December 7, 1941 - ” A date which will live in infamy,” according to President Franklin Roosevelt.

The attack is rumored to have caused Fleet Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku to have mused, “I fear that all we have done is awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with terrible resolve.”

Japan, desiring to dominate the Pacific and rule East Asia, underhandedly attacked the United States Navy at Pearl Harbor, a treacherous deed considering the US was neutral, in an attempt to neutralize the Americans before they could get involved in the war. America responded to this attack by quickly mobilizing and taking the war to Japan.

Not quite right?

How about this?

Japan, seeking to procure minerals and other raw materials it needed, exercised a system of spheres of influence, just as the European powers and the United States were doing in the region, when they were met with unprovoked American belligerence in the form of a blockade from the Philippines. Being starved of precious resources and battered by attacks on their possessions in Asia, the Empire of Japan was left with no choice but to attempt to mitigate America’s strangulation of the nation.

Still not it?

Given that you’re reading this article in English, it’s likely you are from an English-speaking country, which means it’s likely you’ve heard the first story, but not the second. If you’ve also heard the second, it’s likely that you tend to believe one or the other. The truth, we always hear, is somewhere in the middle, but that doesn’t really tell us anything. So, on the 65th anniversary of the December 7, 1941 Japanese attack on the US Naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, we bring you a brief history of what happened (with links to more detailed accounts.)

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The American minesweeper USS Condor spotted a Japanese Ko-hyoteki midget submarine at half past four on the morning of Sunday, December 7th and relayed its location to the destroyer　Ward, which sank the sub at 6:37 a.m., thus firing what were technically the first shots of what would soon be known as the Attack on Pearl Harbor and the beginning of World War II for the United States.

Sometime in the next hour, another Japanese midget submarine entered Pearl Harbor and fired a torpedo into the battleship West Virginia, technically beginning the Japanese attack. While what exactly happened to that sub is unknown, it is known that none of the ten crewmen aboard the five midget subs involved returned safely to Japan. Nine were killed, becoming kami, or gods, revered in their homeland, and one, Sakamaki Kazuo, became the first P.O.W. taken by the Americans in WWII, reviled in his homeland.

Despite widespread notices that war with Japan was imminent and warnings including one from General Billy Mitchell, which not only warned of war with Japan, which was then still in the Taisho era, but of an air attack on Pearl Harbor, as far back as 1924, at which point Pearl Harbor had been a US Navy shipyard only since 1908 and a center of military aviation (based at Ford Island) for only seven years, the commencement of the main thrust of the first of two waves of the Japanese attack at 7:53 a.m. (3:23 a.m. on the 8th in Japan) took the slumbering Americans - ammunition under lock and key, anti-aircraft guns unmanned, fighters parked wing-to-wing to prevent sabotage, arms not distributed around the base in order to avoid unnerving local landowners, too few patrol flights being flown, submarine nets not in place in the erroneous belief that the harbor’s shallow waters were a natural defense - by surprise.

183 Japanese planes left aircraft carriers two-hundred miles north of Hawaii and attacked in the first wave, led by Lieutenant-Commander Fuchida Mitsuo, attacking the prime targets, the battleships as Hickham and Wheeler fields, among US air bases around Oahu, were dive-bombed. In the second wave, 170 planes attacked Bellows Field and Ford Island, opposed by a mere twenty-five sorties of P-36s and P-40s and anti-aircraft fire.

Three attacks had been planned, but Vice Admiral Nagumo Chuichi, commander of the Carrier Striking Task Force, abandoned the third wave for a variety of reasons, including improved American defenses during the second attack, which resulted in two-thirds of Japan’s losses, the increased preparation time required for a third attack, and the threat of detection by the three absent US carriers, meant to have been targets. In the end, the battleship Arizona was destroyed, the Oklahoma was capsized and later righted, but never repaired, and six other battleships were sunk, damaged, or beached, but repaired and returned to service during the war. Nine other warships were severely damaged. 188 planes were destroyed. 2,403 American servicemen and sixty-eight civilians were killed.

Why? The Casus belli

Growing pains threatened the established order.

After Commodore Matthew Perry’s black ships dropped anchor in the harbor at Shimoda, forcing Tokugawa Japan open for the purposes of securing whaling rights in Japanese waters and, more important, the coal so avariciously consumed by steamships, thus precipitating a civil war in which the power of the emperor was “restored” in the controversial Northern line of the until-then impotent Imperial family, resulting in the ascendancy of Mutsuhito, the Meiji Emperor, Japan embarked on a period of modernization possibly unmatched in modern history. Meiji Japan adopted a Prussian-style Imperial constitution and began importing machinery, technology, and even fashion from Europe. It was not long before Japan realized it could and should catch up with the West and, as a result, be regarded on an equal footing.

This meant not only adopting Western technology and industrialization, but also needing a way to fuel such advancement. Being a mountainous island nation, Japan, of course, needed natural resources. This need led to a war with China in 1894, which gained Japan Formosa, and with Russia in 1904, gaining Japan control of Korean and territories in and near China. Japan’s control of these territories, as well as of many of Germany’s former East Asian and Pacific possessions, was formalized after World War I, in which Japan had supported the Triple Entente - the powers later to largely make up the Allied Powers in World War II.

As Japan militarized in the early years of the Showa era (the reign of Emperor Hirohito), it set up the puppet state of Manchukuo in Manchuria (in 1931) and staged an attack on its own facilities in Manchuria, in 1937, to provide the pretext for an attack on Chinese forces.

The United States, United Kingdom, Netherlands, and Australia, all of whom had territorial claims in the Pacific, and the League of Nations protested, which resulted in Japan’s withdrawal from the League and the US’s termination of the 1911 US-Japan commerce treaty - an action that was both a mark of disapproval and a removal of the impediments to an embargo.

Japan declared common cause with Nazi Germany in 1939 by signing the Anti-Comintern Pact, and soon after, in 1940 signed the Tripartite Pact with both Germany and Mussolini’s Fascist Italy to form the Axis Powers.

The United States, already giving de facto material support to the United Kingdom, which had already declared war on Germany, responded to Japan’s actions with an embargo on steel and gasoline and the closing of the Panama Canal to Japanese shipping. In order to secure resources thus lost, the Japanese Army moved into Northern Indochina, which resulted in the US’s cutting off of Japan’s most vital resource: oil.

Oil. Well, well, well. The more things change. . .

In 1940, Japan got 80% of its oil from the United States. The US cut off the oil and began an embargo enforced from American possessions in the Philippines. The Japanese Army wanted to push South, into Southeast Asia, to secure oil supplies. The Navy, the world’s third largest, running on imported bunker oil stocks, knew this would bring war with the US.

What Fleet Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, a Harvard man, who reportedly made the “sleeping giant” comment after the attack on Pearl Harbor, actually said prior to the attack:

Should hostilities once break out between Japan and the United States, it is not enough that we take Guam and the Philippines, nor even Hawaii and San Francisco. We would have to march into Washington and sign the treaty in the White House. I wonder if our politicians (who speak so lightly of a Japanese-American war) have confidence as to the outcome and are prepared to make the necessary sacrifices.

What the Japanese Cabinet said on September 4, 1941, at the second of two Imperial Conferences to discuss the attack plans of Imperial General Headquarters:

Our Empire, for the purpose of self-defence and self-preservation, will complete preparations for war … [and is] … resolved to go to war with the United States, Great Britain and the Netherlands if necessary. Our Empire will concurrently take all possible diplomatic measures vis-a-vis the United States and Great Britain, and thereby endeavor to obtain our objectives … In the event that there is no prospect of our demands being met by the first ten days of October through the diplomatic negotiations mentioned above, we will immediately decide to commence hostilities against the United States, Britain and the Netherlands.

What Prime Minister Tojo Hideki’s ultimatum to the United States, the November 26, 1941 Hull note, delivered, for lack of proper instructions regarding its urgency, to US Secretary of State Cordell Hull several hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, said:

Obviously it is the intention of the American Government to conspire with Great Britain and other countries to obstruct Japan’s efforts toward the establishment of peace through the creation of a new order in East Asia … Thus, the earnest hope of the Japanese government to adjust Japanese-American relations and to preserve and promote the peace of the Pacific through cooperation with the American Government has finally been lost.