Original subtitles

On the morning of December 7th, 1941,

the Antares was pulling a barge behind it.

The signalman saw something very strange.

It's following in the wake, and it looks awful like

the shape of a submarine conning tower, only smaller.

The Antares sent a message

that this was some kind of an enemy incursion.

The USS Ward fired upon the mini sub when they saw it.

Gun number one barks…

…gun number three barks…

…and a shell hits it right between the sail and the hull

and the submarine dives.

The crew of the USS Ward didn't know it yet,

but they have just fired the first American shots of the Second World War.

Pearl Harbor.

The surprise Japanese attack that killed nearly 2,400 people

and changed the course of history.

How could such a small, island nation

take an obviously suicidal step?

Nobody was brave enough to say, "Look, this is a crazy plan."

It was Japan's version of the atomic bomb.

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 series to mark the 80th anniversary of the attack,

we hear from some of the last remaining survivors.

Fire was burning all around the deck

and your 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.

We bring together the foremost experts in the field

to reveal the mistakes and missed opportunities

that could have averted the attack…

Washington sent all of its commanders a message

that was unprecedented in American naval history.

That message simply said,

"This dispatch is to be considered a war warning."

…and reveal how events unfolded, minute by minute.

An enormous naval armada

is gathering in a remote location at Hitokappu Bay in the Northern Pacific.

The mission is so secret that only a handful of the thousands

of Japanese men assembling here know their destination.

On board the Japanese ships, there's just wild speculation

as to where they might be headed.

This could be another training exercise.

Many of the men thought maybe it's an attack on the Americans

in the Aleutians because we're heading north,

but they really had no idea where they were going.

On board, one of the six aircraft carriers

is 23-year-old torpedo bomber Masamitsu Yoshioka.

Now 103, he is one the last remaining Japanese survivors

of the Pearl Harbor attack.

We were normally told where we were going

and for what objective.

But on this particular mission, we weren't told where we were headed.

The fleet that's assembling

aims to carry out one of the most complex

and ambitious operations in the history of naval warfare.

They plan to sail a fleet of aircraft carriers

3,500 miles across an ocean

and attack the home of the US Pacific Fleet

on the Hawaiian island of Oahu.

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.

The captain

began reading out these instructions…

"Faced with the arrogant tyrant America,

from the 8th of December, we will be at war."

It felt as though all the blood in my body had drained

from my head down to the flight deck.

I thought, "So now, we finally have to go."

"It will be a huge war."

"I won't be coming back."

The attack on Pearl Harbor

will be the first in a wave of attacks

across the Pacific as Japan seeks to establish an empire.

They have already invaded large parts of Northeastern China

and need oil to continue their expansion.

Japan is an island nation, and many of their main product

and resources, especially oil, had to be imported,

and the United States was one of the main people to provide that.

When Japan invades French Indochina in 1940,

America has had enough.

In August 1941, it cuts off Japan's oil supply.

Military strategists started thinking,

"Oh, we really need to look further than Indochina,

because we really need oil."

Diplomatic negotiations between Washington and Tokyo,

in theory, still carries on.

The military junta that was leading Japan

concluded that they were not going to gain access

to the reserves it needed by negotiations.

The only way was by violence.

To get oil, Japan plans to invade

the oil-rich Dutch East Indies. But there’s a snag.

They knew the United States would be the power

that would get in their way, especially because the United States

occupied the Philippines.

So, it was already set. They were going to take the Philippines,

and in order to be able to take the Philippines,

they had to first wipe the American Pacific Fleet off the map.

Sunrise in Pearl Harbor, the home of America's Pacific Fleet.

More than 90 ships are based here in its natural harbor

as well as 84,000 servicemen on the island of Oahu.

Honolulu was a great posting.

If you were an American serviceman, there was no better place to be posted

than Honolulu right before the war.

Lovely climate, nice people,

there's bars and restaurants and the beach,

and you know, lots to do if you are a serviceman.

It's been just nine months since Admiral Husband Kimmel

took over as Commander in Chief of the US Pacific Fleet in February 1941.

Admiral Husband Kimmel was an efficient,

very well-organized admiral.

He's the type of person to be more admired than liked, perhaps,

but he was also incredibly well respected because he became the commander in chief

of the US fleet above many other senior admirals.

Kimmel was really dedicated to training and to exercises,

activities that were going to be needed to prepare the United States for war

that everybody knew was coming.

Lou Conter is a 20-year-old quartermaster

on the battleship USS Arizona based at Pearl Harbor.

We'd been out there for 20 months training.

We were highly trained for anything that could happen.

Everything was training for war, live ammunition and everything else,

so it was all instilled in you.

But it wasn't the readiness of his men that would be tested first.

It was Kimmel's own instincts as a commander.

On November 27th, he receives intelligence warning of an attack

somewhere in the Pacific.

The war warning said, "Japanese intentions are not known."

"Their actions are going to be unpredictable. Just be prepared."

Hitokappu Bay in the Northern Pacific.

The Japanese strike force, or Kidō Butai, is now at full strength

and sets off for Hawaii.

As Kidō Butai crossed the Pacific,

the six carriers were in a box formation.

Out on the flanks were the heavy cruisers and the two battleships.

It must have been a grand sight to see all these ships together at one time.

Most navies use their aircraft carriers

to go find the enemy out there at sea and report back to where it was

so that the big ships with the guns could find them and engage them.

Using aircraft carriers in a massed force was an unusual naval tactic.

It was quite revolutionary.

For the mission to succeed, the strike force must remain undetected

over its 3,500-mile journey.

The strike force, when it left, really entered its own isolated world.

It didn't send out reconnaissance planes, and they were very careful

about dumping garbage over the sides of their ship

in case an American submarine happened to be sailing by.

All of the Japanese ships are keeping position on each other

strictly through visual means.

They're using flags and semaphores to maintain position and to communicate.

There's no radio traffic whatsoever.

The Japanese plan to attack Pearl Harbor

has taken more than nine months to devise.

Its architect is Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.

Isoroku Yamamoto was a conflicting, if not paradoxical, character.

There was this side of him who was a very rational thinker.

The other side of him was a very big gambler.

His plan was passed in October 1941,

but to some, it's a suicide mission.

If we were to have a war with America,

they had more fighter planes, more warships.

So, we were resigned to the fact we wouldn't be able to come back.

In Pearl Harbor, Admiral Kimmel receives news

about the possibility of a Japanese attack and its expected location.

Washington sent all of its commanders in the Pacific,

a message that was unprecedented in American naval history.

That message simply said in its first line,

"This dispatch is to be considered a war warning."

And it also said, "We think the attack from the Japanese

will occur in the Philippines or in Borneo."

It didn't say Hawaii, but it did tell Kimmel, "You should prepare."

The American bases around the Pacific

are receiving lots of different pieces of intelligence

which point to the imminence of a Japanese attack.

Kimmel is alerted, but the whole military is not on a wartime footing.

War hasn't been declared.

They don't know where it's coming from.

Meanwhile, the Japanese Fleet is nearly halfway to Pearl Harbor,

and conditions are challenging.

The route that the Japanese have selected to approach Hawaii

is through the most desolate stretches of the northern Pacific,

which means that the weather is absolutely wretched.

There were men who were washed off the deck.

It was also very cold and very uncomfortable.

The Japanese wasted little fuel

in trying to keep the interior of the ships warm.

And they were using cold seawater to bathe in.

So, it was a brutally cold crossing in winter.

When we set out from Hitokappu Bay,

the weather was awful.

We played Go or Shogi and listened to the records.

We just had fun.

Nobody particularly talked about life or death.

On board one of the carriers,

its leader, Vice Admiral Chūichi Nagumo

receives the order he's been waiting for.

The order says Climb Mount Niitaka,

that means to him that negotiations with the Americans

have conclusively broken down, that there is no hope of avoiding war.

If there had been some breakthrough in Washington,

then the fleet on its route would have been radioed and told,

"Peace has broken out," but these negotiations were going nowhere,

and both sides knew it.

And at this point, Nagumo's force

is to carry out its mission and destroy as much of the American navy

in Pearl Harbor as he possibly can.

And the Japanese have been busy in preparation for the attack,

but the challenges of a strike on Pearl Harbor are many.

Pearl Harbor is a remarkable geologic feature cut into the south coast

of the island of Oahu.

And its principal or unusual trait was how shallow it was.

The depth of the water was about 45 feet,

and that shallowness became an asset in terms of being threatened

by air-dropped torpedoes.

Traditionally, torpedoes dropped from a height would sink

probably 40, 50, 60 feet into the sea before beginning their trajectory.

So, a harbor is not a good place to attack ships in conventional thinking.

The Japanese solution to this problem was to put wooden fins

onto their air-dropped torpedoes…

that would act as sort of a shock absorber,

so when the torpedo hits the surface of the water,

these wooden fins absorb the shock, shatter, blow off

and thereby shallow up the dive of the torpedo.

They also severely limited the speed of the aircraft,

and they asked the pilots to cant the nose of the aircraft

up about five degrees

to ensure that the torpedo would fall flat into the water.

That was what kept the torpedo from diving too deeply

and lodging into the mud of the harbor.

And it wasn't just technological innovation.

The flying crews are also specially selected.

They were all crack pilots, and that was necessarily so

because the Japanese Naval Air Force was very small,

and the resources were limited, especially after the embargo,

so they had to choose a select few who could really fly.

The pilots started training in the south of Japan in Kinko Bay,

which was shaped just like Pearl Harbor.

The pilots didn't know for what they were training.

Instruments were no good

at telling distance or height,

so I trained to measure them by sight.

We were training to carry out aerial torpedo attacks on shallow bays.

Their prime targets

are the US Pacific Fleet's eight battleships

moored on the pier Battleship Row.

From the Japanese perspective,

uh, battleships are still the coin of the realm.

That's how you measure naval power in 1941.

And so, if they can sink four or five American battleships,

that will put the battle line out of commission,

and that will constitute success for the operation.

Their secondary targets

are the fleet's three enormous aircraft carriers,

which are usually moored on Carrier Row.

Though air power was clearly rising in, uh, importance,

all navies of the world were still centered on battleships

as their single most important naval weapon.

Yamamoto hoped that by destroying the American Pacific Fleet's battleships,

it would be as much a psychological blow as it would be an actual military blow.

At Pearl Harbor, Admiral Kimmel meets

his Intelligence chief, Edwin Layton.

The news he hears, if acted on, could be crucial in averting the attack.

His intelligence chief said, "I have to tell you, Admiral,

that four of the Japanese aircraft carriers aren't saying anything."

"There's no radio traffic from them."

"They aren't communicating or receiving messages."

Japanese ships had gone missing before,

so Kimmel and Layton are not unduly concerned.

But it’s a crucial misjudgment.

He said, "Now, Admiral, I think that means they are in port

and therefore not talking."

And Kimmel did agree with his intelligence chief

that the silence of those carriers meant that they were in home waters,

but those four carriers were four of the six

that were on their way to Hawaii.

Unbeknown to the Americans,

the Japanese Fleet is also receiving vital intelligence from inside Hawaii.

The latest report says there is now only one aircraft carrier in the harbor,

but the message has taken seven days to arrive.

This was an age before spy satellites and listening dishes

of high sophistication.

So, they might sail all the way across the Pacific to Hawaii

and find out that the bulk of the fleet wasn't there.

The Japanese have planted a secret intelligence source,

a spy called Takeo Yoshikawa.

He's been hiding in plain sight amongst Hawaii's large Japanese population

for the past eight months.

He is one of the greatest spies of World War Two,

and his job was to study the operations of the Pacific Fleet, its moorings,

-its capabilities…

…to fly over its airfields, see what the strength of aircraft was.

He is a trained naval officer and so he knows what to look for.

And he's also a very creative guy.

I mean, he's willing to go to some interesting lengths

to gather this sort of intel.

Yoshikawa found a taxi driver who would drive him all over the island

to see different points. Uh, he went on boat rides.

He would dive sometimes in the waters, and he would use a thin reed

to be able to breathe underwater.

He has noted that there are no anti-torpedo nets around the battleships.

Yoshikawa also observes that there are no barrage balloons.

Barrage balloons would make aerial attack more difficult.

Yoshikawa does a pretty effective job of laying out the basic rhythm

of how the Pacific Fleet is operating in this time.

They're usually in port on the weekends,

and that is the critical piece of information

that leads to Yamamoto's decision to attack on a Sunday morning.

In Washington,

President Roosevelt is alerted to a decoded internal Japanese

diplomatic message signaling their intention

to pull out of peace talks.

There were instructions in that message for Japanese embassies

to begin burning documents, destroying their code books,

destroying their code machines.

That too suggests a sort of finality to the negotiation process

that has been ongoing all this fall.

Roosevelt is very seriously alarmed when he reads this message,

and he turns to his naval aide who gives it to him and says,

"What do you think this means?"

And he says, "Well, if there was one in a thousand chance

of keeping the peace yesterday, today it's only one in a million."

Saturday night before Pearl Harbor

is a typical night out on the town for a lot of these servicemen.

They're out drinking, they're eating, they're spending time with their friends.

And there's a battle of the bands that is also occurring.

It was a competition among all the battleships there,

and I think we had gone through about half of them,

and our band was still in first place.

We would play a lot of march music or light classical music

and maybe a little Latin music here or there.

We were the favorite band there.

The last number we played I think was named White Heat.

It was fast and loud.

The winner was judged by applause,

so I think we had more crew there all the time,

so we were still in first place.

The Japanese strike force is now 400 miles from Hawaii.

On the bridge of the Japanese aircraft carrier Akagi,

Vice Admiral Nagumo receives a final message

from the spy in Pearl Harbor.

On the eve of this attack, it doesn't look like there are going to be

any American aircraft carriers in the harbor.

That's a real disappointment, but at the same time,

there's also an understanding

that there are plenty of battleship targets

and other worthy targets there.

The night before setting out,

I was quite calm.

As far as dying went, once you got on a plane and took off,

you had to be prepared for such things,

so I didn’t feel particularly scared of dying

just because we were going to Hawaii.

Then, just outside Pearl Harbor, US sailors spot

an unusual submarine-like vessel in the defensive area.

There was always that thought

that the wooden fin modifications on the aerial torpedoes would not work.

So, the Japanese had a backup plan in the form of five miniature submarines.

Pearl Harbor is an experiment of new military devices

that has been not used in the Second World War until that time.

One of the weapons developed was a midget submarine.

They would be carried by mother submarines and launched.

They’re about 80 feet long, six feet wide at the widest part

and they're very, very cramped.

There’s only two people inside of the sub.

Very, very, hot conditions. It's over 100 degrees Fahrenheit

inside of the sub,

and basically, the whole purpose of them is to sneak into Pearl Harbor

to have extra torpedo power.

The final part of the message from the Japanese government

outlining their intention to end peace talks

is intercepted by naval intelligence and sent to Washington.

It had wording to the effect that, in light of the views

of the Japanese government, all negotiation should be terminated.

And it almost read like a declaration of war.

But this was all part of the Japanese plan.

The reason the Japanese did this was because they wanted, in later days,

to be able to tell people that we did warn the Americans.

Significantly, the message instructs

the Japanese ambassador to deliver it at00 p.m. Washington time,

which is30 a.m. in Hawaii.

That caused enough concern

that maybe something was going to happen at one o'clock…

that Washington began to prepare messages

for Hawaii and elsewhere to alert them to the significance of that.

Such vital warning messages would normally be sent

straight through military channels, but there's a problem.

The problem was that radio circuits

between Washington and Honolulu were not good that morning,

so they had to resort to sending them by commercial means.

The crucial message is sent via Western Union instead.

It won't arrive in Hawaii until33 a.m.,

just 15 minutes before the Japanese attack actually begins.

It's not marked as being high priority,

and so the staff there kinda, you know, put it in the medium priority messages.

Meanwhile, on board the carrier Soryu,

pilots and crews get ready for the attack.

We felt that if we were shot down

and parachuted out,

it would be terrible because we'd end up as prisoners of war.

So, we decided not to wear our parachute belts

and flew to Hawaii without parachute belts on.

All of us, everyone.

At00 a.m.,

the strike force is now 180 miles northeast of Hawaii,

and the first wave of 183 planes takes off from the Japanese carriers.

It was dark when we started taking off,

so I couldn't see well.

Nine fighter planes took off before me.

One of the planes didn't gain enough lift, so it dropped into the sea.

Their plan is to fly in two waves,

one after the other,

with the torpedo bombers starting the attack on the harbor

and the airfields being hit straight after.

The first wave has 40 torpedo bombers,

which would try to sink the American battleships,

and then there were 50 horizontal high-level bombers

to attack the inboard, uh, battleships.

They are supported by dive bombers and fighters

and are led by Commander Mitsuo Fuchida.

-

Back at Pearl Harbor,

the Americans once again spot a submarine-like vessel.

The USS Ward spots it, and they fire at it.

Their first shot misses, but then their second shot hits,

and they’re pretty certain that they have sunk whatever this is.

The crew of the USS Ward didn't know it yet,

but they have just fired the first American shots

of the Second World War.

A message is sent into Pearl Harbor,

"We have fired and depth charged a submarine

operating within the defensive sea area."

That message, unfortunately,

began to only creep up the chain of command.

There have been so many instances of reports of subs

that turn out to be false

that the report really doesn't go anywhere.

Meanwhile, at Opana Point on the northern tip of Oahu,

radar operators spot what appears to be a large number of planes

approaching rapidly.

Privates Joseph Lockhart and George Eliot

of the aircraft warning service noticed a large target

which appeared on their oscilloscopes.

It was larger than any other sighting they had seen before.

And they watched it for a few minutes, and they said,

"We really do need to report this."

Thirteen minutes after the sighting,

they call a switchboard operator, who relays the message

to the officer in charge, First Lieutenant Kermit Tyler.

Kermit Tyler remembered what a friend had told him,

that when flights of American B-17s came in from the West Coast,

KGM broadcast Hawaiian music all night long as a navigation aid.

And when Kermit heard this, he recalled that he had been listening

to Hawaiian music during the drive and he concluded,

well, this is probably these B17s.

It was to be a tragic mistake.

He knew nothing about radar,

was only there because he had been told to be there all night

so that he could see how radar identification worked.

And he told the two guys at Opana Point. "Eh, don't worry about it."

The delayed message from Washington

warning military bases to be on high alert

finally arrives at the RCA telegraph office in Honolulu.

A messenger shows up and puts it into his parcel,

hops on his motorcycle.

But given the traffic in Honolulu at that time,

it takes him an inordinately long time to actually get through the traffic

and out to Pearl Harbor and so, the message does not arrive

until it's too late.

At the same time,

Admiral Kimmel is getting ready to play golf

when news of the mini sub skirmish arrives.

When Kimmel gets word that a submarine has been attacked

at the entrance of the harbor, it's obviously of great concern.

He cancels the golf game with General Short.

He’s in the process of getting himself ready to go back to his headquarters,

uh, so that he can start getting a better handle on the situation.

Just off the coast of Oahu, the first wave of Japanese planes arrives.

When I descended lower,

the clouds changed to only half as thick

as before, so I could clearly see what was beneath us.

I saw a roundish-shaped white line and knew straight away it was land.

The residents of Hawaii said, "Oh, my heavens,

this is just another one of these stupid drills."

And for the longest time, they did not pay any attention to it.

Japanese planes fill the skies above Oahu

and await a crucial signal from their leader,

Mitsuo Fuchida, to attack.

If one flare went out, surprise had been achieved.

If two flares are shot out, surprise had not been achieved.

So, that would alter the way the attack would take place.

But things don't go as Fuchida plans.

They get there, they find nobody's expecting them,

so the attack is a surprise.

Mitsuo Fuchida fires his flare, but he doesn't think

one of his flight leaders has noticed this,

because he doesn't get in the correct pattern.

So, he decides he's going to fire a second flare

just to make sure everybody has seen it.

But another one of his flight leaders, when he sees that second flare,

he thinks it has been a double flare and he is supposed to attack immediately,

so he ends up pulling out of formation leading his planes in to attack.

This misunderstanding means that the island's airfields

will now be hit first, before the slower torpedo bombers arrive

and hit the battleships in the harbor.

What should happen is the torpedo planes attack first

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

and once the dive bombers attack, there's going to be a lot of smoke

and explosions, which is gonna make the targeting run

for the torpedo planes more problematic as well.

Wheeler Airfield in central Oahu

is the first to be hit, followed by Kaneohe Air Station

in the east of the island.

We were heading over to get breakfast,

and as we walked out the barracks door, a Japanese plane flew by,

and since the army had been having maneuvers,

I said, "Oh, look, the army is making this really look real."

Uh-- "They've painted the plane like a Japanese plane,

and they're pretending that they're attacking us."

I was assigned to the aircraft on the water for that day.

We had planned the training, and I was getting ready to do that.

I heard aircraft flying and looked out, and I saw a formation of planes.

I don't know if I was hit on the first run or the second,

but I could see where the bullets were hitting

and little squirts of water coming up through the bottom,

and then a bullet obviously penetrated the gas tanks,

and the plane just went up in flames very, very rapidly.

They strafed our hangar.

We ran towards the hangar.

And when we got down there, sure enough, they had strafed

almost all of our planes.

The military had grouped them together rather than separating them,

because they feared sabotage by the Japanese-American residents

far more than they feared attack by airplanes.

So, the military handed the Japanese on a platter

airplanes they could easily destroy.

We tried to move some of them.

We got to pulling them apart, 'cause some of them were burning,

so they wouldn't catch each other on fire.

The results are tremendous damage to the Americans.

Burning hangars, destroyed aircraft, lots and lots of smoke,

certainly casualties.

I got burned getting out.

I had to swim through the gasoline burning on the water.

We had three or four planes on the water,

and I think that I'm the only one that got out alive.

At this point,

with the Japanese level bombers and torpedo bombers

and dive bombers all approaching Pearl Harbor directly,

and there's not a plane in the sky from the American side, uh,

it's pretty clear that there is no hope for the Americans to avoid what is coming,

which is going to be an absolutely devastating attack.

Japanese commander, Mitsuo Fuchida,

flying over Pearl Harbor, sends the coded message, "Tora Tora Tora."

The message was "To." It was a one-syllable, uh, message

that was to be repeated at least six times.

"To, To, To, To, To, To."

He tells his radio operator to tap out the message.

It's at that point then that he starts to begin their assault on the harbor.

Next time…

The Japanese unleash the full force of their weapons

on the Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor.

The bomb went right down through the center of the ship,

and I was knocked off the deck.

We lost 1,177 men in ten minutes.

We're just lucky that we're alive.

The gates of hell had been opened up.

The scene is absolutely cataclysmic.

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

I said, "I'm not leaving. My brother's in there someplace."

"I gotta find him. I gotta find him."