Could the bombing of Pearl Harbor have been avoided and many lives been saved if the Americans had kept better track of Japanese intelligence, and if President Franklin D. Roosevelt had warned Pearl Harbor that it was going to be attacked? President Roosevelt denied intelligence to Hawaii, sent false information to Hawaii about the location of the Japanese carrier fleet, and misled commanders into believing that negotiations with Japan were continuing.
In 1887 the U.S government first got exclusive use of the inlet of the island of Oahu, Hawaii; a principal naval base of the Unites States, for repairs and a coaling station for ships.
On November 26, 1941 Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo's fleet assembled in Tankan Bay and in the Kurile Islands and left, in secrecy, for Hawaii. On December 7, the fleet of six heavy aircraft carriers and 24 supporting vessels arrived, and the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor was attacked. The six carriers launched a first wave of 181 planes made up of torpedo bombers, dive bombers, horizontal bombers, and fighters. The Japanese planes also attacked military and naval airfields which were nearby. When the attack ended 2 hours later, a lot of damage was done, eight American battleships and ten other naval vessels were either damaged or they sunk, close to 200 American aircraft were destroyed, and around 3000 naval and military personnel were killed or wounded. Japan's losses were not very bad comparatively. Twenty-nine planes, which was less than 10 percent of their attacking force, failed to return to their carriers. Soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor the United States declared war on Japan and formally entered into World War II. Many Japanese immigrant leaders were arrested the first few weeks after the attacks. On February 19, 1942 President Roosevelt signed an order allowing military leaders to exclude whomever they wanted to from military areas. Nearly 120,000 ethnic Japanese,...