Pearl Harbor

Admiral Richardson, leader of the pacific fleet does not think this is a good idea and gets removed from power. Admiral Husband E. Kimmel is put in command and has a plan to make the navy fleet ready for war. With Europe in turmoil, Tojo takes advantage and joins forces with Hitler. Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto is concerned that this means war with the United States. He does not want war with the U.S. because he had gone to Harvard and seen how much of an industrial giant that the U.S. was. The Japanese relied heavily on the U.S. for oil so the U.S. government put an oil embargo on japan. This temporarily stopped Japan from moving further into China. Japan then moves southern to the Dutch ruled West Indies where there is lots of oil. 

Next Japan wants to move into the American held Philippines to get revenge on the oil stoppage, but Yamamoto has a different plan, it is to take out the entire U.S. navy fleet in Pearl Harbor. Japan is 3000 miles away from Hawai’i and it would take 12 day to get there. The hardest part would be keeping it all a secret. In Hawai’i there are more Japanese than any other race so spies blend in. In Washington, American intelligence breaks Japan’s secret communications code. It is clear from the messages that Japan is going to attack but no one knows when. A message is sent to Pearl Harbor from Washington that an attack is coming soon. The message also says that the attack will not be at Pearl Harbor, but somewhere else. Admiral Kimmel gets the Pacific Fleet ready to go as backup to anywhere the Japanese attack. An order is sent out to put all aircraft on the center of the tarmac to protect the base. While on the aircraft carriers pilots practice the attack with scale models of Oahu and U.S. Navy Battleships. One day before the attack the Japanese pilots are getting ready for war and are in awe that they have gone twelve days undetected.

At 7:02 AM, December 7, 1941, on the north shore of Oahu, radar detected a large blob of planes. Headquarters tells them not to worry and that it is probably some U.S. planes coming from the mainland. Plains start coming in and the initial thought is that there is training on Sunday. Japan’s plan is to attack the air bases so that there is no defense in the sky. The planes are parked in neat rows making perfect targets. Next the Japanese turn their attention to battleship row, the real prize. In minutes all battleships are in flames because of the bombs and Japan’s specially made torpedoes. These torpedoes were specially designed to go in shallow water. One of the bombs strikes the forward magazine of the USS Arizona and explodes all of the ammunition creating a massive explosion. Admiral Kimmel is disappointed because just 30 minutes before the attack he had received a call saying that an enemy submarine had been sunk in the harbor, Kimmel thought nothing of this. At 9:45 AM the attack is over and pearl harbor is a complete mess with many planes destroyed, 19 battleships sunk and thousands of men dead. Kimmel knows that his days as commander are over and later he says that if only one of those bombs had hit me how much better it would have been. Later many of the battleships were recovered and brought back to life. Pearl harbor will never be forgotten