The Approach
Attack - First Wave
Attack - Second Wave
The Third Wave Decision
Aftermath

Aftermath 

The American President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, described 7 December 1941 as "a date which will live in infamy". Because Japanese aircraft had bombed Pearl Harbor before a note breaking off diplomatic relations was delivered in Washington he told Congress the following day, "always will we remember the character of the onslaught against us [as an] unprovoked and dastardly attack". A massive sense of shock and outrage at this "sneak" attack swept the United States which ensured that the war against Japan would be fought with the utmost vigour and singlemindedness. As Admiral Yamamoto, C-in-C of the Japanese Combined Fleet, accurately predicted: "we have awakened a sleeping giant and have instilled in him a terrible resolve".

2,335 service personnel and 68 civilians were killed on 7 December; 1,178 people were wounded. 55 Japanese aircrew and nine submariners died. Eighteen ships were sunk or damaged and 174 aircraft were destroyed. The Japanese lost a total of 29 aircraft, nine from the first wave and twenty from the second. Such was the American determination to recover from the reverses of this day that only three ships were total losses, the battleships Arizona and Oklahoma and the target ship Utah. Every other damaged ship was repaired and returned to service at some point during the war. 

The immediate effect of the attack was to deny the Americans any opportunity to retaliate. The destruction of naval and air command systems and such large numbers of aircraft prevented the mounting of a substantial and co-ordinated search operation to find the Japanese task force. In the short term, a stunning success had been achieved. The Japanese had won the time they wanted to conquer south-east Asia. However, although it would have been very difficult to launch an effective third wave assault later on 7 December, the Japanese failure to destroy the base infrastructure and the American carriers ultimately turned Pearl Harbor into a strategic defeat. 

The battleships lost or damaged on 7 December were obsolescent, lacking the speed to escort the more important but vulnerable aircraft carriers. Their loss compelled the Americans to rely on the carrier task forces which later became so successful in the Pacific war. Had its indispensable support facilities been destroyed too, the fleet would have been forced to retreat to harbours on the American west coast, 2,200 miles further away from Japanese operations. The decision not to launch a third wave gave the Americans the opportunity to recover and rebuild. Only six months later, at the Battle of Midway, when the Japanese tried again to destroy the US carriers, the Americans inflicted a decisive defeat on the Japanese Navy which lost four carriers of its own and much of its naval air force. The Pacific war would be hard fought for three more years, but the strategic balance had shifted and, after Midway, the Americans, with the backing of their industrial might, were able to move forward inexorably towards victory. 

Perhaps the greatest mistake the Japanese made was to attack Pearl Harbor at all. Had they not done so, it is by no means certain that America would have declared war on them over continuing aggression in south-east Asia. Even if the Americans had opened hostilities, the US Navy would have been required to advance several thousand miles to take the offensive against Japanese forces secure behind their defensive perimeter, at a time when the Japanese Navy was larger than the US Pacific and Asiatic Fleets combined. Such a campaign would certainly not have been conducted with the fervour which gripped the Americans after the attack at Pearl Harbor. 

For Japan, Pearl Harbor was at the same time its greatest victory and the root cause of its utter defeat. To many Japanese, regardless of its consequences, the attack was a glorious revenge for ninety years of humiliation heaped upon their country by the western nations, but particularly America, ever since Commodore Perry had sailed imperiously into Tokyo Bay in 1853. For America, it was the catalyst which united and galvanised the nation. No longer doubtful about involvement in a distant, largely European, conflict, Americans now had a cause for which to fight. America's entry, coupled with Germany's declaration of war upon the US, was the turning point of the war, changing it from a series of regionalised conflicts to a true world struggle.

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