Washington, D.C. • December 18, 1944 On December 7 and 8, 1941, the Empire of Japan launched an unprovoked air and sea attack on U.S. military assets in the Central and Western Pacific Ocean, at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and the Philippines, respectively. On December 11, 1941, the U.S. Congress declared war on the aggressor nation. Seventy…
Washington, D.C. • November 7, 1941 Relations between the U.S. and Japan grew chilly in mid-1941 after President Franklin D. Roosevelt froze Japanese assets in the U.S. and embargoed oil and gasoline exports to Japan in retaliation for that country’s occupation of Indochinese airfields in what is today Vietnam. The year before Roosevelt had banned…
Tulelake, Modoc County, California • April 15, 1942 On this date in 1942, in a remote, underdeveloped reclamation district roughly 35 miles/56 kilometers southeast of Klamath Falls, Oregon, and about 10 miles/16 kilometers from the town of Tulelake (or Newell), the federal government began construction of the Tule Lake Relocation Center for persons of Japanese ancestry forcibly deported from…
Washington, D.C. • December 8, 1941 Although the devastating Japanese surprise attack on U.S. military installations at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, came as a shock to most Americans, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration had already begun weighing possible responses to an outbreak of war with Japan, Germany, and Italy—countries treaty-bound in a mutual…