AN ECONOMIC PEARL HARBOUR

An Economic Pearl Harbour ~ 220 ~ AN ECONOMIC PEARL HARBOUR In December 1941, during the Second World War, the U.S.A.’s top naval base, Pearl Harbour, on the Pacific island of Hawaii, was attacked without prior warning by the Japanese. So severe was the bombardment that, of the hundred odd naval vessels anchored there, only a handful survived. This had the immediate effect of bringing America into the war as one of the Allied Powers. Up till that point, the U.S.A. had had no direct involvement in hostilities save as a supplier of armaments to the enemies of Japan. The Japanese attack had been uncalled-for and ill-considered, but they did not realize the magnitude of their error until 1945, when America finally took its revenge by dropping the first ever atom bombs on two of Japan’s major industrial centres, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thus annihilating Japan as a military power. The Americans then kept a tight military and political hold over Japan. But the latter country, astonishingly, recuperated from the horror of largescale atomic devastation, and proceeded to adapt itself to an entirely new set of circumstances. Before the Second World War, it had relied on the power