Japan won a devastating tactical victory at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, crippling the United States Pacific Fleet in a surprise carrier air raid on the Hawaiian base. Strategically it backfired: the attack brought a united America into World War II, and the aircraft carriers it failed to catch, together with the fuel tanks and repair shops it left alone, let the US Navy strike back within months.1
Anniversary 7 December 2026 marks the 85th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.
Just before 8 a.m. on a quiet Sunday, 7 December 1941, Japanese carrier aircraft swept over the Hawaiian island of Oahu and fell on the United States Pacific Fleet at its moorings in Pearl Harbor and on the airfields around it. The attack came in two waves and was over by about ten o'clock. By then all eight battleships in the harbor had been sunk or damaged, most of the aircraft on the island had been destroyed, and more than 2,400 Americans were dead.2
Part of The greatest battles of the Pacific War · Next: The Doolittle Raid
Who won at Pearl Harbor and why?
Japan won the battle. Its six carriers caught the Pacific Fleet unready on a Sunday morning, sank or damaged all eight battleships and destroyed 188 aircraft for the loss of 29 planes. Surprise was complete because warnings were missed. But the American carriers were at sea, and the fuel tanks and repair shops survived.3
A plan born of surprise
The road to war ran through China and Indochina. Japan's full-scale war on China from 1937 and its move into French Indochina hardened American opposition, and in July 1941 the Roosevelt administration froze Japanese assets and cut off Japan's access to American oil and steel. Japan's leaders chose war rather than give up their conquests, and planned to strike at once against Dutch, British and American possessions across the Pacific and Southeast Asia.4
The plan to open that war at Pearl Harbor was the work of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander in chief of the Combined Fleet, who wanted to cripple American naval power at the start and win Japan time to seize the resources it needed. Japanese war games suggested the raid might cost two carriers and a third of the planes, but the Navy pressed on. Aircrews trained on an island in Japanese waters that stood in for Oahu, wooden fins were fitted to aerial torpedoes so that they would not dive into the mud of the shallow harbor, and 16-inch armor-piercing shells were converted into bombs for the high-level bombers.5
The striking force, under Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, brought together six carriers, Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, Hiryu, Shokaku and Zuikaku, with two battleships, two heavy cruisers, destroyers and three submarines, and more than 360 aircraft. It gathered in Tankan (Hitokappu) Bay in the Kurile Islands and sailed on 26 November by Japanese dates, under strict radio silence and with orders to turn back if the talks in Washington succeeded. A separate force of large submarines deployed south of Oahu, five of them carrying two-man midget submarines meant to slip into the harbor.6
On the evening of 6 December, Hawaiian time, the force reached a point about 500 miles north of Oahu and turned south at high speed. Before dawn it reached its launch point a little over 200 miles north of the island. Scout planes went ahead and found the fleet in harbor, all except the prize targets, the carriers.7
Warnings that went unheeded
The defenders had two chances to see the blow coming. At about 3:50 a.m. the minesweeper Condor sighted a periscope near the harbor entrance, and at 6:45 the destroyer Ward attacked and sank a midget submarine there. The Navy was still checking the reports when the air attack began, and no one told the Army.8
The second warning came from radar. At 7:02 a.m. two privates at the Army's mobile radar station at Opana, on the northern tip of Oahu, Joseph Lockard and George Elliott, picked up a large formation more than 130 miles away. They reported it to the information center at Fort Shafter, where the only officer on duty, Lieutenant Kermit Tyler, in his second day of training, took it for a flight of American B-17 bombers expected from the mainland and told them not to worry. The B-17s did arrive, Morison notes, only five minutes behind the first Japanese wave.9
Two waves over the harbor
The first wave was 183 aircraft: 40 torpedo planes, 49 high-level bombers, 51 dive bombers and 43 fighters. It sighted the coast of Oahu shortly before 7:40, split up to come at its targets from several directions, and opened the attack in the Pearl Harbor area at 7:55. The torpedo planes did the worst damage, and most of the damage to the fleet was done in this first half hour.10
The second wave, launched an hour and fifteen minutes after the first, was 170 aircraft: high-level bombers, dive bombers and fighters. It arrived around 8:45 to 9:00 and kept up the attack until about 9:45, against much heavier antiaircraft fire from the ships. By about ten in the morning the attack was over and the last Japanese planes were heading back to their carriers.11
Battleship Row ablaze
The heart of the disaster was Battleship Row, the moorings along Ford Island where seven of the eight battleships in port lay, several of them in pairs; the eighth, the fleet flagship Pennsylvania, sat in dry dock at the navy yard. Torpedoes tore into the outboard ships, and a bomb made from a converted 16-inch shell pierced the Arizona and set off her forward magazine.12
The Arizona lost more men than any other ship that day. The National Park Service puts her dead at 1,177, of whom over 900 still lie in the wreck; Morison's count, published in 1948, gives 47 officers and 1,056 men killed or missing. The Army's official history says almost half of all the deaths of the day came from that one explosion.13
The Oklahoma, hit by torpedoes, capsized within twenty minutes until her masts stuck in the mud, and 20 officers and 395 men were killed or missing. The West Virginia and California sank at their moorings. The Nevada got under way and headed for the open sea, but was hit again and again, and tugs beached her on hard bottom opposite Ford Island so that she would not sink in the channel. On the other side of Ford Island the old target ship Utah rolled over and sank, taking 58 of her crew with her.14
The airfields
The Japanese sent 199 of their planes, nearly 60 percent of the force, against the airfields, to keep American aircraft on the ground. At Kaneohe every one of the 33 patrol planes present was destroyed or damaged, and at the Marine air station at Ewa not one aircraft was left fit to fly. At Hickam and Wheeler fields the Army's planes had been lined up wing to wing as a guard against sabotage, and more than half the bombers at Hickam and two thirds of the planes at Wheeler were destroyed or badly damaged.15
In the middle of the attack twelve unarmed B-17s arriving from the mainland flew into the battle and landed wherever they could. Only a handful of American fighters got into the air, from the small field at Haleiwa, which the Japanese had not attacked, starting at about 8:15. In all, 188 American aircraft were destroyed.16
Why the Japanese did not come back
Nagumo did not send another strike. His planes were back on board by about 1:30 in the afternoon, and the force turned away to the northwest at high speed and reached Japan on 23 December. Two carriers, Soryu and Hiryu, were detached on the way to reinforce the attack on Wake Island.17
That decision left the base itself largely intact. The raiders had knocked out the battle line, but they neglected the permanent installations: the repair shops, which went on to return many damaged ships to service with remarkable speed, the power plant, and the fuel oil tank farm, filled to capacity. Admiral Thomas Hart, quoted by Morison, thought the loss of those tanks would have set back the American advance across the Pacific longer than the damage to the fleet did. And none of the Pacific Fleet's three carriers was in port.18
Counting the losses
The attack killed 2,403 Americans and wounded 1,178, the figures used by the National Park Service and by Morison's official Navy history. Morison breaks them down as 2,008 Navy dead and 710 wounded, 109 Marines killed and 69 wounded, 218 Army dead and 364 wounded, and 68 civilians killed and 35 wounded. Earlier counts differ a little: the Army's official history gives at least 57 civilian dead.19
Japan lost 29 aircraft in combat, nine from the first wave and twenty from the second, according to the Army's official history, and the 1946 Joint Congressional Committee gives the same total. The Japanese acknowledged 55 airmen killed. All five midget submarines were lost, with nine of their ten crewmen; the tenth, an ensign who abandoned his submarine when it grounded off Bellows Field, became the first Japanese prisoner of the war. In all, the committee counted fewer than 100 Japanese dead.20
Of the ships, the committee listed eight battleships, three light cruisers, three destroyers and four other vessels sunk or seriously damaged. Most came back. Every battleship that sank except the Arizona was raised, the capsized Oklahoma in the hardest salvage job of all, and most of the damaged battleships were repaired and returned to service. Only the Arizona and the Utah were never raised and still lie where they sank.21
A date which will live in infamy
The tactical victory was dazzling, but its strategic verdict fell against Japan almost at once. At 12:30 p.m. on 8 December President Franklin Roosevelt spoke to a joint session of Congress and the nation by radio and called 7 December "a date which will live in infamy"; his first draft had read "a date which will live in world history". Congress declared war on Japan that day, and Roosevelt signed the declaration at 4 p.m.22
Within days, on 11 December, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States, and the United States declared war on them in turn. The attack that was meant to keep America out of the Pacific for months instead brought it into the whole war, in Europe as well as in Asia.23
Why did Japan attack Pearl Harbor?
Japan struck Pearl Harbor to put the US Pacific Fleet out of action while it seized the oil and raw materials of Southeast Asia. Within hours the same offensive struck Guam, the Philippines, Wake Island, Midway and Hong Kong, part of a single plan against American, British and Dutch possessions across the Pacific and Southeast Asia. The architect of the raid is profiled among the commanders of the Pacific War.24
Who was to blame?
Washington wanted to know how the fleet had been caught asleep. Navy Secretary Frank Knox flew to Hawaii and reported on 15 December that neither Admiral Husband E. Kimmel nor Lieutenant General Walter C. Short had expected an air attack or taken adequate measures to meet one. A commission under Supreme Court Justice Owen J. Roberts followed, and shortly after the disaster both commanders were retired from active duty.25
The investigations went on through the war and ended with the Joint Congressional Committee in 1946, which concluded that the errors of the Hawaiian commands were errors of judgment and not derelictions of duty, and that Washington too had failed in its responsibilities. The Army's official history judges that even with the last hour's warnings the damage would have been much the same, given the weight of the attack.26
How is Pearl Harbor remembered today?
Since a 1994 act of Congress, 7 December has been National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, and federal law asks the President to issue a proclamation each year calling for flags at half-staff. The National Park Service and the US Navy hold a ceremony at Pearl Harbor National Memorial, where the USS Arizona Memorial spans the sunken battleship.27
Fewer veterans of that morning attend each year. In December 2025 only 12 survivors were known to be alive, all of them centenarians, and for the first time none could travel to Hawaii for the ceremony. The carriers that escaped the raid struck back six months later at Midway.28
