The Japanese task force moving to attack Pearl Harbor. A Japanese representative says Japan just wanted peace, and US refusal to sell them scrap metal was delaying peace in Asia. They begin their attack on th US base.
This section examines various things, including whether or not the US knew about the Pearl Harbor attack in advance. They talk to some actual veterans of the Pearl Harbor attack, and more than one says he thinks the US knew about the attack in advanced and let the attack happen in order to get the US (which was still reluctant to go to war) into the war, no matter what the average person wanted.
19 US vessels, including 8 battleships, were sunk or damaged, according to the narrator. 188 US planes were destroyed. 1109 wounded, 2280 killed. 68 civilians were also killed.
The film says FDR, according to some documents, might have known about the attack in advance. One of the veterans, and the narrator, is talking about the isolationist attitude of many Americans. Many felt that our entry into World War I was a mistake, and now it looked possible that the same kind of thing would happen again.
Some of the veterans feel that FDR was politically motivated to find some way to get the US into the war despite the fact that he had basically promised that no “US blood” would be spilled overseas. The nation was still in favor of neutrality, and it would take a significant incident to get the people to change their minds and unite behind a war. The film also talks about MAGIC, the code-breaking device that allowed our government to know what the Japanese diplomats were saying. The film notes that, since we knew what was going on behind the scenes, how could be not have also known about the plan to attack Pearl Harbor?
Apparently there was little communication between the FBI and the military intelligence sections and there were sort of basically not getting along, very much like the state of affairs decades later prior to the attack on the Twin Towers.
I think that a lot of this material has been colorized.
Main Index
Japan main page
Japanese-American Internment Camps index page
Japan and World War II index page
