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 an unprovoked attack on America’s doorstep, the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor and its defending Army Air Corps and Marine airfields dotting the harbor perimeter. Twelve days…
Chicago, Illinois · December 4, 1941 Early in July 1941, four 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 asked his Secretaries of War and the Navy…
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 the…
Washington, D.C. · November 20, 1941 On this date in 1941 in Washington, Japanese ambassador Kichisaburō Nomura presented his government’s final proposal for peace in the Asia Pacific region. Through much of 1941, Ambassador Nomura had negotiated with U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull to resolve festering bilateral issues, among them the Japanese conflict with…
Tokyo, Japan · November 5, 1941 Early in September 1941 Japanese officials gave their diplomats until 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, timber, and rice. The restrictions had been imposed the previous…
Tokyo, Japan · October 16, 1941 On this date in 1941 Prince Fumimaro Konoe resigned as prime minister of Japan. Konoe had lost the support of cabinet and Army minister Gen. Hideki Tōjō, who called for a firmer line with the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt over the U.S. ban on the export of…
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 6, 1941 On this date in 1941, in an Imperial Conference in Tokyo, Japanese officials concluded that if diplomatic measures could not reverse the U.S. policy of embargoing the export of various strategic raw materials (e.g., oil, iron ore, rubber, and scrap steel) to Japan by early October, then the government…
Washington, D.C. · July 2, 1940 America responded to Japan’s invasion of China in 1937 and to the many news reports of indiscriminate bombing of Chinese civilian targets by imposing trade restrictions on exports to Japan. Initially a proclamation by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on June 26, 1940, it morphed into an expression of national moral…
Tokyo, Japan · May 11, 1939 Europe, the United States, and Japan, profiting from the technological, economic, social, and military advantages conferred on their countries by the Industrial Revolution, began placing weaker nations elsewhere in the world under their “protection.” The United States did that in 1898, when the Philippines became an American territory. Japan…