Dbq Pearl Harbor

December 7th, 1941 changed United States history forever, and it was all over by 9:55 a.m. Dale Gano, eyewitness to the attack, states “watching Pearl Harbor get destroyed and thousands of lives lost put most of us in a state of shock.” The people of Pearl City, home to over 47,000 today, were close enough to witness the attack of Pearl Harbor strike. Witness said that he saw sunken U.S. Navy ships on both sides of Ford Island burn furiously. Dale could not locate his wife until four months after the attack. That was just one example of the thousands of people who lost their family and friends. This surprise attack brought much distraught to everyone in the United States. To the people of Hawaii and all over the world, it was unclear if the

Germany had been swept by nationalism and was going against the Versailles Treaty, which ended the first World War. This treaty stated that Germany had to take full responsibility for the war and pay for the reparations. China was at war with Japan since 1931, the invasion of Manchuria. Japan invaded China because they believed that the Chinese messed with their railroad, but really most Chinese say they were just looking for a reason to invade. During all of this, the United States passed many Neutrality Acts, trying to prevent conflict with foreign countries. The United States also suffered because of the Great Depression, which was the deepest and longest economic plunge in United States history. The Great Depression began after the stock market crash in 1929. A stock market crash is a sudden and steep decline of stocks across majority of the market. This market crash sent Wall Street into a dismay and sent many investments down the drain. In 1933 the Great Depression reached its peak and many americans were unemployed and broke, this was a small cause of the second World War. Unexpectedly, the World War helped to turn around the economy when it was necessary that we kick it into gear (History.com

Early in the morning there were sightings of large groups of planes, but American planes were expected to come in the same morning so nobody was alarmed. At Hawaii time of 7:55 a.m., 360 Japanese airplanes in six aircraft carriers flew out from the cloudy sky. They were in a decent onto the American Naval Base called Pearl Harbor. Bombs and bullets poured onto the Island of Hawaii. At approximately 8:10 a bomb that weighed 1,800 pounds fell onto the dock where all of the ships were held, specifically the USS Arizona, as you can see in figure 01. This ship exploded when the bomb was dropped and sank to the bottom of the ocean with more than 1,000 innocent men trapped inside. As you can see in the picture, many men could not do anything about the attack and had to watch all of their battleships get destroyed. The USS Arizona’s first battle was the attack of Pearl Harbor. The ship never got to fire one of its 14 guns and 100 pounds of gun powder. This ship stayed at the deck of the harbor for almost 27 years and at the last moment had a huge impact in the United State’s entrance into the war. Although over a thousand men died that day, 335 men escaped their death and lived out the attack. Few of those crew members live today, the ones that live tell their stories about how they lived in the day of December 7th, 1941. The crew states that they were not alone in the water, they were surrounded by 10-15 sharks. Lou Conter