Historic Photo: Cavite on fire after Japanese air raid, December 1941.
This was just one part of the major Japanese offensive across the Pacific after Pearl Harbor.
There are millions of photographs and images of World War II, but this particular one is the one I find the most striking and that I return to time and time again. (It seems odd and macabre to call an image like this my “favorite” photo of World War II). As photos of the war go it is not particularly famous, but there is both an ominous quality to it as well as a haphazardness—taken crookedly on the fly, perhaps by someone fleeing the disaster. This is the U.S. naval base at Cavite, in the Philippines, on fire after a devastating air raid on the afternoon of December 10, 1941. That was 83 years ago today. The base was virtually leveled, and was of little further use to American forces, which in any event were defeated and driven out of the Philippines only a few months later.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which brought the U.S. into World War II, was not an isolated incident. (I teach an online class about Pearl Harbor, by the way, it's here, and it's free!) It was merely the first in a series of lightning raids that represented a massive Japanese offensive across the Pacific. The Philippines, an American colony, and Singapore, a British possession, were both targets. Cavite is near Manila, which itself doesn’t have a very good harbor, and from the time the U.S. conquered the Philippines from Spain in 1898, Cavite was its central naval base and basically the key to controlling Manila itself. The Japanese planes that attacked it three days after Pearl Harbor were land-based planes flown from Taiwan, then known as Formosa. They certainly knew what they were going after. There were oil facilities at Cavite, which accounts for the billowing black smoke you see burning in this photo.
