A Japanese pilot said “ it was amazing seeing 500 to 1000 ships only about 200 yards from one another.“ Tora, Tora, Tora meaning Attack, Attack, Attack in Japanese was called and the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. America was in the war. The Americans were outraged and did all they could to support the war. The British were happy we were bombed because they wanted our help in the war.

A month after the Coral Sea battle the battle of Midway broke out. The battle of Midway was a major naval battle. It was fought June 4 through June 7, 1942. The Americans cracked a Japanese code and set a trap for their fleet by saying their base had water supply problems and completely destroyed them. The U.S. “hell divers” had the hardest job of them all, bombing ships while in anti-aircraft fire. One Japanese on a carrier described being bombed by Hell Divers “a lookout screamed, ‘Hell Divers!’” then he looked up in time to see three dark shapes so close to the ship you could see the pilots in the sky and smaller specks getting bigger until you could see they were bombs. Three ships all sunk at the same time within 24 hours because of the Hell Divers.

This is a Kamikaze fighter.

USS Bunker Hill after two Kamikaze attacks.

The Second Sino-Japanese War (July 7, 1937 to September 9, 1945) was the largest Asian war in the twentieth century. From 1937 to 1941, it was fought between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Second Sino-Japanese War merged into the greater conflict of World War II as a major front in the Pacific Theatre. Although the two countries had fought intermittently since 1931, full-scale war started in earnest in 1937 and ended only with the surrender of Japan in 1945. The war was the result of a decades-long Japanese imperialist policy aiming to dominate China politically and militarily to secure its vast raw material reserves and other resources. At the same time, the rising tide of Chinese nationalism and notions of self determination stoked the coals of war. Before 1937, China and Japan fought in small, localized engagements in so-called "incidents". Yet the two sides, for a variety of reasons, refrained from fighting a total war. The 1931 invasion of Manchuria by Imperial Japan's Kwangtung Army is known as the "Mukden Incident". The last of these incidents was the Marco Polo Bridge Incident of 1937, marking the beginning of full scale war between the two countries.