“The war that we have carefully for years provoked Catches us unprepared, amazed and indignant. Our warships are shot Like sitting ducks and our planes like nest-birds, both our coasts ridiculously panicked, And our leaders make orations. This is the people That hopes to impose on the whole planetary world An American peace.” – Robinson Jeffers, “Pearl Harbor.”
“This Pearl Harbor business has a terrible smell. – Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander-in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet in World War II.
Eighty years ago today—what President Franklin Roosevelt termed a “date which will live in infamy”—Japanese forces attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor off the coast of Hawaii, triggering U.S. intervention in World War II.
pearl harbor attack newspaper report The Honolulu Star-Bulletin announces the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941. [Source: chiff.com] Historian Samuel Elliot Morrison wrote that one could “search military history in vain for an operation more fatal to the aggressor.”[3] 2,403 Americans were killed and 1,143 were wounded. Eighteen ships were sunk or run aground, including five battleships.
Of the American fatalities, nearly half were due to the explosion of the USS Arizona’s forward magazine after it was hit by a modified 16-inch (410 mm) shell.[4]
In his address to the nation following the attacks, President Roosevelt stated that “the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by the empire of Japan.”
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