President Franklin D. Roosevelt called December 7, 1941, “A day that will live in infamy”. On that day, Japanese bomber and fighter planes attacked the United States Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, on the island of Oahu. There was actually fore warning of the attack, on the morning of December 7, 1941. Two soldiers gave news to their commanding officer that there were many planes coming into the mainland. The officer ignored the message because he was expecting a friendly squadron of B-17’s that afternoon. Thirty minutes later the first bomb was dropped on Pearl Harbor. The Japanese sent 423 planes on six aircraft carriers. During the attack, eight American battleships and thirteen other naval vessels were sunk or badly damaged, almost 200 American aircraft were destroyed, and approximately 3,000 military personnel were killed or wounded.
On December 8, 1941, President Roosevelt addressed congress, and they declared war on Japan. Three days later, on December 11, 1941, Italy and Germany declared war on the United States. When the United States entered the war, the whole country supported it. The United States used a lot of areas of the economy. The government directed science and technology to military purposes. Industry focused mostly on the war effort. The United States started to send more and more troops and supplies to the allied cause. They brought really needed weapons, supplies, and money, to the troops of the allies. The United States and England began pushing towards Berlin in order to prevent the Soviet Union from spreading their communism. The United States helped take over and secure a lot of Japanese islands to try and get closer to conquering Japanese powers. The United States had stopped the Japanese in the central Pacific in the Battle of Midway.
The United States had to do something in order to end the war. So they began to work in great detail on the Manhattan Project. The Manhattan Project was organized in order to create a bomb so powerful that it could destroy huge numbers of people and land. The United States kept secret, the fact that they had created an Atomic Bomb. However, they were forced to drop the bomb on Hiroshima when the fear that Russia would soon attack Japan and try to claim the rewards of war. The first Atomic Bomb, “little boy,” was dropped on Hiroshima; carried by the United States airplane named the Enola Gay, and killed approximately 70,000 people. The next bomb, “fat man,” was dropped on the city of Nagasaki and took about 40,000 lives. Japan agreed to the allied terms of surrender on August 14, 1945. These are the only times that a nuclear weapon has been used in a conflict between nations. The Atomic Bomb gave the United States superiority over every other country in the world. However, Germany had stolen the building plans of the Atomic Bomb, and a few weeks later, they also had the power of the bomb. This created a nuclear arms race. Soon after the United States created a bomb one hundred times more destructive, called the Hydrogen Bomb, or H-bomb. This Bomb has never been used.
There were two major results that came from the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The first was the United States becoming involved in World War Two, and the second was the creation and dropping of the Atomic Bomb. Without the United States involvement in World War Two, the allies would have probably lost. The bombing of Pearl Harbor was a very strategic attack upon the United States by Japan, but all they did was awaken a sleeping giant. The events following the bombing had actually helped gain power for the Allies, by the Americans entering the war and creating the Atomic bomb.