Original subtitles

The 1930s is a decade of aggression.

Italy attacks Ethiopia,

dreaming of a modern Roman Empire.

Hitler's Thousand-Year Reich calls for his seizure of Austria,

Czechoslovakia, and Poland.

The Japanese Empire expands

with the invasion of Manchuria and China,

but intends to dominate all of Asia.

To accomplish that,

the military in Japan know they must first eliminate

the United States as a seaborne power.

They act accordingly.

All wars change the world. But none of them change the world

like the Second World War did.

Japan's on the march. Germany's on the march.

No-one can imagine the nightmare

they're about to unleash:

the most destructive war in history.

Suddenly, the world is turned upside down,

and all hell is let loose.

The West is stunned by the speed of the advance.

You get the Allies, led by the Big Three:

Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin.

Men who are dealing with immensely complicated questions.

It's the biggest military operation of human history.

The Allies have to come together not just militarily,

but industrial-scale. It's a global perspective.

They have to fight in every climate,

from the Arctic to the jungles of the Pacific,

to the deserts of Africa and the depths of the ocean.

But there was no certainty of victory.

It was going to be a horrific bloodbath.

We see humans at their absolute worst,

how they treat other human beings.

We see them at their absolute best, willing to give their lives

that others might live. - World War II was a struggle

in which there could be one victor and one vanquished.

In late 1937,

the Japanese escalate their military campaign in China.

They already occupy Manchuria.

After three months of fighting,

they take Shanghai...

...and move to the ancient Chinese capital of Nanking.

The Japanese brutality that follows will shock the world.

They enter the city, but instead of just occupying it,

they let the Japanese troops off the leash. They rape,

they pillage, they burn, they steal.

The Japanese commanders

ordered their soldiers not to take any prisoners,

which meant executions.

This was Japanese soldiers

looking down on the Chinese as an inferior people

and as being non-humans.

Japanese soldier who committed atrocities himself,

he described it as killing pigs.

Japanese officers had a competition

to see who could be the first to kill 100 civilians with a sword.

This was printed in Japanese newspaper.

To show pictures of swordsmen

decapitating bound prisoners

in the 20th century...

...made the people doing the killing

seem almost like they were barbarians from another era.

And it struck Americans and people in the Western world

in a different way than had they shown

people being lined up and shot.

Hundreds of thousands of people raped and murdered by the Japanese.

It was called the Rape of Nanking.

In just six weeks, the Japanese army

kill 200,000 Chinese in Nanking.

Most are civilians.

The Japanese invasion does identify the Japanese

as an aggressive power in the Pacific, that they are brutal

in the way that they've treated the population.

And this starts to change people's perceptions

with regards to the Japanese.

By the end of 1939,

Japan controls vast areas of north and central China,

as well as the southern port cities.

The Japanese are driven by the desire for raw materials.

The luck of the historical draw has put the Japanese people.

on a series of beautiful islands

which are, unfortunately, resource-poor.

Take iron ore. The Japanese have almost no indigenous sources

of iron ore. Their steel industry is based on U.S. scrap iron!

They need the raw materials

and almost limitless manpower of China.

Japan is a modern and complex nation.

At the pinnacle of society is the emperor Hirohito...

...the 124th Emperor of Japan.

The constitution made the Emperor of Japan

a divine figure...

...literally a living god.

Taken literally, he's a god on Earth,

or a mystical figure who people aren't really supposed to have

much direct contact with.

Emperor Hirohito is not really a policymaker in Japan.

He's not the wartime planner.

He doesn't go through details of tax policy

in the way you would think a president or prime minister does.

He's a guarantor and a protector of Japanese tradition.

Emperor Hirohito approves government policy.

But real power lies with the Japanese army and navy

and its political allies.

They want Imperial Japan to control Asia.

For the last couple of decades,

it has been a major industrial power,

powerful economy.

Its armed forces have been built up.

It's in a really strong position.

The Japanese resent the Western colonial empires

that dominate Southeast Asia and control resources.

The British rule over Hong Kong,

Burma, Malaya, and Singapore.

There's French Indochina...

...and the Dutch East Indies.

Even the United States has territories,

called protectorates, in Guam and the Philippines.

Japan intends to create what they term

the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere

under their leadership.

By this point, Japan is Asia's pre-eminent power

by a long way, and I think because of that

the Japanese have a sense that they are destined

to bring the rest of Asia with them.

Japan had an interest in becoming the supreme power

of not only continental China

but also Asia. "Asia for the Asians" was one of the propaganda slogans,

one of the key slogans of the Japanese Empire.

Asia for the Asians was understood

by some Japanese politicians at the time

as an honest interest in liberating Asia

from the Western colonisers.

But there were some voices in the Japanese military

who had a different understanding of the phrase "Asia for the Asians,"

saying, OK, Asia for the Asians means actually Asia for Japan.

You get people in the Japanese government

who are militarists,

who have a very constrained view of the world.

Their attitudes are somewhat disdainful

of Western comfort and softness and all these sorts of things.

The Japanese believe their soldiers

are the toughest in the world.

They combine modern weapons

with the traditional training and values of the samurai warrior,

known as the code of Bushido.

Bushido was an older tradition that had now been inculcated

into the manpower of the Japanese army.

The Japanese didn't choose this aspect of their history

randomly. They don't have the aircraft

to compete with the West.

They don't have the heavier tanks and artillery.

There needs to be an equaliser. And they believe they've found it

in the superior fighting spirit of the Japanese soldier.

By 1940, Japan controls most of China.

In Washington,

President Franklin D. Roosevelt is alarmed

and fears further Japanese aggression

could threaten the entire Asian Pacific region.

Japan is an authoritarian power

organised and driven by a theory of racial superiority

on a march of aggressive conquest.

That was what Japan was doing.

Now, the only problem there is that the United States

has traditionally seen the Pacific as its own area of operations.

Roosevelt is determined to dislodge Japan from China,

and the Japanese are determined to stay.

To counter continued Japanese aggression in China,

Roosevelt orders the U.S. fleet to move from San Diego

to Pearl Harbor, a naval base on Hawaii

2,000 miles closer to the Japanese mainland.

This is a land that is an extension of the U.S.

It IS the United States.

Roosevelt is sending a clear signal

he hopes will deter Japan:

the Pacific is America's sphere of influence.

He wants the fleet to be positioned far enough forward

that the Japanese take it seriously, but at the same time

not to be too provocative by moving it

to the Philippines or maybe Singapore.

Pearl Harbor is now the front line

of American naval power in the Pacific.

The Pearl Harbor naval base is perfect,

because it's got a narrow channel into a wide harbour

with an island right in the middle. So it looks like a fortress.

Outside the naval base is the thriving city of Honolulu.

The Hawaiian islands to America looks like a paradise:

beautiful beaches, relaxed culture,

amazing weather.

But there are security concerns

among top naval and army commanders.

Because now they are surrounded

by a population that is disproportionately Asian

and a population that also includes

a very large percentage of Japanese-Americans.

30% of the population of the Hawaiian Islands

has Japanese heritage. - One of the major fears

is sabotage from local Japanese-Americans.

General Short, who is in charge of the army at Hawaii,

is much more afraid of sabotage than air attack.

So he takes the fighter planes out of their protective bunkers,

lines 'em up on the airfield,

where he thinks his soldiers can protect them from sabotage.

Unfortunately, he's presented a line of sitting ducks.

The U.S. expands its profile in the Pacific

at the same time as Germany's forces sweep through Europe

and conquer nation after nation.

Hitler doesn't realise what he's done,

but in toppling France, he 's set in motion

a kind of ripple effect of aggression

that is going to move far and wide.

Going back to the First World War,

there's a sense in Japan that when things happen in Europe,

there's an opportunity for Japan in Asia.

If they can get their hands on something

while the big powers are busy in Europe, they will. That happens

in June 1940.

Germany's conquests present Japan with an opportunity.

Germany now occupies the Netherlands,

colonial ruler of the oil-rich Dutch East Indies.

Great Britain, still at war with Germany,

controls the resources of Malaya, Singapore,

Burma, and Hong Kong.

And the French, who rule Indochina,

have surrendered to the Nazis.

The Japanese now realise that opportunity is beckoning.

The Dutch can't defend the Dutch East Indies any longer.

The British are gonna have a heck of a time

trying to defend Singapore, and on and on,

the French in Indochina. The resources await.

And it seems to the Japanese

that a once-in-a-century opportunity has arisen

to seize those colonies.

Who's going to defend them?

So the French are overrun by the Nazis.

You have the Vichy regime being set up.

The Japanese really have their eyes on Indochina

because of the resources there. the sense

that it won't put up a fight, as France is busy elsewhere.

Japan's first target is French Indochina.

In September 1940,

it pressures the French Vichy government

to cede to them the northern region.

That same month,

Japan's leaders sign a formal alliance with Germany

and Italy called the Tripartite Pact.

The three nations become known as the Axis powers.

One of the characteristics of the Axis, of course,

is that they were three hyper-aggressive militant powers

eager for war.

Hey, America...

They're strange bedfellows.

There seems to be no overlap between German interests,

which are focused on Eurasia,

Italian interests, focused on the Mediterranean

and North and East Africa,. Japanese interests are in East Asia.

And so there's no obvious overlap between the three.

They come together as they're all kind of outcasts.

The Tripartite Pact is a marriage of convenience,

to try and put the Americans off

from entering any kind of conflict with Japan.

There isn't a great deal of ideology there. It's simply a case of,

how do we keep the Americans at bay for now

so that we can do what we need to do in Asia?

In the summer of 1941,

the American-Japanese relationship reaches crisis level

when Japan takes control over all of French Indochina.

The French yield, and the Japanese come down,

and they start helping themselves to the resources they need

to keep the war going.

And then eventually they just outright take it over.

It's a great source of resources, also a great staging post

for whatever else you might want to do in Southeast Asia.

Japan now has access to even more raw materials.

The thinking in Tokyo is, we need to get tin and bauxite from Malaya.

We need to get oil from the Dutch East Indies.

We need to get rice from the Philippines.

Everything you need is there.

It's a no-brainer.

The United States has one major weapon

to force Japan out of China and Southeast Asia,

and President Roosevelt is about to use it.

In the summer of 1941,

the United States takes its strongest stand yet

against Japan's territorial ambitions.

The United States has been concerned

about Japanese expansion and aggression in Asia

for some time. Roosevelt has stopped short of a military response,

but there's been a series of embargoes:

embargo on weapons, an embargo on scrap iron.

Japan is almost entirely dependent on oil

imported from the U.S.,

so FDR imposes an embargo on the Japanese.

In the summer of 1941, America essentially turns off the tap.

The embargo becomes a disaster

for the Japanese economy and military.

By installing an oil embargo,

we have basically said,

we are going to control your future.

The Japanese have to find a way out,

and there's oil nearby. The Dutch, for example, control huge amounts

of oil in that region, so it becomes almost a temptation:

why wouldn't you take it, especially when you feel like

the U.S. had no right to cut you off from oil

in the first place? Would a European power stand for it?

Roosevelt turns off the tap, and the clock is ticking.

In Tokyo, the Japanese make plans to strike back.

Japan thinks about, how do we get out of this straitjacket?

Well, we have to replace those things

by seizing the raw materials of Southeast Asia.

And the first step

would be to knock out the American Pacific fleet.

The Japanese finalise plans to attack American interests

in the Pacific.

There's a sense amongst the Japanese

that the Americans are merchants rather than warriors,

and that if you do give them a really bloody nose, they'll think,

actually, this isn't for us.

So if you really show them some proper steel,

they might back away.

But not everyone in Japan is committed

to conflict with the United States.

Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe wants to find a peaceful solution.

Very much of a noble background, he is an internationalist.

He has great relationships with diplomats in the West.

His big concern, I think, is how you reach some settlement

with the United States, and manage to bring

the Japanese military with you.

But War Minister Hideki Tojo

is determined to go to war against America.

Hideki Tojo does have a very aggressive sense

of what Japan is going to have to do.

The destiny of Japan is to be the pre-eminent power in Asia,

is to push the Americans out, to push the British out,

to push the Dutch out. Look at what's happening in Europe.

Look at the success of the Nazis.

That is the way a great power is going to run itself in future.

Emperor Hirohito is caught

between the war and peace factions in Tokyo.

He gathers his political and military leaders

for an imperial conference,

where he recites a poem written by his grandfather,

the Emperor Meiji.

"Across the four seas, all men are brothers

In such a world, why do the waves rage,

the winds roar?"

The Japanese try to interpret Hirohito's feelings

about the war from the poem,

but he never states his views explicitly.

Prime Minister Konoe

still wants to find a diplomatic solution.

There's no harm done in keeping open

channels of communication. There are an ambassador

and a special envoy in Washington talking to the State Department.

But the Americans still demand that Japan

withdraw from China.

I don't think they see any possibility

that this problem can be negotiated away.

I think the Japanese have made a pretty firm decision to go to war.

In mid-October 1941,

a frustrated Prime Minister Konoe resigns.

He tells his government secretary,

"His Imperial Majesty is a pacifist.

I told him that war was a mistake.

He agreed, but the next time I met him, he leaned more to war.

I felt the Emperor was absorbing more and more

the view of the army and navy high commands."

Hirohito heard plans discussed in detail constantly.

He never really said yes.

But the crucial factor is that he never said no.

War Minister Tojo becomes the new prime minister.

Japan's destiny is now in the hands of the military.

In Honolulu, there's a new employee

at the Japanese consulate: Takeo Yoshikawa.

Takeo Yoshikawa was a member of the Japanese navy

and was sent to Hawaii as a spy.

Yoshikawa is hoping that he's going to find

some sympathisers within the Japanese population

that will give him additional information.

But what he quickly discovers is,

the vast majority of the Japanese-Americans on Oahu

are loyal to the United States.

So he's renting planes to take sightseeing tours

around the harbour. He's driving around town.

He's taking pictures. "I'm a tourist."

He's renting boats to go around

and measure the depth of the harbour.

So he gathers a lot of intelligence

about the daily activities on the Pacific Fleet.

Yoshikawa is the one who comes up with the insight

that Sunday morning really is the best time

to launch an attack against the Americans.

Although meant to deter Japan,

FDR's order to move the Pacific Fleet base

from California to Pearl Harbor

means it's now within striking distance.

Roosevelt doesn't really understand

that by moving the fleet this far forward, it now becomes

a potential target for the Japanese, because the Americans, in general,

don't understand the sophistication and level of capability

that the Japanese now have.

On a cold Wednesday morning,

a fleet of the Japanese Imperial Navy

heads out into the Pacific.

In overall command is Grand Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.

It was his plan to launch a surprise attack

against the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor.

Yamamoto has a really good appreciation

for just how powerful the United States is.

He's lived in the U.S. He was a naval attache.

He speaks some English. And so he understands

that any war with the United States

is going to have to be a very fast affair,

that they've got to get this thing over as rapidly as possible.

Hit them hard at the outset and try to go after American morale.

The way he thinks he can do that

is by sinking as many of our battleships as possible.

Maybe then the Americans will come to the bargaining table,

and we can get this war over with in six months, something like that.

Key to the operation

is grouping six modern aircraft carriers together for the attack.

Yamamoto is an airpower advocate.

He has consistently pushed to beef up Japan's aircraft carriers.

And they create this organisation,

Kido Butai, the Mobile Force.

Aircraft carriers are usually deployed

one at a time,

and their aircraft are tasked with defending heavy battleships.

The Japanese are like, we're going to take all our carriers

and put them into a carrier fleet of six big flight decks...

...that can now bring 350 aircraft across the ocean.

That is going to allow the Japanese

to deliver these enormous pulses of firepower

over the battlefield,

which has never been seen before in naval warfare.

The Japanese have another challenge:

how do you get this enormous armada

across 3,500 miles of ocean without being detected?

First, they shut down radio communications

and travel in silence.

Then, eight oil tankers sail alongside the fleet.

The ability to refuel at sea

is one of the masterstrokes of Pearl Harbor,

because your fleet didn't have to stop at any bases.

This is how the Japanese fleet could stay radio-silent.

Refuelling at sea literally allowed the Japanese fleet

to vanish like a ghost.

As the Japanese fleet steams towards Hawaii...

...in Washington D.C., the Japanese and the Americans

continue to negotiate.

On December 6th,

President Roosevelt writes to Emperor Hirohito directly.

"It is clear that a continuance of such a situation is unthinkable.

We have a sacred duty to restore traditional amity

and prevent further death and destruction in the world."

Roosevelt's saying, look, war would be a horror,

this war that none of us want. But at this point,

Hirohito has embarked on war.

The Japanese fleet has reached the point of no return.

December 7, 1941.

Just before 4 a.m., a patrol ship, the U.S.S. Ward,

receives a message.

A small submarine has been spotted in the area near Pearl Harbor.

At 6.40 a.m.,

the Ward drops depth charges on the submarine.

They send a sighting report upstairs.

The people at Pearl Harbor. look at it and they're like,

this is a brand-new captain. He's only been on duty for a day.

He probably doesn't know what he's doing. Ignore it.

Even though the Ward has successfully fired.

the first shot in this war, her report is completely ignored.

20 minutes later,

two young radar operators spot a huge formation of planes

approaching the area. They report it to their senior officer.

He knows that there's a group of American B-17s

that are due in this morning

that should be coming from roughly that direction.

He tells those two radar operators, don't worry about it.

183 Japanese planes descend on Pearl Harbor

in the first wave of the attack.

Their target: the airfields.

The result is going to be this concentrated bombing attack

to try to put as many planes out of business

at the outset of the attack.

At 7.55 a.m...

...the first bombs hit.

You hear the planes: they're doing training early today!

And then when all of a sudden things start to explode, man,

this training is way out of hand.

At 8 a.m. on Honolulu,

the Japanese spy Takeo Yoshikawa tunes his radio in

to a Japanese weather forecast.

The announcer uses the phrase, "Higashi no kaze ame."

"East wind, rain." It's code.

The attack on America is underway.

Another formation of Japanese aircraft

dive on the ships anchored along Battleship Row.

Torpedo planes at low level...

...and overhead bombers.

It's not until ships actually start exploding...

...bullets start ripping through the decks

that they realise, oh my god, this is real.

Torpedo attacks are very, very successful.

The Oklahoma and the West Virginia are very heavily hit.

Oklahoma ends up capsizing,

trapping hundreds of men in this overturned ship.

Over 400 sailors and marines die on the U.S.S. Oklahoma.

At the same time, level bombers are coming in overhead

and dropping their bombs.

One of them lands a devastating hit on the battleship Arizona...

...and destroys her...

...in just the blink of an eye.

The explosion on the U.S.S. Arizona

kills 1,117 men.

So if you think about every, you know, soldier, sailor, marine,

they cannot connect the idea of what is happening.

There are bombs exploding, ships sinking.

There are men on fire. There are body parts flying around.

Imagine trying to wrap your mind around all that.

After two waves of attack...

...the Japanese withdraw.

188 U.S. aircraft are destroyed.

1,178 servicemen and civilians are wounded.

2,403 are dead.

But the United States Navy's aircraft carriers are at sea

and escape the devastation.

If we want to talk about the grand inflection point

in World War II, it's December 7, 1941.

At 7.55, it's the world as we've always known it.

15 minutes later, at 8.10, the world is different.

We are now at war.

The America that wakes up on December 8, 1941

is a different country.

The country's being tested. Are we up to this?

Can we meet this challenge?

We are being put in the balance,

and would we be found wanting or not?

Prime Minister Tojo tells the Japanese people

about the victory of its navy at Pearl Harbor.

He also tells them that Japan has attacked Singapore, Hong Kong,

Malaya, Wake Island,

Guam, and the Philippines.

While American attention is focused on the surprise attack...

...the Japanese are bombing and launching invasions all around.

Malaya, the Philippines.

At 12.30 p.m., Congress assembles.

Yesterday, December 7, 1941...

...a date which will live in infamy...

...the United States of America

was suddenly and deliberately attacked

by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

He dictated a good part of the speech

to his secretary, Grace Tully,

and the initial formulation was,

"Yesterday, December 7, 1941,

a date which will live in world history."

And at some point, before he gets to Capitol Hill,

he writes in his wonderful handwriting,

"date which will live in infamy."

So it was his edit of his own dictation

that created an indelible phrase.

I ask that the Congress declare

that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack

by Japan on Sunday, December 7,

1941,

a state of war has existed

between the United States

and the Japanese Empire.

Look very carefully at what Franklin Roosevelt said

on the 8th of December:

"We are declaring war against the Empire of Japan."

He does not mention Germany.

The 8th goes by. The 9th goes by. The 10th goes by.

And not until the 11th,

when Hitler decides to declare war on the United States,

did the United States then, in turn, declare war on Germany.

America now faces a global war on two fronts.

We were dragged into this. Let's be very clear.

The United States did not wake up

in mid-century and decide to defeat tyranny.

Tyranny had to force us into a struggle we now recognise

to be the great existential struggle,

arguably, of the last millennium. But it was not a quick or easy date

with destiny.

We are now in this war.

We're all in it, all the way.

Every single man, woman, and child

is a partner in the most tremendous undertaking

of our American history.

It will not only be a long war, it'll be a hard war.

We are going to win the war.

And we are going to win the peace that follows.

America is now at war,

the most devastating in world history.

Germany reigns from the Atlantic to the outskirts of Moscow.

Imperial Japan has swept across the Pacific,

forcing America into an armed struggle

it is not yet ready to fight,

not on land, not in the air, not at sea.