Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941

At seven forty-eight in the morning, Hawaii time, the first Japanese aircraft reached Oahu. The radar return had been visible for nearly an hour at the Opana Point station on the island's northern tip, but the duty officer who received the report assumed it was a flight of American B-Seventeens expected in from the mainland. He told the radar operators not to worry about it.

The attack came in two waves across roughly one hundred ten minutes. The targets were the eight United States battleships moored along Battleship Row on the southeastern shore of Pearl Harbor. The first bombs fell on Ford Island and the air stations at Hickam and Wheeler fields, destroying aircraft on the ground before they could respond. Then the torpedo planes came in low over the water.

At eight oh six in the morning, a Japanese bomb struck the forward deck of the USS Arizona, penetrating to the forward ammunition magazine. What followed took approximately nine minutes. The Arizona sank with one thousand one hundred seventy-seven of her crew still aboard. They remain there. The wreck was designated a national memorial in nineteen sixty-two and has never been raised. Every year, oil still seeps to the surface from the hull below.

By the time the second wave turned back toward the Japanese carrier fleet, two thousand four hundred and three Americans were dead and one thousand one hundred seventy-eight were wounded. Eight battleships had been damaged or sunk. One hundred eighty-eight American aircraft had been destroyed, most of them on the ground. The Japanese lost twenty-nine aircraft, five midget submarines, and sixty-four men.

President Franklin Roosevelt addressed Congress the following morning and called December seventh a date which will live in infamy. Congress declared war on Japan within hours. Germany and Italy declared war on the United States four days later. The attack that the Japanese military had designed to neutralize American naval power in the Pacific had the effect of bringing into the war a country that had spent three years reluctant to enter it.