(Time) ighty-one years ago, on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed U.S. Pacific fleet and Army and Navy aircraft at Pearl Harbor on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, killing some 2,400 military personnel and civilians.
The attack marked the beginning of America’s combat role in the Second World War. But Pearl Harbor wasn’t the only attack on allied positions in the Pacific that week.
The Japanese launched assaults on the American territories Guam, Wake Island, the Philippines, and British territories of Hong Kong, Malaya, and Burma. As the National World War II Museum explains Japan’s strategy back then: “As Adolf Hitler’s armies rampaged across Europe, overrunning Germany’s neighbors in 1939-40 and threatening to invade the British Isles, the European colonial empires in Asia lay nearly undefended, ripe for the picking: the Malay Peninsula, the Dutch East Indies, Indochina. Rich sources of raw materials lay in all of them, rubber, tin, and especially oil, the precious lifeblood of any modern economy.”… Read More
