Pearl Harbor
Pearl Harbor, on the island of Oahu, had been used by the US Navy since the early part of the
twentieth century. In April, 1940, the US Fleet had been sent to Pearl Harbor to deter aggressive
moves by Japan in the Pacific. Tensions increased when in September, 1940, Japan and Germany
signed the German-Japanese Pact. Allied secret services soon discovered that Joachim von
Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister, had sent a telegram to Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet
foreign minister, where he pointed out that the alliance was to be directed towards the United
States and not the Soviet Union. "Its exclusive purpose is to bring the elements pressing for
America's entry into the war to their senses by conclusively demonstrating to them if they enter
the present struggle they will automatically have to deal with the three great powers as
adversaries." In January 1941, the Commander in Chief of the Japanese Combined Fleet, Admiral
Isoruku Yamamoto began planning for a surprise attack on the US Navy at Pearl Harbor.
Yamamoto feared that he did not have the resources to win a long war against the United States.
He therefore advocated a surprise attack that would destroy the US Fleet in one crushing blow.
Yamamoto's plan was eventually agreed by the Japanese Imperial Staff in the autumn and the
strike force under the command of Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo sailed from the Kurile Islands
on 26th November, 1941. Richard Sorge, a German journalist working as a Soviet agent in Tokyo,
discovered details of the plan for the attack on Pearl Harbor. However, this information does not
seem to have been passed onto the United States. US Army intelligence. Harold Stark, Chief of
Naval Operations, feared a Japanese attack on the US Fleet at Pearl Harbor but by the end of
1941 became convinced that the initial attack on the US Navy would come in the Far East.
Military intelligence did intercept two cipher messages from Tokyo to Kichisaburo Normura, the
Japanese Ambassador to the United States, that suggested an imminent attack, but Richmond
Turner, in charge of evaluating and dissemination, did not pass on warnings of the proposed
attack to Admiral Husband Kimmel. Nagumo's fleet was positioned 275 miles north of Oahu. On
Sunday, 7th December, 1941, 105 high-level bombers, 135 dive-bombers and 81 fighter aircraft
attacked the the US Fleet at Pearl Harbor. In their first attack the Japanese sunk the Arizona,
Oklahoma, West Virginia and California. The second attack, launched 45 minutes later, hampered
by smoke, created less damage. In two hours 18 warships, 188 aircraft and 2,403 servicemen
were lost in the attack. Luckily, the navy's three aircraft carriers, Enterprise, Lexington and
Saratoga, were all at sea at the time. The following day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and a
united US Congress declared war on Japan.