This December 7th marks the 83rd anniversary of what President Franklin Delano Roosevelt proclaimed as “a date which will live in infamy.” On that quiet Sunday morning in 1941 American military personnel, and civilians, of the United States Pacific naval and army base at Pearl Harbor were completely taken by surprise when 353 undetected Japanese planes attacked. No one can doubt that the Japanese had gained a great military success, as the attack on Pearl Harbor severely crippled American military strength in the Pacific. Other American and European Allied military strongholds throughout the Pacific were also attacked by Japanese imperial forces on December 7th and 8th.
Japanese strategy to win a war was rather simple, quick and decisive strikes. This led to the ascending empire’s victories against theoretically more powerful opponents, such as the ailing Chinese Empire under the Qing Dynasty in the 1894-95 First Sino-Japanese War, and Tsar Nicholas II’s Russian Empire army and navy in the Russo-Japanese War in 1904-05. In a subsidiary role, a modernized Japan again rejoiced in a victory, shared with the Entente and Associate Forces, as Armistice was declared on the Eleventh of November, 1918. Quick and decisive strikes led to further victories for the Empire of the Rising Sun in Far-East Asia during the 1920-30s. Aggressive Japanese expansion did not go unchecked by the United States, as the government banned the sale of raw and natural materials that were necessary for the Japanese war effort by 1940.
The extent of the surprise operations in the Pacific on the 7th and 8th of December did not sway the United States to immediate capitulation toward Japanese aggression, which the imperial government believed would have occurred; rather, a unified public swept away all earlier support for impartial neutrality and the hardships of the depression, becoming resolute to win the war.
Up to the day of infamy, the United States government believed that Japan was not daring, nor resourceful enough, to launch an attack on the Pacific stronghold that was some 4,000 miles away from the empire. In 1936 the mastermind of the attack, Admiral Yamamoto Isoruku, stated that such an attempt would be a game of chance. Training took place before the attack on the Japanese mainland in the year leading up to December 7th. On the second of December, 1941, Tokyo high command sent the signal to Admiral Chuichi Nagumo “Climb Mount Niitaka 1208,” setting in motion the attack that took place five days later. Reconnaissance lent target information to Nagumo’s armada of 6 carriers, 2 battleships, 3 cruisers, and 9 destroyers which had, for the most part, slipped in undetected approximately two hundred miles north of Oahu.
At 06:10 AM the first wave of a Japanese aerial force of 183 dive, level, and torpedo planes took off from their carriers; having evaded the American radar warning system the aerial force commenced with the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor at 07:55. For the first thirty minutes as the sirens wailed from Battleship Row and loudspeakers called for “All Navy personnel get back to their ships,” Japanese planes struck the airfields, anti-air defenses, and naval vessels. Ships linearly anchored in the harbour were perfect targets for the Japanese bombers. Fighter planes closely lined up parallel to the runways were easy targets for strafing.
After a fifteen-minute lull the second wave of one hundred-seventy Japanese airplanes commenced its aerial assault at 08:40. This attack concentrated on the eastern side of Pearl Harbor and went on for an hour. Across the harbour on board the ships, in the air, in installments set up along the airfields, and in hastily constructed fighting positions, American personnel who were at first caught flat-footed by the first attack in turn offered greater resistance.
In total there were more than 3,400 military and civilian casualties in and around Pearl Harbor. Japanese loss of aircraft and men was surprisingly minimal, with the loss of 129 servicemen, 29 planes, and a mini-submarine. Base personnel in the following weeks undertook the task to rescue men trapped in the sunken vessels, recover and identify the fallen, salvage scrap and ordnance from the wrecks, and rebuild Pearl Harbor.
Most of the damage on the moored and drydocked battleships occurred in the first wave. The super-dreadnought battleships U.S.S. Arizona (BB-39) and the Oklahoma (BB-37) were completely destroyed. The dreadnought battleship U.S.S. Utah (BB-31) was a total loss. Six other battleships suffered varying degrees of damage.
Of the 2,404 military personnel and civilians killed in the attack, 1,177 of those killed were aboard the Arizona, as a 551 pound armor-piercing Type 99 anti-ship bomb, dropped by a Japanese Aichi D3A1 “Val,” struck and ignited over a million pounds of munitions within the ship’s forward magazine. According to Lou Conter, a surviving veteran on board the Arizona, the explosion lifted the battleship about 40 feet out of the water. Only 335 Arizona crew members survived.
In drydock, the destroyer U.S.S. Shaw’s forward magazines detonated due to multiple hits by Japanese bombers; the spectacular blast completely blew off her bow and damaged nearby ships also in drydock. Three cruisers, three destroyers, and a complement of other vessels were also damaged. More than 180 military aircraft were destroyed. Around the ships the water was on fire as oil leaked out.
Total victory at Pearl Harbor slipped away from Admiral Yamamoto since the Pacific fleet was not completely destroyed as hoped; the three aircraft carriers of the United States Pacific fleet, the U.S.S. Enterprise (CV-6), U.S.S. Lexington (CV-2), and the U.S.S. Saratoga (CV-3) were by chance out on maneuvers. Nagumo’s twin attacks failed to also destroy the installation's fuel stores.
Despite Pearl Harbor’s command attempt to prevent sabotage and track foreign adversary movement, U.S. forces, in the end, were unaware of the attack to come. Culpability for American defeat, in an investigation which followed the disaster in the Pacific, was laid on the feet of area commanders Admiral Husband Kimmel and General Walter Short in late-1942. Later commissions up to 1946 would discover that Admiral Harold Stark, Chief of Naval Operations, failed to advise Kimmel of the critical situation prior to the attack. Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, and Generals George Marshall and Leonard Gerow of the War Plans Division would all also be found culpable for the disaster.
Before the war the diplomacy of isolationism kept the United States from exerting leadership in international affairs; afterwards, the practice was laid to rest due to the allied war effort abroad as America rose as a World Superpower. It would take 3 years, 8 months, and 25 days for the resolute American public to see Roosevelt’s assertion of “absolute victory” in the Pacific Theatre, as on a cloudy morning in Tokyo Bay on Sunday, September 2nd, 1945 somber imperial delegates of the Empire of Japan boarded the battleship U.S.S. Missouri (BB-63) in Tokyo Bay to sign the Instrument of Surrender. Of the Allied armada of over three hundred vessels anchored in the bay, as a symbol of the occupation forces’ combined might in the Pacific, was the dreadnought battleship U.S.S. West Virginia (BB-48), the only surviving battleship from the Pearl Harbor attack.
On this day the overwhelming pre-war senses of defeatism of the Depression and anxiety of the Second World War both yielded to a national feeling of exhilaration for President Roosevelt’s promised “absolute victory.” What the war taught us was that all nations are indeed politically and economically interdependent. Following the war the free world looked towards the United States as an international power to not only maintain peace, both politically and militarily, but to rebuild the economies of war-torn Europe and Japan.
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