vietnam, the Bush Administration’s War in Iraq, and the Search for a Usable Past. Pacific Historical Review 74 (3): 411–426.

Prange, Gordon W. 1991. At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor. New York: Penguin.

Todd L. Belt