Manila, Philippines • December 10, 1941 At 3:40 a.m. on December 8, 1941 (Manila time), 1 hour and 40 minutes after the start of Japan’s unprovoked air and naval attack on U.S. military installations at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, 62‑year-old Lt. Gen. Douglas MacArthur awoke to a terrible day of his own. Within 3 hours MacArthur learned that Japanese carrier…
Pearl Harbor, Hawaii • December 7, 1941 On this date in 1941, a quiet Sunday morning on the Hawaiian island of Oahu just before 8 o’clock, Japan staged a devious, vicious, unprovoked air and naval attack on America’s doorstep, the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor and its defending Army Air Corps and Marine airfields that…
Chicago, Illinois • December 4, 1941 Early in July 1941, just 4 months after the U.S. Congress had enacted the Lend-Lease Program that began assisting Great Britain and China in their defense against the aggressor states of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan, President Franklin D. Roosevelt requested his Secretaries of War and the Navy…
Hitokappu Bay, Kurile Islands, Northern Japan • November 26, 1941 For several months the airmen of Japan’s First Naval Air Fleet had trained for an attack on the main base of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. Squadrons of naval planes flew low over the city of Kagoshima on…
Tokyo, Japan • November 11, 1940 Seventh child to a Japanese schoolmaster and his second wife and named “Isoroku” to memorialize his father’s age (56), the future commander of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Combined Fleet (Rengō Kantai) for much of World War II would seem to have been born under what Westerners call “a lucky star.”…
Tokyo, Japan • November 5, 1941 On September 6, 1941, Japanese officials, in a decision endorsed by Shōwa Emperor Hirohito, gave their diplomats until mid-October to reverse the policy of the Western powers—principally the U.S., Great Britain, and the Netherlands—of restricting Japan’s access to vital Southeast Asian resources, among them oil, rubber, tin, bauxite, timber,…
Washington, D.C. • October 7, 1940 In the 1930s Japan’s statesmen and military leaders in China were acutely aware that their economy and armed forces were dependent on imports from the United States and its colonial friends who had holdings in the Asia Pacific region: the Americans in the Philippines, the British in Malaya (now…
Tokyo, Japan • September 30, 1943 On this date in 1943, at the fourth Imperial Conference held since the start of the Pacific War, senior Japanese military and civilian leaders adopted the “absolute defense perimeter” strategy after securing the requisite imprimatur of Shōwa Emperor Hirohito. The strategy reflected a shift in the expectations of both…
Tokyo, Japan • September 6, 1941 On this date in 1941, in an Imperial Conference in Tokyo, Japanese military and political leaders embarked on a collision course with the West. It was decided that Japan would begin war preparations against the U.S., Great Britain, and the Netherlands (all countries with territorial claims in Southeast Asia;…
Hashirajima Anchoring Area, Hiroshima Bay, Japan • May 27, 1942 A little over 4 months after Japan devastated the U.S. Pacific Fleet riding at peaceful anchor at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, Japanese Shōwa Emperor Hirohito and his Army and Navy staff officers received a rude calling card from Lt. Col. James “Jimmy” Doolittle and 79 other airmen of…