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December 7 Remembered: The Human Cost of Pearl Harbor's Darkest Hours
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
On December 7, 1941, 353 Japanese aircraft descended on Pearl Harbor in 110 minutes of coordinated destruction that killed 2,403 Americans and ended U.S. isolationism forever. This chapter follows the attack from Yamamoto's carriers to the burning wreck of the USS Arizona.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
On the morning of December seventh, nineteen forty-one, the United States was a country that believed it could stay out of the war. By noon, that belief was gone.
To understand why Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, you have to go back further than nineteen forty-one. Japan had been on an imperial course since the eighteen nineties.
The architect of the attack was Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. He knew the United States better than most of his contemporaries.
December seventh was a Sunday. For the men stationed at Pearl Harbor, it was a quiet morning.
What followed was one hundred and ten minutes of coordinated destruction. The first wave targeted the battleships and airfields simultaneously.
Two thousand four hundred and three Americans were killed on December seventh. Another eleven hundred and seventy-eight were wounded.
President Franklin Roosevelt learned of the attack while meeting with advisors at the White House. By that afternoon the outline of casualties was becoming clear.
Before December seventh, isolationism had been a mainstream political position in the United States. It wasn't fringe.
The attack left a wound on the American home front that the country would spend decades acknowledging. Fear followed the shock.
Yamamoto's plan rested on a fundamental misread of American character. He expected a negotiated peace.
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