Pearl Harbor

Submitted By pagallarka69
Words: 2789
Pages: 12

Pearl Harbor

Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941 using 361 planes in two waves of aerial assault. The U.S. losses included 10 ships and 164 planes, while another 128 planes were damaged. 2403 servicemen and civilians were killed and another 1178 were wounded. An imperial government is one that has one ruler. Japan ruler was an emperor; the sole head of an empire. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor to protect their imperial government so they can take control of Indo-China as well as other nations in the Pacific. Japan had plans for world domination with Germany as its ally. Germany, Italy and Japan were called the Axis powers during WWII. They had formed a pact of their own against the allies that consisted of the U.S., Great Britain, Soviet Union, France and other nations in Europe. The Indo-China negotiations also played an important role when Japan decided to attack the U.S. Japan knew that they would eventually be in a war with America because of Germany’s presence in the Soviet Union and other Ally nations. Japanese war plans with Germany consisted of attacks that would take place simultaneously that would take over all the ally nations and the nations that they were protecting. The Imperial government of Japan was looking to build a policy that would establish what they called “The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” (Wohlstetter, 346). This Japanese dream would include all British, Dutch, French, and Portuguese colonies in the Far East and the Philippines, India and Australia. Japan was and still is a very small island supporting a large population of people. It is very limited in natural resources and relies on trade to obtain many energy sources and raw material. Japan wanted to take over Asia for various reasons. For one, Japan continued to put pressure on Portugal to supply them with raw material from Timor, Portugal’s colony in the East Indies. After Nazi Germany took over France in 1940, Japan expanded their search for raw materials to the French colony of Indochina which is now known as Vietnam. Since Japan was such a small island, their quest for raw material never ended. Iron, tin, copper, zinc, gold, silk coal and oil were some of the thing that the Japanese did not have on their tiny island; on the other hand China was rich in these natural resources. Backed by their desire of building a great Empire, it was as good reason as any to take over China. The conflict between China and Japan sparked in 1937. As an agreement to end the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, Japanese troops were stationed near the Marco Polo Bridge near Peking (Beijing). They very presence of Japanese troops on Chinese soil was a sore point for China. This formed a union between the Chinese Nationalist party led by Chiang Kai-shek and the Communist party led by Mao Tse-tung. A little incident between the Japanese and the Chinese Nationalist troops escalated into major warfare between the two nations. Over the next four years, the public support went to the Chinese and not Japan. The Japanese even tried to persuade the Americans to favor them because of the communist activity in Northern China. The United States had broken a treaty that enabled them to place an embargo on exports to Japan if necessary. The U.S. broke the Japanese-American commercial treaty when they supported the Chinese in the war against Japan by supplying them with cheap equipment. The Japanese then took over the nations in Indochina which were colonies of France. This occurred because Nazi Germany and Japan had formed an alliance and Germany had taken control of France. Germany also had plans of invading Great Britain. The U.S. feared that if Germany took over Britain, Canada and the British territories in Central and South America as well as the Caribbean would fall to the Axis powers. Since France and Great Britain were allies of the United States, President Roosevelt called for an international embargo that would cut off all foreign oil