The United States was never gonna join the war, America’s job was to only supply Great Britain with money and equipment to fight Hilter and his Blitzkrieg. When the war started on September 1, 1939, it sent the world into chaos, the United States was safe from Hiter’s army and was not going to get involved, but that all changed on December 7, 1941, when the Empire of Japan surprise bombed U.S. ships at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Hawaii. The Japanese force consisted of 353 aircraft were launched. These included 40 torpedo planes, 103 level bombers, 131 dive-bombers, and 79 fighters. This attack left 2403 U.S personnel dead, the attack lasted 11 minutes and would change America’s look on the war. At this point, the Axis powers that consisted of Germany, Japan, and Italy and the Allies were the United States, Great Britain, USSR, and France. The reason the attack even happened was a “major intelligence failure” (Dahl 70), we that we thought the planes coming in were our bombers coming back from a recon mission, but it was the Japanese flying in to attack. “Since the attack on Pearl Harbor, anesthesia caused almost 1178 perioperative deaths 24 hours following the attack” (Crowhurst 21). This attack is a “day that will live in infamy” (Friedrich 2). That day Japan had awoken a sleeping giant and will make us join the war and almost 4 years later we would drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ending the war. While the war was being fought people found more jobs and America started to rebuild after the Great Depression. When the remaining soldiers came home, there was a new generation born, the generation was called the baby boomers and are still alive today. But the ones that didn't their sacrifice will always be remembered.
WWII was the largest and bloodiest war in the world and it happened in less than a blink of an eye, Hitler invaded Poland and started taking people from their homes and putting them in labor camps, he used a strategy called blitzkrieg which was he and his Nazis would storm in the country and take it over as fast as they can leaving nothing left. But sometimes on both sides, soldiers were captured they were questioned and tortured until either death or the war ends. The soldiers captured are called Prisoners of war or POWs, there are many stories of soldiers captured by the enemy not just from WWII but from pretty much every war. If a German soldier was captured they were questioned then put to work if they disobeyed they had to be taught some sort of discipline and what they did was a general arrest of the soldier (Lewis, 232). Back home in the United States economy and the need for jobs skyrocketed, this ended the great depression and people focused on the war because of this it changed future per capita income growth of countries affected, mortality, changing sex ratios, absence of a father, migration, dispossession, and periods without food (Kesternich). People would do anything to reinforce themselves and the soldiers fighting by saving and by sending them food, clothes, and letters from home (Kesternich). But the United States had no idea what they were gonna get involved in, the British forces were taking heavy losses. The Normandy invasion campaign was the first real battle the United States truly saw. The Normandy offense was strong and every battle we took heavy casualties, the number of losses caused considerable anxiety among certain U.S officers. For the first 16 days, psychiatric casualties in 8 different corps varied. The overall rate was 14.6% while the rate of the British forces was 18% (Jones, 224). But the united states finally pushed through and started to head inland further into the war. While they were also fighting the Japanese in the pacific.
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But this all started because of the attack on Pearl Harbor, this event was the spark that made us join the war. The Japanese were interested in U.S battleships, destroyers, and aircraft carriers, the total amount of ships were 18 ships, the most known were the USS Arizona and the USS Oklahoma both ships were completely sunk but now there is a museum apart of the USS Arizona and part of the ship is still visible (Wohlstetter, 390). The United States joined the war on December 7, 1941, the day Pearl Harbor was attacked, and would strike the Japanese at Midway in the Pacific. We barely won that battle but it was a turning point for the United States and shows that they won’t go down without a fight. Japanese Americans under the law of president Franklin Roosevelt must be sent to relocation camps until the war was over, even though about 120,000 Japanese Americans were U.S citizens and had the same rights as a normal American. The president succumbed to pressure and established 10 concentration camps in remote areas of the west. They were forced to leave literally everything behind and forced to move into these camps (Matsumoto, 440). In that time the rate of unemployment and crime has slowly dropped. Since 1940 for about two years, it is entirely possible that the summed effects for six years of the war reported confounding an initial negative impact of unemployment on crime rates. (Cantor, 318). When soldiers came home from the war, there was a baby boom, the population increased and soldiers could finally stop fighting, the world would recover and rebuild but this should have never happened. There were many treaties signed for peace and other events happening, signing these treaties should have kept peace and the war should have never happened. One of the documents signed was towards the POWs or prisoner of war. The Nuremberg Tribunals of 1945, and the Geneva Convention of 1929 and 1949, the Thirteenth Amendment to the constitution, the Alien Tort Claims Act, and the Torture Victim Protection Act says that you can not torture a POW and that handling them has to be humane by any circumstance (Joseph, 216).
The United States joining the war did impact the outcome of the war. Great Britain and France would have fallen if we didn’t back them up and give them money, weapons, food, and soldiers. The war finally ended on September 2, 1945, when the United States dropped two atomic bombs named Little Boy and Fatman from the plane of the Enola Gay. On August 6 and August 9, 1945, the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Reported numbers has been estimated that by the end of 1945, 90,000 to 120,000 out of a civilian population of about 330,000 in Hiroshima, and 60,000 to 80,000 out of 280,000 in Nagasaki. They would be dead as a result of exposure to the intense heat, physical force, and ionizing radiation emitted by the two bombs. This will forever be a part of the war and for many years after the bombs dropped there will be side effects radiation and health defects to children of the survivors. Responders in the 1950s say that there were about 284,000 A-bomb survivors about 159,000 of them were present in Hiroshima and about 125,000 survivors in Nagasaki. The United States moving from Japan and now paying attention to their ally the Russians or USSR, they were building atomic weapons like we were and just like that we were at war again but this time it was with the USSR and it was a different type of war it was an arms race to see who could make the most atomic weapons the fastest and use them on each other and other global enemies. This war was waged on political, Propaganda, and economic fronts and had only limited recourse to weapons (Schlesinger, 22). For the United States, we were involved in most of them, next would be the Korean War in 1952 and the Vietnam War in 1968. These two wars the United States would lose more than 100,000 soldiers and around 400,000 wounded (Mayhew, 483). From today the United States Navy has rebuilt what was destroyed and they have learned better communication skills and radar so another attack will never happen, the day America was attacked by the Japanese army is a day that will never be forgotten, that attack was the reason we joined and we finished the war and got revenge. During the attack, two U.S soldiers second Lieutenant Ken Taylor and George Welch were heroes during the day of infamy attack fighting back against Japanese planes (Barry). During Pearl Harbor, there were the Iowa boys these boys defended the ships at Pearl Harbor whether it be in the air, on the land, or on the sea, in every situation the Iowa boys have responded with honor. They have been decorated with the Purple Heart, the Silver Star, the Navy Cross, and the Distinguished Flying Cross (Swisher, 203). These few heroes made a huge impact during the attack on Pearl Harbor only a few saw what they did and remember them for their courage and bravery. But not only them were brave the whole United States army is they've fought and pushed to make sure there is a future and they will never be forgotten (Swisher).
How did the attack on Pearl Harbor affect the United States’ involvement in WWII? The United States suffered a massive attack at Pearl Harbor killing thousands of servicemen and the loss of many ships. Japan won the battle but not the war, The United States pushed to the west in the pacific with very little ships and planes. But yet the Japanese were not our only enemy. We were fighting on the western from pushing the German line back, but war always has a cost America suffered millions of casualties but the soldiers of the United States showed bravery and courage and without the massive forces of the United States the world would have never been the same. My advice would have been possible from then to have better radar men working that day and have more patrol planes out, I bet if they did Pearl Harbor would've never happened and more than 3,000 U.S soldiers between the ages of 18-30. For today, my advice would be to never have naval ships in one area at once and to always have materials to build backup ships. For future research, I suggest that we should dive deeper into the water and do a more thorough search of the water and other objects they could find, then analyze them to see if they match the date or era of Pearl Harbor, other research would be to find old communications between the Japanese about the bombing and check our equipment to see if there were any malfunctions with anything to fully get an overview of what happened at Pearl Harbor.
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