Pearl Harbor Remembered
"A date which will live in infamy"
by Gerry Brown
Dec. 7, 1941—at five minutes to eight o'clock, 183
Japanese warplanes ruined a perfectly fine Sunday morning on the island of
Oahu in Hawaii. The first attack wave had reached the U.S.
Pacific Fleet stationed at Oahu's Pearl
Harbor and for all intents and purposes, World War II began for the United
States.
Although the U.S. military forces in Pearl Harbor had been
recently strengthened, the base was not at a state of high alert. Many
people were just waking when the first bombs were dropped. No one was
prepared to do battle.
Japanese aircraft had flown 230 miles from the
north, originating from an attack force comprising six aircraft carriers and
423 planes.
The assault was the complete surprise the Japanese
wanted, even though at 7:02 a.m., almost an hour before the first wave of
planes arrived, two Army radar men on Oahu's northern shore had detected the
attack approaching. They contacted a junior officer, who disregarded their
reports, assuming they had instead spotted American B-17 bombers expected in
from the West Coast of the U.S.
The first wave of Japanese planes,
made up of 51 Val dive bombers, 50 high level bombers, 43 Zero fighters and
40 Kate torpedo bombers, attacked when flight commander Mitsuo Fuchida gave
the now infamous battle cry "Tora! Tora! Tora!" ("Tiger! Tiger! Tiger!") The
second wave arrived shortly thereafter. Almost simultaneously, five Japanese
"minisubs" began their attack from underwater, but were able to do little
damage.
Less than two hours later, 2,280 American servicemen and 68
civilians were dead, 1,109 were wounded, eight battleships were damaged and
five sunk. Three light cruisers, three destroyers, and three smaller boats
were lost, along with 188 aircraft.
The biggest loss that day was the
USS Arizona, on which 1,177 crewmen were killed when a 1,760 pound
bomb smashed through her decks and ignited her forward ammo magazine causing
a terrible explosion. Fewer than nine minutes later she was
underwater.
Pearl Harbor was the principal but not sole target of the
Japanese attack that day. Other military installations on Oahu were hit.
Hickam, Wheeler, and Bellows airfields, Ewa Marine Corps Air Station, Kaneohe Bay Naval Air Station, and
Schofield Barracks suffered varying degrees of damage, with hundreds of
planes destroyed on the ground and hundreds of men killed or
wounded.
While the attack that day was a huge blow to the U.S.
military presence in the Pacific, it was not a total victory for the
Japanese. Not only were the attack's biggest targets, the American aircraft
carriers, out of port at the time and therefore saved, but the attack
galvanized the nation's support for involvement in the war, ultimately
contributing to the defeat of the Axis powers.
Today, 63 years
later, more than 1.5 million people a year visit the memorial that floats
over the sunken Arizona to pay respects to the loss of life that
occurred on what President Franklin D. Roosevelt would call "a date which will live in infamy."
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