destroy U.S. Navy, seen as threat to their expansionist ambitions and must be destroyed.
In July 1941, Japan announced that it was taking control of French Indochina. Roosevelt took three steps in response: he froze all Japanese assets in the United States, he restricted oil exports to Japan (the United States was then producing half of the world’s oil), and he merged the armed forces of the Philippines with the U.S. Army and put their commander, General Douglas MacArthur, in charge of all U.S. forces in East Asia. Forced by the American embargo to secure other oil supplies, the Japanese army and navy began planning attacks on the Dutch and British colonies in the South Pacific. Actions by both sides put the United States and Japan on a collision course leading to a war that neither wanted. Officials in Washington, believing that war was imminent, sent warnings to U.S. commanders in the Pacific that the Japanese might attack somewhere in the southwest Pacific. But no one expected that Japan would launch a surprise attack five thousand miles away, at Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor on the island of Oahu. In the early morning of December 7, 1941, low-flying Japanese planes began bombing the unsuspecting American fleet at Pearl Harbor.
