WWII Battles

The attack on Pearl Harbor came as a complete surprise. Hundreds of Japanese fighter planes and bombers flew to Pearl Harbor and attacked. The bombers dropped bombs and torpedoes on the warships, while the fighter planes attacked the US fighter planes on the ground so they could not take off and fight back. There were two waves of attacks and by the end of the second wave several US ships were destroyed.

On June 3, 1942, The Japanese formulated a plan to sneak up on U.S. forces. They hoped to trap a number of the U.S. aircraft carriers in a bad situation where they could destroy them. However, American codebreakers had intercepted several Japanese transmissions. The Americans knew the Japanese plans and prepared their trap for the Japanese.

An atomic bomb named Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. The explosion was huge, the city was destroyed, and tens of thousands of people were killed. The bomb was dropped by a plane named the Enola Gay which Colonel Paul Tibbetts piloted. The bomb itself was over 10 feet long and weighed around 10,000 pounds. A small parachute was on the bomb to slow its drop and allow the plane time to fly away from the blast zone. Three days later, on August 9, 1945, another atomic bomb, nicknamed Fat Man, was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan.