Original subtitles

Previously…

The Japanese launched their secret plan to attack Pearl Harbor

and caught the American forces by surprise.

The Japanese have transited across the northern Pacific

in the largest unified carrier task force in history.

Not only were they planning to attack the naval harbor

and to destroy the US Pacific fleet,

they were also going to attack all the airfields on Oahu Island as well.

It was very ambitious, but also very daring.

I couldn't get it in my head that they were attacking us,

and I don't know anybody else that could in our area either.

Pearl Harbor, the surprise Japanese attack

that killed nearly 2,400 people and led to America entering World War II.

It’s one of those crucial days in history,

like the attack on the Twin Towers on September 11th.

You know the world won't be the same after as it had been before.

In this episode, the attack on the harbor begins.

Fire was burning all around the deck

and the skin would come off in your hands.

He tried to stand up

and when we walked over to him, he was dead.

Our chances of returning from Pearl Harbor

were almost zero in our view.

In just 30 minutes, 183 Japanese bombers and fighters

will wipe out almost all the Pacific’s Fleet's battleships.

About a million pounds of propellant goes up… …in a flash.

Arizona is completely destroyed.

We lost 1,177 men in ten minutes.

It was awful.

But we're just lucky that we were alive.

The temperature's about 80.

There was a little light breeze blowing down off the mountain there

and the… The air was still,

and you could-- You could smell the flowers in the air.

It was just a wonderful day.

They had dances on Saturday night, parties on Saturday night,

and a lot of the military are just sleeping in.

They're beginning to go to mess call.

There are some religious services ongoing.

It's just a normal, calm Sunday morning routine

that is about to be shattered.

One minute before the attack on Pearl Harbor begins,

Frank Emond and the band on the USS Pennsylvania

are preparing to play.

The navy plays "The Star-Spangled Banner"

at00 every morning.

We were lined up to raise the flag.

Closing in on Pearl Harbor

is an assault group of 183 Japanese bombers and fighters

-from six aircraft carriers.

The next half an hour will see the crippling

of America's mighty Pacific Fleet with the tragic loss of thousands of lives,

many aboard its eight battleships.

At five minutes to eight, they sound the bugle call

to let everybody know that it's almost time for colors,

and at that time I'd heard a noise, I looked up in the air

and there was a line of planes coming in from the right-hand side.

The first one peeled off.

Nine dive bombers target the seaplane base on Ford Island.

The first wave involves striking the search planes on the ground.

By knocking out those aircraft in the first few minutes,

then it will be impossible for the Americans to retaliate and damage

any of the Japanese carriers that are at sea.

Something come off the airplane.

I thought the tail assembly had broken off or something,

so I watched it all the way to the ground, hit the hanger on the air station there.

It exploded in flame and smoke and a lot of noise, startled everybody.

The initial response to the attack is disbelief.

Lieutenant Commander Ramsey is on Ford Island,

and he thinks that it's just some American pilot hot dogging it.

He wants to get the serial number off of the plane

and report him to his commanding officer.

It takes just a minute for the dive bombers

to complete their bombing mission.

As they circle round to fire at the sea plane base,

torpedo bombers swoop down.

When we reached the coast,

I felt I had to get ready.

The release wire has a safety mechanism.

I disengaged it and got ready to drop the torpedo at any time.

The sky seemed to be full of airplanes.

Small prop airplanes and, uh, you could see big red spots

on the fuselage and wings.

So, immediately you knew that they were not our airplanes.

The Japanese were there.

Now the full enormity of what is about to happen

begins descending on those American crews.

It's been just over a minute

since Japanese dive bombers began their surprise raid on Pearl Harbor.

With the seaplane base on Ford Island now ablaze,

40 Japanese torpedo bombers take center stage.

One group is gonna go after Battleship Row and the outward battleships there.

The other group coming in against the other side of Ford Island

is still hoping to find perhaps an American carrier.

Twenty-three-year-old Masamitsu Yoshioka is a navigator

in one of the planes in the leading group.

The east side of the island

was where the battleships were moored.

Our orders were to attack the aircraft carriers on the west side.

The US Pacific Fleet

has three carriers based at Pearl Harbor.

But today, their moorings are empty.

I was disappointed, but it couldn't be helped.

There was a battleship so we decided to go for that one.

From the Japanese perspective,

battleships are still the coin of the realm.

If they can sink four or five American battleships,

that will constitute success for the operation.

All eight battleships happened to be in port at the same time,

which was a rarity, had not been achieved since, uh, the summer of 1941.

Seven of them are lined up in Battleship Row

on the East of Ford Island.

The eighth, the flagship of the Pacific Fleet,

USS Pennsylvania, is in dry dock undergoing repairs.

Months of intensive training had gone into preventing their torpedoes

from nose-diving into the shallow harbor floor.

Airspeed was cut back to about 150 knots

and the altitude of the aircraft at 30 feet.

Optimally, what should happen is the torpedo planes attack first,

because they are going to have to attack low and slow,

they're going to be very vulnerable to anti-aircraft fire.

But already, the Japanese plan is unravelling.

Miscommunication between aircrews has seen the dive bombers jump the gun.

So, consequently, the first wave goes in helter-skelter immediately

and you have simultaneous attacks happening at once.

As the first group of torpedo bombers prepares to attack,

they are hit by pillars of black smoke

drifting upwards from the earlier dive bomber hits.

There was a lot of smoke,

so I couldn’t see the west side clearly.

Adding to their problems

is the blinding sunrise.

With the sun in their eyes,

the crews had a very difficult time seeing anything.

Looking at the shape of the mast,

it was a Colorado-class battleship.

We decided to aim for that,

and I think the lead aircraft also thought the same.

The torpedo unit's leader arrows in,

but as he nears his target, he suddenly pulls out.

His wingman follows him.

The planes immediately behind them thought that,

"Well, they must have launched against the battleship,

so we're going to do that as well."

Masamitsu Yoshioka releases his torpedo,

but as he flies over the ship, he is panicked.

I thought the battleship was smaller

than our Japanese warships.

The USS Utah is the first victim of the torpedo attack.

This is an old ship that's been largely demilitarized.

The moment is caught on camera.

And she is hit right, uh, in the center of the ship.

Within seconds, another torpedo slams into Utah’s hull…

…but it's a target the Japanese crews had been briefed to avoid.

I really think we messed up with the Utah.

The other guys had done okay.

So, even at my age, the Utah still bothers me.

It's not one I can be proud of.

Four more torpedoes are wasted on the Utah.

One torpedo is so off target that it hits the cruiser,

USS Raleigh, moored behind.

The pilots should have exhausted all possibilities

before attacking these lesser ships.

And they really were taken to task

once they returned to the carrier by their superiors

for making poor target selection.

Just seconds after he bypassed the Utah,

the unit's leader, Lt. Nagai, is convinced he's got a battleship in his sights.

As he approaches 10-10 dock,

he thinks he sees the USS Pennsylvania moored there and unleashes his torpedo.

In reality, what he is seeing is the Helena and the Oglala

lashed side by side.

He thinks that it is a battleship because the morning sun is--

has silhouetted both of those ships together,

so it looks like an extra-long type of ship.

The torpedo goes underneath an old minelayer, USS Oglala,

berthed next to the cruiser, USS Helena.

The explosion tears a hole in the Helena's port side.

The shockwave of that explosion also damages the Oglala

and eventually it tumbles over and capsizes on its side.

The sailors who were at 10-10 dock

would joke in the days afterwards that the Oglala died of fright.

Watching on from the deck of USS Pennsylvania,

Frank Emond is counting his blessings.

And that was the dock that our ship usually were at.

We-- We had moved it to dry dock two or three days before that.

A Japanese photographer captures the destructive moment.

It shows the smoke coming up out of Ford Island

and the simultaneous hits on the Helena and the Utah.

Four more bombers waste their torpedoes

on the cruiser USS Helena.

They really could not see

what in the name of heaven they were aiming at.

That speaks to the incredible pressure

that these pilots are under.

That they probably think too that,

"If I don’t attack now, I may not get a second chance."

Two minutes into the raid,

not a single torpedo has been released against a battleship.

Across Ford Island, ships' crews in Battleship Row

are wising up to the imminent threat.

I was down in the office wrapping presents

to be sent home for Christmas when the speaker system hollered…

"…Air attack, air attack. All hands seek cover."

And almost immediately they added another announcement,

"General Quarters, man your battle stations."

The people who were there used a great deal of profanity

and, uh, vulgar terms to describe… …what was going on.

And it left no doubt in anyone's mind who heard that

just what was unfolding outside.

When General Quarters goes off, wherever you are on a ship,

the crew is trained, it's just ingrained in them,

it's automatic, to proceed to your battle station.

Everybody was in their battle stations in three minutes

and doors are closed, the hatches are closed,

our first guns were fired within 30 seconds.

I was on the quarterdeck, the vessel alongside of us,

they had to cut the lines off the vessel first,

so we didn't last long enough to even get the engine started up.

Twenty-four torpedo bombers descend into the Southeast Loch

in preparation for their attack on Battleship Row.

This body of water was almost like a bowling alley

heading down toward the battleships.

The pilots could see that these two ships,

the West Virginia and Oklahoma, were the golden targets.

These were skilled aerial technicians that were going to deliver

an 18-foot torpedo that could blow a hole

in the side of the battleship that a truck could drive through.

-They were coming in in pairs.

One plane on one side of the pair was to take one battleship.

And then the plane on the opposite side was to take the ship next to it.

But as the lead pair get ready to drop their torpedoes,

planes from the earlier attacks cross their path.

There were multiple aircraft crossing against, uh, the grain, as it were.

Things got very confused

and then those aircraft had to abort and circle around again.

Its valuable time wasted,

the Japanese are rapidly losing the advantage of surprise.

The locks were broken,

uh, so that ammunition could be brought to the guns.

The volume and intensity of the American anti-aircraft fire

swells very, very quickly.

The Japanese were absolutely astonished, if not dismayed,

at how quickly the Americans came online with anti-aircraft fire.

They were not expecting it.

The bombers drop their torpedoes

scoring direct hits on the USS West Virginia and the USS Oklahoma.

Incredibly, the first two torpedo hits on a battleship at Pearl Harbor

are caught by a Japanese camera.

These dramatic pictures are being taken by the aircraft in the air

and you see the water geysers, which my grandfather witnessed,

that were going 90 to 100 feet or more into the air.

Very, very quickly, the first six aircraft came in,

bam, bam, bam, within seconds of each other,

and all these torpedoes were running at the same time.

You can see streaks of torpedoes now striking the West Virginia,

and then you can also see torpedo streaks and some disturbance in the water

of, uh, torpedoes coming towards the Oklahoma.

Both battleships are unprepared for war

with their watertight doors left unsecured.

As America was at peace, these doors were open.

Their underwater integrity was severely compromised,

because, of course, in the levels of the decks below the waterline,

the water would just surge through the ship.

I felt the ship take on a bit of a list.

And I thought, "My God, they're flooding the blisters."

One of the ways in which you can prevent a ship from capsizing

is to flood other sections of the ship to balance it out.

But on the Oklahoma, the first torpedo hits knock out

a lot of lights below decks, such that the repair crews

cannot get to the stations they need to be to counter flood.

There's a case made that one torpedo followed

right through the hole of the torpedo before it.

She is in a very bad way.

The flooding is so bad on the port side of the vessel that it starts to keel over.

When the ship listed about 15 degrees,

you couldn't walk the deck.

We hand-walked the overhead pipes

walking on top of the bolted down machinery.

Commander of the Pacific Fleet, Admiral Kimmel,

is at home when he receives a message.

"Air Raid Pearl Harbor, this is no drill."

He's due to play golf with the army commander, General Short.

He cancels the golf, he gets into his uniform

and prepares to leave for his headquarters.

Admiral Kimmel could very clearly see the harbor

and see the battleships lined up against Ford Island.

And so, he was watching the torpedo explosions

one after another on the ships under his command.

And it must have been an absolutely devastating experience for him.

Despite receiving a warning that an attack was imminent,

Kimmel had not put the base on a war footing.

This was a man who had never failed in his professional career.

And so, here he was witnessing catastrophic failure on his part

and the wife of the neighbor

recalled that Kimmel looked as white as the uniform he was wearing.

But things are about to get even worse.

The crews who are working in the California's guns

start firing back at the Japanese planes pretty much immediately,

but they very quickly expend their ammunition,

and the rest of their ammunition is locked in the magazines

and they are not able to access it right away.

The ship is defenseless as a torpedo bomber drops its payload

with devastating effect.

USS California is the battleship least able to survive the attack.

She had a number of the manhole covers

that led down into her double bottom loosened to-- for inspection.

When the water came into the lower portions of the ship,

it just surged all back and forth.

It starts to flood very, very quickly.

So, the crew has to focus on countermeasures,

has to focus on getting these watertight doors closed

just to keep the ship afloat,

because they are not prepared for this at all.

Through the driving rain of machine gun fire,

four more bombers torpedoed the USS Oklahoma and the USS West Virginia.

The two center line ships, West Virginia and Oklahoma,

are just absolutely gutted.

And the result is that their port sides are just ripped open like a tin can.

A stray bomber from the earlier attacks swoops in

to get another hit on the California.

You can see the battleship California,

uh, in this picture struggling from her attacks.

The torpedo bombers continue their assault,

but now in extended intervals.

With anti-aircraft fire growing in intensity,

aircrews take the easiest option.

With the West Virginia and the Oklahoma again taking the brunt.

It's overkill against them.

The amount of damage that they took would have sunk them twice over.

A photo taken by a Japanese raider

perfectly captures the scene.

You can see that the torpedo attack

has been devastating and you can look at the black groupings,

that's oil just pouring out of the sides of the ships.

But nothing can prepare the crews for what happens next.

As the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor rages,

Commander of the Pacific Fleet, Husband Kimmell,

watches in shock from his neighbor’s lawn.

Hundreds of his crewmen are now fighting for their lives.

The coup de grâce of the first wave

is the high-level bomber attack led by Commander Fuchida himself.

The high-level bombing units circled around the western side of Oahu

and lined up for an attack run on the battleships.

The level bombers' ultimate aim is to destroy the battleships

that have survived the torpedo raids unscathed,

the inboard giants at Battleship Row,

USS Maryland, USS Tennessee, and USS Arizona.

They will approach Battleship Row from the south

and their mission is to go in and strike the battleships one at a time

with the first five plane divisions that is supposed to strike the Nevada,

the next one, the Arizona, and on down the line.

For the mission,

the Japanese have designed a unique weapon.

They take a heavy, armor-piercing battleship shell,

and turn it into an aerial bomb.

So it's got to be dropped from a very great height,

at least 10,000 feet, so that gravity can accelerate that bomb

to the point that when it hits the deck, it's got sufficient kinetic energy

to get through the deck armor about four inches,

and into the innards of the ship before it detonates.

The 800-kilogram bomb is so heavy,

the bombers can only carry one each.

Again, there's no second chance on this, I’ve got to drop at exactly the right time

and if I don’t get a hit result on this first attack,

it's over and I've wasted my entire effort.

To maximize their chances of hitting their targets,

the planes divide into ten V formations each of five planes.

As they approach Pearl Harbor, a photographer aboard one of the bombers

captures the devastation below.

You can see that Oklahoma is already in the process of rolling over

while some of these planes are coming in.

It soon becomes clear to Mitsuo Fuchida, the attack leader,

that hitting a battleship from two miles up is no mean feat.

Fuchida said that the anti-aircraft fire at that point in time was pretty severe.

In fact, his wing man is hit and the battle damage causes

the armor-piercing bomb to fall away from the undercarriage.

Then right at the last minute, they fly through a cloud,

and they are unable to see their target, the USS Nevada.

They have to go around two or even three times

before the elements collaborate enough that they can get a fix on their target.

USS West Virginia, already struck by six torpedoes,

is listing badly when more bombers arrive overhead.

The specially adapted bombs hit West Virginia

and USS Tennessee moored alongside.

The fuses on those weapons mean that the bombs don't detonate cleanly.

Had the fusing on these 800-kilogram bombs

been more effective and more reliable,

they quite possibly could have blown up the Tennessee and the West Virginia,

both of which suffered direct hits on their rear turrets.

One casualty is West Virginia’s Captain Mervin Bennion,

hit by flying shrapnel from the Tennessee blast.

They needed to get the captain off the bridge,

because the fires were starting to envelop the lower portion of the ship.

Enter a Pearl Harbor hero, mess attendant, Doris Miller.

As Dorie Miller is proceeding to his assigned battle station,

an officer flags him down and asks him to help him move…

…the commanding officer of West Virginia to a safer location.

The status of African Americans in the United States Navy in 1941

was to segregate the races, whites from Blacks.

And the Navy did that by limiting the ratings

for which African Americans could qualify.

Despite no training, mess attendant Miller

immediately joins in the ship's defense.

He sees an unmanned anti-aircraft gun

and according to his own account, Miller says, "I just shot it."

"I-- I wasn't sure what to do."

Dorie Miller was the first African American

to receive the Navy Cross.

The Navy Cross is the US Navy's highest military honor.

But all Dorie Miller wanted to do was be in the fight.

Fighting the enemy was not laying out another man's clothes,

cooking and serving his meals.

From the deck of a nearby hospital ship,

navy doctor, Eric Haakenson, starts filming the horror in the harbor.

He panned up from the stern of the hospital ship, Solace,

on about the third higher deck and aimed his camera

at a V pattern of Japanese bombers.

He caught two groups flying at altitude.

All five bombers in the first formation

-drop their payloads simultaneously.

A Japanese photo shows the moment of impact

on Arizona's stern.

One of the shells is bounced off the faceplate

of gun turret number three and exploded into the water aside of it.

A bomb dropped between us and the Vestal

and it blew me inside the hatch, knocked me silly.

And I, uh… …of course, that set off a wildfire.

The, uh, repair ship Vestal sustained two hits

and almost sank right then and there,

not from the explosions, but from the flooding,

because the bombs went clear through the ship.

On the USS Arizona, Bosun’s Mate John Anderson

goes to help his twin brother Delbert

on one of the ship's anti-aircraft batteries.

Unaware that a second group of bombers has the Arizona in their sights.

I started up that ladder to the boat deck

where all the anti-aircraft guns were.

When I got to the top of the ladder and the enormous explosion occurred

and people were just blown all over the place.

There's all kinds of body parts, different, uh…

There was nothing I could do-- To do, if anything,

and a tremendous fire broke out.

That bomb lands just slightly behind turret number two,

it goes through the deck armor and into the powder rooms

for Arizona’s main guns and detonates there.

The result is that about a million pounds of propellant go up instantaneously.

The forward end of the ship and her mast go up

by as much as 40 feet before settling back down again.

So, she's literally been blown out of the water.

The bow of the 32,500-ton ship is split

from the rest of the Arizona's superstructure.

The explosion of the Arizona's forward magazines

incinerated instantly almost everything that was in the forward half of the ship.

Half or more of Arizona's crew is killed outright by that conflagration

and many others are, uh, very badly injured by flash burns.

You're on fire from the mainmast forward.

The flames were floating up hundreds of feet in the air,

and, uh, it was awful.

But we're just lucky that we were alive.

The ones coming out of fire there, we got 12, 14 of them in there,

they were still alive. A lot of them didn't live long.

I grabbed a guy, but the hand was on fire,

and I held on to him. And he was from Greenfield, Ohio.

I've never forgot that.

And I saved him. I got him out of there.

Watching the horror unfold

is the Commander of the Pacific Fleet, Admiral Kimmell.

And in his words,

he could see the Arizona sink down, way down.

And it's then that the real weight of this attack

falls fully on him and he begins to understand

just what a catastrophe, uh, he is witnessing.

A Japanese photograph documents the devastation in the harbor.

Oil was coming from the Nevada,

the West Virginia, the Oklahoma, the California.

Along Battleship Row, the Arizona's explosion ignited that oil.

And now you had oil fires enveloping all of those ships.

Even the inboard ships now have oil around them and on fire.

USS Arizona's senior surviving officer,

Lt. Commander Sam Fuqua, takes charge of the operation

to fight the blaze and evacuate the wounded.

He was seeing men falling dead on the deck

and others just walking, uh, all afire.

It was something so horrifying he could hardly recall it without weeping.

In Honolulu, their uniform were shorts and T-shirts,

so their arms were burned, their face was burned,

their legs were burned.

And you'd pick them up, the skin would come off in your hands.

They were burned pretty bad. Lot of them.

So, it is a confusing,

eerie and nightmarish situation on the Oklahoma

as nothing can stop this ship from going over.

It's as if a monster took its claws

and tore out the outside skin of the Oklahoma

and allowed the water to flood through.

If they are on the quarter deck, they are lucky.

The roll of the ship is so slow that a great many of them

can simply walk over the railing on the starboard side

and then walk onto the keel of the ship.

Unfortunately, those are the minority of the sailors on the Oklahoma.

The majority have taken shelter below decks,

which is where they are required to be during an aerial attack.

More than 400 men are trapped in the bowels of the ship.

Now that the ship had totally capsized,

what has been the deck is now the ceiling…

and you're in this compartment, that is your coffin.

Desperate measures are required

aboard West Virginia to prevent a similar fate.

There is a lieutenant commander who is taking charge

and he orders all of the watertight hatches sealed.

And at one point, uh, one of his junior officers hears men

on the other side of the water-tight door pounding away,

asking to be let in, 'cause if they open those doors again,

the whole damage control center floods

and the effort to save the West Virginia will perish.

The lieutenant commander says, "No, the door stays shut."

There were heroic efforts to try to move through gasoline fires.

It was just a scene from hell.

Twenty minutes into Japan's raid

on the US Naval bastion of Pearl Harbor,

their ambition to cripple the Pacific Fleet

by destroying its battleships is well on the way.

Uh, there were immense columns of smoke

coming up from multiple ships,

uh, primarily the West Virginia and the Arizona,

which cast a pall over everything.

The USS Arizona is blown in half,

the USS West Virginia is sinking fast, and the USS Oklahoma nearby has capsized.

She's turned turtle,

the Americans are facing up to having to figure out

how to chop holes in her bottom to actually get some of the crewmen out

that they suspect may be trapped inside.

The California is still afloat, but slowly sinking.

Another quintet of level bombers looms over her,

but the salvo is off target.

The harmless explosions signal the end of the bombing raid.

The Americans are trying to figure out how to rescue as many men as they can.

There's a lot of sailors coming out in small boats

trying to pick up the survivors and take them back to land,

take them back to medical stations.

Enveloped by flames, Arizona is in the direst need.

Officer in charge, Sam Fuqua, knows the crew is fighting

a losing battle with the raging inferno.

He immediately took action,

boats from the USS Solace, the hospital ship, were coming alongside.

Fuqua was yelling at me to get in one of those boats.

"We want to save as many men as we can, get in there."

We-- I said, "I cannot leave. My brother is there in someplace."

"I got to find him, I got to find him."

And he says, "He can't made it. He couldn't have made it."

The Andersons are one of 38 sets of brothers aboard Arizona.

Only one set survived.

"Just get in there." He said, "This place is going to blow."

The blaze threatens to ignite another ammunition store.

I said, "Well, I'm not going."

He says, "Yes, you are." And he shoved me in.

With a wounded man in my hand.

So, I got in the boat whether I wanted to or not.

The USS Monaghan crew was just passing Pearl City Peninsula

when they were notified that there was a submarine in that area.

But this is no ordinary submarine.

It's part of a fleet of midget subs never before used in combat.

The Americans didn't have mini submarines in their naval arsenal,

they weren't expecting this sort of attack.

At first, the skipper of the Monahan is incredulous.

He thinks there can't possibly be an enemy submarine in the harbor,

but just as he is saying these words,

one of his crewmen who is on the bridge says,

"Well, I understand that, Skipper, but what the hell is that?"

And he points and you can see the conning tower

of a Japanese miniature submarine dead ahead.

The submarine itself fired a torpedo at the Monaghan,

which brushed along the side of the ship.

The engineers rang up full power and, uh, fired at the, uh, submarine.

The first shot goes right through the conning tower,

and as the crew explained,

decapitated the pilot of the Japanese submarine,

and then the Monaghan proceeded straight ahead,

rammed the enemy submarine, and for good measure,

rolled depth charges off the back of the ship.

Well, against, you know, such a tiny target as that,

the result is complete destruction.

It's a small price to pay for the Japanese successes.

The first wave attack on Pearl Harbor has hit most of the prize targets.

But the fleet's flagship,

the USS Pennsylvania, in dry dock, remains unscathed,

the USS Maryland and USS Tennessee have so far escaped serious damage.

Had the plan been better executed, things could have been much worse.

If things had gone absolutely according to plan,

it's not unreasonable to think that the Japanese might have sunk

every single battleship in Battleship Row.

Twenty-four out of the available 40 torpedoes

are launched against the Oklahoma, the West Virginia and the California.

There was definitely target fixation on the Oklahoma and the West Virginia,

and it prevented further damage to the battleships Nevada and California,

which by all rights could have been sunk.

Of the 50 heavy-armor-piercing bombs

that the Japanese dropped, they got only ten hits.

That's a 20% hit rate,

that's lower than they wanted to see as a result of their work-up exercises.

And of those ten hits, a number of them were duds.

The Japanese lose only nine planes

shot down in the first wave.

It's a very minimal amount,

considering all the risks that went into this mission.

A lull settles over the harbor.

The gates of hell had been opened up, uh, by the end of the first attack wave.

The scene and the anchorage is absolutely cataclysmic.

Instead of relief, there is chaos and fear.

The, uh, men in the harbor were just firing at anything and everything.

They would hear a strange noise and they'd start firing the machine guns.

American, uh, planes, if they got near the harbor,

were thought to be Japanese planes.

We didn't know whether the Japanese had troop ships

and they were gonna land troops on the island or not.

Next time,

with the US Pacific Fleet on its knees, a second wave of Japanese planes arrives.

Their mission, to finish off the fleet.

All the fighters and bombers in the air.

The Nevada got attacked by everybody.

By this time, the Americans were fully alerted,

and they were blind fighting mad.

He got a machine gun

and was shooting back at the Japanese planes.

It showed a lot of courage to me.