Eng 11 Pearl Harbor

Noah Stuve

English 11/U.S. History

Research Paper

29 March 2017        

Pearl Harbor

Pearl Harbor is a day that will forever live in infamy. Many Americans know the affects that have come from this major event in history. The attack on Pearl Harbor crippled the United States naval fleet in the Pacific. The Japanese wanted to disable the United States pacific fleet so they can be more imperialistic, which led to the attack on Pearl Harbor and later sent the United States into World War II. This one event is one of the only times that all of America was completely unified as one. The attack enraged many Americans and started a larger movement then one could imagine.

One cause of the attack on Pearl Harbor was Japan’s need for natural resources. Japan had just gone through the long process of westernization (transcript), but they were unable to meet the dual challenges of economic depression and the political power of the Japanese military leaders in the 1920s and 1930s, because of this Japan became more imperialistic and started to set their eyes on other countries such as Korea, and Manchuria which is later called “Manchukuo”. Also the Japanese declared war on china in 1937. Since Japan declared war, this provoked the United States into applying a battery of economic sanctions and trade embargoes on Japan. But there was one major problem with Japan being imperialistic. That problem was the United States. With the U.S. in the pacific it imposed a grave threat on Japans plans to move into the Dutch East Indies and Malaya (Davis). So this had Japan planning to attack the island.

This leads to our second cause, the United States underestimated Japan’s power. The United States was roughly aware that something was coming but they didn’t expect the something (the attack) to be so close to our home soil (History.com Staff). Prior to the attack the United States had seen blips on a radar which were the Japanese B5N2 bombers, Aichi D3A1 dive bombers, and their A6M Model 21 Zeros but the United States had mistaken them for United States bombers coming back from bombing runs. Right there the United States could’ve prevented the attack or fought back with more than what they did but they overlooked what was inevitable. The attack on Pearl Harbor destroyed our naval fleet in the pacific, killed around 2,000 people, and damaged some of our airfields. But the United States was able to bounce back easy from this because Japan had missed important on shore facilities like oil storage depots, repair shops, ship yards, and submarine docks leaving them all intact (History.com Staff).

Now after the attack it enraged the American people. There was many effects on the U.S. due to the attack. One effect is the creation of Japanese internment camps (Bosworth), another was the attack led the United States into World War II, and lastly it drove the United States coming together as one. As stated the U.S. had been so enraged we created Japanese Internment camps to keep the Japanese threats so they didn’t influence others or create more problems. Internment camps were large fenced in facilities with mess halls, lavatories, showers, and a barracks (Bosworth). The FBI created a threat list which had substantial amount of people of Japanese descent on it. The United States would seek out people who were on that list and they would put them into the internment camp with no questions asked. Japanese people were enraged and wanted to show their loyalty to the United States. Many Japanese people joined the military. A great deal of the Japanese people joined the 442nd Infantry Regiment which was a mostly Japanese fighting group. Many Japanese people wanted and then later succeeding in showing their loyalty to America.