Why Was The Pearl Harbor Attack

Register to read the introduction… The United States had gotten some warning sings even before the Pearl Harbor attack. The first warning sing was that since the U.S. was already able to break the Japanese diplomatic code, they got news that Japan was going to attack, the only problem was that the message sent to Washington D.C. got there too late. The second warning sing was a sing before the attack, a radar picked up Japanese planes, but the people who picked up the signal thought that the plane on the radar was American B-17s due from the West Coast (Why Did Japan Attack?) Due to the terrible handling of warning sings, Pearl Harbor gets attacked on a Sunday morning, which are peaceful days; “Sunday mornings were a time of leisure for many U.S. military personnel at Pearl Harbor. Many were either still asleep, in mess halls eating breakfast, or getting ready for church on the morning of December 7, 1941. They were completely unaware that an attack was imminent.” (Attack on Pearl Harbor) (Bliven, 1-2) At 6:00 a.m. a wave of Japanese airplanes left six aircraft carriers and struck Pearl Harbor at 7:55 a.m. (Why Did Japan Attack?) At 7:15 a.m. 167 more Japanese planes left and got ready for the second wave. During those two hours of terror, seven U.S. battleships were destroyed, these ships were the Nevada, the Arizona, the Tennessee, the West Virginia, the Maryland, the Oklahoma, and the California (Attack on Pearl …show more content…
President Franklin D. Roosevelt had to inform congress, and they either chose to go to war or not. The Americans already knew that congress was going to vote to go to war; it was an easy decision, due to the fact that they had just been attacked. Everyone in the United States expected for the votes to be all in favor to go to war, but that wasn’t exactly. One Montana congresswoman, Jeannette Rankin, voted against the war, she was a pacifist, and decided not to vote in favor of the war. One reason why Rankin voted against the war was because she believed that the President had provoked the Japanese, which would be an excuse to go to war in Europe, and fight the German Nazis (Jeanette Rankin Casts Sole Vote against WWII) Due to her controversial decision, she was hated by all Americans, she was event threatened to be assassinated, when re-election came, she was so sure she wasn’t going to get re-elected, that she didn’t even run for re-election. The U.S. eventually went into war, the news were handed by President Roosevelt at 12:15