Sunday, December 7, 1941 was one of those cold, clear New York winter days. The citizens of New York had been following the news of rising tension with Japan and the war in Europe. But, like most Americans, they felt secure behind the walls of water called the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. This December Sunday they were getting ready for Christmas, having Sunday dinner with their families or listening to the football game on the radio between the Brooklyn Dodgers (yes football) against the New York Giants at the Polo Grounds in Harlem.
At 2 p.m., the flash came across Time Square that Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Every New Yorker knew this meant war and the end to the idea that the ocean would keep the war at bay. Mayor LaGuardia immediately sent the New York Police Department to the Japanese consulate. The offices of the counsel general, Mr. Morito Morishima, in Rockefeller Center were searched. There the FBI found photographs of key New York landmarks as well as bridges. There were also photos of landmarks in the nation’s capital. As would happen on the West Coast, the FBI began to round up the almost 2,500 Japanese who lived in the city and brought them to Ellis Island.
The next day every recruiting station was jammed with young and old wanting to join to avenge Pearl Harbor. At the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where the U.S. S. Arizona was built, workers signed up to be shipped to Pearl Harbor to help raise the Pacific fleet that laid smoldering in the water. Those men would shipped out to the Pacific over the course of two weeks arriving in Hawaii to still burning ships.
Air raid wardens, December 8, 1941
That Monday night New York had its first air raid with rumors swirling of a possible Japanese attack. Despite those fears New York would not darken its famous skyline for another two years. This allowed the real danger to New York to operate in the dark waters of the harbor – German U-boats. The skyline of New York was a perfect back drop for U-boat captains to bring the war to the American east coast sinking 21 merchant marine ships in the first month of the war in what the Germans called “The great American turkey shoot.” (Jaffe 241)
The U.S. Arizona in 1916, on its way to docking at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
Bowery & Canal 