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Battleship Row: The Two Hours That Changed America Forever
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
At 7:48 AM on December 7, 1941, 353 Japanese aircraft descended on Pearl Harbor and sank the sleeping giant's illusions along with its fleet. This chapter traces Yamamoto's gamble, the warnings that failed, and the catastrophic minutes that killed 2,403 Americans and ended isolationism overnight.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
It's just before eight in the morning. Sunday, December seventh, nineteen forty-one.
To understand what happened that morning, you have to go back further than nineteen forty-one. The collision between Japan and the United States didn't happen in a day.
Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto had studied at Harvard. He'd served as a naval attaché in Washington.
What makes the attack especially stark in retrospect is how many times it almost didn't work, and how many American systems failed to stop it. A decrypted diplomatic message had given intelligence analysts reason to believe something was coming.
The first wave hit at seven forty-eight in the morning, Hawaii time. One hundred eighty-three aircraft.
The USS Arizona is the name most people remember, and the reason is the scale of what happened to her. A Japanese armor-piercing bomb penetrated her forward magazine.
When the smoke cleared, twenty-one American ships had been sunk or damaged. Nearly one hundred ninety aircraft were destroyed.
Franklin Roosevelt learned of the attack that afternoon. By the next morning, he was before a joint session of Congress.
For years before the attack, American public opinion had been sharply divided. There was a powerful isolationist movement that argued the country had no business in European or Asian wars.
Not every consequence of December seventh pointed toward unity and resolve. Some pointed toward fear, and fear produced one of the most serious domestic failures of the war.
The attack on Pearl Harbor reshaped American foreign policy for the rest of the twentieth century and beyond. The isolationism that characterized American thinking through the nineteen thirties never fully recovered.
The USS Arizona still lies at the bottom of Pearl Harbor. The memorial built above her draws more than a million visitors a year.
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