The USS Arizona Memorial is the final resting place for many of the battleship's 1,177 crew members who lost their lives on December 7, 1941. The Memorial commemorates the site where World War II began for the United States. Visitors experience history through the national memorial's program tour, museum, and wayside exhibits.
The memorial offers tours, exhibits, a film, and educational programs.
The Minidoka Internment National Monument presents the story of the forced relocation of people of Japanese descent within the U.S. following the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor. With President Franklin Roosevelt's (in office 1933-1945) signing of Executive Order 9066, over 120,000 men, women, and children were required to move to one of 10 Relocation Centers. Minidoka was one such center, built to contain the Japanese in the U.S. and prevent potential spy communications. Today the site includes the guard house and waiting room.
The site offers interpretive signage. The Jerome County Museum offers a display on the Minidoka Relocation Center, and the Idaho Farm and Ranch Museum offers a restored barracks building.
Professors Lawrence J. Vale, Thomas Kochan, and J. Phillip Thompson discuss issues related to the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina and the recovery of New Orleans. Vale looks at past urban disasters and how these cities have changed and recovered; Kochan contrasts Franklin D. Roosevelt's response to Pearl Harbor with Bush's to Katrina; and Thompson looks at racial tension in New Orleans, prior to and after the hurricane.
September 11, 2011, marked the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, DC. Next week, December 7, 2011, will mark the 70th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Though news sources, lesson plans, and other materials draw parallels between the attacks, it is important to remember that they occurred in different times and places. What led to the attack on Pearl Harbor? What did the attack entail? What effect did it have on the U.S.? How was the attack memorialized (or not) in later years?
We've gathered all of our resources on the attack on Pearl Harbor on our spotlight page, Remembering Pearl Harbor. Learn about the attack and popular memory with oral history, discover lesson plans and more exploring the context of the attack, and uncover photographs of U.S. participation in World War II.
After you've explored our spotlight, check out these websites for more resources on Pearl Harbor and the anniversary:
What constitutes the limits of dramatic license in fictional motion pictures set within the framework of a historical event? Filmmakers have regularly argued that the need for drama always outweighs the need for plausibility and historical accuracy. Audiences have generally bought the argument, as have the filmmakers themselves. Does it matter that Steven Spielberg portrays the Pentagon receiving word of the death of two Ryan brothers on Omaha Beach within two days of D-Day? Does it matter that a German fighter plane flew to the vicinity of Greenland as shown in U-571? Does it matter that Jimmy Doolittle and his raiders never flew in formation during the attack on Tokyo as shown in Pearl Harbor?
Who cares? After watching U-571, one person said, “If I want to see the truth, I will watch PBS.” But does falsifying or fabricating events add to the drama, or is good drama incompatible with truth? Clearly painting the name Enola Gay on the wrong side of the fuselage in The Beginning or the End (1947) and Above and Beyond (1952) adds nothing to the drama of Paul Tibbets's mission to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Does the mistake matter? On the other hand, portraying Tibbets as feeling guilty for carrying out his assignment, as Above and Beyond clearly does, falsifies history. Do the directors' justification that they could not show an American officer in 1952 willingly killing 80,000 people suffice?
Jonathan Mostow, director of U-571, claimed he was making a fictional story, not a documentary, about life aboard a submarine during the battle of the Atlantic and therefore he did not have to portray history accurately. Nevertheless, the British immediately took offense, claiming he was turning the Royal Navy's capture of an Enigma machine from a German submarine in 1941 into an American heist in 1942. Mostow denied he was doing this, pointing out that the British used a destroyer while he used a submarine. With U-571, the problems had less to do with history than with plausibility. The Germans did fly four-engine patrol planes over the North Atlantic but certainly not single-engine fighters. Whether an American submarine disguised as a German submarine might capture a U-boat might not be too farfetched, at least as portrayed in the movie. But having a second German submarine, in the dark of night, in a driving rainstorm recognize what was happening and figure out which one to torpedo stretches credibility beyond any realistic limits. Likewise, having the American boarding party know how immediately to start the disabled German submarine and get underway strains believability. Worse, submariners have attested to the virtual impossibility of one submarine torpedoing another submarine when both were submerged with the technology available early in the war.
U-571 remains probably the most exciting submarine movie ever made. Nevertheless, the factual and historical errors in the film prevented the director, Mostow, from fulfilling his goal of providing the contemporary generation with any real sense of life aboard a World War II submarine. His response to critics of the film: “Hey folks, it's only a movie.” In contrast, producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Michael Bay tried to have it both ways with Pearl Harbor. On one hand, both men claimed they were making a fictional movie using the historical events only as the stage on which to create a love story. On the other hand, Bay predicted before the start of production, “You will see what happened at Pearl Harbor like you have never seen it in any other movie. Our goal is to stage the event with utmost realism.” He claimed that he wanted his Pearl Harbor movie to become one “by which all other films are measured,” dismissing Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) as being “more of a documentary.”
To achieve these goals, Bay and Bruckheimer claimed to have read extensively in the histories about Pearl Harbor and to have interviewed many Pearl Harbor and Doolittle raid survivors. Noting that everyone had his or her own memories that did not always agree with others' on particular aspects of the Japanese attack, the filmmakers felt their re-creation was as valid as any of the recollections.
Of course, all memories are created equal, but some are more equal; where truth conflicted with drama, Bay and Bruckheimer chose to go with the drama, claiming they had captured the essence of what had happened on December 7. In fact, “essence” remains a very subjective term that can conceal a plethora of sins. One of the trailers for the film perhaps said it best: “Pearl Harbor is a fictional tale crafted from a kaleidoscope of real life personal experiences of those living through this terrifying tragedy.” The operative word is “fictional.” So little of what appears on the screen bears even a remote resemblance to actual events leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, the actual attack, or the aftermath, including the Doolittle raid, that audiences come away from the film with no real understanding of what happened and why. If the film's title had remained “Tennessee,” the original code name Disney gave the project to hide its actual subject, Bay and Bruckheimer, like Mostow, could have hidden behind the claim that they were only making a dramatic movie, not a documentary.
However, the title Pearl Harbor and Bay's predictions about what he intended to do strongly suggest the film is providing a reasonably accurate account of what happened on December 7. Historians have to be careful to criticize the elephants, not the ants, when discussing the dramatic license filmmakers take in their movies. But audiences have to know little or nothing about Pearl Harbor to recognize the errors or fabrications. In view of the recent attention given to President Franklin D. Roosevelt because of the dedication of his memorial, most people understand that he simply could not stand up unaided, as happens in the movie.
Likewise, since the movie portrays the growing tensions between Japan and the United States and relates at least superficially the plans for the attack on Pearl Harbor, audiences are going to wonder how one of the heroes could manage to get permission to fly his P-40 over Pearl Harbor at dusk. While Bay commented with pride about the film's signature shot of a bomb falling slowly downward toward the Arizona, people recognize the hokiness of the sequence even if they do not know that the battleship was hit after the Oklahoma, not before, as portrayed.
In fact, the reviewer has compiled a five-page list of “flaws” in Pearl Harbor. Do they matter? Only to the extent that truth itself matters. For most historians the liberties the filmmakers took with the facts render Pearl Harbor useless as a tool to teach students about the Japanese attack. From the Japanese perspective, however, the film has a significant upside. Most people went to see Pearl Harbor for the love story and the explosions and so left the theater without any significant antagonism toward those friendly people who brought the United States into World War II and later began making fine cars, cameras, television sets, and video recorders.
This review was first published in the Journal of American History, 88 (3) (2001): 1208–1209. Reprinted with permission from the Organization of American Historians (OAH).
To browse all of Teachinghistory.org's materials on Pearl Harbor, try our spotlight page: In Remembrance: Pearl Harbor. (Browse our full selection of spotlights on historic events and commemorations here.)
If America had opened its ports at Pearl Harbor and the Philippines to the Russians prior to 1941, do you think that might have delayed or caused the Japanese to think twice about attacking these places, so as not to get America and Russia combined against them?
Most probably not. Although the Japanese generally avoided attacking Russian ships, there simply was not a lot of Soviet merchant shipping in the Pacific at the time. And perhaps more important, there were almost no Soviet warships in the region, so the chance of the Japanese attackers encountering and engaging with Russian ships by accident was small. Even if they had, Japan and Russia had chosen to gloss over incidents in the recent past because they calculated it was in their larger interests to do so. The chance that Japanese attackers might have damaged Russian ships did not affect Japanese planning.
American ports were not closed to Russian warships or merchant ships. A fleet of 11 Soviet ships, for example, left port at Balboa, U.S. Canal Zone, in July 1939, for the Russians' naval base at Vladivostok. Four mine layers among the fleet went by way of San Francisco, and the other ships went by way of the merchant shipping port facilities next to Honolulu.
Russian freighters and tankers often used port facilities in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Dutch Harbor, Alaska. It was Russia's merchant ships, not its navy, that crossed the Pacific at this time. At the beginning of World War 2, many of the Soviet Union's warships, in fact, had been purchased from or built by the U.S. The bulk of its navy was based in the west, in Leningrad, Kronstadt, Sevastopol, Odessa, and Murmansk.
Soviet maritime activity, both mercantile and military, had waxed and waned from the late 19th century to the World War 2 period. Japan was a regional rival and this tension erupted in the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War, in the course of which Japan all but obliterated the Russian fleet and emerged as a world naval power. The 1917 Russian Revolution and 1919-21 civil war drew off much of the Russian military presence in the Far East and Pacific region, but it began to build up again, including at its Pacific base in Vladivostok, in response to Japanese incursions in China in the late 1920s and into the 1930s. The Soviet Pacific Ocean Fleet at that time consisted almost entirely of small submarines, torpedo boats, and coastal patrol boats.
Almost all of the Soviets' "blue water," heavy warships were in the west. This did not have anything to do with American policy regarding its ports. In short, Russian warships would not have been cruising the Pacific, either in Hawaii or the Philippines, before the war. They were needed elsewhere.
The Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact was signed in April 1941. Cross-border skirmishes in Japanese-occupied Manchuria and in Mongolia motivated Japan to sign in order to keep Russia from tying it down in northern Asia while it accomplished its goals of territorial expansion in Southeast Asia. Russia signed it because it was focusing its military might to the west, supplying Germany with food and war material, in line with the August 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, but also preparing for a confrontation with Germany itself. That came in June 1941, when Germany suddenly invaded the Soviet Union.
At that time, Japan, as an ally of Germany, apparently briefly considered abrogating its neutrality pact with the Soviets and invading Russia, but decided against it in favor of focusing on military conquests toward the south. Both the Soviets and the Japanese found it expedient to honor their neutrality pact throughout most of the war. That included, for Japan, allowing passage to Russian merchant ships that were carrying supplies from the U.S. to Vladivostok.
After the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the U.S. had conducted its Russian trade warily, with some constraints on what it would allow to be sold to the Russians (to try to prevent material from being further shipped to Germany). Britain, during this time, pressed the U.S. to drastically reduce its trade with Germany, Italy, and Japan, as well as Russia, as a partner in its "economic warfare."
From the summer of 1941, after Germany invaded Russia, U.S. relations with the Soviet Union went into flux, as FDR's administration moved to convert a near-adversary into an ally. In September 1941, for example, FDR promised Russia that the U.S. would deliver five new B-17s, flying them to Russia over the skies of Germany. U.S. constraints on sales were lifted and America began shipping food, fuel, and other war material to Russia, via Vladivostok, under the terms of the Lend Lease Act.
At nearly the same time, Roosevelt, not wishing to subsidize Japan's expansion in Asia, stopped shipment of U.S. oil and gasoline to Japan. It was at this point that Japan concluded that it would have to go to war with the U.S. in order to ensure its own territorial expansion. From Japan's point of view, at least privately, the die had been cast. The U.S. was still, however, trying to sort out its interactions with Russia under the changed circumstances. No joint naval operations, for example, had been authorized by the U.S. Chief of Naval Operations by the end of 1941.
Although the Germans pressured their Japanese allies to stop the shipping of U.S. goods via Russian freighters to Vladivostok, it continued, mostly unmolested, throughout the war. Both the Russians and the Japanese generally went out of their way avoid conflict with each other, despite isolated incidents. On May 1, 1942, a Japanese submarine sunk the Soviet cargo ship Angarstroi, loaded with sugar, in the Sea of Japan after it was detained, searched, and released by the Japanese Navy. At first, the Japanese blamed it on an American submarine, but the Soviets were not fooled and tensions escalated. The same month, a Japanese submarine exchanged fire with a Russian freighter off the coast of Australia.
At that point in the war, Japan was riding on the crest of victories at Pearl Harbor and the Philippines and it is possible that some of its naval officers were emboldened enough to disregard the Russia-Japan Neutrality Pact. Both countries built up their forces facing each other, separating Siberia from Manchuria, and Outer Mongolia from Inner Mongolia, but Russian and Japanese diplomats and military officers decided to pass over the incidents at sea and Russia and Japan continued to avoid conflict.
The Japanese meticulously planned their attacks at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and, on the following day, at Manila. Their goal, which they largely (though only temporarily) achieved, was to destroy or disable the American Pacific fleet, especially its capital ships (aircraft carriers and battleships), in order to clear obstacles to the Japanese invasion of suth and southwest Asia, starting with the Philippines.
For the Pearl Harbor attack, the attacking Japanese pilots knew the composition of the American fleet and targeted specific ships. They were even prepared to fly to Maui in pursuit of these particular ships if the fleet had moved to its occasional anchorage at Lahaina.
The attackers, in other words, were not aiming to cause general chaos and destruction, but rather to destroy specific warships, to the extent that they could locate them. (The Americans' aircraft carriers happened to be out at sea that morning). The Japanese did not attack the merchant docks in Honolulu Harbor, and so, whatever foreign freighters happened to be there were not imperiled. The attack on the Philippines 10 hours later was aimed particularly at destroying U.S. military airpower in the Pacific, the B-17s and P-40s at Clark and Iba air bases. This would give Japan's airplanes uncontested control of the air and, therefore, allow the Japanese army's invasion of the Philippines.
Gordon William Prange, At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor (New York: Penguin, 2001).
William H. Bartsch, December 8, 1941: MacArthur's Pearl Harbor (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2003).
Kinoaki Matsuo, How Japan Plans to Win. Trans. Kilsoo K. Kaan (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1942).
Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon, eds. The Pearl Harbor Papers: Inside the Japanese Plans (Washington: Brassey's, 1993).
Ian Kershaw. Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941 (New York: Penguin, 2007), pp. 331-381.
Donald W. Mitchell, A History of Russian and Soviet Sea Power (New York: Macmillan, 1974).
Mairin Mitchell. The Maritime History of Russia, 848-1948 (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries, 1969).
Jurgen Rohwer and Mikhail S. Monakov. Stalin's Ocean-Going Fleet: Soviet Naval Strategy and Shipbuilding Programmes, 1935-1953 (New York: Frank Cass Publishers, 2001).
"Russia, Japan Mobilize; Soviet Gunboat Is Sunk; Ultimatum for Moscow," Washington Post, July 1, 1937, p. 1.
"Soviet Ships Quit Panama: Vessels Take Diverse Routes on Trip to Vladivostok," New York Times, July 18, 1939, p. 10.
"Soviet Attitude Toward Chinese Influenced by Stand U.S. Takes," New York Times, July 14, 1940, p. 29.
Raymond Daniell, "British Seek the Enlistment of U.S. in Economic War on Axis and Allies," New York Times, January 29, 1941, p. 1.
Bertram D. Hulen, "Soviet Requests U.S. Help; Offers to Pay for Supplies," New York Times, July 2, 1941, p. 1.
"Russian Ship Shelled: Japanese Submarine Driven Off in Attack Off Australia," New York Times, June 26, 1942, p. 2.
"Soviet Ship Sunk by Japs," Los Angeles Times, June 26, 1942, p. 1.
"Japan Lets Russia Get Our Supplies," New York Times, March 13, 1943, p. 4.
John G. Norris, "Knox Sees Little Chance of Russo-Jap War Now," Washington Post, June 23, 1943, p. 3.
Barnet Nover, "Japan and Russia: Is Their Truce About to End?" Washington Post, August 14, 1943, p. 4.
"It Depends on Who's Winning," Los Angeles Times, November 16, 1944, p. A4.
Pearl Harbor Attack, 7 December 1941. Department of the Navy, Naval History & Heritage Command.
Images:
"This is Not [a] Drill" Dispatch, 12/07/1941, National Archives and Records Administration, Waltham, Massachusetts.
Aerial Photograph of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii: 01/07/1941, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.
This interactive website on the attack on Pearl Harbor provides a chronological overview of the day's events. Each major event on the day's timeline is shown on a map of Hawaii, giving the events a visual place within the harbor geography and allowing site visitors to see where ships were in relationship to each other.
On the map, each major occurrence can be selected as the "full story." These individual full story pages provide a short textual overview of the event alongside a looping archival image and video slideshow. Clicking progresses through the slideshow for users interested in quickly revisiting an image after it has passed or who simply want to go through the slideshow at a faster pace. Many of the events also offer eyewitness quotes.
One of the most praiseworthy aspects of the site is that these quotes are not all from U.S. sailors and commanders. The voices selected include two women—a nurse and the daughter of a military man—and several Japanese airmen, submariners, and commanders. By providing voices from both sides of the attack, National Geographic avoids dehumanizing the Japanese through the absence of their own stories.
From C-SPAN's Video Library:
"Historian Harry Butowsky discussed 'The Mystery of Radar in Hawaii.' In 1941 radar was a new technology that was being utilized at Pearl Harbor, but the infrastructure surrounding its monitoring was not fully developed. Mr. Butowsky used many slides while telling the December 7, 1941, story from the point that the Japanese planes were detected on radar to the ongoing discussion of assigning blame for the success of the surprise attack."
CBS's The Early Show draws parallels between 9/11 and Pearl Harbor in this short video clip filmed for the 10th anniversary of 9/11, which uses interviews with two eyewitnesses.
How was the Second World War likely to end if the U.S. hadn't intervened? Who seemed to be winning the war before the U.S. joined after the Pearl Harbor attack? Would the Allies have been able to prevail without U.S. help?
During the months preceding the attack on Pearl Harbor, the war in Europe had essentially boiled down to a contest between the Axis Powers of Germany and Italy, and against them, the Soviet Union and Great Britain.
Six months before Pearl Harbor, Germany had launched an invasion of the Soviet Union, its erstwhile ally. By December 5, two days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, German armies had advanced to within 5 miles of Moscow.
Hitler had decided to postpone a cross-channel invasion of Britain itself until his armies were able to defeat the Soviet Union, but Germany was still fighting Britain through aerial and missile bombing, and was engaged against Britain on the seas, as well as elsewhere in the British Empire, as in North Africa. In South Asia, Britain was also defending its colonies and commonwealth against Japan. On the face of it, especially in the long term and even with Lend-Lease aid from the United States, it is difficult to see how Britain could have continued the war without the entry of the United States into the conflict on its side. Presumably, Winston Churchill would have had to sue for peace, or endure a German invasion of the British Isles once the Nazis had consolidated their military strength in Europe.
That did not happen, of course. After Churchill heard that America had been attacked at Pearl Harbor, he rushed to a secure telephone to call Franklin Roosevelt. His Memoirs of the Second World War relate the following:
In two or three minutes Mr. Roosevelt came through. "Mr. President, what's this about Japan? "It's quite true," he replied. "They have attacked us at Pearl Harbor. We are all in the same boat now."
No American will think it wrong of me if I proclaim that to have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy. I could not foretell the course of events. I do not pretend to have measured accurately the martial might of Japan, but now at this very moment I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all!
Yes, after Dunkirk; after the fall of France; after the horrible episode of Oran; after the threat of invasion, when, apart from the Air and the Navy, we were an almost unarmed people; after the deadly struggle of the U-boat war—the first Battle of the Atlantic, gained by a hand's-breath; after seventeen months of lonely fighting and nineteen months of my responsibility in dire stress. We had won the war. England would live; Britain would live; the Commonwealth of Nations and the Empire would live.
How long the war would last or in what fashion it would end no man could tell, nor did I at this moment care. Once again in our long Island history we should emerge, however mauled or mutilated, safe and victorious. We should not be wiped out. We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end. We might not even have to die as individuals. Hitler's fate was sealed. Mussolini's fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to powder.
United States forces played a direct role in defeating Germany, but also forced Hitler to keep huge military forces in Western Europe rather than sending them to reinforce his armies fighting against the Soviet Union, where they would likely have been a decisive factor against the Soviets. Instead, the German invasion of Russia failed after the effort that culminated at Stalingrad, and the German forces in Western Europe were eventually pushed back anyway, beginning with the landings at Normandy.
Your questions are hypothetical. They invite speculation. One of the delights of the alternate history genre of fiction is that its authors generally expend some considerable effort on the notion of history itself, especially the way in which history unwinds out of a skein of causes both large and small. In these novels, large and familiar causes and conditions and forces roll out across the world, but small human details, such as a missed appointment at the Reichs Ministry, an overlooked telegram, Hitler's mistress Eva Braun's choice of perfume on a fateful day, or a random batch of sunspots that interferes with a particular radio transmission, sometimes cascade into a vastly different history than the one with which we are familiar.
Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle (1962), in which Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan win World War II. The East Coast and Midwest of the United States are occupied by Germany and the West Coast by Japan.
Harry Turtledove, In the Presence of Mine Enemies (2003), in which the U.S. does not enter the war, and the Axis Powers win. Germany then bombs the U.S. in the 1970s with nuclear weapons and defeats it.
Robert Harris, Fatherland (1992), another one in which Germany wins the war, although the U.S. defeats Japan.
Norman Spinrad, The Iron Dream (1972), which is presented as a science fiction novel written by pulp-fiction artist Adolf Hitler after he flees Germany to live in the United States after the end of the First World War.
Jo Walton’s "Small Change" series [Farthing (2006), Ha’penny (2007), and Half a Crown (2008)], in which the U.S. fails to provide aid to the UK to resist Germany and Britain makes peace with the Nazi Reich. Germany continues a drawn-out war with the Soviet Union, and Britain turns into a fascist state.
Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstchen, 1945 (1995), in which the U.S. defeats Japan but not Germany, and a subsequent "cold war" ensues between the U.S. and Germany.
Winston Churchill, Memoirs of the Second World War, an abridgment of the six volumes of the Second World War. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1959.