Pearl Harbor and September 11
Throughout American history many surprise attacks have occurred. In December 1941, Japanese planes raided Pearl Harbor and its surroundings. Only 60 years later on September 11, 2001, four planes were launched into buildings by your arab terrorists. These two attacks show similarities in many ways such as being a huge surprise. Americans say that these two events were no coincidence, could history be repeating itself?
It was a fateful Sunday Morning in December 1941, before the strafing and bombing began. Like tears from the dead, beads of oil still float up from the sunken hulk of the battleship Arizona, fresh reminders of the 900 sailors and marines entombed in America’s most vivid symbol of Japanese sneak attack. The Missouri sits in the spot on the Battleship Row that was occupied on December 7, 1941, by the USS Oklahoma, which rolled over and sank during the attack one of eight American battleships sunk or seriously damaged when waves of japanese planes raided Pear Harbor and surrounding military installations. A couple hundred yards away on one of the nations most hallowed sites, “ A, 1760 pound bomb dropped by a Japanese Kate hit the Arizona’s forward magazine a few minutes after 8 that morning, sinking the ship in about 40 feet of water in 9 minutes.”(Potts) One man named Al Rodriguez was on duty at Bishop’s Point at the entrance to Pearl Harbor. He was just sitting down to breakfast when the general quarters alarm sounded. He and other navy seamen were give .30-caliber rifles and .45-caliber revolvers to defend the base. Rodriguez quoted “That’s all we had to shoot at the planes with.”(Potts)Initially the men thought one of the oil-fired stoves in one of the mess halls had blown up, only to find out that they were under attack by the Japanese. In 1941, there were plenty of warning signs of impending attack, in part because they had cracked the code “MAJIC” that the Japanese government used to communicate...