Pearl Harbor Attack 69 Years Ago

USS Shaw Explodes During Japanese Sneak Attack on Pearl Harbor

The attack on Pearl Harbor (called the Hawaii Operation or Operation Z by the Japanese Imperial General Headquarters, and the Battle of Pearl Harbor by some Americans) was a surprise military strike conducted by the Imperial Japanese Navy against the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on the morning of December 7, 1941. The next day the United States declared war on Japan resulting in their entry into World War II. The attack was intended as a preventive action in order to keep the U.S. Pacific Fleet from influencing the war that the Empire of Japan was planning in Southeast Asia, against Britain and the Netherlands, as well as the U.S. in the Philippines. The base was attacked by Japanese aircraft (a total of 353, in two waves) launched from six aircraft carriers.

Four U.S. Navy battleships were sunk (two of which were raised and returned to service later in the war) and all of the four other battleships present were damaged. The Japanese also sank or damaged three cruisers, three destroyers, an anti-aircraft training ship and one minelayer. 188 U.S. aircraft were destroyed, 2,402 personnel were killed and 1,282 were wounded. The power station, shipyard, maintenance, and fuel and torpedo storage facilities, as well as the submarine piers and headquarters building (also home of the intelligence section) were not attacked. Japanese losses were light, with 29 aircraft and five midget submarines lost, and 65 servicemen killed or wounded. One Japanese sailor was captured.

The attack was a major engagement of World War II and came as a profound shock to the American people. Domestic support for isolationism, which had been strong, disappeared. Germany’s ill-considered declaration of war on the U.S., which was not required by any treaty commitment, moved the U.S. from clandestine support of Britain (for example the Neutrality Patrol) into active alliance and full participation in the European Theater. Despite numerous historical precedents for unannounced military action, the lack of any formal warning by Japan, particularly while negotiations were still apparently ongoing, led to President Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaiming December 7, 1941 “a date which will live in infamy”.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the US into World War II occurred 69 years ago today. You might not know about the one person who caused it to be so devastating (a two-part story).

The History Place

National Park Service – Pearl Harbor

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The Viral Me: Devin Friedman Investigates the New World of Social Networking

Cupertino is where Apple is. Palo Alto is where Facebook is. Mountain View is where Google is. Geographically speaking, then, Y Combinator, let’s call it YC, is in Googletown, a flat suburban place dotted with low bungalows and bathed almost always in sunlight. On a side street here, more of a service road, really, sits the small building that houses the company. It hardly exists at all, physically. It’s just two rooms—the office, where the three full-time employees can sometimes be found, and the main room, which, with its bright plywood picnic tables and orange acoustic tiling, looks like the dining hall at one of the better youth hostels in Denmark. YC is a kind of tech-industry incubator, maybe the most important in the world. It’s the place where people are trying to invent the ways we’re going to behave, at least as far as the Internet goes, in the future.

The first person I meet at YC is an entrepreneur named Jiggity, who is 22 years old and got his computer-science degree from MIT about twenty minutes ago. His real name isn’t Jiggity; it’s something Korean, but Jiggity is “more memorable when I’m meeting a whole lot of people.” Jiggity is building something called Teevox, which is going to turn your iPhone into a remote control for your computer. A remote control that can search and play every movie, TV show, album, video, etc., that exists on your hard drive. (YC lesson one: Your smartphone is now, or will be, your basic interface with the world.)

The way things work at YC is like this: You and your co-genius collaborator apply out of Stanford, MIT, or Cal (more or less); if YC accepts you (it accepts only 3 percent of applicants), it gives you $20,000 (in exchange for a portion of your company), helps you develop your product, and, three months later, puts you in front of a room filled with the most important investors in Silicon Valley to ask for money—money you will get, and often in large quantities. The average YC business emerges from the three-month start-up process worth millions of dollars.

Jiggity lays out for me a future where his product is central to the way we live our lives, filled as they are with a constantly proliferating collection of DVRs and MP3s and MPEG-4 files and streaming video, etc. Teevox will make finding and playing all that media so much simpler. Especially when people finally realize that TVs are basically going to be giant high-def computer monitors.

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The 10 Most Spectacular Ways the World as We Know It Could End. And, as you probably guessed, there are book and movie analogies to help explain each catastrophe.

The Liljenquist family donated 400 Civil War photographs to the Library of Congress for a collection called The Last Full Measure. Then as now, many who did the fighting and dying seem to be too young to shave, much less fight.

Laughing lowers stress hormones (like cortisol, epinephrine, and adrenaline) and strengthens the immune system by releasing health-enhancing hormones. – Provided by RandomHistory.com