Pearl Harbor - A sad day in United States history
Pearl Harbor Navy Yard was established in 1908 in Hawaii and has grown to play an important role in maintaining the United State Navy’s Pacific Fleet. It is the largest naval repair facility in the Pacific Ocean between the west coast of the United States and the Far East. The dry docks and machine shops service all types of naval craft from submarines to aircraft carriers. The shipyard is Hawaii’s largest industrial employer today, with more than four thousand civilian workers and around eight hundred uniformed personnel. The shipyard was heavily involved in repairing the Pacific Fleet following the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.
As Japanese influence increased in the Pacific, the United States increased the United States Navy’s presence as well. With tensions rising between the United States and Japan in 1940, the United States began training operations at the base. The attack by Japan on December 7, 1941 brought the United States into World War II.
On the morning of December 7, 1941, planes and midget submarines of the Imperial Japanese Navy began a surprise attack on the United States under the command of Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo. This attack brought the United States into World War II. At 6:00 a.m. on December 7th, the six Japanese carriers launched a first wave of 181 planes comprised of torpedo bombers, dive bombers, level bombers and fighters. The Japanese hit American ships and military installations at 7:53 a.m. They attacked military airfields while at the same time they hit the fleet anchored in Pearl Harbor. Overall, twenty-one ships of the United States Pacific fleet were damaged and the death toll reached 2,400. The attack was the worst naval defeat in United States history since the Penobscot Expedition of 1779. Today, people visit the USS Arizona Memorial which sits across the mid-section of the sunken ship.
The story of Pearl Harbor has been retold in books and in films, although some film versions have took liberties of their own and are more fictional than fact. The Final Countdown is a movie set around Pearl Harbor in which a nuclear aircraft carrier from 1980 is sent back in time to December 6, 1941, a day before the attack.
From Here to Eternity is a movie that is a love story set in Hawaii in 1941 involving a naval officer named Robert E. Lee Prewitt. The attack on Pearl Harbor is the climax of the film.
Pearl Harbor, released in 2001 starring Ben Affleck, Cuba Gooding, Jr., and Tom Sizemore is a fictional love story based around the attack and is not considered an accurate portrayal of the event. The movie didn’t fair too well with critics or at the box office.
If you would like more information about this infamous day in United States and Japanese history, search online on historical websites dedicated to World War II and Pearl Harbor.