Pearl Harbor ~Dec 7th ~ 68th Anniversary

I would like to THANK ALL THE WWII VETERANS who sacrificed their lives for our lives today! There’s not very many left of the WWII vets alive, but we will always remember them in our hearts…. 🙂 This day was the day that America was in war with Japan when they did the most horrible thing bombing Pearl Harbor….this is the quote that I remember from FDR ~ Yesterday, December 7, 1941 – a date which will live on in infamy – the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Address to Congress, Dec. 8, 1941

Thank to WIKIPEDIA for the information below and the quotation from The Quotation Page

A series of historical events leading to the attack on Pearl Harbor occurred that contributed to the actual attack. War between Japan and the United States had been a possibility that each nation’s military forces planned for since the 1920s, though real tension did not begin until the 1931 invasion of Manchuria by Japan. Over the next decade, Japan expanded slowly into China, leading to all out war between the two in 1937. In 1940 Japan invaded French Indochina in an effort to embargo all imports into China, including war supplies purchased from the U.S. This move prompted the United States to embargo all oil exports, leading the Imperial Japanese Navy to estimate that it had less than two years of bunker oil remaining and to support the existing plans to seize oil resources in the Dutch East Indies. Planning had been underway for some time on an attack on the “Southern Resource Area” to add it to the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere that Japan envisioned in the Pacific.

The Philippine islands, at that time an American territory, were also a Japanese target. The Japanese military concluded that an invasion of the Philippines would provoke an American military response. Rather than seize and fortify the islands, and wait for the inevitable US counterattack, Japan’s military leaders instead decided on the pre-emptive Pearl Harbor attack, which would negate the American forces needed for the liberation and reconquest of the islands.

Planning for an attack on Pearl Harbor had begun in very early 1941, by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. He finally won assent from the Naval High Command by, among other things, threatening to resign. The attack was approved in the summer at an Imperial Conference and again at a second Conference in the fall. Over the next year, pilots were trained, and ships prepared for its execution. Authority for the attack was granted at the second Imperial Conference if a diplomatic result satisfactory to Japan was not reached. The order to attack was issued at the beginning of December.

The attack on Pearl Harbor (or Hawaii Operation, Operation Z, as it was called by the Japanese Imperial General Headquarters)^[6] was an unannounced military strike conducted by the Japanese navy against the United States‘ naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on the morning of Sunday, December 7, 1941 (Hawaiian time, December 8 by Japan Standard Time), later resulting in the United States becoming militarily involved in World War II. It was intended as a preventive action to keep the U.S. Pacific Fleet from influencing the war the Empire of Japan was planning to wage in Southeast Asia against Britain, the Netherlands, and the United States. The attack consisted of two aerial attack waves totaling 353^[7] aircraft, launched from six Japanese aircraft carriers.