What were the effects of the battle?
The Japanese were hoping to destroy America’s will to fight with the bombing. Instead, America wanted revenge. The day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt made a famous speech saying the words that are still famous to this day. He pronounced Pearl Harbor “A date that will live in infamy.” America declared war on Japan and finally got involved in WWII. The attack also prompted an astounding number of men to join the army. There were lines for enrollment stretching along sidewalks, made up of citizens wanting to join the army. Along with the men going to the army, women from all around the country went into manufacturing factories to make ammunition for their husbands and the men that were fighting in WWII.
After the Pearl Harbor attack, manufacturing of war machines and materials such as guns, planes, ships, and tanks rapidly accelerated in a national attempt to make America a formidable force in the war. The Japanese destroyed Pearl Harbor, and the next day, Japan initiated the attack on Midway Island. Japan ended up trying to conquer the entirety of the Pacific, and America stopped them from taking Hawaii and Midway Island. The attack also resulted in many parents losing all their children in the boats from the bombing attack. This was very important, since when the parents are old, who will look after them and take care of them when they cannot take care of themselves? After all the families had their kids killed, America decided never to put brothers in the same military base again. After the attack, there was little trust for those of Japanese descent, and so they put them in internment camps, where there was no privacy and little space for living. Surprisingly, one of the first internment camps was on Bainbridge Island. For the rest of WWII, the American battle cry was “Remember Pearl Harbor!” Later in WWII, the Americans decided to bomb two of Japan’s major cities with atomic bombs, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These devastating bombs caused Japan to surrender and ended the war in 1945.
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The Japanese Internment Memorial, Bainbridge Island.
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