Original subtitles

Previously…

The Japanese had caused devastation in Pearl Harbor

in a thunderous first attack.

All of a sudden, the sky was full of planes,

and there was shooting all over the place.

The Japanese had sunk three battleships.

There was one that was in danger of sinking.

We lost 1,177 men in ten minutes.

It was awful.

The gates of hell had been opened up. The scene is absolutely cataclysmic.

Eighty years ago, an ambitious Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor

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

How could such a small island nation take an obviously suicidal step?

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 final episode…

…after the surprise first attack, a second wave is imminent.

It had been quiet for a while,

but then you could start hearing loud explosions again.

All the fighters and bombers in the air,

the Nevada got attacked by everybody.

And amid the chaos, heroes emerge.

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.

The first wave of the attack ends,

and the last of the Japanese aircraft exit Hawaiian airspace.

After the first wave attack was over,

there was a momentary lull for about 20 to 25 minutes.

Many of the crew, they start abandoning ship.

They're jumping into these oil-stained waters.

And they have nasty, terrible burns.

Sailors had shorts and t-shirts, so their arms were burned,

their face was burned, their legs were burned.

Despite the chaos on the island,

the Americans prepare for another potential Japanese attack.

The Americans have no idea that there's a second attack wave incoming,

but it's reasonable to assume that they may be under attack again.

Certainly, they are making sure that every anti-aircraft gun

anywhere in the neighborhood has got sufficient access to ammunition.

On Oahu's airfields,

some American pilots manage to get airborne.

Amongst the first are Lieutenants Kenneth Taylor

and George Welch.

They had been sort of up all night partying,

uh, with an all-night poker game, and they were still in their tuxedos.

They're able to rush to a car

and drive out to a very remote airfield called Haleiwa.

When they arrived, their planes were ready.

They climbed in and got to the air and flew over towards Pearl Harbor.

At Pearl Harbor, despite suffering torpedo damage,

the USS Nevada has managed to get underway,

the only battleship to do so.

Nevada's commanding officer was ashore,

yet subordinates realized that the best solution here,

the best way to save oneself, was to get the ship underway

and to get out of Pearl Harbor.

Chief Bosun's mate, Edwin Hill, leads a team

to get the Nevada unmoored from the dock.

He leaves the ship, he cuts the line,

then he jumps into the water and he swims back to Nevada.

When it threw the lines away and backed away and down--

started down the channel, everybody saw was right in the middle of the channel.

Nevada's move is a gutsy move,

and it demonstrates to everyone in the harbor

that we are not just gonna sit here and take it.

Nevada was just… Uh-- It was quite a scene.

Following the departure of the Japanese first wave,

the Americans, anticipating a second attack, get themselves ready.

The Americans took advantage

of the lull between the attack waves to get organized.

They've had a little bit more time to prepare,

more time to get their ammunition to their guns.

There are also more men manning the anti-aircraft batteries.

Crewmen on the USS Tangier

sight the lead formations of the Japanese second wave.

One hundred and sixty-seven planes make up this second wave.

Seventy-eight dive bombers,

thirty-five fighters, and fifty-four high-altitude bombers.

The overall composition of the second wave

is a large group of dive bombers that are gonna be going after

targets of opportunity in Pearl Harbor itself,

but there are also groups of level bombers that are gonna be inflicting

additional attacks on American airfields, such as up at Kaneohe.

But the main show is the dive bomber attacks

that are gonna be coming in against Pearl Harbor.

At54 a.m., the attack on the harbor begins.

It had been quiet for a while,

but then you could start hearing loud explosions again,

so you know that it had started again.

By this time, there was much, much heavier anti-aircraft fire

because the Americans were fully alerted,

they had plenty of targets, and they were blind fighting mad.

For the Japanese pilots, one ship clearly stands out.

When they arrive over Pearl Harbor,

the thing that they see is the battleship Nevada.

It had been hit, so it was suffering fires,

but it got underway, headed for the mouth of Pearl Harbor and the open sea.

It becomes an obvious target for the Japanese fliers.

They're swarming around like bees around a honey pot.

All the bombers and fighters in the air, the Japanese hit it.

The Nevada got attacked by everybody.

Its crews were still shooting back

at the Japanese, who were now really focused on hitting the Nevada.

One of the men defending the Nevada is Joseph Taussig.

Ensign Joseph Taussig was a junior officer aboard the Nevada.

He was pretty green.

He had not had much experience at all in the Navy,

and he was in charge of the starboard anti-aircraft gun.

When the attack happens, he's hit.

He looked down, and his left foot was in his armpit.

Ensign Taussig continues to fight, and he does not go to the medical bay

until he is actually forced to, until his crew carries him there.

The battleship Nevada,

the visible symbol that we are resisting vigorously with everything that we've got.

The sight of this ship underway,

on fire, and people remembered its flag still flying at the rear,

moved some people to tears.

Many of the men who saw this

said that it was one of the finest things they saw all day long.

A huge cheer comes up

from the West Virginia and the Tennessee, as if it was like a football game.

Nevada was just… Uh, it was quite a scene.

However, the battleship's defiant run soon comes to an end.

Dive bombers bracketed her with near-miss

after near-miss after near-miss…

and finally, she was struck by five bombs.

It soon becomes clear to those on board

that they're not going to be able to get to the open sea.

She was down by the head so much, and she was on fire so heavily,

that the captain made the decision

uh, to ground the ship on, uh… On Hospital Point.

And then the tugs later pulled her across the channel

and there she ended her sortie.

She lost, uh, quite a number of men.

One of the casualties

is the man who helped get the USS Nevada underway.

Edwin Hill, he is working on the forecastle,

and he is blown off the side of the ship, and he is killed instantly.

Nevada, she docked herself,

because she didn't want to get sunk in the channel.

Everybody acted 100% the way they were supposed to act.

There wasn't anybody on that ship that did wrong,

what they were trained to do.

On Oahu's airfields, the second attack is also underway.

P-40 fighter pilots Kenneth Taylor and George Welch

have managed to get airborne.

They, uh, vectored south and saw that there were many aircraft

kind of circulating over the Ewa Mooring Mast Field,

which was the main marine air base.

And so they went over there expecting to find some American aircraft

and found out they were Japanese.

When they fly their P-40s into the air,

they find that some of the guns aren't even working on their aircraft.

Uh, they have to kind of go in really almost at-- At half strength.

The Japanese, their rear seat gunners are kind of not paying attention,

they're simply firing down, strafing at American targets on the ground

and so Taylor and Welch were able to get behind a bunch of them,

and then light them up with their machine gun fire.

They were able to shoot, uh, I think, two or three of them down.

But they had exhausted their ammunition, they were low on fuel,

and they went back to Wheeler and landed.

And they become some of the more successful American pilots in the air

and, uh, credited with some of the first aerial victories of the Pacific War.

Japanese bombers now strike the Kaneohe Naval Air Station.

One-hundred-and-one-year-old Cass Phillips witnessed the attack.

Japanese planes were, uh, flying in, in formation,

and they dropped another bomb on the hangar.

There was a fellow sitting on the hangar door

and when that bomb came in, it looked like he tried to stand up,

and then he sat back down. When they walked over to him, he was dead.

And it turned out that that bomb, a tiny piece of shrapnel

uh, went directly into his heart through his chest.

Since we didn't have any guns to fire back at them,

uh, we tried to stay out of the way.

As a matter of fact, there was a fellow,

he got a machine gun out of one of the airplanes,

and he was the only one that had a mount for a machine gun,

and he was shooting back at the Japanese planes.

Whether he hit one or not, I don't know.

That fellow is Chief Petty Officer John Finn.

Well, I thought he had a lot of nerve standing-- Standing out there,

being shot at and actually being hit and continuing to fire.

They tried to get him to come and get out of the way,

but he wouldn't do it.

He stayed right out there and continued firing back at them.

Uh-- It showed a lot of courage to me.

At the harbor,

the dive bomber attack is now focused on Dry Dock Number One.

The second wave has orders to go in and hit some of the capital ships

that have not been hit by the first wave.

The USS Pennsylvania,

a flagship of the US Pacific fleet, was in dry dock.

So the dry docks too become targets of the second wave.

The USS Pennsylvania suffers a direct hit from a 550-pound bomb.

Frank Emond, now a hundred and three, was on board.

The bomb went right-- right down through the center of the ship.

It hit the six-inch steel deck and exploded upwards.

I was knocked up off the deck about three or four inches.

Luckily, we-- We were in the back part of the ship,

so-- So we were not, uh, injured in the bomb explosion.

Twenty-four men are killed and twenty-nine wounded.

Being a stretcher bearer,

I had to go help pick up the dead and wounded people.

The memory that sticks in my mind is, uh,

trying to pick up bodies that were close to the explosion.

The-- The skin had been burned,

and-- And you could smell the, uh--

you could smell the burned-- the burned flesh.

We went up and found them, and, uh, we got them in the stretcher

and, uh, were able to take them to where they needed to go.

The USS Pennsylvania and Nevada

aren't the only ships attracting the Japanese bombers.

There are two vessels that receive a lot of attention

during the second wave assault.

One of these is the USS Nevada,

and the other ship is the destroyer USS Shaw.

The USS Shaw is hit by a bomb,

triggering one of the largest explosions of the day 20 minutes later.

It is captured in this iconic photo.

The Shaw is hit right on its bow

that explodes the forward magazine, blows the bow right on off,

and there is an enormous, thunderous explosion

that almost dwarfs what had happened to the Arizona.

The Japanese, they had caused the damage they wanted to do.

They'd sunk or damaged so many of the battleships.

They'd caused mayhem across the harbor.

The scene is one of utter confusion and bedlam and anger.

Despite the devastation on the ground,

American resistance continues in the air.

At Wheeler Airfield, four P-36 fighters,

led by Lieutenant Lewis Sanders, take off.

The pilots have had little time to prepare.

Phil Rasmussen is one of the few American pilots

who manages to get his plane aloft.

He is still wearing his purple pajamas when he gets in his plane.

When they got up in the air, they vectored out

toward Kaneohe Bay Naval Air Station.

And there, they spotted a flight of, uh-- of Japanese aircraft off in the distance.

They were in a superb position for an attack.

They were on the high side, with the sun at their back,

and they caught the Japanese aircraft completely blind.

However, the odds are stacked against them.

It's well and good to get a P-36 up in the air,

but that is not the kind of plane

that you want to be flying against a Mitsubishi Zero.

The Zero is probably the finest, uh,

carrier-launched fighter, at this point, in the world.

If you go after it and actually try to dogfight it,

by turning inside it, you're going to end up dead.

But pilot Phil Rasmussen

finds there is an issue with his plane.

Phil Rasmussen discovered that one of his guns was jammed,

and the other, uh, machine gun started to run away and fire all by itself.

All the time, he was turning, trying to do battle with these Zeros.

Rasmussen manages to hit a Japanese Zero…

…but is then struck himself with hundreds of rounds of cannon fire.

It blows off the canopy of Rasmussen's plane,

it shoots away all his controls. His plane is now falling.

Somehow, he actually manages to land the plane without a tail wheel,

without brakes, and without his rudder.

He couldn't believe he had made it alive through the encounter.

In fact, he reached up with his hand,

put it on top of his head to see whether he was bleeding anywhere,

and all he could feel was shattered glass.

After nearly two-and-a-half hours,

the attack is finally over,

and the Japanese planes head back to their carriers.

The place is an absolute shambles.

Uh, you have a number of sunken battleships,

Arizona heavily afire,

with her superstructure collapsing forward.

The harbor is full of small boats,

which are trying to make their way around and pull men out of the water.

It was just awful, and there was no other way to put it.

This was an American horror story they were living through.

Following the departure of the last Japanese planes,

the Americans wait in anticipation for a possible third-wave attack.

After the Japanese aircraft left from the second-wave attack,

there was a moment of… fear.

What's next? Is this thing over with? Are there going to be further air attacks?

Could there even be something like an invasion?

Yeah. Well, we did think they would probably be coming back, yes.

A lot of people even expected that there would be a landing.

The third wave never comes.

Vice Admiral Chūichi Nagumo withdraws his forces

and turns back to Japan.

Nagumo, his theory, I believe, was,

"Well, the Americans know we're here now, and two of their aircraft carriers

are missing from the harbor. We don't know where they are."

"They could be coming after us right now."

The end of that day, we knew about where they were.

Had he continued to be there and then run short on fuel,

left himself vulnerable for torpedo attack from American submarines.

I think on balance, Nagumo probably made the best decision.

Nagumo looks at his orders, and he says,

you know, "I was tasked with sinking four American battleships."

"The initial assessment says that I've gotten at least that many."

"The mission is a success. We're going home."

The once mighty US Pacific Fleet now lies in ruins.

Five of eight battleships have been sunk

along with a target ship, a minelayer, and a repair ship.

On Oahu's airfields, 347 planes have been destroyed or damaged,

significantly more than the Japanese had expected.

The Japanese had accomplished beyond their wildest dreams.

They obviously were very disappointed that carriers were not in port.

But they had damaged the battle line in the Pacific Fleet.

It would never be the same.

The immediate reaction in Japan,

um, to the news of Pearl Harbor success was, I think, one of euphoria,

at least on the surface of society.

When we started being able to get up topside with the stretcher,

we could see the look over the harbor and all the ships you could see,

and there was fire from some ships and just smoke from all the rest of them.

Seeing those battleships lying on their side,

and, uh, sunk and so forth,

I was just sorry to see the damage that was done.

Japanese losses are significantly lower.

Five midget submarines are lost,

and of the 350 aircraft launched, just 29 fail to return.

Most of the losses occur in the second wave.

The Japanese, they suffer more aircraft casualties in the second wave,

when the American anti-aircraft defenses are more fully alerted.

Uh-- They lose twenty planes in the second wave

as opposed to only nine in-- in the first wave.

But America's fierce resistance has tragic consequences.

The Americans fired between five and six thousand shells

and around a quarter of a million fifty-caliber machine gun bullets.

Inevitably, some of these shells end up going up

and then landing in civilian areas, uh, around Honolulu.

One of them tragically hits a car directly and kills all of its occupants.

Forty-nine civilians lost their lives that day.

Many of them lost their lives from friendly fire,

and there were children among that group.

The total toll on American life is huge.

Two thousand, three hundred ninety are killed and 1,179 wounded.

The vast majority are junior enlisted personnel,

a few years out of high school.

The Japanese lose just 65 men.

By now, the news of the attack

has reached Winston Churchill in Great Britain.

The attack at Pearl Harbor happens very early in the morning, Honolulu time.

In Britain, it's early evening.

The prime minister, Winston Churchill, goes up to bed, and he says that night

he slept the sleep of the saved and the thankful.

Because he knows that with America in the war, victory is certain.

At Pearl Harbor,

sailors continue to evacuate their sunken and burning ships.

On the USS West Virginia, crew come on board the Tennessee

by way of a five-inch gun.

Others jump into the water.

There's fuel oil that is floating on top,

in some cases on fire. Same thing, there were pools of gasoline and whatnot,

and so you can understand that just getting these guys out of the water

in many cases was very difficult.

One of the sailors went out in one of these boats to pick up survivors

and wound up picking bodies up.

And there's this one fellow they picked up,

and he was so badly burned

that when he grabbed his arm, all the skin and meat came off of his arm.

And the guy was still alive, just screaming.

There just wasn't enough people to deal with the high rate of casualties.

The hospitals were full.

The hospital ship Solace was taking on more casualties than it could.

Uh-- The doctors were working feverishly.

At Hickam field, they ran out of morphine at the small station hospital.

They ran out of bandages. They ran out of antiseptic.

One fella was lying there.

There wasn't room for him, we didn't have a hospital, of course.

I felt extremely sorry for him,

young man that was, uh, a half-hour earlier,

was perfectly healthy, and now he was, uh…

he couldn't-- He couldn't even feel his legs.

With medical facilities stretched,

civilians assist with the casualties.

One of them is the young daughter of Captain Logan Ramsey.

Mary Ann Ramsey was a 16-year-old girl.

As the attack was happening,

she ran down to one of the makeshift medical stations.

She had no medical training,

and as burned men were being brought up,

she would comfort them. She hugs them, and she talks to them.

She does everything she can to help out these men

who are dying in front of her.

These angels of mercy, um, and young women at the time,

and those nurses, were dealing with the reality of war

in a scope that they never envisioned.

Rescue operations at the harbor continue into the night.

But on some ships, rescue is almost impossible.

One of the toughest stories of Pearl Harbor

is the story of the Oklahoma that capsizes

in the course of the attack when hit by torpedoes.

Uh-- Many men manage to get off. They get onto the hull,

uh, and they are rescued, but many more are left inside the ship.

Once the ship rolls over, up is down, down is up.

Uh-- It is complete darkness. Sailors are trapped in air pockets.

They are covered in oil, they can't see.

It is a place where sailors have become entombed.

At this point, there is no way for them to get out.

They're simply trapped underneath the hull,

and they have to wait for rescuers.

It is a delicate task.

When opening portions of the hull, air escapes and lets in water,

drowning some of the men trapped inside.

Yard workers described seeing the hands coming out of the hull,

and with not having the air in there,

um, they would drown right in front of them,

um, and they would see the hands retreat from the hole.

But rescuers come up with a solution.

They were dealing with this problem, and as yard workers,

and people with technical skills, they would pump air into that compartment

-before they could get the men out.

They would use air pumped from the USS Tennessee,

and they would cut holes in the hull.

Navy Federal workers managed to save 32 men,

and that was significant, and it was something

after the attack that they could take pride in.

They had seen so much death.

But tragically, more men will be lost.

Within 24 hours of the attack,

President Roosevelt signs a declaration of war against Japan,

which is passed by the US Congress

after he makes one of the most iconic speeches in American history.

When I hear Roosevelt's speech, even now, I still get shivers up my spine.

December 7th, 1941…

a date which will live in infamy.

"A date that will live in infamy."

That absolutely encapsulated the American mood at this point,

that we are furious about this attack.

This form of treachery shall never again endanger us.

"The day that we will live in infamy," really spoke to a lot of people,

and the cowardly nature of the attack also added to that.

So, "Remember Pearl Harbor" became a kind of slogan.

For thousands of young Americans,

-the attack on Pearl Harbor is a calling.

Americans are now eager for retaliation.

You couldn't keep people away from the recruiting stations.

The reason for that is because they believe

that getting into the US Navy

was the surest-fire way of punishing the Japanese

for what happened at Pearl Harbor.

For the Japanese-Americans living on US soil,

the repercussions of the attack are devastating.

After the attack, Japanese-Americans are basically treated like the enemy,

suspected of espionage and other acts against the United States.

Assets were seized. Homes, businesses.

These are Japanese taxpaying Americans.

You have this absolutely shameful situation,

uh, where the-- The Californian Japanese were…

herded into detainment camps for the remainder of the war.

Uh, one of the most shameful episodes in American history, I think.

Japan's aim of demoralizing America

to bring them to the negotiating table doesn't come to pass.

Strategically, they make a huge error of judgment.

One of the biggest, uh, mistakes made with Pearl Harbor

is that they underestimated Americans.

They hoped to not only decimate our fleet, but to break the American spirit.

Japan never intended for this to be a long-term war.

Their ultimate goal is to have a negotiated end to this war

sometime within the next six months to a year,

so the way to inflict the maximum amount of shocking impact

on the American populous is to sink warships.

United States will be shocked enough

after the success of Pearl Harbor to sue for peace.

But in that, they were wrong.

The Japanese miscalculated the American retaliation,

because in 1942, Americans got together to fight a war in the Atlantic

-and a war in the Pacific simultaneously.

And in the end, they helped conquer, uh, two fascist empires

that were set on world domination.

You can make a credible argument that Japan lost World War II

as soon as the first bomb fell on Ford Island.

In the wake of the deadly Pearl Harbor attack,

the damage done to the once-imposing American Pacific Fleet is immense.

These vessels cost tens of millions of dollars to build

back when that was real money.

Um-- And so, the destruction of any one of those assets

would be tantamount to a national catastrophe.

In January 1942, Captain Homer Wallin

began the task of salvaging and restoring the crippled fleet.

The dramatic salvage operations undertaken by Homer Wallin

-were nothing short of a miracle.

It was very, very difficult to get-- to get these ships back into shape.

Their cables and wires and pipework and ductwork

all over the place, all that gets obliterated.

The miracle of the salvage of Pearl Harbor

is most of the ships damaged that day

made it back into service in one form or another.

And that was an engineering miracle.

Of the ships that were damaged and sunk at Pearl Harbor,

there were only three that were not repaired

and returned to service.

The Utah, which had capsized,

the hulk of the Arizona, which had been blown apart,

and the Oklahoma.

All the other ships were returned to service.

The USS Nevada was sent to the US West Coast

for full repairs in April 1942.

She saw action in Normandy, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa.

But the question remains. Could the attack have been avoided?

And the answer to that is a flat-out no.

The Japanese had decided they were going to go to war

with the United States, and that was the end of it.

So, could the attack on the island have been prevented?

Three big opportunities were missed,

beginning with the sinking of the Japanese midget submarine

on the morning of the attack.

-The commander of the Ward

immediately sent a message to Pearl Harbor.

No one reacted, uh, with high speed or alacrity.

If it had been promptly recognized for what it was,

you might have put all the ships in the harbor on full alert.

The second critical mistake

occurred less than an hour before the attack,

with a radar sighting of a large number of planes rapidly approaching Oahu.

We blew that because we did not have the trained personnel in place

to make a good determination on whether this target coming in was friend or foe.

They did call it in to an Army pilot

who knew nothing about radar. He told the two guys,

"Eh, it's probably the army coming in. Don't worry about it."

And the third missed opportunity

came from the lack of thorough searches and patrols north of the harbor.

Admiral Kimmel was a man of offense.

He wasn't defensive-minded.

He was reluctant to use any resources to protect himself in Hawaii.

"Why go look for something I don't think is there?"

"That just wastes my airplanes?"

They should have said, "Get these aircraft up."

"Just as a safeguard. Let's not take a chance."

But they never did that.

We weren't ready. We weren't prepared.

And that's the only thing that I think.

How much different it would have been had we been prepared.

America being alerted, at least for a few minutes,

and it would have prevented a lot of American lives from being lost.

Washington, December 1941.

The Roberts Commission is set up

to investigate the circumstances of the Japanese attack.

It finds Admiral Husband Kimmel, along with General Walter Short,

guilty of dereliction of duty.

If you're in a position of command, and something goes wrong,

you have to take the blame for it, and you have to fall on your sword.

-They were fine officers.

They deserved better.

But ultimately, that responsibly rested on their shoulders.

Today, at the bottom of Pearl Harbor,

lies the ghostly wreckage of the USS Arizona.

The Arizona has become this symbol of the attack.

Really quite a moving place to go.

It's a place where people could come and walk upon the memorial,

see the names of the dead of the USS Arizona, and touch history.

On September 2nd, 1945,

the Japanese signed their surrender aboard the USS Missouri.

It now operates as a museum at Pearl Harbor

in sight of the USS Arizona.

If you go aboard Missouri today and stand there,

you can look and see the Arizona Memorial

just a few hundred yards away.

And so really, you've got the whole Pacific War,

uh, right within visual sight. It started there, it ended here.

Today, only a small number of survivors remain,

the last of a generation who, on one fateful day in December 1941,

found themselves in the eye of a storm.

There's not many of us left. From Pensacola, only about two I think,

and, uh, I am glad to see, though, that people, in general,

are still remembering that it happened and hopefully that they're, uh…

doing whatever they need to to not let it happen again.

Any way you look at it, uh, war is a terrible thing

and es-- Especially when-- When you're in the middle of it.

There's nothing you can do, but--

But just join your fellows and, uh… And then try to survive.

1,177 on the Arizona. My shipmates.

Lost.

I'm not a hero, those are the heroes. They're the ones that lost their lives.