Day of Infamy
Chapter 1 – Prologue
On December 7, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was sitting at his desk in the Oval office working on his stamp collection, when his private secretary, Grace Tully, notified him at 1:47 PM Eastern Standard Time that Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, was on the phone. He answered the call and Secretary Knox notified him that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii earlier that morning.
It was just before 8 AM Pacific Standard Time on a quiet Sunday morning in Hawaii. The Japanese planes flew low to the ground in an effort to avoid the radar. A young boy, about eight years old, was out playing in his front yard waiting for his family to finish getting ready so they could go to church when he saw the planes approach.
He was excited to see planes so close to his home. He waved at the planes as they flew low over his house. He knew they lived close to the base but he had never seen the planes fly so close to their house. They were so low he recognized that they were not US Navy planes.
He saw the big red circle on the plane and ran in the house and told his father that Japanese planes just flew over their house. His father ran outside to see the last of the wave of planes fly by. He ran back inside to call the base but the planes had already started their attack.
The base was minimally manned as it was a Sunday. The eight o'clock shift personnel were on their way to work and the personnel on base were waiting to be relieved so that they could go home and enjoy time with their families. People throughout the United States had been watching the news reports of the war in Europe and knew that someday the United States might be called into the war.
At 6:10 AM the first wave of Japanese planes took off from aircraft carriers in the Pacific Ocean, approximately 200 miles from the Hawaiian island of Oahu. The Japanese fleet had 67 ships that had launched a combination of 353 dive bombers, torpedo bombers and fighter planes. They had carefully selected their flight path to minimize their risk of detection. They had planned for the Sunday morning attack knowing that people would be more relaxed. Their guard would be down, and it was. They were able to go undetected.
A series of events took place that could have warned personnel at Pearl Harbor if they had all of the information. At approximately 6:10 AM the Minesweeper USS Condor sighted a periscope. At 6:45 AM the USS Ward fired on and sunk a submarine and then at 6:53 AM they radioed Navy headquarters but the message was delayed due to the decoding process.
At 7:02 AM a radar station on Oahu spotted unidentified aircraft heading toward Hawaii. An Army lieutenant that received the report believed that the report was about a flight of US B-17 bombers that were coming in from California and disregarded the message. At 7:40 AM the first wave of Japanese aircraft reached Oahu. At 7:49 AM the order for the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor was given by the aerial commander.
A war council, a group of military and diplomatic advisors, was convened by President Roosevelt a little after 3 PM EST. At almost 4 PM EST the president received an update of damage. It was reported that Pearl Harbor had sustained substantial personnel losses and severe damage to the base. He immediately started working on a speech to address the American people.
Over 3,400 Americans were killed or wounded by the early morning surprise attack at Pearl Harbor. The majority of the dead were aboard the USS Arizona, which had exploded about fifteen minutes after the attack began. At the time of the attack there were 102 ships stationed at Pearl Harbor only 33 of them were damaged. Seven ships sunk but only three ships were considered a total loss the Arizona, Oklahoma and Utah. The other damaged ships were repairable and most were back in service within six months.
His speech which began, "Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy …' and included the following statement to the American people, "But always will our whole Nation remember the character of the onslaught against us. No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory," transformed the nation from a state of shock to a state of war. A speech that he himself wrote that was under 500 words and only six-an-a-half minutes in length.
He delivered the speech to a joint session of Congress on December 8, 1941. The speech which meant a great deal to him gave him the strength he needed to put on heavy leg support braces and walk up to the podium and deliver his speech. He stood during the entire speech and walked away from the podium at the conclusion of his speech. He used a cane and had his son walk beside him.
Most people had only seen President Roosevelt in his wheelchair but he wanted to stand before the American people demonstrating strength and that is why he painfully walked into the building and stood before Congress to give his speech.
His speech writing team had come up with a 17-page speech for him to recite but he felt his speech said what he needed to say to Congress and the American people, so he used his own speech.
Within an hour of the conclusion of his speech, Congress passed a formal declaration of war against Japan, entering the United States into World War II. The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 was the catalyst that brought the United States into World War II. The shots that the USS Ward fired on a submarine December 7th became the first shots from the United States in World War II.
It took the United States, who had lost hundreds of thousands of lives, and their allies almost four years to end World War II, but they were victorious. World War II ended nearly four years after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Japan's formal surrender (V-J Day – September 2, 1945) was celebrated 117 days after the Allied victory in Europe (V-E Day on May 8, 1945).
In the United States December 7, 1941 is still referred to as 'the Day of Infamy.'