On a Sunday morning in 1941, 353 Japanese aircraft launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in two waves. The attack destroyed or damaged 19 U.S. warships, 300 aircraft, and killed or wounded more than 3,500 American troops and civilians. The next day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt addressed Congress and the nation, asking for a declaration of war against Japan. The U.S. entered World War II within hours. Alan Allport, Dr. Walter Montgomery and Marian Gruber Professor of History, discusses the history of the tragic day.

“Tensions between the two countries had been rising for quite a long time. The Japanese had been involved in a war in China for several years. It was a very brutal war, one that attracted a great deal of criticism internationally, especially in the United States which had strong links to China,” says Allport.

“The Roosevelt administration had attempted to reign in the Japanese, particularly by the use of economic boycotts. In mid-1941, especially, the Roosevelt administration had boycotted all sales of gasoline and aviation fuel to the Japanese. Now the idea was that this would be a detterent to the Japanese. It would persuade them to withdraw from China. But ironically, it ended up having the opposite effect,” Allport says.

“The Japanese saw themselves as being painted into a corner and from their point of view, they felt that they had no choice but to launch an immediate attack, grab the territory that they needed in Southeast Asia and knock out the Americans as a threat before the window of opportunity that they had closed. So the Roosevelt administration's calculations also ended up going wrong because they did not intend to try to get themselves into a war in the Pacific,” he says.

Watch the full interview via LiveNOW from FOX.