How much do you know about the raid on Pearl Harbor?

[Anomalocaris]

Um this is weird, I have had problems posting images too. 

But as far as WW2 History, you are talking about thousands of historical events, multiple world leaders, military leaders and countless key battles. I for example didn't really know that Pearl Harbor only got us involved in the Pacific, and we didn't really get involved in Europe until D-Day in 44. It is a boatload of details over basically a 12 year period from the time Hitler took power to the fall of Berlin in 45. 

You're fast, but I fixed the link.  

But the one detail that shocked me is that the guys monitoring the radar that day mistook the zeros for allied bombers.

Why is that shocking? Two privates training on the SCR-270B set spot a "huge" blip. Biggest they'd ever seen. They report it to Air Information Center, which is closed. The only officer there is a 2nd Lt. fighter pilot doing a "familiarization" visit, not in the chain of command. The AIC closed at 7 AM, but he had been told to be there from 4 am to 8 am, and he was a good boy. The telephone operator passed the buck to Kermit Tyler when Lockard called from the Point. Tyler knew a flight of B-17s was coming in from the US and assumed that's what the men on Opana Point were seeing. This was trivial enough that the Congressional Hearings didn't subpoena him. He ended the war as a major.

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If the first question had listed one answer as Hawaii, and the others as different places, I would have gotten it right. It assumes everyone knows it's in Hawaii.

I don't know the date or anything. I know it's kind of weird we got involved in WW2 because Japan attacked us, but almost everything else they teach in history class involved us going to Europe. Aside from dropping two nukes, and the debate over whether or not that was the right thing to do instead of putting boots on the ground.

Most of the USN and almost all of the Marines fought in the Pacific. But the American-British Conversations earlier in 1941 had established the principle of "Germany First". FDR and Churchill confirmed this at the Atlantic Conference later that year and it was made public at the Casablanca Conference.

As for the nukes, the most humane thing we could have done was to end the war quickly. It worked. (Vastly more complicated than this but boring to most people.)

Europe first was the official position necessary to reduce the chance of a separate soviet-german peace, and avoid demoralizing the British.  It was also in accord with FDR’s view of American geostrategic priorities even though Roosevelt was a Navy man.  It also accorded with army chief of staff Marshall and chief of Army Air Corp Arnold’s views of where their branch of armed services would most likely emphasize its central importance and earn the name to secure its share of postwar American defence budget.

But the Navy and its commander in Chief King was all for a pacific first strategy for very obvious reasons. Elements of state department also saw pacific as affording much more potential for long term expansion of American influence than Europe.

I believe in the end, Admiral King got his way.  In the name of fighting japan, The Navy secured america’s Commitment to build and deploy a far larger Navy than required to fight japan in order to secure the navy’s share of america’s war time Resources, for the purpose of setting up the fait accompli of post war naval supremacy which would then require continued heavy naval funding to sustain. I believe in fact more than half of american war production and economic output during the war were committed to agenda justified by the war in the pacific, and American forces in the pacific never had to significantly slackened its pace of offensive below what over 50% of america’s War fighting potential can support out of deference to Europe first.

So in practice Europe first was more in spirit than in substance. Europe first didn’t suit the navy’s agenda and during the shooting war with Germany and japan, the Navy won the resource war with the army.