[daniel1212]

As someone whose family (as civilians) lived through Pearl Harbor, this one has always been a no-brainer for me. They weren’t hurt but some of their neighbors were killed.

A surprise that should not have been.

[kaehurowing]

“A surprise that should not have been.”

It really wasn’t totally a surprise. The attack might have been, but not the fact that war was coming. A couple of years before Pearl Harbor, the U.S. really started building up facilities at Pearl Harbor. That caused a work boom for construction labor. My father-in-law moved from Kauai to Honolulu to work as a worker on construction projects; they built things like new aircraft hangars, etc. So everybody in Hawaii knew that that the U.S. was preparing for a potential war and at some point things could get bad, but I don’t think anyone in Hawaii thought Japan would have the gall to actually sneak attack a major U.S. naval facility the way it did. I think most folks assumed that the Japanese attack on America would have come somewhere in Asia like the Philippines.