By Kevin Seabrooke
A wave of 177 Japanese aircraft approaching the U.S Naval base at Oahu’s Pearl Harbor became visible at 7:48 a.m. on Sunday, December 7, 1941. Their mission was to bomb the hangars and parked aircraft of the island’s airfields to prevent a U.S. response and to launch torpedoes at the warships in the harbor.
Within five minutes, four battleships had been hit, including the USS Oklahoma and the USS Arizona—which exploded and sank after a bomb hit its gunpowder stores, killing 1,177 of its crew.
A second wave of 163 Japanese planes attacked about an hour later. And then, one of the pivotal moments of the 20th century was over. In just an hour and a quarter, 21 Navy ships had been sunk or damaged, 188 planes destroyed and 2,402 service personnel killed.
Many of the ships were repaired and went to battle later in the war. But paramount for the U.S., all three of the Pacific Fleet’s aircraft carriers were safely out at sea that Sunday. This was especially important now that the era of battleships was officially over—Japan’s use of six carriers for a coordinated attack had altered naval warfare forever.
Being the “sleeping giant” that was awakened on December 7 is something that most Americans with even a passing knowledge of the events can understand—the shock, the outrage, the desire for revenge. But how did that stunning moment in history come about? Why did the Japanese strike Pearl Harbor knowing they could not possibly hope to win a war against the United States?
The overall goal of the Pearl Harbor attack was to damage as much of the U.S. Pacific fleet as possible to prevent it from responding to Japanese operations taking place on the same day against British, Dutch and U.S. territories in southeast Asia—mainly in order to access oil production. America had begun a partial embargo of the oil shipments over Japan’s refusal to abandon military efforts in China.
Author Mark Stille bemoans the “continuing flood of Pearl Harbor books [that] focus on the failure to avoid conflict in the months before the attack or on the deeply flawed concept that ‘Washington’ conspired to let the Japanese take the first shots of the war while not informing the commanders at Pearl Harbor what was coming.”
Though Stille admits parts of the Japanese plan had merit, the idea of tactical Japanese brilliance holds such appeal is that “such a narrative is much more palatable than to point out that American unpreparedness allowed a flawed plan, executed in a mediocre manner, to inflict heavy losses”
With Pearl Harbor: Japan’s Greatest Disaster (Mark Stille, Osprey/Bloomsbury Publishing, 368pp., 16-pages b.w photos, appendices, Nov. 4, 2025 $35 HC), Stille has produced a detailed and encyclopedic study of the Japanese mindset in the early part of the 20th century—incorporating seemingly every possible aspect of this epic event militarily, politically, geographically, culturally, psychologically.
Stille has successfully set out to clear out the confusion and mythology that has entrenched itself around the event, producing what will surely be a definitive resource on the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
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