Plate 032 — Battles
REF: BF-BTL-032Pearl Harbor - Overview
Attack on Pearl Harbor: the action on the chart
7 December 1941. Times are local Hawaiian time (roughly UTC−10:30 in 1941, before Hawaii adopted a whole-hour standard time zone).
- 06:00
Kido Butai launches the first wave
From a position roughly 230 nautical miles north of Oahu, the six carriers of Kido Butai launched a first wave of 183 aircraft – fighters, dive bombers, level bombers and torpedo bombers – under Commander Mitsuo Fuchida. The task force had crossed the North Pacific in strict radio silence since leaving the Kurile Islands on 26 November, avoiding normal shipping lanes.
- 06:37–06:45
Ward attacks a midget submarine
Off the harbor entrance, lookouts on the destroyer USS Ward spotted the conning tower of a Japanese midget submarine trailing the supply ship Antares toward the boom gate. Ward opened fire at 06:45, scoring a hit, and dropped depth charges, sinking the submarine – probably the first American shots fired in the Pacific war, though the report up the chain of command was not acted on in time.
- 07:02
Opana radar detects the incoming raid
An Army radar set at Opana Point on Oahu's north shore picked up a large formation of aircraft approaching from the north at a range of about 137 miles. The duty officer at the information center, expecting a flight of B-17s due in from the mainland, told the operators to disregard it.
- 07:48
First wave strikes the airfields
Japanese dive bombers and fighters hit the airfields at Wheeler, Hickam, Kaneohe and Ewa within minutes of each other, aiming to destroy American aircraft on the ground before they could rise to intercept. Nearly all the Army, Navy and Marine planes on Oahu were caught parked wingtip to wingtip.
- 07:55
Battleship Row hit
Torpedo bombers and dive bombers fell on the eight battleships moored along Ford Island's southeast shore and in dry dock across the channel. West Virginia and Oklahoma took torpedo hits within the opening minutes; Oklahoma capsized soon after, trapping hundreds of her crew below decks.
- 08:10
Arizona destroyed
An armor-piercing bomb penetrated Arizona's deck and ignited her forward ammunition magazine. The explosion tore the ship apart and killed 1,177 of her crew – about half of all Americans who died in the attack.
- 08:30
Nevada gets underway
Despite earlier torpedo damage, the battleship Nevada worked up steam and stood out down the channel toward the open sea, the only battleship to get underway during the attack. A brief lull in the fighting followed as the first wave's planes turned for home.
- 08:50–08:54
Second wave attacks Nevada
A second wave of 170 Japanese aircraft, launched thirty minutes behind the first, arrived over the harbor and concentrated on the moving Nevada, hoping to sink her in the channel and block the entrance. On orders from the harbor control tower she beached herself at Hospital Point instead, keeping the channel clear.
- ≈ 09:45
Attack ends
The raid was over shortly before 10:00, less than two hours after it began. Twenty-one ships of the Pacific Fleet had been sunk or damaged and 188 aircraft destroyed; 2,403 Americans were dead, including 68 civilians killed mostly by misdirected anti-aircraft shells falling on Honolulu. Twenty-nine Japanese aircraft, fewer than ten percent of the attacking force, failed to return.
- ≈ 13:00
Kido Butai withdraws
Vice Admiral Nagumo declined to launch a third strike against the harbor's fuel depots and repair yards, judging the risk to his carriers too great, and turned Kido Butai north and west for home. The American aircraft carriers, absent from harbor that morning, and the base's oil storage and shipyard survived undamaged.
Outcome. Twenty-one US ships were sunk or damaged, including all eight battleships present, for 2,403 American dead and 1,178 wounded; Japan lost 29 aircraft and five midget submarines, with 64 servicemen killed and one sailor captured. The attack failed to find or damage any American aircraft carrier and left the base's fuel and repair facilities intact, but it brought the United States into the Second World War the next day.
Pearl Harbor, 7 December 1941
The 7 December 1941 Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor was one of the great defining moments in history. A single carefully-planned and well-executed stroke removed the United States Navy's battleship force as a possible threat to the Japanese Empire's southward expansion. America, unprepared and now considerably weakened, was abruptly brought into the Second World War as a full combatant.
Eighteen months earlier, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had transferred the United States Fleet to Pearl Harbor as a presumed deterrent to Japanese agression. The Japanese military, deeply engaged in the seemingly endless war it had started against China in mid-1937, badly needed oil and other raw materials. Commercial access to these was gradually curtailed as the conquests continued. In July 1941 the Western powers effectively halted trade with Japan. From then on, as the desperate Japanese schemed to seize the oil and mineral-rich East Indies and Southeast Asia, a Pacific war was virtually inevitable.
By late November 1941, with peace negotiations clearly approaching an end, informed U.S. officials (and they were well-informed, they believed, through an ability to read Japan's diplomatic codes) fully expected a Japanese attack into the Indies, Malaya and probably the Philippines. Completely unanticipated was the prospect that Japan would attack east, as well.
The U.S. Fleet's Pearl Harbor base was reachable by an aircraft carrier force, and the Japanese Navy secretly sent one across the Pacific with greater aerial striking power than had ever been seen on the World's oceans. Its planes hit just before 8AM on 7 December. Within a short time five of eight battleships at Pearl Harbor were sunk or sinking, with the rest damaged. Several other ships and most Hawaii-based combat planes were also knocked out and over 2400 Americans were dead. Soon after, Japanese planes eliminated much of the American air force in the Philippines, and a Japanese Army was ashore in Malaya.
These great Japanese successes, achieved without prior diplomatic formalities, shocked and enraged the previously divided American people into a level of purposeful unity hardly seen before or since. For the next five months, until the Battle of the Coral Sea in early May, Japan's far-reaching offensives proceeded untroubled by fruitful opposition. American and Allied morale suffered accordingly. Under normal political circumstances, an accomodation might have been considered.
However, the memory of the "sneak attack" on Pearl Harbor fueled a determination to fight on. Once the Battle of Midway in early June 1942 had eliminated much of Japan's striking power, that same memory stoked a relentless war to reverse her conquests and remove her, and her German and Italian allies, as future threats to World peace
credits: US Navy History Center