Pearl Harbor, Attack on (1941).The Japanese surprise attack on the U.S. Navy's base at Pearl Harbor and on Oahu in the Hawaiian Islands on Sunday morning, 7 December 1941, destroyed much of the American Pacific Fleet and brought the United States into World War II. What President Franklin D. Roosevelt called a “day which will live in infamy” led Congress to declare war on Japan on 8 December.

The attack followed the decision of the government of Premier Hideki Tojo that the Roosevelt administration would not abandon China and Southeast Asia to the Japanese military nor continue to supply Tokyo with oil and other vital supplies. Thus, while negotiating with Washington, Tokyo also planned a major Japanese offensive into British Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, and the American Philippines.

The major opposing naval force in the Pacific would be the U.S. Navy, which had moved to its forward base at Pearl Harbor in May 1940. As part of the Japanese of fensive, Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, commander in chief of the Combined Japanese Fleet, devised a secret plan for a preemptive air strike against the American fleet in order to give Japan time to fortify its newly conquered territories.

It was an extremely risky gamble—projecting a naval task force composed of six of Japan's nine aircraft carriers 3,400 miles across the northern Pacific without discovery or major loss. The strike force, commanded by Vice Adm. Chuichi Nagumo, was composed of two fleet carriers, two converted carriers, and two light carriers, along with two battleships, and a number of cruisers, destroyers, and support ships.

Between 10 and 18 November, Nagumo's ships left separately from Kure Naval Base, assembling 22 November by the Kurile Islands. The force departed on 26 November. To avoid detection, it followed a storm front and maintained strict radio silence, while Tokyo used signals deception from other sites to disguise the true location of the carriers. Consequently, although the U.S. Navy was monitoring Japanese naval radio traffic (they did not break the naval code until 1942), naval intelligence did not know where Japanese carriers were but knew that they had gone on radio silence on earlier deployments.

The United States had secretly broken the Japanese diplomatic codes in a system called MAGIC, and the few authorities in Washington who were informed of them understood that relations between the two countries had reached a final crisis as the Japanese envoys received Tokyo's last negotiation offer and were told to destroy their code machines and deliver the proposal to the secretary of state on Sunday morning, 7 December. Americans saw Japanese naval vessels and troops ships headed south in the China Sea. But while recognizing that war might be imminent, Washington and Pacific commanders did not know whether this would include an attack on American territories; if it did, they assumed it would be on the Philippines. So did the two American commanders on Oahu, Rear Adm. Husband E. Kimmel, commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, and Lt. Gen. Walter Short, U.S. Army commander in Hawaii. Both considered sabotage from among the sizable Japanese population to be the main threat in Hawaii.

On 7 December, Nagumo's force arrived 275 miles northwest of Oahu, and at 6:00 A.M. it launched the first attack wave, consisting of 49 bombers, 40 torpedo planes, 51 dive‐bombers, and 43 fighter aircraft; this was followed by a second wave of 54 bombers, 78 dive‐bombers, and 36 fighters. The first wave arrived over Pearl Harbor at 7:55 A.M. (1:20 P.M. in Washington, D.C.), and the attack continued until 9:45 A.M.

While Japanese fighters strafed the Army Air Corps' planes at Hickman Field, the torpedo planes and dive‐bombers attacked the navy ships. Along Battleship Row, the Arizona, the California, and the West Virginia were sunk; the Oklahoma capsized; the Nevada was grounded; and the three others were damaged. (The Japanese had secretly developed aerial torpedoes that could operate in such shallow water and bombs that could penetrate deck armor.) In all, the Japanese attack sank or disabled nineteen ships, including all eight battleships, three light cruisers, three destroyers, and several support vessels. At the airfields, 164 planes were destroyed and 128 damaged. Among American sailors, Marines, and soldiers, casualties were 2,335 killed, along with 68 civilians, and 1,178 persons wounded.

Yamamoto's plan called for a third wave to destroy the repair facilities as well as the storage tanks containing 4.5 million gallons of fuel oil. But despite losing only twenty‐nine planes, Nagumo feared a counterattack and turned for home.

News of the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor shocked Americans, ended the prewar isolationist‐interventionist debate, and unified the country. Yamamoto had misjudged the effect on a previously divided public. His attack, which was an extraordinary tactical success, failed in its larger military goal of destroying the U.S. Navy in the Pacific. Although the battleships were damaged, Nagumo's failure to destroy the repair yards enabled the Americans eventually to return six of the eight battleships and all but one of the other vessels to active duty (the wreckage of the Arizona remains there today as a monument). The fuel reserves enabled the remainder of the fleet to continue to operate, and failure to destroy the submarine base allowed submarines to play a major role in the Pacific War.

Equally important, the two aircraft carriers normally based at Pearl Harbor—the Lexington and the Enterprise—were undamaged. Escorted by heavy cruisers and destroyers, they were out delivering planes to Midway and Wake Islands.

Later on 7 December (8 December, Far Eastern Time), the Japanese launched assaults on British forces in Hong Kong and in the Malay peninsula, and U.S. forces on Midway Island, Guam, and the Philippines, where the Japanese also caught American planes on the ground.

The Pearl Harbor attack led to eight investigations between 22 December 1941 and 15 July 1946, to establish responsibility for the disaster. On 24 January 1942, a presidential commission headed by Supreme Court Justice Owen J. Roberts attributed the effectiveness of the Japanese attack to the failure of the military commanders in Hawaii, Admiral Kimmel and General Short, to institute adequate defense measures; it found them guilty of “dereliction of duty.”

The Roberts Commission concluded that there had been enough advance warnings for the local commanders to have been on the alert instead of maintaining Sunday routine. Among these were reports to Kimmel in March and August 1941 from the Army Air Corps' commanders and the naval aviation commander in Hawaii indicating the possibility of a Japanese naval air attack from that direction and on a Sunday morning (reports that Kimmel filed away). In addition, as the crisis with Japan had mounted, Washington, on 27 November, notified Kimmel and Short, and all other Pacific commanders, that the Japanese ships and troops were moving south and that war was imminent (although the Hawaii commanders assumed on their own that this meant they should be alert to sabotage). More directly, about 4:00 A.M. on 7 December, the American destroyer Ward spotted a Japanese midget submarine trying to enter Pearl Harbor, although it did not report the sighting until it sank the submarine at 6:40 A.M., and even then the army was not informed. Finally, at 7:10 A.M., the new Opana radar station on Oahu picked up a large blip approaching from the northwest, but the control center concluded erroneously that it was a flight of B‐17 bomber aircraft due in that morning from the mainland, even though those American planes would be arriving from the northeast.

Kimmel was relieved of his command and succeeded on 17 December by Adm. Chester Nimitz, and both Kimmel and Short were forced into retirement. During the war, the army and navy held several inquiries. Some held the two local commanders derelict in their duty; others concluded that they were simply guilty of errors of judgment. But all left some questions unanswered, and the controversy continued.

After the war, a joint committee of Republicans and Democrats from both houses of Congress held an investigation from 15 November 1945 to 15 July 1946, which obtained additional testimony and previously classified information about the deciphering of the Japanese diplomatic codes and monitoring of naval radio traffic. In the committee's final report, the minority Republicans tended to criticize the Roosevelt administration, the service secretaries, and Gen. George C. Marshall, the army chief of staff, for misjudgments, interservice rivalry, and poor communication; the majority Democrats blamed Kimmel and Short, although for errors of judgment rather than dereliction of duty. Like its predecessors, the congressional inquiry failed to resolve who was ultimately responsible. Kimmel and Short were never court‐martialed. Short died soon after the investigation; Kimmel lived until 1968.

Although new evidence continues to emerge, particularly about intelligence gathering by the United States and the Allies, no credible evidence has been produced to support the conspiracy thesis of a few writers that Roosevelt had foreknowledge of the attack and “allowed” it to occur so that he could take the United States into World War II. Nor have the president and his subordinates ever been shown to have been guilty of misconduct. No solid evidence has yet emerged to support a recent allegation that British intelligence was reading the Japanese naval code JN25 in 1941 and that, therefore, Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill knew of the impending attack.

The overwhelming scholarly opinion from the American perspective views the Pearl Harbor attack as an unforeseen tragedy. Scholars have stressed the difficulty in extracting in advance the relevant information from masses of intelligence data. Most accounts also note the communication problems caused by interservice and interdepartmental rivalries. Recent evidence has added the FBI, which unfortunately downgraded information from a British double agent, Dusko Popov, who reported that Berlin had asked him in 1941 to obtain detailed information about Pearl Harbor. Nor was information supplied to Kimmel and Short about the reports of spies at the Japanese Consulate in Honolulu transmitting detailed information about ship deployments at Pearl Harbor.

Many scholars also emphasize the distortion of the interpretation of data caused by preexisting perspectives in December 1941; the American underestimation of the Japanese operational ability; and the overriding belief that the targets of Japanese attack were in the western Pacific and Southeast Asia. Indeed, these were the main targets of Japanese expansionism.
[See also Intelligence, Military and Political; Isolationism; World War II, U.S. Naval Operations in: The Pacific; World War II: Changing Interpretations.]

Bibliography

Congressional Record, U.S. Congress, Hearings and Reports, Vols. 87–104, 1941–58.
Robert A. Theobald , The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor, 1954.
Husband E. Kimmel , Admiral Kimmel's Story, 1955.
Gwen Teraski , Bridge to the Sun, 1957.
Roberta Wohlstetter , Pearl Harbor, Warning and Decision, 1962.
Ladislas Farago , The Broken Seal, 1967.
David Kahn , The Codebreakers, 1967.
H. Agawa , The Reluctant Admiral: Yamamoto and the Imperial Navy, 1979.
John Toland , Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath, 1982.
Gordon W. Prange,, with Donald Goldstein, and and Katherine V. Dillon , December 7, 1941: The Day the Japanese Attacked Pearl Harbor, 1984.
Edwin T. Layton,, Roger Pineau,, and and John Costello , And I Was There, 1985.
Hilary Couroy and Harry Wray, eds., Pearl Harbor Reexamined: Prologue to the Pacific War, 1990.
Gordon W. Prange,, with Donald Goldstein, and and Katherine V. Dillon , At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor, 1991.
Gordon W. Prange,, with Donald Goldstein, and and Katherine V. Dillon , Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History, 1991.
Henry C. Clausen and and Bruce Lee , Pearl Harbor: Final Judgment, 1992.
Donald Goldstein and and Katherine V. Dillon , The Pearl Harbor Papers, 1993.
Edward L. Beach , Scapegoats: A Defense of Kimmel and Short at Pearl Harbor, 1995.

Donald M. Goldstein

Pearl Harbor, attack on, Japanese pre-emptive strike on the US Pacific Fleet's Hawaii base—5,500 km. (3,400 mi.) from Japan—which had been planned by the C-in-C of the Imperial Japanese Navy, Admiral Yamamoto. It was launched by units of his combined fleet at 0600 on Sunday 7 December 1941 after the Japanese realized that negotiations with the USA over, inter alia, their involvement in China (see China incident) were proving fruitless (see USA, 1).

The striking force, commanded by Vice-Admiral Nagumo, comprised two fleet and two light carriers; two carriers converted from a battleship and a cruiser; and two battleships, two cruisers, a destroyer screen, and eight support ships. They left Kure naval base between 10 and 18 November 1941, and signals deception (see signals intelligence warfare) and strict radio silence meant that the US Pacific Fleet's C-in-C, Rear-Admiral Kimmel, had no idea where the carriers were. When, on 2 December, he asked his fleet intelligence officer their location, the officer replied he did not know. ‘Do you mean to say,’ said Kimmel, ‘they could be rounding Diamond Head and you wouldn't know it?’

Kimmel's dilemma was a real one. In the event of hostilities he was required to raid the Japanese Marshall Islands, which meant he had to keep aircraft in reserve for long-range reconnaissance of them. In any case he had sufficient aircraft only to cover a 144° sector out from Hawaii. Not unnaturally he concentrated on the sector that covered the Marshall Islands—some 3,250 km. (2,000 mi.) to the south-west and the closest Japanese territory to Hawaii—as it was from them that any Japanese attack could be expected; and it was here that the only three reconnaissance aircraft aloft were patrolling at the time of the attack. But Nagumo approached from the north.

US planners in Washington were also looking the wrong way as they considered the Philippines the most likely area for a pre-emptive Japanese strike. Sabotage and submarines were thought the most likely forms of attack on Hawaii. That the navy department considered an air strike there a remote possibility was confirmed, in Kimmel's eyes at least, by its decision to transfer many of his P40 fighters to Wake and Midway islands to cover bombers being flown to reinforce the Philippines. Because the harbour lacked the necessary depth, the department had also ruled out a raid by torpedo-carrying aircraft, so no nets protected the battle fleet. In fact, the Japanese, who had learned much from the British raid on Taranto the previous year, had modified their torpedoes to run in shallow water.

On 27 November all US Army and Navy commanders had received a final war warning. But this had not mentioned Hawaii as a possible target, and the island's army commander, Lt-General Walter Short, interpreted it as meaning that any attack on Hawaii would take the form of sabotage. He therefore brought his defences to the highest state of alert for sabotage and informed Washington that he had done so. When he received no reply he assumed that he had interpreted the war warning correctly. Consequently, anti-aircraft batteries around the harbour had no ready ammunition and USAAF aircraft on the ground were easy targets as they were grouped together unarmed on airfields for easier protection against saboteurs. The naval defences, too, were alerted only to sabotage which resulted in the following state of affairs: only one in four of the navy's machine guns was manned, with the ready ammunition being locked in boxes to which only a duty officer had the keys; none of the main or 5 in. (12.7 cm.) batteries was manned; no additional long-range air reconnaissance had been ordered; and one-third of the ships' captains were ashore, as were many of their officers.

Though both Kimmel and Short were undoubtedly culpable for allowing a normal Sunday routine to continue in such circumstances, much of the blame for Hawaii's lack of general preparedness lay in Washington where inter-service and inter-departmental rivalries were rife. Hawaii's communication intelligence unit, Station Hypo, was unable to read the Japanese PURPLE diplomatic machine ciphers, the source of MAGIC intelligence, as the machine originally earmarked for it had been sent to the British government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park instead. Yet Washington, which also had other information about Axis interest in Pearl Harbor (see Popov), failed to supply Hawaii's commanders with this intelligence on a regular basis. Notably, it failed to supply them with deciphered messages sent to the Japanese consul general in Honolulu which requested his spies to divide Pearl Harbor into a grid of five areas and detail the ships within them. Five days later a Japanese agent working in the consulate suggested an even more detailed grid. Knowledge of these ‘bomb plot’ messages, as they came to be called, would have changed radically his estimate of the situation, Kimmel testified after the war.

By 22 November the striking force had assembled at the Kurile island of Etorofu. Four days later it sailed and under cover of a weather front (see also meteorological intelligence), which moved at about its speed across the Pacific, it was able to reach a position 450 km. (275 mi.) north of Pearl Harbor without being detected, and Nagumo then launched his aircraft. The first wave, which comprised 49 bombers, 40 torpedo bombers, 51 dive-bombers, and 43 fighters, was followed by a second wave of 54 bombers, 78 dive-bombers, and 36 fighters. As the first wave approached Hawaii the clouds parted to reveal the target. This seemed so miraculous to Nagumo and the first wave's leader that both saw in it the hand of divine intervention.

Yamamoto planned that any shipping not sunk in the air attack would be destroyed by sixteen I-type submarines, five of which carried midget submarines, and at 0645 a patrolling destroyer sank a midget submarine as it tried to enter the harbour. It had been first sighted three hours previously, but its presence was not reported until after it had been sunk. Its presence was never reported at all to the army, a typical example of the lack of inter-service co-operation and of military insouciance, which is the hallmark of the Pearl Harbor catastrophe. However, none of the submarines accomplished anything and that arm of the Japanese Navy consequently suffered a loss of prestige from which it never wholly recovered.

The first contact with the incoming waves of Japanese aircraft was made by the Opana Mobile radar Unit, whose operators were under training on Kahuku Point. Their operational hours had been extended after the war warning, from 0400 to 0700, and on that particular morning, between 0645 and 0700, all three radars picked up a reconnaissance float plane from the Japanese force. Its presence was reported but no action was taken. Then, because the breakfast truck was late, one team of operators kept their set on. This detected the approaching carrier aircraft which was also reported to the inexperienced duty officer. But, because the operators failed to report how many planes they had seen, he again did nothing as a flight of B17 bombers was expected from the same direction.

In harbour that Sunday morning were 70 warships, including 8 battleships and 24 auxiliaries, but the heavy cruisers were at sea with the fleet carriers. Guided on to this target by the music being played by a local radio station, and then by the consul general's bombing grid, the first wave of torpedo and dive bombers attacked the battle fleet, and bombed and strafed the airfields. This first phase lasted until 0825 and was followed, after a lull of fifteen minutes, by high-level bombing attacks on the harbour. Then at 0915 the dive-bombing was renewed before the raiders withdrew at 0945. Six battleships were sunk and the other two were damaged. Three destroyers, three light cruisers, and four other vessels were also sunk or damaged. On the airfields 164 planes were destroyed and another 128 damaged. Altogether, 2,403 servicemen and civilians were killed, and 1,178 wounded. Japanese combat losses were light: 29 aircraft and 6 submarines, 5 of them midgets. But Nagumo, fearing a counter-attack, made a critical mistake by refusing to launch a third wave on the harbour's repair facilities and fuel installations, which would have destroyed Pearl as a base. And though he temporarily wrecked the battle fleet, six battleships eventually returned to active service, as did all but one of the other vessels sunk or damaged. But he permanently wrecked the careers of Kimmel and Short, both of whom resigned the following spring.

Though traumatic, the disaster welded the US nation together for war as few other acts could have done. The Japanese won a significant tactical victory, but brought upon themselves a long-term strategic defeat of awesome proportions. The attack was as much a psychological shock to the USA as a physical one and no less than six wartime investigations, and one post-war Congressional inquiry, were made into the reasons for its success. None revealed the president, or any of his subordinates, guilty of misconduct and so far no evidence has ever come to light that convincingly supports the thesis that Roosevelt allowed the attack to occur in order to bring his country into the war. Nor has any incontrovertible evidence yet appeared that a British intelligence unit, the Far East Combined Bureau (FECB), was able to read the Japanese JN25 code at that time and that Churchill therefore knew about the attack beforehand. FECB files are said to have been destroyed but refutation of this canard can be found in evidence that when, in mid November 1941, the Japanese fleet ceased to transmit radio signals—and therefore could no longer be pinpointed by British radio monitors—the Joint Intelligence committee (see UK, 8) immediately informed Washington of this development. A Dutch intelligence unit at Bandung, Kamer 14, may have been able to decipher part of the code as the Dutch commander in the Far East, General Hein ter Poorten, claimed after the war that it had provided him with intelligence reports that showed Japanese naval concentrations near the Kuriles, but this remains unsubstantiated as all the Dutch files were apparently burned when the Japanese invaded Java. What seems certain is that signals dispatched before Nagumo sailed contained sufficient information to alert the Americans to the attack, as 188 deciphered after the war were connected to Japanese preparations for it (see F. Park, Cryptologia, vol. XV, October 1991).

Equally problematical is the case of what became known as the ‘East Winds’ signal. Japanese embassies had been warned that if a weather forecast, Higashi no kaze ame (east wind rain), was broadcast by Tokyo it would mean that Japanese–US relations were in danger. The potential use of this warning was known to the Americans through MAGIC intelligence and was regarded by the US navy department as being tantamount to a declaration of war if it was issued. It was later stated, though the navy department denied it, that the ‘East Winds’ message had been broadcast, and intercepted, on 4 or 5 December 1941. The message was logged but all record of it subsequently disappeared.See also Pacific war.

Bibliography

Beach, E. L. , Scapegoats: A Defense of Kimmel and Short at Pearl Harbor (Annapolis, 1995).
Prange, W. , At Dawn We Slept (New York, 1981).
Wohlstetter, R. , Pearl Harbor—Warning and Decision (Stanford, Calif., 1962).

PEARL HARBOR

PEARL HARBOR is located on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. The U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor and the supporting

army forts and airfields grew in strategic importance during the 1930s as diplomatic relations with Japan deteriorated. On 7 December 1941, Pearl Harbor entered into history as the location of the infamous surprise attack by the Japanese navy on the United States.

Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto selected Commander Minoru Genda to develop the plan to destroy the U.S. fleet and give Japan time to conquer the Philippine Islands, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies. Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo commanded the First Air Fleet, consisting of six aircraft carriers (Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, Hiryu, Shokaku, and Zuikaku) carrying 400 Kate torpedo bombers, Val dive-bombers, and Zero fighters.

The U.S. Pacific Fleet was under the command of Admiral Husband E. Kimmel. Major General Walter C. Short commanded U.S. Army forces, which consisted of the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division, Coast Artillery batteries, and the U.S. Army Air Forces in Hawaii.

The U.S. Army and Navy intelligence services had broken the Japanese diplomatic code, and messages had been sent to both commanders that the Japanese might be planning offensive military operations in the Pacific. Even so there was no warning specifically indicating that the American forces in Hawaii were a target. These warnings would result in many years of charges and countercharges about who was "at fault" for the disaster that occurred.

The Pacific Fleet's primary striking power was in its three aircraft carriers (Lexington, Saratoga, and Enterprise) and eight battleships (Pennsylvania, Arizona, Maryland, Tennessee, West Virginia, California, Oklahoma, and Nevada). On the morning of 7 December the Saratoga was undergoing refitting in California, and the Lexington and Enterprise, with their escorts of fast cruisers and destroyers, were returning from delivering Marine Corps Wildcat fighters to the islands of Midway and Wake.

The initial contact with the Japanese came when the destroyer Ward sighted and fired upon one of five mini-submarines that were attempting to penetrate the harbor in order to attack the battleships in coordination with the aerial assault. At dawn, Commander Mitsuo Fuchida led the first wave of Japanese aircraft, consisting of 133 torpedo, dive, and horizontal bombers and Zeros. Although radar operators located at Opana Point detected the flight, their commander interpreted the signals they received as an indication that a flight of B-17 bombers was arriving as planned from California.

The air forces defending Oahu consisted of ninety-nine P-40 and thirty-nine P-36 fighters, along with twelve B-17, thirty-three obsolete B-18, and six A-20 bombers. The bombers were stationed at Hickam Airfield, next to Pearl Harbor, while the fighters were at Wheeler Field with four squadrons dispersed for training at Bellows and Haleiwa fields. The navy had sixty-nine PBY flying boats stationed at Kaneohe.

The Japanese struck Wheeler Field at 7:52 a.m., destroying most of the fighters that were lined up in the center of the airfield as protection against sabotage. The main force of torpedo, dive, and horizontal bombers struck the battleships anchored alongside Ford Island at 7:55. The initial torpedo runs ripped out the sides of the West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Utah. Two later runs capsized and sank the California. Meanwhile, a bomb detonated in the forward ammunition magazine of the Arizona, destroying the ship and killing approximately 1,200 of her crew. Dive and horizontal bombers struck the California, Maryland, and Tennessee, with the Maryland sinking on an even keel. Other bombers and fighters then attacked the aircraft at Ford Island, Hickam Field, and Kaneohe. Less than a dozen P-40s and P-36s from Haleiwa and Bellows fields managed to take off to defend Oahu. Their pilots shot down thirteen Japanese aircraft.

The 170 aircraft of the second wave arrived over Pearl Harbor at 8:55 a.m. The dive-bombers focused on the Nevada as it started to leave the harbor. Receiving multiple bomb and torpedo hits, the ship's captain beached her rather than risk being sunk in the channel entrance. Other bombers struck the Pennsylvania, which had escaped damage during the first wave, and the cruisers and destroyers, which had until then been ignored. Other elements of the Japanese force struck Ewa, Bellows, and Wheeler fields, destroying the remaining aircraft there.

The Japanese lost twenty-nine aircraft, five mini-submarines, and sixty-five personnel. Declining to launch a third strike to destroy the harbor's oil storage tanks, submarines, and maintenance facilities, Admiral Nagumo turned his force back to Japan after the second wave returned shortly after noon.

Approximately 2,500 American sailors and soldiers died in the attack. Another 1,176 were wounded. Every aircraft was either destroyed or damaged, but not all were damaged beyond repair. Of the ninety-four warships in the harbor, all eight battleships were sunk or severely damaged. Two destroyers were sunk, and several other destroyers and cruisers were damaged.

In the aftermath of the attack, Admiral Kimmel and Major General Short were both relieved of command and forced into early retirement because of their lack of judgment, especially in light of the warnings they had received. The argument over who was "really responsible" for the debacle, however, continues.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Clausen, Henry C., and Bruce Lee. Pearl Harbor: Final Judgement. New York: Crown, 1992.

Lord, Walter. Day of Infamy. New York: Henry Holt, 1957; 60th anniversary ed., 2001.

Prange, Gordon W., with Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon. At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981. 60th anniversary ed., New York: Penguin, 2001.

Prange, Gordon W., with Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon. December 7, 1941: The Day the Japanese Attacked Pearl Harbor. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988.

Frank R.Shirer

See alsoWorld War II ; World War II, Air War Against Japan ; World War II, Navy in ; andvol. 9:War against Japan .

Pearl Harbor

BIBLIOGRAPHY

In the 1920s and 1930s, Americans had become strongly isolationist, many believing that America’s involvement in World War I (1914–1918) had been a political mistake. Moreover, the Great Depression focused people’s attention on the economy. Against this backdrop, the U.S. Congress had passed neutrality acts in 1935 and 1936. The tipping point that rallied public opinion toward involvement in World War II (1939–1945) came on December 7, 1941.

The Japanese leadership had sought to drive U.S. and U.K. forces out of Asia. To Japan, the attack on Pearl Harbor was seen as merely a “strategic necessity”—part of the grand strategy to secure the Pacific for oil shipments to fuel the empire’s efforts to dominate Asia. However, as history has shown, the plan backfired.

In the attack, 21 American ships were sunk or badly damaged, 188 planes were lost, and 155 planes were damaged. In addition, 2,403 American lives were lost and 1,178 persons injured. Fortunately for the U.S. Navy, no aircraft carriers were in port. While the attack produced a substantial military loss, the main effect of the attack was to crystallize Americans’ public opinion against the Axis Powers. On December 8, 1941, the United States declared war on Japan.

Prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had battled with Congress to expand American support for England’s struggle against Germany. But once Americans saw themselves as victims, resistance to entering the war melted away. German führer Adolf Hitler’s declaration of war against the United States on December 11, 1941, provided the linkage necessary to associate pro-war sentiment generated by Pearl Harbor to Germany, and the United States declared war on Germany and Italy on the same day.

Public sentiment toward Japanese Americans was low prior to the attack at Pearl Harbor, as evidenced by the 1924 Immigration Act that halted Japanese immigration. The attack on Pearl Harbor sparked war hysteria. In 1942 Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized the internment of 120,000 individuals of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens. These people were removed from their homes along the West Coast and relocated to inland camps.

President Roosevelt declared December 7 “a date that will live in infamy.” As a term, “Pearl Harbor” has come to represent foreign treachery, the perils of U.S. isolationism, and of potential vulnerability of American military forces. The specter of Pearl Harbor helped to fuel the nuclear arms race between the United States and Union of Soviet Socialist Republics during the twentieth century. But Pearl Harbor also constrained U.S. power. Robert Kennedy persuaded his brother, President John F. Kennedy, not to execute a surprise air strike against Cuba during the 1962 Missile Crisis because it would appear to the world as “Pearl Harbor in reverse.”

In Japan, the attack is sometimes viewed as the mistake that awoke a “sleeping giant.” Others associate it with a dishonorable period of aggression in the nation’s history.

Though Pearl Harbor happened more than sixty years ago, the incident carries a great deal of weight in American political rhetoric. Political analysts and media personnel compared the terrorist attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001, to Pearl Harbor. While similar in some respects, the Pearl Harbor analogy, along with other thinly veiled language such as “axis of evil,” permitted President George W. Bush to build support for the War on Terror by framing it in terms reminiscent of World War II.

SEE ALSO Hitler, Adolf; Roosevelt, Franklin D.; World War II

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Jespersen, T. Christopher. 2005. Analogies at War: Vietnam, the Bush Administration’s War in Iraq, and the Search for a Usable Past. Pacific Historical Review 74 (3): 411–426.

Prange, Gordon W. 1991. At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor. New York: Penguin.

Todd L. Belt

Pearl Harbor, Attack on (7 December 1941).U.S.‐Japanese relations, often tense after 1900, worsened as the United States extended assistance to China following Japan's 1937 invasion of that nation and imposed economic sanctions, including a ban on U.S. aviation fuel, steel, and scrap metal exports to Japan. Hoping to deter further Japanese expansion, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ordered the Pacific Fleet to remain forwardly deployed at Pearl Harbor in Oahu, Hawai'i, after its 1940 maneuvers. Viewing war as inevitable, Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto, commander in chief of the Japanese navy, on 7 January 1941 began plans for an attack on Pearl Harbor. In October, a new, more militaristic government under war minister Hideki Tojo took power in Tokyo. On 26 November, a thirty‐two‐ship fleet under Yamamoto's command left the Kuril Islands. Thanks to intercepted codes, the United States knew that war was imminent, and warnings went out to all Pacific commanders on 27 November, but without specific mention of Hawai'i. Indeed U.S. officials expected that the first assault would come against the Philippines or British or Dutch possessions in the Pacific.

On Sunday, 7 December, from a position 275 miles north of Oahu, Yamamoto launched two waves of planes against the U.S. fleet anchored at Pearl Harbor. Achieving complete tactical surprise, the first wave of 183 planes from 6 Japanese carriers struck U.S. airfields and U.S. battleships moored along Ford Island at 7:55 a.m. The planes reached their targets shortly before Japanese diplomats delivered a message to U.S. officials in Washington, breaking diplomatic relations. The 167 planes of the second wave, arriving at 8:40 a.m., continued the onslaught. U.S. losses included 2,403 killed and 1,178 wounded as well as 187 aircraft, 8 battleships, 3 cruisers, 3 destroyers, 2 auxiliary craft, a minelayer, and a target ship. Japan lost only 29 planes, 6 submarines, and 64 men. Only the absence of U.S. aircraft carriers, which were delivering planes to Midway, and Japan's failure to destroy repair facilities, submarine pens, and fuel‐storage tanks prevented total disaster. Addressing Congress, President Roosevelt called 7 December a day that would “live in infamy.” “Remember Pearl Harbor” became America's World War II rallying cry.

On 22 December, a commission chaired by Supreme Court Justice Owen J. Roberts launched the first of eight investigations conducted over the next five years, none of which clearly fixed specific blame for the catastrophe. However, Rear Admiral Husband Kimmel and Major General Walter C. Short, the navy and army commanders at Pearl Harbor, were held negligent and relieved of duty. Debate continued for more than fifty years, some writers blaming Roosevelt and other officials in Washington, and others defending them. Still others lay a preponderance of blame on Short and Kimmel, or on British and Russian officials who, some have alleged, knew the Japanese fleet was sailing eastward but failed to inform the United States. No credible evidence supports the conspiracy theory that Roosevelt knew of the attack in advance but allowed it to occur to create a pretext for war.

Pearl Harbor is today a national historic landmark. The partially‐submerged battleship Arizona, with the bodies of 1,103 U.S. sailors still entombed within, remains as a memorial of the attack. The battleship Missouri, on whose deck Japanese officials signed surrender papers ending the war, is anchored nearby as a war memorial.
See also Foreign Relations: U.S. Relations with Asia.

Bibliography

Martin V. Melosi , The Shadow of Pearl Harbor: Political Controversy over the Surprise Attack, 1941–1946, 1977.
Gordon W. Prange et al. , At Dawn We Slept, 1991.
Gordon W. Prange et al. , Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History, 1991.
John Costello , In Days of Infamy, 1994.

James C. Bradford

Pearl Harbor land-locked harbor, on the southern coast of Oahu island, Hawaii, W of Honolulu; one of the largest and best natural harbors in the E Pacific Ocean. In the vicinity are many U.S. military installations, including the chief U.S. Pacific naval base, Hickam Air Force Base, Pearl Harbor Naval Air Station, and Camp H. M. Smith, headquarters of the U.S. Pacific Command.

The United States first gained rights there in 1887, when the Hawaiian monarchy permitted a coaling and repair station. After the United States annexed Hawaii in 1900, Pearl Harbor was made a naval base. Harbor improvements and fortifications were later added, especially after the signing of the Berlin Pact in 1940 by the Axis nations.

On Dec. 7, 1941, while negotiations were going on with Japanese representatives in Washington, Japanese carrier-based planes swept in without warning over Oahu and attacked (7:55 descr='[AM]' local time) the bulk of the U.S. Pacific fleet, moored in Pearl Harbor. Nineteen naval vessels, including eight battleships, were sunk or severely damaged; 188 U.S. aircraft were destroyed. Military casualties were 2,280 killed and 1,109 wounded; 68 civilians also died. On Dec. 8, the United States declared war on Japan.

There were many charges of negligence against those responsible for Pearl Harbor's defense. A special commission appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt accused the army and navy commanders at Hawaii of dereliction of duty in a report on Jan. 24, 1942. Later army and navy investigations concluded that no valid grounds existed for court-martial. A congressional committee, formed in Sept., 1945, absolved the army and navy commanders in a formal report on July 16, 1946, but censured the War Dept. and the Dept. of the Navy.

Pearl Harbor is now a national historic landmark; a memorial has been built over the sunken hulk of the USS Arizona. The battleship Missouri, site of Japan's surrender, is also preserved there as a memorial.

Pearl Harbor a surprise Japanese attack on the U.S. Navy's base at Pearl Harbor and on Oahu in the Hawaiian Islands on December 7, 1941. It destroyed much of the American Pacific Fleet and brought the United States into World War II. The attack followed the decision of the Japanese government that Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration would not abandon China and Southeast Asia to the Japanese military nor continue to supply Tokyo with vital materials. Early Sunday morning, December 7, Japanese aircraft launched an assault that destroyed or disabled nineteen ships and 292 planes. American deaths totaled 2,335 and 1,178 were wounded. Ultimately, though the attack was a tactical success, the Japanese failure to destroy American repair yards, fuel reserves, and submarine base prevented them from achieving their goal of destroying the U.S. Navy in the Pacific.

Pearl Harbor A major US naval base on the island of Oahu in Hawaii. A surprise attack by Japanese carrier-borne aircraft on 7 December 1941, delivered without a prior declaration of war, brought the USA into World War II. A total of 188 US aircraft were destroyed, eight battleships and eleven other navy vessels were sunk or damaged. The attack was a strategic failure, however, because the crucial element of the US Pacific fleet, its aircraft carriers, were out of the harbour on that day.

Pearl Harbor US naval base in Hawaii. On December 7, 1941, a Japanese naval taskforce, which approached within range of the islands unobserved, attacked Pearl Harbor, headquarters of the US Pacific fleet. The Japanese assault killed c.2400 people and destroyed or damaged c.300 aircraft and 18 ships. The attack provoked US entry into World War II.

Pearl Harbor A harbour on the Pacific island of Oahu, in Hawaii, the site of a major US naval base, where a surprise attack on 7 December 1941 by Japanese carrier-borne aircraft, inflicted heavy damage and brought the USA into World War II.

Pearl Harbor, Hawaii/USA Wai Momi The present name is merely a translation of the earlier Hawaiian name meaning ‘Pearl Waters’, a reference to the pearl oysters that grew here.

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