Tuesday, March 18 - War Stories- World War II - Pearl Harbor, Dunkirk and War
Objective: To understand how Pearl Harbor brought the U.S. into the war and changed the tide for the Allies
Pearl Harbor
Pearl Harbor is a U.S. naval base near Honolulu, Hawaii, that was the scene of a devastating surprise attack by Japanese forces on December 7, 1941. Just before 8 a.m. on that Sunday morning, hundreds of Japanese fighter planes descended on the base, where they managed to destroy or damage nearly 20 American naval vessels, including eight battleships, and over 300 airplanes. More than 2,400 Americans died in the attack, including civilians, and another 1,000 people were wounded. The day after the assault, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war on Japan.
The Japanese plan was simple: Destroy the Pacific Fleet. That way, the Americans would not be able to fight back as Japan’s armed forces spread across the South Pacific. On December 7, after months of planning and practice, the Japanese launched their attack.
At about 8 a.m., Japanese planes filled the sky over Pearl Harbor. Bombs and bullets rained onto the vessels moored below. At 8:10, a 1,800-pound bomb smashed through the deck of the battleship USS Arizona and landed in her forward ammunition magazine. The ship exploded and sank with more than 1,000 men trapped inside.
Next, torpedoes pierced the shell of the battleship USS Oklahoma. With 400 sailors aboard, the Oklahoma lost her balance, rolled onto her side and slipped underwater.
Less than two hours later, the surprise attack was over, and every battleship in Pearl Harbor—USS Arizona, USS Oklahoma, USS California, USS West Virginia, USS Utah, USS Maryland, USS Pennsylvania, USS Tennessee and USS Nevada—had sustained significant damage. (All but USS Arizona and USS Utah were eventually salvaged and repaired.)
But the Japanese had failed to cripple the Pacific Fleet. By the 1940s, battleships were no longer the most important naval vessel: Aircraft carriers were, and as it happened, all of the Pacific Fleet’s carriers were away from the base on December 7. (Some had returned to the mainland and others were delivering planes to troops on Midway and Wake Islands.)
Moreover, the Pearl Harbor assault had left the base’s most vital onshore facilities—oil storage depots, repair shops, shipyards and submarine docks—intact. As a result, the U.S. Navy was able to rebound relatively quickly from the attack.
After the Pearl Harbor attack, and for the first time during years of discussion and debate, the American people were united in their determination to go to war.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress on December 8, the day after the crushing attack on Pearl Harbor.
“Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.
The Japanese had wanted to goad the United States into an agreement to lift the economic sanctions against them; instead, they had pushed their adversary into a global conflict that ultimately resulted in Japan’s first occupation by a foreign power.
Dunkirk
Dunkirk is located in the north of France, on the shores of the North Sea near the Belgian-French border. The Strait of Dover, where the distance between England and France is just 21 miles across the English Channel, is located to the southwest.
On May 10, 1940, Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Belgium in a blitzkrieg (German for “lightning war”) attack.
Soon after the blitzkrieg began, German forces invaded France—not along the Maginot Line, which the Allies had expected, but through the Ardennes Forest, moving steadily along the Somme Valley toward the English Channel.
As they advanced, German forces cut off all communication and transport between the northern and southern branches of Allied forces, pushing several hundred thousand Allied troops in the north into an increasingly small sliver of the French coast.
By May 19, General John Gort, commander of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) had begun to weigh the possibility of evacuating his entire force by sea in order to save them from certain annihilation by the approaching Nazi troops.
At first, British command opposed evacuation, and French forces wanted to hold out as well.
But with the BEF and its allies forced back on the French port of Dunkirk, located on the shores of the North Sea just 10 km (6.2 miles) from the Belgian border, Churchill soon became convinced evacuation was the only option.
On the first full day, Operation Dynamo was only able to evacuate about 7,500 men from Dunkirk; around 10,000 got out the following day (May 28).
As Dunkirk had such a shallow beach, Royal Navy vessels couldn’t reach it, and the Allies put out a call for smaller ships to carry troops from the shore to the larger ships further out in the North Sea. Some 800 to 1,200 boats, many of them leisure or fishing crafts, eventually aided in the evacuation from Dunkirk.
Some were requisitioned by the Navy and crewed by naval personnel, while others were manned by their civilian owners and crew. The first members of this small armada—which would become known as the “Little Ships”—began arriving on the beaches of Dunkirk on the morning of May 28, helping to speed up the evacuation.
At the outset, Churchill and the rest of British command expected that the evacuation from Dunkirk could rescue only around 45,000 men at most. But the success of Operation Dynamo exceeded all expectations. On May 29, more than 47,000 British troops were rescued; more than 53,000, including the first French troops, made it out on May 30.
By the time the evacuations ended, some 198,000 British and 140,000 French troops would manage to get off the beaches at Dunkirk—a total of some 338,000 men. An additional 90,000 Allied forces were left behind, along with the bulk of the BEF’s heavy guns and tanks, when the resistance ended on the morning of June 4 and German troops occupied Dunkirk.
Germany had hoped defeat at Dunkirk would lead Britain to negotiate a speedy exit from the conflict. Instead, the “Miracle at Dunkirk” became a rallying cry for the duration of the war, and an iconic symbol of the British spirit.