When this article went to press the Pear Harbor attack was already over a year old - and like the articles that came out in '41, these two pages capture much of the outrage that was the general feeling among so many of the American people. The article serves to give an account as to how the ships that were damaged that morning have largely recovered and were once again at sea (excluding the Arizona).
Five months after the Pearl Harbor attack the United States Navy defeated the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Coral Sea, click here to read about it...
Attached is an eyewitness account of the Pearl Harbor attack as relayed to family members in a letter written home a few weeks after the assault:
"The noise was like ten thousand factories gone nuts....Quicker than I can tell you, a bomb blows up the barracks with the gang in it, a ship explodes in front of me, a hangar goes up in flames..."
The very next day President Roosevelt stood before the microphones in the well of the U.S. Capitol and asked Congress to declare war against the Empire of Japan; CLICK HERE to hear about the reactions of the American public during his broadcast...
Pearl Harbor Christmas: A World at War, December 1941
Click here to read about the Battle of Midway.
One morning a 17 year-old boy exclaimed to his amateur aviator father: "Let's fly around the island, Dad!" - this article wouldn't seem worthy of appearing on the internet if they lived on Nantucket or Martha's Vineyard, but the island in question was Honolulu and the morning was December 7, 1941... When the twenty-year-old editor at YANK MAGAZINE wrote this editorial at the close of W.W. II he was expressing a belief that was shared equally with the members of the W.W. I generation who prosecuted and managed the war from Washington - and that was an understanding that the world is a far more dangerous place than we thought it was and it needs to be watched. This 1946 article is similar to other columns that appeared in 1947 (when the CIA was established) and 1952 (when the NSA opened its doors) in that it announced the creation of a government agency intent on global espionage in order to have done with all future concerns that another Pearl Harbor was in the planning.
"It now becomes apparent that the U.S. Government, long before Pearl Harbor, knew Tokyo's war plans almost as thoroughly as did the Japanese. To all practical purposes, Washington had ears attuned to the most intimate, secret sessions of Japan's cabinet." To get a sense as to how thoroughly the Japanese diplomatic codes had been compromised, we recommend that you read the attached article. It is composed entirely of the chit-chat that took place between the government functionaries in Tokyo, their diplomats in Washington, their spies in Hawaii and their representatives in Berlin.
The article winds up explaining that the one vital communication that contained the information regarding the day of Japan's attack was not translated until December 8.
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