They came out of the northwest on a quiet Sunday morning, some 353 aircraft in two waves. Their primary target was the United States Pacific Fleet anchored in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, but they also struck at a number of other facilities, particularly airfields. Of the eight US battleships present that morning, four were sunk and the rest damaged. One, the USS Arizona, blew up and was never raised. It is now a graveyard in the middle of the harbor, containing the bodies of some 1,177 sailors. The Japanese also sank or damaged three cruisers and three destroyers. One hundred eighty-eight U.S. aircraft were destroyed. Two thousand four hundred three Americans were killed and 1,178 others were wounded. December 7, 1941, eighty years ago today….
The next day President Roosevelt made the speech in which he asserted that December 7, 1941, was a date that will live in infamy, and asked Congress for a declaration of war. He got it—the Senate voted unanimously for war, and in the House only Jeannette Rankin voted no, as she had in 1917 when Woodrow Wilson asked for a declaration of war.
FDR had long recognized the threat posed by Nazi Germany, but strong (mostly Republican) isolationism had hampered his ability to support Britain and counter Nazi aggression. Hitler solved FDR’s problem on December 11, 1941 when he declared war on the US. For Germany, this meant that in less than six months they had chosen to go to war with the two nations with the greatest military potential in the world—they attacked the USSR on June 22, 1941, and declared war on the US half a year later. In retrospect this would seem to have made Germany’s defeat inevitable, but at the time the world was engaged in the most desperate struggle, and some 50,000,000 people would die before Germany and Japan surrendered.
The successful surprise attack on Pearl Harbor was seared into the consciousness of US statesmen, politicians, and military leaders. In my opinion, it contributed to the rise of the Imperial Presidency and the constant state of war and semi-war in which we’ve found ourselves ever since. Especially with the advent of nuclear weapons deliverable by ICBMs, the fundamental imperative of US defense policy has been that we will never be surprised like that again.