Original subtitles

Pearl Harbor's the most dramatic opening of any war in almost all of human history.

Nobody imagined the Japanese would do such a thing.

This was almost like science fiction.

Pearl Harbor is one of the cleanest breaks

between the past and the future I think you can find.

Pearl Harbor is one of the most extraordinary events of World War II.

Now, rare footage from around the world,

expertly restored in full color,

tells the story as you've never seen it before.

It was very cold.

Some accounts said that it was snowing.

The sailors on the 30 ships did not know

where they were going to war,

did not even know who the enemy was.

They thought they were going to attack Singapore or Hong Kong.

All radio communications were cut off.

Special provisions were made to not dump garbage

over the sides of the ships.

They formed a box in the sea several miles across.

Always fearful that someone was going to appear in the sky above them.

What happens if an American vessel,

if a fishing vessel, if anyone

comes across the entire Japanese Navy at sea.

The Japanese entire plan crumbles, because it has to be based on surprise.

The largest gathering of naval air power in history

sets out on a top-secret mission.

Thirty ships, carrying 408 airplanes

and 16,000 men,

are traveling 4,000 miles across the Pacific Ocean.

They're heading to attack a country

ten times richer and more powerful than their own,

in one of the most audacious military gambles in all history.

They've calculated that they have only a 50 percent chance of success,

and failure would be suicide.

What has pushed them into this desperate situation?

1905.

Eighteen months of fighting against imperial Russia

ends in a shock victory,

when Japan, a small island nation,

emerges triumphant.

After centuries of being ignored by other nations,

the Japanese have finally arrived on the world stage

as a serious military power.

And that shocked the world,

that this vast czarist empire

could be beaten on the battlefield

by these funny little people in this island chain

off the east coast of Asia.

I think that convinced the Japanese

they should be considered a world power.

A decade later, after the outbreak of World War I,

when Imperial German forces start moving into China,

Japan teams up with Britain

to help drive them out.

Thanks to the Japanese, the Allies gain a key victory.

Afterwards, Japan gets a seat at the top table,

and they want recognition for helping win the war.

Japan was one of five countries invited

to the Paris Peace Conference.

The Japanese didn't have major say, but they were there.

The Japanese brought a racial equality clause.

As part of the post-war treaty,

Japan asks the Allies for their citizens

to have freer immigration to western countries,

like Australia and America.

But their request is denied.

So the Japanese went home angry.

But Japanese leaders persevere.

Having recently transformed their feudal society

into a parliamentary democracy,

they hope their new politics will help align them with the West.

Once again, they are rebuffed.

When the US bans all non-whites from moving to American soil,

the Japanese are included.

So this kind of discrimination, which was overt,

and, you know, references to the yellow peril,

really made the Japanese very resentful.

And so the Japanese feel that they are still being treated

as a second-rate power,

when, in fact, they do have a first-rate military.

The outlook of the British,

the outlook of the Americans, is somewhat racist.

So there's this poisonous brew of militarism,

grudges against the West.

Then the fledgling democracy takes another hit,

when in 1929 America's Great Depression

sends a shock wave round the globe

that reaches the markets of Japan.

Its economy takes a devastating blow.

In the early thirties, things were utterly miserable.

The demand for silk dropped,

and so there are many, many stories about struggling farmers

having to sell their daughters into prostitution.

With Japan on its knees

and the international door tightly closed,

the country looks inwards for the solution to its problems.

Inspired by ancient samurai codes and traditions,

a far-right nationalist movement gains traction.

At first, it takes over the military,

but soon starts infiltrating the civilian government.

Japan's parliamentary democracy works for a time.

And then gradually, the parties begin to have a tough time.

There's scandals, there's corruption,

and the military men begin to intimidate.

And at that point, parliamentary democracy really ceases to function.

Leading the military power grab is an ultra-nationalist army general,

the son of a revered samurai.

Hideki Tojo is a fierce military fighter,

and he has a vision

for how to transform an impoverished Japan

into a rich and powerful nation.

Tojo is a bright man,

certainly, a very good administrator.

But he's also relatively small-minded.

He is not a well-traveled individual.

He looks at the world

completely from the military point of view,

and his solution to any problem

is a military solution.

For Tojo, the days of asking for equal stake

in the Pacific are over.

General Hideki Tojo very much represents

this stream of opinion in Japan,

that they need to take a very hard line with the western powers.

And they had a really admirable belief

that far too much of Asia was in western hands.

The Dutch controlled what we today call Indonesia.

The French controlled South East Asia.

The British had Singapore, Malaya, and Hong Kong.

The United States had the Philippines.

And the Japanese believed that Asia should be for the Asians.

Tojo's fixation with the western territories in Asia

stems from their valuable natural resources,

resources Japan needs if it's going to prosper.

They had very few natural resources.

No oil to speak of, no coal,

nothing in the way of the fuels that were essential to be a great power.

In 1931, Tojo's army invades

the Chinese Province of Manchuria,

an area rich with coal and iron.

Western powers with interests in the Pacific

become uneasy.

An international summit is called,

where the other nations agree to help China resist Japan.

For the Japanese delegates, it's an abomination.

Japan finds it impossible to accept

the report adopted by the assembly.

The west had stolen, occupied, taken…

Pick your verb… Land all over Asia,

and so to be denied the same privilege

seemed to the Japanese to be western hypocrisy.

Ignoring all calls to end their expansion,

in 1937 Japan moves even further into China.

Marking the beginning of a savage and bloody war.

Within weeks,

thousands of Chinese citizens had been killed

at the hands of the Japanese Army.

And when reports of systematic rape

and civilian massacre in the city of Nanking surface,

the world is horrified.

Certainly, the rape of Nanking in 1937 is shocking.

The atrocities were unimaginable at the time.

To the United States, it's just further proof

of Japan's malign intentions in China.

That they are going to go in, colonize China,

and they are gonna milk at their resources.

The Americans had always liked to think of themselves

as China's protector against outside aggression.

The Japanese invasion is, of course, a huge challenge to this.

But the West soon has big problems of its own.

In Europe, another far right nationalist leader

is putting his expansionist vision into action.

Hitler's fearsome army is sweeping across the continent.

Overrunning country after country

and incorporating them into a German Empire.

For British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill,

the threat of a Nazi controlled Europe is now very real.

Winston Churchill realized that the only realistic hope

of the West prevailing over Hitler,

was if the Americans could come into the war.

And all the time, from 1940 onward,

he was urging the Americans, saying "Come on, come on,

you must realize that only if we stand together

against these great evils can we possibly hope to prevail."

But the Americans were not that receptive.

Blessed by simple geography,

that being thousands of miles from other countries,

gave it a sense of safety.

Europe was regarded as a place that was forever at war.

If you're in Iowa, what difference does it matter

what happens in Alsace?

What real threat is it to the United States,

which is 3,000 miles away across a huge ocean?

The vast majority of Americans believe Europe's war

has nothing to do with them.

Publicly, President Franklin Roosevelt

is careful to uphold the wishes of his people.

1940, or course, is an election year

and Franklin Roosevelt, knowing how powerful

the isolationist element was,

promised to American mothers,

"Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign war."

Roosevelt was someone who played all his cards

very close to the vest.

He hated to commit to policies,

allowed people to think that he agreed with them.

But deep down, Roosevelt is worried

that the Nazi peril isn't limited to Europe.

He was far out in front of the rest of the country

in recognizing the threat to the United States

posed by the peril that Great Britain faced.

And while he won't go back on his word to the American people,

he knows the Allies need help.

His goal in 1940 was to provide the raw materials.

The air planes, the tanks, the shipping, the equipment, the ammunition, the oil,

that would allow Britain to hold on.

When in May 1940, Hitler invades France,

for Roosevelt, the stakes are higher than ever.

What he can't do is openly get the United States in war.

So he does everything possible short of that.

He begins to flood the British with aid.

He begins to take the most extraordinary risks

with American ships in the Atlantic,

to try and make the Germans fire the first shot.

Facing a rapidly escalating crisis in Europe and the Pacific,

Roosevelt turns his attention to Japan.

Franklin Roosevelt, in his policy towards Germany,

he always has an eye on Japan.

What he doesn't want to have happen is the Japanese to take advantage

of what's going on in Europe to expand.

And Roosevelt was worried that Japan would seize that moment

to start capturing the colonies of defeated European powers.

In line with his policy of doing everything

short of using force,

he sends Japan a warning.

When his Pacific naval fleet go to Hawaii for training,

he takes the unusual step of keeping them there.

The United States Pacific Fleet,

was largely based in California.

Roosevelt figured that if he moves the fleet

and keep it permanently based at Pearl Harbor,

that would be a loaded gun.

There's no other large naval base within thousands of miles.

So Japan, it's a very threatening base.

It extends the American Navy

thousands of miles farther into the Pacific.

But not everyone agrees with Roosevelt's decision.

Admiral Richardson is in charge of the Pacific Fleet at the time

and he does not think that the move out to Hawaii

is going to be a good one.

The fleet needed more training, more ships,

and Richardson felt that, if you're gonna call someone's bluff,

you have to back it up with something meaningful.

And his distaste for this move,

leads to him having some very strong words

with President Roosevelt

and Roosevelt actually removes him from command.

Richardson has a point.

Far from being battle-ready,

for the many the move feels more like a tropical holiday.

This exotic, faraway place,

it smelled beautifully.

The palm trees, the mountain ranges.

It's a great place to be able to have fun.

In the off-hours, they're having picnics,

they're going out dancing.

They're going to the clubs, they're just having a really good time.

The geographical location of Pearl Harbor

makes it seem impregnable.

Thousands of miles from land,

it is well protected from air strikes.

There were a number of air strips,

docking facilities, there were repair facilities,

there were fuel depots.

It was a major base that could defend itself.

The geography provides the fleet with natural protection.

Pearl Harbor is a very large, but in many ways,

actually, quite shallow base.

Which is seen as a great protective thing

in the inter-war period for torpedo attacks.

Pearl Harbor at its deepest is about 40 or 45 feet.

Torpedoes drop from airplanes.

They're heavy weapons, they're about 2,000 pounds.

They drop and plunge quite deep into the water,

before they rise up a bit and begin their journey to your target.

And the feeling was that Pearl Harbor was too shallow

to use a torpedo dropped from a plane.

But the relaxed mood soon changes,

when a new man takes over.

Admiral Kimmel is now in charge of the fleet.

Admiral Kimmel was almost a quintessential career naval officer

in the 1930s.

He was liked by his subordinates,

he was admired by his superiors.

He is very, very particular,

and everybody has to do what he says,

exactly how he says it.

So, his plan is to start making sure they're ready.

And ready for what? Well, he and, most everyone else in the Pacific Fleet

knew war was close enough that you needed to prepare for it.

And he embarked on relentless maneuvers.

Believing that war is dangerously close,

Kimmel wastes no time in preparing his fleet,

so that when the time comes,

they'll be ready to take the war to Japan

and destroy them in the open ocean.

He wanted to be in a decisive engagement.

The capital ship of every navy was still the battleship.

Kimmel was raised on battleships.

He had served on nine of them.

He, like most people in the Navy,

still envisioned settling matters at sea.

The newly-stationed fleet does little to calm

Japan's military ambitions.

With Europe in turmoil,

Tojo and his colleagues see an opportunity

to take advantage of the chaos.

They join forces with Hitler and Mussolini in an historic pact,

promising to support each other's imperial efforts.

The majority of the people within the Japanese military

look at the successes of Nazi Germany,

and that's something that they want to emulate.

But the pact is not without its critics within Japan.

Head of the navy, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto,

is concerned that the pact risks Japan

being dragged into war against the Allies.

And that could mean taking on the huge might of the USA.

Admiral Yamamoto thinks that this is insane,

for Japan to enter into a new agreement with Nazi Germany.

But he is a real minority.

He had risen all the way to the top

of the Japanese Navy because he was tough,

and he was brilliant,

also had a kind of a sensitive side to him.

He carried a list of all the people

who had ever been lost at sea on his watch.

And Yamamoto was a brilliant commander,

and not somebody who was eager to go to war with the United States.

He had spent two tours in the United States.

Part of that at Harvard University.

He had seen the enormous potential of the American industrial capacity,

the oil wells of Texas,

and he knew that war with an industrial giant like this

was not a great idea.

But Yamamoto's doubts fall on deaf ears.

The pact is signed.

Empowered, the Japanese Army decides to continue their imperial expansion.

Once Hitler rolled over the powers of Holland and France,

their Asian colonies became orphans

and ripe for the plucking.

When France falls to the Nazis,

Japan seizes the opportunity to invade French Vietnam.

It's exactly what Roosevelt had feared Japan would do.

But his hands are now tied.

He wants to avoid intervening with force.

But he can still hit Japan hard.

Roosevelt imposes harsh sanctions.

Suspending all American exports to Japan, including oil.

Knowing that Japan gets 80 percent of their oil from America.

It's a huge blow for the Japanese.

Roosevelt will remove the embargo,

only if they reverse all their expansionist actions to date.

It seems like a brilliant move.

To the Japanese, the sanctions are no small thing.

Because let's remember they've got over a million troops

in China by this point.

So they need fuel oil, desperately.

Roosevelt believed that by putting the sanctions on,

that would definitely keep the Japanese in line.

I don't know if he realized it puts them in such a dilemma.

So the American sanctions threatened to unhinge

this Japanese war effort,

so, they have to start thinking about this southern operation.

Either they will have to back down.

They will have to accept American demands,

which are ultimately to pull back

on these great Japanese imperial advances,

or they have to go to war to get oil. That's it.

But far from halting Japan's expansion,

the sanctions push war closer.

Japan turns to a new source of oil, much closer to home.

But it's in the hands of another western country.

Japan has no oil.

There is a lot of that in the Pacific, but it's in the Dutch East Indies.

What is now known as Indonesia.

The Dutch possession has there

some of the richest oil fields in the world,

and that would be where they would get their resources.

The risk is that any move south,

puts them dangerously close to the American held Philippines.

But any caution evaporates,

with a dramatic change in the political situation in Japan.

The prime minister resigns.

Tojo takes control of the country.

And if war is now inevitable,

Japan will strike the first blow.

They looked at America and saw it as the ultimate sort of decadent power,

where, you know, consumer culture, materialism.

If we punch them really hard,

and they're already under threat from the fascists in Europe,

what are the odds of the Americans gathering themselves and saying,

"Okay we're gonna make this super human effort

to fight in the Pacific,

the Atlantic and Europe, all at the same time."

The Japanese gambled, "They won't do that."

The idea was not to defeat the United States,

it was to wear out the United States.

Oh, they knew we had a bigger population,

had more factories and could produce more airplanes,

but we did not have the Japanese spirit and that would win the war.

But any attack on the US, would have to involve the navy.

And for that, they would need the help of the war skeptic,

Admiral Yamamoto.

Yamamoto thought this was an insane idea.

We should not go to war with the Americans.

But he saw which way the wind was blowing,

he knew he could not say no.

The obvious place to attack America

is in the Philippines,

on route south towards the oil fields.

But Yamamoto hits on a more audacious plan.

Yamamoto was a gambler.

He once said that his ideal retirement would be to retire to the French Riviera

and gamble away the hours in the casinos of Monte Carlo.

He believes Japan's only chance of victory in the Pacific

is to go straight for the jugular.

Taking out the American Pacific Fleet,

now enticingly stationed at Pearl Harbor.

And so he said this, "If we have to go to war

with the United States, the only chance we have to survive it,

is to take out their fleet on the first day."

Japan will at least have a breathing space to go south,

seize the resources

and then try and affect some kind of political settlement.

To attack Pearl Harbor was an astonishing act of military guts.

Uhm…

So much could go wrong.

It was 3,000 miles from Japan.

Would take them 12 days to get there,

on any one of which they could have been spotted.

They would have to refuel at sea, repeatedly.

Which is an extremely difficult operation.

And perhaps the greatest difficulty was keeping the whole thing secret.

So Yamamoto estimated his chances at probably about 50/50.

He was a gambler, and 50/50 looked pretty good to him.

So there's a real irony here.

On the one hand, Yamamoto has been saying for months

that we would be insane to go to war against the Americans.

And yet, on the other hand, he is absolutely dogmatic

about making sure that his own vision

of the attack against the Americans is adopted.

Meanwhile in Washington,

American intelligence has broken Japan's secret communication code,

and it's clear from the messages

that Tojo is gearing up for war.

The Americans are reading this message traffic of Admiral Nomura

who was the Japanese Ambassador to the United States.

So that we knew that Nomura was getting this message,

it said, "You must do certain things by the end of November

or other things are automatically going to happen."

The Japanese had six large-deck aircraft carriers.

They could carry as many as 450 combat air planes.

And what Yamamoto wanted to do was use all six of them

to strike at Pearl Harbor.

So that made this grouping

the largest concentration of naval air power

in the world, at the time.

The Americans were operating very much of the mindset

of the time of the inter-war period.

The Japanese, partly because they were forced

to make the imagination leap required

to think of using the aircraft carriers alone,

as a strike force to cripple the fleet.

Knowing from the intercepts that Japan is poised for war,

Washington alerts all military forces in the Pacific.

And so a message was sent to Pearl Harbor,

that began with a nine-word sentence,

that really is probably the most famous in American naval history.

It said, "This dispatch is to be considered a war warning."

And it then went on to list possible targets.

The Philippines, Malaya,

and Husband Kimmel, in Hawaii, got that message

and he sat down with his executive staff

and they analyzed, "What does this mean?

What should we do?"

And they concluded, well, they are specifically noting

that the Japanese are going here, here and here.

But they don't mention us.

Admiral Kimmel believes that he is gonna have to send his fleet out

to support whatever area does get attacked.

So Kimmel focused on making sure the ships were ready,

they were fueled up, they had good training,

they were ready to go out to sea

when the Japanese struck, wherever they struck,

and everyone expected a Japanese attack.

While Kimmel prepares his fleet,

to attack the Japanese at sea,

army head, General Short, has to defend the base.

But he expects the real threat

to come from within the island.

There were more people of Japanese ancestry

than any other nationality, including native Hawaiians.

And there was this widespread feeling that before it came

they would all rise up and they would plant bombs under bridges.

So Short wanted to guard against people committing acts of sabotage.

And in the end, he ends up issuing an order

that requires his air fields to put all of their aircraft

on the center of the tarmac,

where they can be guarded around the clock.

But what the Americans don't know

is that a vast armada is now making its way

across the Pacific Ocean.

The attack is less than a week away.

But for the Japanese, it's been months in the planning.

The Japanese knew this was something that had to be meticulously planned.

They had to decide which mix of air planes to use.

Which targets were the priority targets,

who would lead which squadrons,

everything was planned.

And there was some intelligence

that could only be collected on the ground.

Of the thousands of Japanese residents on Hawaii,

one was Takeo Yoshikawa.

A Japanese citizen, a naval officer,

who'd been living on the island for eight months,

working as a spy.

Every day he'd been observing the movements

of the ships and the aircraft,

down to the smallest details.

On board one of the ships, there were two models

of Pearl Harbor and Oahu.

Actual scale models that had been built on table tops.

They even made little miniature warships

about the size of a Hershey bar.

So that pilots could practice which directions to come from

and would recognize the landmarks on the island.

Signs of an impending attack continue to grow.

It became evident that Japanese embassies and consulates

were starting to destroy

their secret code machines and documents.

Now why would a country do that?

Well, a country that's about to go to war with another country,

realizes the host country will probably come knocking

on your embassy front door

and seize everything it can find.

The news of that destruction was sent

to the Pacific Fleet in Hawaii,

and its commander, Husband Kimmel, read the message.

And he read it as, "They think we are going to attack them.

So they are destroying their stuff in anticipation of being attacked."

There's a strong sense of fatalism in Japanese culture.

The sacrifice of your life for the greater good,

for the empire, for the emperor.

This is the highest duty and the greatest honor.

When the word finally was passed to the typical crew men,

many of course did the obvious thing.

They began writing their wills

and sending letters to their family.

December the 6th, 1941.

The Japanese fleet are 200 miles off the north coast of Hawaii.

And closing in on their final destination.

Against the odds, they have survived the epic journey undetected.

The American fleet at Pearl Harbor had no idea they are there.

The American Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox,

had a dinner party in Washington D.C.,

where members of the press

were invited and they asked him to say a few words.

And he said "Ladies and gentlemen,

I don't know what's going to happen.

None of us know what's going to happen,

but I can tell you this with great assurity.

Whatever may happen, we will not be surprised.

The American Navy is ready."

Radar was a new invention in 1941.

The army had mobile radar units.

One of those was at the farthest northern point

of the island of Oahu.

Manned by two privates

and they had been told to operate their radar,

just for practice.

Nobody had told them there was anything to worry about,

and at 7:02 a.m., they detected on the screen

a large blob of airplanes.

And they called down to their headquarters.

"There's this blob of planes out there,

we don't know how many, but it's a lot."

And headquarters essentially told them,

"Don't worry about it, they're probably Navy planes.

They could be army planes coming from the mainland."

The privates had, in fact, spotted 183 planes

that comprised the first wave of Japanese aircraft

heading directly towards them.

At 7:53 a.m., the planes arrive at Oahu

to find a sitting duck awaiting them.

Pearl Harbor happens on a quiet Sunday morning.

When American sailors are going about their business

as if it is any other Sunday at peace time.

The initial thought is that for some reason

there's training on Sunday and that seems wildly unbelievable.

Why are there planes in the air?

The Japanese had certainly banked on the element of surprise.

That they would catch the American Fleet and the airfields unawares.

But they had to assume that there would be some reaction.

The sight that greets them, you know,

no enemy fighters in the sky.

They must now have been thinking to themselves

that not only are they gonna pull off this attack,

but "We may in fact walk away with far fewer causalities

than we had anticipated."

They cruise in on a lovely morning.

The air is clear,

makes it very easy to identify their targets.

And so they go into their dives and they drop their bombs.

The Japanese target the airfields first,

taking out any defense planes before they have a chance to fight back.

And thanks to general Short's orders,

the planes make perfect targets parked together on the runways.

And anti-aircraft ammunition is locked away from saboteurs.

For some on the ground,

it meant a desperate scramble to find the keys.

Initially we had to have Pearl Harbor locked up

we can't do nothing,

we were just spectators because we couldn't fly.

After destroying hundreds of planes within minutes,

next, the Japanese turn their attention to the real prize.

Battleship row.

I'll never forget all those cruisers and battleships were tied,

mostly were behind, each on the side of the pier.

And they sat in there just like a hornet’s nest.

And within minutes, everything's aflame.

Their comrades are dead,

they're watching the ships that they considered invulnerable,

the greatest battleships in the world,

beginning to burn.

It would have been just a cacophony of noise

and a crush of men going in these narrow passageways,

trying to get their ships operational.

People moving through hatchways,

up and down ladders, you have to run to your guns

and do something to defend your ship.

Because if you don't, you're all gonna die.

And the attack only intensifies

as the Japanese unveil their secret weapon.

And I looked, and just as I looked west,

I saw them drop two torpedoes in the water.

Americans tended to disparage

the technological prowess of the Japanese.

They were not thought to be great engineers.

Knowing that Pearl Harbor was impervious to torpedoes,

in the weeks leading up to the attack,

the Japanese had come up with an ingenious solution.

They built a brand-new type of torpedo

that can be dropped in shallow water.

Fixing wooden fins and other things to the torpedoes

that would absorb the initial impact of the weapon,

allow it to dive not quite so deeply.

They're able to utilize what the Americans think

is an advantage for the Americans and turn it on its head.

It's like adding insult to injury here.

Because they're not just being attacked from the dive bombers,

the torpedoes are clearly working, wreaking devastation.

The Japanese get a very lucky shot and one of their bombs

strikes the forward magazine of the USS Arizona.

And it just lifts the ships out of the water.

And in just a few seconds more than 1100 sailors are killed.

And so this is the most devastating blow of the entire morning.

For one American watching the events unfold,

the attack is more than a national catastrophe.

On that morning, Kimmel was slated to play golf with Short.

Kimmel was up when he got the phone call

that planes were now attacking Pearl Harbor.

He put on his uniform, had it only partially buttoned

and walked out on to the lawn of his house, and from there,

looked out at history unfolding in front of him.

Bombs are going off, Japanese planes are flying by

and it's a nightmare!

But Kimmel's nightmare is made even worse,

by the fact that he'd missed a glaring opportunity

to act that very morning.

Around half an hour before the Japanese planes arrived,

he'd received a phone call

that an enemy submarine had been spotted

and destroyed by an American ship,

just outside Pearl Harbor.

Despite the warning, he'd failed to prepare for attack.

So the great irony here is that America fires the first shot

in the Pacific war.

Because we fling all these depth charges

at this Japanese midget submarine.

So we fire the first shot

and then we stand down and allow ourselves to be attacked.

Kimmel has heard so many war warnings at this point that,

even when USS Ward says,

"I depth-charged this submarine and sank it,"

he just doesn't believe that it could possibly be true.

That's, you know, one of the failings that morning.

Kimmel knew his days as commander of the Pacific Fleet were over.

And, of course, later famously said,

"If only one of those bombs had killed me,

how much better it would have been."

By 9:45 a.m., the attack is over.

In just two hours,

the Japanese had dropped hundreds of bombs

and dozens of torpedoes

to cripple the American Pacific Fleet.

328 American aircraft are put out of action

nineteen navy ships destroyed,

and in total,

2,403 Americans would be killed.

It was a terrible thing,

as we went out in the Harbor to see

men in the, in the water…

bodies, it was a horrible sight.

So the Japanese could call it a perfect day.

"We've pulled this thing off, it was extremely daring,

we know that we've hit the enemy, terribly hard."

They feel it's mission accomplished.

With the Pacific Fleet in ruins,

the Japanese can push ahead with territorial expansion

in the South Pacific.

Within 24 hours, they invade Hong Kong,

Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines, and quickly drive south.

In a matter of weeks they would have taken over

thousands of miles of territory.

Reaching even the ultimate prize,

the oil of the Dutch east Indies.

Embolden by their success at Pearl Harbor

and new territorial gains,

and with the valuable oil supply feeding their huge war machine,

the Japanese feel more powerful than ever.

But as the new empire takes shape,

the man behind the plan to destroy Pearl Harbor,

Admiral Yamamoto, falls into a depression.

He fears the attack missed important targets.

Yamamoto, having spent some time in the United States, knew two things.

That number one, that Americans worshiped their battleships.

So if you knock the battleships out in the first round,

Americans would feel as if they were stripped

of their most potent weapon.

The other thing that Yamamoto knew was that the Americans

had really good aircraft carriers and great aircraft and pilots on them.

That was the thing that needed to get knocked out.

And the worst possible outcome was to destroy their battleships

and leave their aircraft carriers untouched.

Which is exactly what happened.

By total chance, America's three Pacific aircraft carriers

had not been in Pearl Harbor on the morning of December the 7th.

While his colleagues don't see this as important,

Yamamoto understands its significance.

He was an innovator, out front in terms of recognizing

the significance of air power at sea,

and recognized that this was the coming wave.

So if you look at aircraft carriers as the fundamental units of the fleet,

Pearl Harbor does nothing to weaken the United States.

But there was another reason that Yamamoto's mood was low.

As he'd feared, the American public hadn't reacted

as his military colleagues were hoping.

Far from being shocked into submission,

the attack had completely the opposite effect.

The Japanese really kick over a hornet's nest,

because the Americans are like, "Wow, we can't take this sitting down,

we need to strike back."

People want to be involved in this war.

People are rushing to the recruiting stations.

A country like the United States

is never gonna be brought to its knees as the result of losing one battle.

No matter how devastating the Japanese attack had been,

had they sunk every single battleship,

had they found and sunk those carriers,

it still would have meant that the United States was galvanized

into a full-scale war.

The one man who understood, immediately,

the true meaning of Pearl Harbor was of course Winston Churchill.

Because he knew that although a vast amount

of dying and killing had to go on,

that once the United States was in the war,

with this stupendous economic and industrial power,

that the Allies must, in the end, prevail.

Churchill claimed he went to bed that night

saying to himself in his head,

"So we had won after all."

With Anti-Japanese feeling at an all-time high,

President Franklin Roosevelt grasped the opportunity

to unite the country for the fight ahead.

In a speech to congress, he declares war

on this new and evil enemy.

Roosevelt calls it dastardly and evil.

He calls it a day of infamy,

American opinion rallies strongly against Japan.

No matter how long it may take us…

to overcome this premeditated invasion,

the American people in their righteous might

will win through, through absolute victory.

From a political standpoint,

Pearl Harbor is a gift to, you know, FDR,

that he couldn't have possibly imagined.

That all of a sudden, all of the road blocks

to being able to fight against the Axis had been magically removed.

Four days after Roosevelt's speech

marks the beginning of the war with Japan,

Hitler weighs in,

declaring war on the US.

Less than a week after the Pearl Harbor attack,

united and galvanized,

America is now a fully-fledged combatant in World War II.

Within days, Roosevelt lays plans for the bombing of Tokyo,

using two of the aircraft carriers

that were untouched during Pearl Harbor.

In three months, half of the ships

thought to have been destroyed during the attack,

are returned to service.

Eventually, all but three will be fully repaired.

As the Pacific conflict continues into 1942,

and the full military might of America is unleashed,

the war is only just beginning.

Re-sync & redact: BLU DUAINE blu.duaine@protonmail.com