Battleship Row, Pearl Harbor

Eight bombs, eight minutes

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor began at 07:48 on Sunday, 7 December 1941.

The first wave of 183 aircraft — 49 high-level bombers, 51 dive bombers, 40 torpedo bombers, and 43 fighter escorts — launched from six Japanese carriers 370 kilometres north of Oahu, arrived over Battleship Row on the southwest side of Ford Island, and began their attack runs.

Eight US Navy battleships were moored in tight pairs along the row.

The 800-kg armour-piercing bomb that struck the USS Arizona at 08:06 fell from about 3 000 metres, penetrated four armoured decks, and detonated in the forward magazine where 32 tonnes of black powder was stored for the main 14-inch guns. The Arizona's bow blew off in a single massive explosion that lifted the front of the ship clear of the water for an instant.

The deadliest single moment

Of the 2 403 American military personnel killed at Pearl Harbor, 1 177 died on the Arizona alone. Almost all of them in the explosion or in the next few minutes from burning fuel oil that spread across the water.

The ship sank in nine minutes.

About 900 of the dead remain entombed in the wreck, which now lies under the white-arched USS Arizona Memorial that spans the hull.

Oil from her bunkers — perhaps 4 million litres at the time of sinking — continues to seep to the surface at a slow rate of two to nine litres per day, 84 years later. The seepage will continue for several more decades before the bunkers are finally empty.

The carriers that weren't there

The strategic failure of the Pearl Harbor attack — visible only in hindsight — was that the US Pacific Fleet's three aircraft carriers were not in port.

The Enterprise had sailed two days earlier on a mission to deliver fighters to Wake Island. The Lexington was at sea ferrying aircraft to Midway. The Saratoga was in San Diego receiving an overhaul.

Japanese intelligence about the carriers' movements was poor, and the strike commander Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo elected not to launch a third strike against Pearl Harbor's fuel depots and dockyards.

Within six months, the same three carriers would defeat the Japanese fleet at the Battle of the Coral Sea (May 1942) and the Battle of Midway (June 1942), reversing the Pacific war's strategic balance.

"A date which will live in infamy"

President Franklin Roosevelt addressed a joint session of Congress the next morning, 8 December 1941, with what became one of the most famous political speeches of the twentieth century.

His opening line, drafted overnight:

Yesterday, December 7th, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

The phrase "day of infamy" was Roosevelt's own edit. His draft had originally read "a date which will live in world history".

Congress declared war on Japan with a single dissenting vote — Representative Jeannette Rankin of Montana, who had also voted against US entry into the First World War.

Three days later, on 11 December, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States, and the Second World War became truly global.