Pearl Harbor, in Hawaii, is located around 2,000 miles from the U.S. and about 4,000 miles from Japan. So no one believed that the Japanese would attack the far off islands of Hawaii. The american intelligence officials were confident that any Japanese attack would happen on one of the nearby European colonies including the Dutch East Indies, Singapore or Indochina. Because they were not expecting an attack, the naval facilities were pretty undefended. The Japanese took …show more content…
A plan was developed to disable the US Fleet at Pearl Harbor to allow time for Japan to get the resource areas it needed and make it to where taking them back would cost more lives than they thought Americans would be willing to give up. The Pearl Harbor attack plan was made by Isoroku Yamamoto, who was the commander in chief of the IJN. Yamamoto studied in the United States and he knew his nation didn't have the ability to defeat them in a fight because they were way larger. He did not share the opinion of many Japanese officers who thought that the Americans didn't want to fight. But Yamamoto’s arguments against going to war with America were overruled by the High Command. The attack on Pearl Harbor was influenced by the British attack that used carrier aircraft against the Italian fleet in Italy the previous year. It was the last hope for Japanese success in the