TODAY: “Air raid on Pearl Harbor X This is not a drill.”
This was the hurried dispatch from the ranking United States naval officer in Pearl Harbor, Admiral Husband Edward Kimmel, Commander in Chief of the United States Pacific Fleet, sent to all major navy commands and fleet units, providing the first official word of the attack at the ill-prepared Pearl Harbor base on Dec. 7, 1941.
This reminder of “a date which will live in infamy” comes from the Library of Congress.
“On December 7, 1941, Japanese planes attacked the United States Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii Territory, killing more than 2,300 Americans. The U.S.S. Arizona was completely destroyed and the U.S.S. Oklahoma capsized. A total of twelve ships sank or were beached in the attack and nine additional vessels were damaged. More than 160 aircraft were destroyed and more than 150 others damaged.”
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed a joint session of Congress the following day, and made a speech which to this day is one of the most well known political addresses in history, which led to a declaration of war.
According to the Library, “Congress then declared War on Japan, abandoning the nation’s isolationism policy and ushering the United States into World War II. Within days, Japan’s allies, Germany and Italy, declared war on the United States, and the country began a rapid transition to a wartime economy by building up armaments in support of military campaigns in the Pacific, North Africa, and Europe.
“Also on the day following Pearl Harbor, Alan Lomax, head of the Library of Congress Archive of American Folk Song, sent a telegram to colleagues around the U.S. asking them to collect people’s immediate reactions to the bombing.”
“Over the next few days prominent folklorists such as John Lomax, John Henry Faulk, Charles Todd, Robert Sonkin, and Lewis Jones responded by recording ‘man on the street’ interviews in New York, North Carolina, Texas, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. They interviewed salesmen, electricians, janitors, oilmen, cabdrivers, housewives, students, soldiers, physicians, and others regarding the events of December 7.”
More than 200 people’s reactions are preserved in the Library in about 12 hours of a portrait of life in America as the U.S. entered World War II.
