Explain the causes and immediate effects of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and describe how American society mobilized its economy and workforce for total war.
On the morning of December 7, 1941, Japanese aircraft launched a surprise attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, sinking or damaging 19 ships and killing over 2,300 Americans. The attack followed months of rising tension: the U.S. had cut off oil exports to Japan in response to its brutal war in China and expansion into Southeast Asia, and Japanese military leaders gambled that a crippling surprise strike could knock America's Pacific Fleet out of the war long enough to secure resource-rich territory before the U.S. could respond -- a gamble that badly misjudged how quickly and completely American industrial capacity and public will would mobilize. Roosevelt asked Congress for a declaration of war the next day, calling December 7 "a date which will live in infamy"; Congress approved almost unanimously. Days later, Germany and Italy, honoring their alliance with Japan, declared war on the United States, bringing America fully into both the European and Pacific wars at once.
Total war required total mobilization. The federal government coordinated an enormous shift of industry to war production -- automobile factories built tanks and airplanes instead of cars -- and roughly 16 million Americans eventually served in the armed forces, creating severe labor shortages at home. Women entered war-production factories in unprecedented numbers, memorialized in the "Rosie the Riveter" image, doing skilled industrial work many had been told was not suited to them; most, however, were expected to and did leave those jobs once male veterans returned after the war. Rationing of gasoline, rubber, sugar, and other goods became a shared daily experience, and Americans bought war bonds to help finance the massive cost of fighting on two fronts simultaneously. This mobilization finally ended the Great Depression's unemployment crisis for good -- a fact many historians point to as evidence for just how much larger and more sustained wartime government spending was than anything attempted in the New Deal alone.
Mastery looks like: They can explain Pearl Harbor's events and strategic logic, describe how the U.S. entered the European war too, and give two specific examples of home-front mobilization.
Common stumbles: Assuming Pearl Harbor alone explains American entry into the European war, without connecting it to Germany and Italy's separate declarations of war days later.