JAPAN, PEARL HARBOR, AND WAR
While most Americans anxiously watched the course of the European war, tension mounted in Asia . Tak- ing advantage of an opportunity to improve its strategic position, Japan boldly announced a “new order” in which it would exercise hegemony over all of the Pacific . Battling for survival against Nazi Germany, Brit- ain was unable to resist, abandon- ing its concession in Shanghai and temporarily closing the Chinese sup- ply route from Burma . In the sum- mer of 1940, Japan won permission from the weak Vichy government in France to use airfields in north- ern Indochina (North Vietnam) . That September the Japanese for- mally joined the Rome-Berlin Axis . The United States countered with an embargo on the export of scrap iron to Japan .
In July 1941 the Japanese occu- pied southern Indochina (South Vietnam), signaling a probable move southward toward the oil, tin, and rubber of British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies . The United States, in response, froze Japanese assets and initiated an embargo on the one commodity Japan needed above all others — oil .
General Hideki Tojo became prime minister of Japan that Oc- tober . In mid-November, he sent a special envoy to the United States to meet with Secretary of State Cordell Hull . Among other things, Japan demanded that the United
States release Japanese assets and stop U .S . naval expansion in the Pacific . Hull countered with a pro- posal for Japanese withdrawal from all its conquests . The swift Japanese rejection on December 1 left the talks stalemated .
On the morning of December 7, Japanese carrier-based planes ex- ecuted a devastating surprise attack against the U .S . Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii .
Twenty-one ships were destroyed or temporarily disabled; 323 aircraft were destroyed or damaged; 2,388 soldiers, sailors, and civilians were killed . However, the U .S . aircraft carriers that would play such a criti- cal role in the ensuing naval war in the Pacific were at sea and not an- chored at Pearl Harbor .
American opinion, still divid- ed about the war in Europe, was unified overnight by what Presi- dent Roosevelt called “a day that will live in infamy .” On December 8, Congress declared a state of war with Japan; three days later Ger- many and Italy declared war on the United States .