Pearl Harbor Dbq Essay

On Sunday, December 7, 1941, Japanese planes flew into the American Naval base, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii with a surprise attack that heavily damaged and destroyed planes and navy vessel as well as killed over 2,000 servicemen. This attack was a huge surprise for the commanders on base, but many historians do not believe it was much of a shock for President Roosevelt or other important individuals in Washington. Immediately after the attack, Japan declared war on the United States, which also meant that the United States would eventually go to war with Japans ally, Germany, which the President had wanted for many months prior to the attack. President Franklin Roosevelt had previous knowledge of the surprise attack, but withheld it from any generals,

The Soviet Union feared that Germany attacking from the west and Japan attacking from the east would have led to an ultimate defeat and ended Communism. Roosevelt praised Stalin, the Soviet Union dictator, so he diverted Japan attention from the Soviet Union and cut off Japanese oil supplies and froze their assets. This caused Japan to move southward to conquer smaller Asian countries to obtain more natural resources instead of northward to help the Germans. Japan used these natural resources for fuel and naval vessels so that they could strike back at the United States for cutting of their supplies. If Roosevelt would have left the Soviet Union to defend themselves, Japan would not have conquered other Southern Asian countries and most likely would not have attacked Pearl Harbor. American intelligence knew the reason that Japan was conquering smaller nations, but nothing was done to stop them so therefore, Roosevelt could have easily prevented this

Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, Japan was on a mission to conquest other Pacific countries in order to gain more power and to harvest more natural resources since Japan had so little. Neither the American people nor the government trusted Japans actions, so when they invaded China and Indo-China, Roosevelt shut off all oil exports and froze all their assets. Japanese and American ambassadors attempted to settle diplomatic relations with negotiation without war, but Japan was secretly planning an attack on Pearl Harbor as their ultimatum. The “Magic” decoding system could not decode military codes, only diplomatic codes, so the telegraphs that the American government and military officers received were not for codes of war but truly were for diplomatic purposes as Roosevelt had told his Generals in Hawaii. According to a letter dated December 1, 1941 from Roosevelt to the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, the President was concerned that one of the decoded messages meant that Japan was planning an attack somewhere in the Pacific with the army they had assembled in Indo-China, so he asked his diplomats to investigate the Japanese’s intentions. After the attack, Roosevelt was concerned about the safety of America,