By late 1941, tensions in the Pacific had reached a boiling point. Economic sanctions levied by the United States—a response to Tokyo’s refusal to withdraw military forces from China—threatened to deprive Japan of needed resources for sustaining and expanding its empire. With diplomacy faltering and no resolution in sight, Japanese leaders quietly approved plans to end the standoff with a preemptive strike against the US Pacific Fleet anchored at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

The operation began in late November with a Japanese armada steaming from the home islands, led by six of their premier aircraft carriers. Undetected, the ships reached their destination in the early morning hours of December 7, just 230 miles north of Hawaii, where they launched 183 torpedo-bombers, dive-bombers, and fighter planes into the pre-dawn darkness. As the planes neared their objective, a US Army radar unit on Oahu picked up the inbound formation, but an inexperienced duty officer dismissed the report, mistaking the reading for a flight of American bombers expected from the West Coast.

The Japanese pilots had an array of targets to choose from. Though all three US aircraft carriers operating in the Pacific were away from the base that morning, seven battleships were anchored alongside Ford Island, with an eighth in a nearby drydock undergoing repairs. Within minutes of the attack, every one of the great ships had been slammed by bombs or torpedoes, leaving “Battleship Row” fully ablaze. One bomb detonated inside an ammunition magazine on the USS Arizona, and the earsplitting explosion tore apart the front of the battleship, killing 1,100 sailors and Marines.

An hour after the attack began, a second wave of 170 planes swooped in, pasting the harbor and surrounding airfields again. Battleship Row was devastated, with the USS California and USS West Virginia joining the Arizona on the harbor bottom and the USS Oklahoma fully capsized. Smoke also billowed from air bases across Oahu, where Japanese bombs and strafing attacks had destroyed entire fighter squadrons parked on open tarmacs.

As news of the surprise attack swept across the United States, the nation was left stunned, grieving, and enraged. 2,403 Americans were dead and another 1,178 wounded. Though the Japanese lost just twenty-nine planes, the lopsided outcome proved far less a victory than first thought. Not only had the American aircraft carriers escaped any harm, but the Japanese failed to target fuel storage, maintenance, and repair facilities – each essential to future US naval operations.

With fires still smoldering across the harbor, a somber but defiant President Franklin D. Roosevelt appeared before Congress the next day. He denounced the attack, describing December 7 as “a date that will live in infamy,” and formally requested a declaration of war. After resounding approval from Congress, America was in the fight.