Rico's rants: History for the day: 1941: Myths of Pearl Harbor UF

The battleship USS West Virginia took two aerial bombs, both duds, and seven torpedo hits, one of which may have come from a midget submarine:

War History Online asks the question: was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawai'i the most successful pre-emptive assault ever or, rather, a fatal blow to the Japanese Empire’s pursuit of self-reliance?
The attack on Pearl Harbor has been a subject of controversy and intense interest and misinterpretations. We are going to look at five myths about the attack on Pearl Harbor and why they are not true:

1 The US had no knowledge of a Japanese attack before 7 December 1941.
There were several obvious signs of increased aggression by the Japanese Empire prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. The American river gunboat USS Panay was anchored in the Yangtze River in China when it was attacked and sunk by three Yokosuka B4Y bombers of the Japanese Navy on 12 December 1937. Japanese troops committed horrendous mass murder of over three hundred thousand people and mass rape of over twenty thousand elderly women and infant girls after capturing the then Chinese capital of Nanking on 13 December 1937.
Fear of Japanese expansion increased in the West, and America, the UK, and France provided loan assistance for war material supply contracts to China. On 26 January 1938, John Moore Allison, an American diplomat and consul at the US embassy in Nanking, China was struck in the face by a Japanese soldier. This incident, together with the looting of American property in Nanking that took place at the same time, further strained relations between Japan and the United States, which had already been damaged by the Panay incident less than two months earlier.
Japan invaded French Indochina in September of 1940 to intercept supplies for China. Imperial Japan signed a tripartite treaty with Nazi Germany & Fascist Italy on 27 September 1940. America halted parts, airplanes, machine tool, and aviation fuel shipments to Japan in the same year. Except for the aviation gasoline, America continued its oil exports to Japan at that time. Japan considered this as an unfriendly act. President Roosevelt shifted the Pacific Fleet from San Diego, California to Hawai'i, and ordered a troop buildup in the Philippines. Following Japanese expansion after the fall of France, America stopped oil exports to Japan in July of 1941. By late 1941, according to many observers, hostilities between Japan and America were imminent.
In turn, Japan had its eye on the oil-rich Dutch East Indies, known today as Indonesia. On 17 August 1941, Roosevelt warned Japan not to attack any neighboring countries.
Military commanders in the Pacific had been sending various other imminent war warnings for some days prior to the infamous attack on Pearl Harbor. Secret cables between the Japanese embassy in Washington and Tokyo had been intercepted and analyzed by the War Department. At one point, the department thought that the Japanese forces would attack Hawai'i on 30 November 1941. In a blaring headline, a newspaper in Hawai'i even published the warning of a possible attack.
Roosevelt received a 26 page memo titled ‘confidential’ from the Office of Naval Intelligence describing details of the espionage efforts by Japanese intelligence. A paragraph of the memo mentioned that, ‘in anticipation of possible open conflict with United States, Japan is vigorously utilizing every available bureau to secure naval, military, and commercial info, paying special attention to the Panama Canal, the West Coast, and Hawai'i.’
However, American forces and officials could not detect the huge Japanese armada traveling thousands miles from Japan to Hawai'i and were caught off guard by the attack on Pearl Harbor.

2: Only Pearl Harbor was attacked by Japan on 7 December 1941
Though the attack on Pearl Harbor caused the most American losses, Japan attacked British and American territories in Southeast Asia & the Central Pacific simultaneously.
The attack includes landings in Malaya (now Malaysia) and Thailand, beginning the Battle of Hong Kong, along with attacks on the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, and Midway Atoll:

Guam was occupied by the Japanese on 10 December 1941.
Japanese forces occupied Wake Island on 23 December 1941.
Hong Kong was occupied by the Japanese forces on 25 December 1941.
Manila, the capital of the Philippines, fell to the Japanese in January of 1942.
Malaya fell on 31 January 1942.
American forces in the Philippines surrendered in May of 1942.
Other than Hawai'i, Midway was the only target of the simultaneous Japanese attack on 7 December that did not fall under the Japanese Empire.
The massive British battleship, HMS Prince of Wales and her escort, the battlecruiser HMS Repulse, were sunk in a manner of minutes after being attacked by Japanese airplanes. Winston Churchill wrote in his memoirs that sinking of these battleships was his lowest point in the whole of World War Two.

3: Quick and decisive response was carried out by American forces
American forces suffered defeat after defeat in the Pacific in the four months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. False rumors swept the United States on 8 December that the Navy was in pursuit of the Japanese fleet that attacked Pearl Harbor.
A telegram was sent to FDR from the commander of the American garrison in the Philippines, General Douglas MacArthur, pleading for naval assistance, especially for American submarines to attack the Japanese ships delivering troops, but his request was unanswered, as there was very little assistance to offer the besieged General. The Philippines fell after six months of battle.
The first American shots fired at the attacking Japanese came from the Wickes class destroyer USS Ward on the morning of 7 December, several hours prior to the air attack on Pearl Harbor. A Japanese two-man Ko Hyoteki-class midget submarine was tailing the cargo ship USS Antares off the entrance to Pearl Harbor.
While conducting a patrol there at 0637, Lieutenant Commander William Outerbridge of the USS Ward ordered attacks on the submarine. The sub was sunk with two Japanese casualties. It was found on 28 August 2002 by scientists from the University of Hawai'i. The sub was lying on the bottom of the sea, three miles outside Pearl Harbor, with a shell hole, evidence of damage from USS Ward’s number-three gun.

(Editors note: Navy ships exchanged fire with German U-boats in the Atlantic prior to Pearl Harbor, so they were not the first American shots in the Second World War.)

4: After Pearl Harbor, the only US citizens rounded up were Japanese-Americans
Within 48 hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor, over a thousand people of Japanese, German, and Italian descent were considered ‘enemy aliens’ and detained by the FBI. The government had detained, interned, or restricted movements of hundreds of thousands of such American citizens.
Over a hundred thousand people were sent to internment camps, of which Japanese-Americans made up the majority. Over eleven thousand German residents were interned. More than six hundred thousand residents of Italian descent were kept under restrictions. Foreign diplomats from Japan, Italy, and Germany were also held.
The Japanese were treated most harshly. President Roosevelt authorized the internments with Executive Order 9066 on 19 February 1942. War hysteria and the Ni'ihau Incident on 7 December 1941 spurred the executive order. During the Pearl Harbor attack, native Hawai'ian residents apprehended the Japanese pilot Nishikaichi, who crash landed on Ni'ihau, Hawai'i. But three local Hawai'ian citizens of Japanese descent tried to free Nishikaichi using guns and taking hostages.
In the 1980s, government disbursed over a billion dollars in reparations to the interned Japanese-Americans and their heirs, as a commission set up by President Jimmy Carter in 1980 ordered a payment of twenty thousand dollars to each internment camp survivor.

5: American public were convinced after the attack on Pearl Harbor that the United States should enter World War Two
The Pearl Harbor attack did not persuade all Americans to support entering the war. America was largely isolationist before the attack, as there was almost no call to enter another war in Europe. The America First Committee, an anti-war movement group that was against American entry into World War Two was growing in popularity, with over eight hundred thousand paid members, and was backed by public figures like Walt Disney and Charles Lindbergh.
This group had also planned to participate in the 1942 congressional race and support the most isolationist candidates, regardless of their party identity. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the movement committee chose to disband.
In the papers of Secretary of War Henry Stimson, archivists discovered a draft declaration of war against Japan, Germany, and Italy for Roosevelt to sign on 8 December, but it was scrapped, and Roosevelt asked for a war declaration only against Japan. Therefore, the attack on Pearl Harbor did not convince the American public or the government to enter the European war, and America entered only the Pacific theater of the war. Roosevelt was compelled to enter the World War when Nazi Germany & Fascist Italy declared war on the U.S. on 11 December 1941.
The United Kingdom declared war on Japan nine hours before the United States did, due to British interests being attacked in South East Asia by Japan. Another reason was that Churchill promised to declare war on Japan within hours if Japan attacked the US.