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Friday, December 16 2011

70th Anniversary of Pearl Harbor. There were the first hours of a sunny Sunday morning in Pearl Harbor- Hawaii, base for the American Navy in the Pacific, when Japanese military planes attacked the American base killing more than 2000 people and caused the loss of a great part of the American fleet in the Pacific, throwing the United States into War World II.

A few hours after the attack, on the 7th of December 1941, the United States officially declared war on Japan and the conflict reached global dimension, trespassing the borders of Europe. In a few years, the events experienced a 180 degree turn when the United States dropped the atomic bombs, that ended the war, over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Seventy years after the bombing, the episode of the attack on Pearl Harbor still attracts the attention and curiosity of numerous scholars and researchers while more details on the events that took place that fatidic day are constantly revealed, raising more questions about whether or not it could be possible to prevent the attack. Some of these questions were intended to be answered on Sunday 11th of December in a special programme broadcasted under the title of “Catastrophic Seconds” by the National Geographic Channel and which counted with the collaboration of American soldiers and some of the Japanese pilots that participated in the attack.