Beginning at 7:48 a.m. local time, 353 Japanese aircraft launched from six carriers hit the naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Eight battleships were damaged and four sunk, including USS Arizona, which exploded and killed 1,177 men aboard. The next day President Franklin D. Roosevelt called it 'a date which will live in infamy' and Congress declared war on Japan, ending American neutrality.
The attack took just under two hours and was devastatingly effective: nearly 20 American ships and 300 aircraft were destroyed or damaged, and the fleet's battleship row was reduced to burning wreckage within minutes. Yet Japan's gamble missed the American carriers, which were at sea, and the base's fuel depots and repair yards survived largely intact — oversights that allowed the U.S. Navy to rebuild with startling speed.
Among the enduring images is the USS Arizona, still leaking oil into the harbor more than eighty years later, now a memorial where visitors can see the ship's silhouette beneath the water. Sailors and Marines who survived described a sky so thick with smoke that the sun disappeared by mid-morning.
The attack instantly transformed American public opinion. Isolationist sentiment, which had kept the U.S. out of the war for over two years, collapsed almost overnight. Within four days, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States too, making the conflict truly global.
Key people: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Chuichi Nagumo, Isoroku Yamamoto, Husband E. Kimmel