Pearl Harbor

December seventh of 1941 will always be a day that won’t ever be forgotten. Many lives were changed and countless lives were lost. This subject touches my soul in a way that I can not describe. The attack on Pearl Harbor lasted only a couple of hours, but the devastation that was caused will live through the centuries. Japan awaken a giant that day that they would later lose the war to and in the end would lose many more Japanese lives than the ones that they took at Pearl Harbor.

The United States should have seen the attack coming. (According to “America’s Entry into the War”) Roosevelt had stopped the sale of oil, scrap iron, and steel to Japan. Because of this, the relationship between the two countries was steadily receding. By the end of 1940 Roosevelt had made it totally impossible for the Japanese to buy metal in the United States. The Japanese had their own view of how the war would go. Their reasoning was so off from reality it’s not even funny. (According to Robert McCall), “The Emperor was told the U.S. would stop the war, the Nazi’s would eventually defeat England”. This is where Japan enters the mighty United States into the second world war.

The Japanese caught America completely off guard. On the day of the Pearl Harbor attack, Private Joseph Lockard was in charge of watching the radar at Opana Point on a mountain top looking over Pearl Harbor. He saw a large blip on the screen so he called his commanding officer and reported the sighting. When he spoke to his commanding officer, the officer told him not to worry about the sighting because they were waiting for a squadron of B-17s to arrive from the states. Little did he realize that the large blip on the screen was the Japanese flying closer and closer.

The minesweeper Condor is on patrol less than two miles off the entrance to Pearl Harbor. At 6:45 a.m. the officer of the deck sees something “about fifty yards ahead off the port bow.” He asks a sailor what he makes of the object. “That’s a...