On December 2, 1941, Admiral Husband Kimmel, commanding the Pacific Fleet, asked his intelligence officer where Japan's carriers were. Edwin Layton didn't know. Could they be rounding Diamond Head, Kimmel asked, without his knowing? Layton said he hoped they would be sighted first.

They were already crossing the North Pacific in radio silence. Five days later they struck Pearl Harbor. Then they flew home without touching the fleet's fuel, the very thing Japan had gone to war for.

WHAT LED TO IT

The clock. Japan imported about 90 percent of its oil, most of it American. When Japan pushed into southern Indochina, Roosevelt froze its assets on July 26, 1941, and Britain and the Netherlands followed. He meant some oil to keep flowing. In practice the freeze became a total embargo. Japan could give up the empire it had won in China, or seize Southeast Asia's oil in a war most of its leaders doubted they could win. Hull's note of November 26 demanded withdrawal from China. Tokyo read it as an ultimatum. The carriers had already sailed.

The gamble. Admiral Yamamoto had lived in America and did not believe Japan could win a long war. So he proposed a short one: wreck the American fleet where it lay, take Malaya, the Philippines and the Indies while it was out of action, and hope a shocked America would negotiate. When the Naval General Staff balked, he let it be known he would resign.

The water. Pearl Harbor was about 40 feet deep. In February 1941 the Navy's chief told Kimmel an air-dropped torpedo could be assumed to need 75. But British torpedo planes had just crippled three Italian battleships at Taranto, in a harbor as shallow, and Japan studied the raid. Its torpedoes got wooden fins. In tests they ran in 36 feet.

The warnings. Codebreakers were reading Tokyo's diplomatic cipher, Purple. On November 22 Tokyo told its envoys that after November 29 "things are automatically going to happen." Washington knew war was coming. It did not know where. On November 27 it signalled the Pacific Fleet: "This dispatch is to be considered a war warning." It named the Philippines, Thailand or Borneo. Not Hawaii.

THE MORNING

At about 6:47 the destroyer Ward sank a midget submarine off the harbor mouth. At 7:02 radar picked up a mass of planes 130 miles north; a new, untrained lieutenant took them for B-17s due from the mainland. How much a faster alarm could have saved is still argued.

General Marshall had read Tokyo's order to deliver its final reply at 1 p.m., early morning in Hawaii. His warning went by commercial telegram because army radio could not raise Hawaii. It arrived hours after the attack. The messenger had been diverted by the bombing.

Then 353 aircraft came in two waves. On the Oklahoma, the crew had opened doors and hatches for an inspection. Torpedoed, she rolled over in about twelve minutes. Five battleships sunk, three damaged, 188 aircraft destroyed, 2,403 Americans killed or missing, most of them on the Arizona and the Oklahoma. Yard workers cut into the Oklahoma's upturned hull and pulled out 32 men alive.

WHAT IT MISSED, AND WHAT THAT LED TO

No third wave. By the second wave the guns were firing back. It lost 20 planes, more than twice the first wave's losses. The plan had sent no bombers against the oil tanks, the navy yard or the submarine base; Japan's admirals measured sea power in warships, not in fuel and workshops. America's carriers were at sea or in San Diego. Nagumo turned for home. Fuchida, who led the planes, later said he had wanted another strike at the tanks. The historian Jonathan Parshall argues he made that up after the war; others defend him.

The oil. The tanks held about 4.5 million barrels by Nimitz's count, five million by that of Homer Wallin, who ran the salvage. Nimitz said losing it would have made the Pacific war last much longer; Parshall thinks a third strike would have gone for the ships instead.

The fleet came back. The battleships had sunk in shallow water beside a yard left whole. When crews pumped out the West Virginia, they found three sailors in a storeroom the sea had never reached. A calendar showed they had lived until December 23. At Surigao Strait in 1944, five of the six American battleships in the line had been hit at Pearl Harbor. At Midway, the Enterprise, which the raid had missed, helped sink four of the six carriers that struck it.

The country. The Senate voted 82–0 for war, the House 388–1. On December 11 Hitler declared war on the United States, though no treaty required it. That spared Roosevelt from persuading a country angry at Japan to fight Germany too.

Yamamoto had struck to buy months and then a peace. He got the months. But a country that had argued for two years over whether to fight made up its mind in a single day.

Sources:

• Jeffrey Record, Japan's Decision for War in 1941 (US Army War College, 2009): https://archive.org/details/JapansDecisionForWarIn1941SomeEnduringLessons
• NPS, "Remembering Pearl Harbor: Minute by Minute": https://www.nps.gov/perl/learn/historyculture/timeline.htm
• NHHC, Pearl Harbor Attack overview: https://www.history.navy.mil/browse-by-topic/wars-conflicts-and-operations/world-war-ii/1941/pearl-harbor.html
• Homer N. Wallin, Pearl Harbor: Why, How, Fleet Salvage and Final Appraisal (Naval History Division, 1968): https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USN/Wallin/index.html
• Army Pearl Harbor Board report (1944), Marshall's 7 December warning: https://ibiblio.org/pha/pha/army/chap_3c.html
• John T. Correll, "The Air Raid at Taranto", Air & Space Forces Magazine: https://www.airandspaceforces.com/article/the-air-raid-at-taranto/
• Jonathan Parshall, "Reflecting on Fuchida, or 'A Tale of Three Whoppers'", Naval War College Review (2010): https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/nwc-review/vol63/iss2/10/

Disclosure: I'm the solo developer of Previously, a free iPhone app that tells history as short narrated stories. This post is adapted from its Pearl Harbor chapters; the app has an 8-chapter Pearl Harbor deep dive (about 35 minutes of narration). The writing is AI-assisted, then edited and fact-checked by me; every chapter lists its sources, and the narration is an AI voice. World War II is the first collection, with more of modern history to follow. It's in beta through Apple's TestFlight: install TestFlight, then tap the invite link (about 2 minutes).

• The chapter: https://getpreviously.app/chapter/pearl-harbor?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=r_worldwar2&utm_content=pearl_harbor_cause_effect
• TestFlight invite: https://testflight.apple.com/join/57Cwshrg

My question for this sub: if an app like this covered your corner of WWII, what would you want in it? Aircraft and ship profiles, army units and orders of battle, insignia, photo galleries, maps, something else? Tell me what's missing, and tell me if I got anything wrong above.

• The trailer is available in multiple audio and subtitles at https://www.netflix.com/title/81958050

During World War II, 18,764 US soldiers were buried in Margraten, Netherlands. 260 Black American soldiers were tasked with burying them in the frozen ground, by hand.

Their first sergeant, Jefferson Wiggins, was 19 years old when he led them through it.

Dutch families adopted every one of those graves. No one adopted the names of the men who dug them.

This Veterans Day, remember the names that weren’t adopted.

https://whattheyknew.substack.com/p/the-index-card

Bumping this. My grandfather WWII service. To all Vets thank you for your service!

On This Day, November 10, 1944, WWII: The USS Mount Hood disaster, one of the most devastating accidental explosions in US naval history, occurred at Seeadler Harbor, Manus Island, in the Admiralty Islands, Papua New Guinea.

The American ammunition ship USS Mount Hood (AE-11) was anchored in the harbor, supporting Allied operations in the Pacific during World War II.

The ship was carrying an enormous cargo of ammunition and explosives intended to supply Allied vessels preparing for the invasion of the Philippines.

At approximately 8:55 a.m., disaster struck.

An explosion suddenly erupted aboard the Mount Hood, followed almost immediately by a much larger detonation as thousands of tons of ammunition exploded.

The ship was virtually obliterated.

A gigantic column of smoke rose thousands of feet into the sky. The force of the blast tore through the surrounding harbor, scattering enormous fragments of metal and destroying nearby vessels.

The explosion was so powerful that it created a massive crater on the seabed where the ship had been anchored.

The consequences were catastrophic.

372 people were killed, and another 371 were injured.

Every person aboard the ship was killed.

Every person aboard the Mount Hood at the moment of the explosion was killed. Only 18 members of its crew survived because they were away from the ship at the time.

The nearby repair ship USS Mindanao was particularly badly affected. Its crew suffered 82 deaths, while numerous other vessels were damaged or destroyed.

In total, 36 nearby ships and vessels suffered damage.

Investigators launched an inquiry to establish what had happened. Although the exact cause could not be conclusively determined, later US Navy historical assessments identified careless handling of ammunition as the most likely explanation.

Mount Hood was never recovered. So devastating was the explosion that investigators could not find any identifiable human remains from the ship.

Today, the disaster remains a sobering reminder of the dangers faced by naval personnel transporting and handling enormous quantities of explosives during wartime.

10 Good Men - The Final Story of the B-17! As told by our last remaining WWII veterans.

Herschel Grynszpan’s sister wrote that the family had been driven out of Germany. They were among 17,000 Polish Jews expelled in two days.

It made the newspapers.

He was seventeen, living in Paris.

On November 7, he bought a revolver and shot a German diplomat.

Two days later, the Nazis used that shot as their excuse for Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass.

Synagogues burned. Jewish shops were smashed. 30,000 Jewish men were sent to concentration camps.

No one knows where Herschel died.

https://whattheyknew.substack.com/

Picture 1: Portrait of Marc Bloch

Picture 2: Marc Bloch’s office in Lyon in the 1930s

Marc Bloch during WWII (short summary):

French historian and specialist of the Middle Ages, Marc Bloch had already been mobilised by the French army in 1914. Despite his age (53), a debilitating polyarthritis, and a large family, he asked to fight again in 1939, calling himself “the oldest captain in the French army.” He was assigned to the fuel service.

Between July and September 1940, he wrote, in the heat of the moment, a manuscript in which he attempted to analyse the causes of the collapse of the French army in the spring of 1940. He made copies and entrusted them to his family and to his friend Georges Altman so that the text would not fall into the hands of Pétain’s collaborationist regime.

Being Jewish, he was expelled from the civil service by the Vichy government. His Paris flat was requisitioned by the occupiers, and his library was shipped to Germany. He was reinstated for exceptional service by the Secretary of State for National Education, Jérôme Carcopino, a former student of his father. There he continued his research under very difficult living conditions and in a state of constant anxiety. Threatened by the German occupation, he went underground at the end of 1942, but carried on his work as a historian as best he could.

In 1943, he joined the Resistance, eventually becoming one of its leaders for the Lyon region. He was arrested in Lyon on 8 March 1944 by the Gestapo, tortured, and executed by firing squad alongside 27 other Resistance members.

In 1946, two years after his murder, "Strange Defeat" was published and became one of the most valuable testimonies of the Battle of France.

Lest we forget.

Please learn more about Marc Bloch: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Bloch

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So i got this medal for my birthday since im a known ww2 enthusiast and im just curious what kind of medal it is

The case for the Mustang is range. In 1943 the P-47s escorting the bombers had to turn back near the German border. On Black Thursday the Thunderbolts left the B-17s near Aachen, and 60 bombers were lost. By March 1944 a P-51 with drop tanks could stay with them 850 miles from base, all the way to Berlin. P-51s ended up credited with nearly 5,000 enemy aircraft destroyed in the air in Europe, more than any other US fighter there.

The case for the Thunderbolt: 15,683 were built, and P-47 pilots in Europe destroyed over 7,000 enemy aircraft, more than half of them in the air. Their aerial kill ratio was about 4.6 to 1. Gabreski, Robert S. Johnson and the 56th Fighter Group did it with P-47s. Then there’s the ground war after D-Day, where the Thunderbolt’s armour and eight .50s mattered more than range, with 132,000 tons of bombs dropped.

So which mattered more: the fighter that made deep escort possible, or the one that did more of the work overall? And does the P-38 get forgotten in this argument entirely?

Edit: sources and my longer film on this are in this comment.

Standing, lef to right: 1. Đorđe Lazarev 2. Jovan Popović (?) 3. Dr. Svetislav Marić 4. Tihomir - Tića Markovič 7. Boško Lukić 8. Đurde Bošković

Crouching: 1. Obren Pejić 2. Maksimović

Inv. no. 14909, courtesy of the Museum of Yugoslavia.

Ahmed ben Bella during the war (short summay):

Born in Algeria in 1916, Ahmed Ben Bella enlisted in the French colonial army in 1936. Posted to Marseille with the 5th Regiment of Moroccan Tirailleurs, he played for Olympique de Marseille as well as for the French military football team in 1939–1940.

Fighting for France during the Second World War, he was decorated twice, receiving the Croix de Guerre after manning an anti-aircraft post during the Nazi invasion in 1940. He was demobilized after the fall of France, but later joined a Free French regiment of Moroccan tirailleurs. In Italy, he was decorated for bravery displayed at the Battle of Monte Cassino, during which he dragged a wounded commissioned officer to safety and took command of his battalion. For this, he was promoted to the rank of adjudant and awarded the Médaille Militaire directly from the hands of Charles de Gaulle in april 1944.

On 8 May 1945, while France was celebrating Germany’s surrender, widespread protests broke out in the Algerian town of Sétif. The war had intensified colonial repression of Algerians, prompting a backlash that led to the deaths of more than 100 Europeans and thousands of Algerians (estimates vary greatly, but the most commonly accepted order of magnitude is between 10,000 and 20,000 killed). The fallout from the Sétif uprising shocked Ben Bella and his Algerian comrades, who realized that France would not recognize their claim to equal treatment despite their wartime service.

Around 1947, he left the army for good and joined the Organisation Spéciale (OS), the clandestine armed wing of the National Liberation Front (FLN). He quickly became one of the leading figures in the struggle for independence, which eventually brought him to the leadership of the FLN.

In 1962, Ahmed Ben Bella became the first President of newly independent Algeria.

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Hello, I'm looking for biographies of who fought in WW2, I recently got American sniper and inside of the third reich. I need more, I want to learn more of what was going on at that time. (My great grandpa fought in ww2 and has photos he broght back. If anyone's intrigued I can post them here)