Were Japan’s targets considered “the United States”? Legally, they were indisputably US territory. Roosevelt was trying to tell a clear story: Japan had attacked the US.

Why did Roosevelt demote the Philippines? We don’t know, but it’s not hard to guess. At some point he deleted the prominent references to the Philippines.

Yet Roosevelt toyed with that draft all day, adding things in pencil, crossing other bits out. That was how the first draft of FDR’s speech went, too: it presented the event as a “bombing in Hawaii and the Philippines”. Eleanor Roosevelt used a similar formulation in her radio address on the night of 7 December, when she spoke of Japan “bombing our citizens in Hawaii and the Philippines”. Sumner Welles, FDR’s undersecretary of state, described the event as “an attack upon Hawaii and upon the Philippines”. “Japs bomb Manila, Hawaii” was the headline in one New Mexico paper “Japanese Planes Bomb Honolulu, Island of Guam” in another in South Carolina. They also attacked the British colonies of Malaya, Singapore and Hong Kong, and they invaded Thailand.Īt first, “Pearl Harbor” was not the way most people referred to the bombings. On a single day, the Japanese attacked the US territories of Hawaii, the Philippines, Guam, Midway Island and Wake Island. Sixteen million Filipinos – US nationals who saluted the stars and stripes and looked to FDR as their commander in chief – fell under a foreign power.Ĭontrary to popular memory, the event familiarly known as “Pearl Harbor” was in fact an all-out lightning strike on US and British holdings throughout the Pacific. There, the initial air raids were followed by more raids, then by invasion and conquest. Japan’s bombers struck, retreated and never returned. The attack on Pearl Harbor was just that – an attack.

Daniel immerwahr how to hide an empire