By Kia Johnson
(Reuters) – The United States will mark the 80th anniversary of the Japanese attack on the U.S. naval base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on Tuesday.
The attack on Dec. 7, 1941, shook a country that had been so focused on World War Two in Europe that it had lost sight of the threat posed by Japan, according to historians.
The attack killed 2,390 Americans, and the United States declared war on Japan the next day.
The bombing was famously dubbed “a date which will live in infamy” by then-U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The United States defeated Japan in August 1945, days after U.S. atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed hundreds of thousands of civilians.
(Reporting by Kia Johnson; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)
