Osprey Trade Editions : Pearl Harbor (2000)

Sunday December 7, 1941 saw the dawn of modern warfare. Air superiority and surprise led to the shattering of the superior US Pacific Fleet by a well planned and excellently coordinated attack of Japanese naval aircraft and submarine forces. The full might of Japanese naval aviation power was hurled against the United States as six aircraft carriers disgorged their full complements in two waves. Depending on opposing viewpoints, the attack on Pearl Harbor was either a brilliant manoeuvre by an audacious strategist or a piece of unparalleled villainy and deception by a supposedly friendly power. The attack on the home of the US Pacific Fleet precipitated the intervention of the United States into World War II, and became a key event in world history. It was a day, Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared, that would 'live in infamy'. Here, Carl Smith examines the events of that fateful day and looks at why the Japanese were so successful, damaging every US battleship in the harbor, shooting up most other major vessels and many planes, and killing 2,403 Americans for the loss of only 185 killed and one captured. The one respect in which the operation was not a success was in its failure to destroy the US Pacific fleet carriers Enterprise, Lexington and Saratoga, all of which were absent from the harbor on the day of the attack. This was later to be important to the outcome of the pacific war, which was to be decided to a large extent by the results of great carrier battles. Text by Carl Smith with illustrations by Jim Laurier and Adam Hook.