Years of fighting brought the US armed forces closer and closer to Japan as they “hopped” from one island to another. President Franklin Roosevelt called the attack “a day which will live in infamy,” and the American people were shocked and angered.
Pacific fleet, and they nearly succeeded. The Japanese goal was to cripple the U.S. In the surprise attack, Japan sunk several ships, destroyed hundreds of planes and ended thousands of lives. The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, brought the United States officially into World War II. Japan, sensing conflict was inevitable, began planning for an attack on Pearl Harbor by April, 1941. Furthermore, the United States demanded that the Japanese withdraw from conquered areas of China and Indochina. Responding to this threat, the United States placed an embargo on scrap metal, oil, and aviation fuel heading to Japan and froze Japanese assets in the United States. Relations between the United States and Japan worsened when Japanese forces took aim at Indochina with the goal of capturing oil rich areas of the East Indies. The United States, along with other countries, criticized Japanese aggression but shied away from any economic or military punishments. In 1934, Japan ended its cooperation with other major powers in the Pacific by withdrawing from the Five Power Treaty. At this time, several treaties were in place to limit the size of navies in the Pacific Ocean. By 1937 Japan controlled large sections of China and accusations of war crimes against the Chinese people became commonplace. Seeking raw materials to fuel its growing industries, Japan invaded the Chinese province of Manchuria in 1931. Every major country of the time was involved in the war.Ĭonflict in the Pacific began well before the official start of World War II. The Caribbean and Central America, Greenland, Alaska, and the Aleutian Islands, Iraq, Syria, Burma, and the Arctic are a few of the little known places that were involved. There were battles and military posts in surprising places. World War II was fought by millions of people in all corners of the world. Electing Our Presidents Teacher Workshop.An Ordinary Man, His Extraordinary Journey.weapon would explode with a yield of 300 kilotons of TNT”. In comparison, today’s thermonuclear weapons are much more powerful. It is estimated that these two bombs killed roughly 200,000 people in the near term, with more dying in the following years from cancer. One frightening aspect of nukes today is that they’re many times more powerful than the Little Boy bomb: “The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were comparable to explosions of about 15 to 20 kilotons of TNT. But my one driving interest was to do the best job I could so that we could end the killing as quickly as possible”. We knew it was going to kill people right and left. We had feelings, but we had to put them in the background. “I knew when I got the assignment”, he told a reporter in 2005, “it was going to be an emotional thing. In a 1975 interview, Paul Tibbets said: “I’m proud that I was able to start with nothing, plan it and have it work as perfectly as it did. Tibbets, en route to Guam, felt a 2.5g shockwave driven before a kaleidoscopic pillar of smoke and debris. 31,000 feet above (9,500 meters), and 10 and a half miles away from them, Paul W. local time, poised above Hiroshima’s Aioi Bridge, Little Boy dropped. The bomb, named “Little Boy”, was anything but snout-nosed, and weighing in at 9,700 pounds (4,400 kg), it resembled nothing more than an obese metal baseball bat.Īt 8:15 a.m. Rather than isobutyl methacrylate or its more famous kin, napalm, this bomb was packed with two masses of highly enriched uranium-235. Unlike the bombs with which the US Air Force had scorched Japan for roughly a year, this bomb was not filled with the usual incendiaries. On 6 August 1945, during the final stages of World War II, it became the first aircraft to drop an atomic bomb. The Enola Gay was a bomber, named for Enola Gay Tibbets, the mother of the pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets, who selected the aircraft while it was still on the assembly line. Colonel Paul Tibbets waving from the Enola Gay’s cockpit to get reporters to stand clear of the propellers prior to engine start, before taking off for the bombing of Hiroshima.