Gov Docs: Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day   Tags: govdocs  

After the Day of Infamy: "Man-on-the-Street" Interviews Following the Attack on Pearl Harbor presents approximately twelve hours of opinions recorded in the days and months following the bombing of Pearl Harbor from more than two hundred individuals in cities and towns across the United States.

Who started the Cold War—the United States or the Soviet Union? Was it Truman's provincial anti-communism or Stalin's ruthless tyranny? Were the vast national security policies and institutions that Washington built to fight the Cold War wise precautions or wasteful threats to American liberty? David Reynolds probably thinks these are the wrong questions.

On December 8, 1941, the day after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt delivered this "Day of Infamy Speech." Immediately afterward, Congress declared war, and the United States entered World War II.

On August 23, 1994, Congress designated December 7 of each year as "National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day." The Day honors the more than 2,400 military service personnel who died on December 7, 1941, during the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, by Japanese forces.

The 7 December 1941 Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor was one of the great defining moments in history. A single carefully-planned and well-executed stroke removed the United States Navy's battleship force as a possible threat to the Japanese Empire's southward expansion. America, unprepared and now considerably weakened, was abruptly brought into the Second World War as a full combatant.

The name Pearl Harbor has become a symbol of our disastrous failure to read rightly the many omens in the weeks preceding that pointed to war and even to this attack.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared December 7, 1941, a "date which will live in infamy." With over 3,500 Americans killed or wounded, the surprise attack by the Imperial Japanese on Pearl Harbor was an attempt to break the American will and destroy our Pacific Fleet.

In the seemingly never-ending debate over the 7 December 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, one of the significant topics of contention pressed by some revisionist and conspiracy writers, historians, and critics of the conventional view of the attack and the Roosevelt administration’s role in it has been the phenomenon of the so-called “Winds Message” (hereafter referred to as Winds message).