Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 Hour by Hour From Radar Blip to Declaration

At 7:02 on a Sunday morning, a radar operator on a hilltop in Hawaii saw something on his screen that was too large to be anything he had seen before. He asked the question any good operator would ask. He called it in. And the answer he got back was a shrug.

That one shrug is the hinge of the whole story. Pearl Harbor is remembered as a day of destruction, and it was. But the clock on that Sunday, read minute by minute, shows something more useful than a catalogue of damage. It shows a series of warnings that were seen and not understood, a set of defenders who were not ready, and then a roomful of ordinary sailors and soldiers who rose to the moment with a courage no plan had counted on. The whole thing took less than two hours. The answer took a day.

The times below are Hawaiian time on December 7, 1941, with the Washington answer on December 8. I have given times that the record supports to the minute or near it, and where the accounts differ by a few minutes I say "about."

Before dawn: the warnings

About 3:42 a.m.: a periscope outside the harbor

The minesweeper Condor, patrolling off the entrance to Pearl Harbor, spotted what looked like a periscope moving in the restricted waters outside the harbor. It signalled the destroyer Ward, which came to search. The Ward found nothing and the search was called off. Remember this entry, because it is the first of several hints that the harbor was already under watch by an enemy.

About 6:37 a.m.: the Ward finds the submarine

A few hours later, the Ward saw a small submarine, a Japanese midget submarine, trailing a supply ship that was about to pass through the harbor's anti-submarine net. The net was open for the ship, and the intruder was trying to slip in behind it. The destroyer's captain, Lieutenant William Outerbridge, ordered an attack.

Shortly before 7:00 a.m.: the first American shots of the Pacific war

The Ward opened fire and dropped depth charges on the submarine, which sank. The crew radioed a report that they had attacked and dropped depth charges on a submarine in the defensive sea area. This was the first American fire of the war in the Pacific, and it came before the first Japanese aircraft arrived. The message went up the chain of command, and it moved slowly. The officers who received it had to decide whether it was a real submarine or another false alarm, which had happened before. They called for confirmation. That was reasonable. It was also an hour that could not be recovered.

The radar contact

About 7:02 a.m.: Opana Point

On the north shore of Oahu, a small mobile radar station at Opana Point was run by two Army privates, Joseph Lockard and George Elliott. They were scheduled to shut down at 7:00, but the truck that was supposed to bring them breakfast was late, and they kept the set running for practice. At about 7:02 the screen showed a very large return, a mass of aircraft well to the north, more than a hundred miles out. Elliott, who was operating the oscilloscope, said it was larger than anything he had seen. They plotted it and called the information centre at Fort Shafter.

Only one officer was there, a lieutenant named Kermit Tyler, who was covering the unit as part of his training. Tyler knew that a flight of American B-17 bombers was expected from the mainland that morning, and he reasoned that the radar had picked up the B-17s. He told the operators in effect not to worry. The operators, who had never seen a return that size, followed the contact until it merged with the island's clutter and then shut down.

Notice how undramatic this is. Nobody was negligent in any simple way. The radar was new, the system was young, there was no routine for passing an urgent report up the chain, and an inexperienced officer made a reasonable guess that turned out to be wrong. That is how disasters arrive. A free country that does not keep a standing military on high alert is accepting a risk, and a great deal of Pearl Harbor is the cost of that risk made visible. I will return to this.

The attack

About 7:48 to 7:55 a.m.: the first wave

The Japanese carrier force had sailed in secret across the northern Pacific, and at dawn it launched aircraft from six carriers in two waves, 353 planes in all. The first wave, about 183 aircraft, came in from the north and swept over the island. The first attacks came between about 7:48 and 7:55, with bombs falling on Ford Island's naval air station and on the airfields at Hickam, Wheeler and elsewhere, where aircraft were parked in tight rows, wingtip to wingtip, as a precaution against sabotage. It was a precaution against the wrong threat. They were easy targets.

Within minutes a message went out from the naval air station in plain language: "Air raid Pearl Harbor. This is not drill." That sentence is among the most chilling in the American military record. A drill was a thing everyone expected. This was not.

About 8:00 a.m.: Battleship Row

The Pacific Fleet's battleships were moored in a line along the east side of Ford Island, in the spot later called Battleship Row. Torpedo bombers swept over them in low, fast passes, and level bombers dropped armour-piercing bombs from above. The Oklahoma was struck by several torpedoes and capsized in minutes, trapping many of her crew inside. In all, 429 men were lost on the Oklahoma. The West Virginia and the California took torpedoes and began to sink at their moorings. The Nevada, hit by a torpedo, got under way and tried to reach the open sea, and was beached to keep from blocking the channel.

About 8:06 a.m.: the Arizona

A bomb struck the Arizona near her forward magazine, and the ship exploded. The blast was enormous and the ship went down in minutes. Of those aboard, 1,177 officers and men died, roughly half of all the Americans killed that day. The wreck remains where it sank, a memorial over the grave of most of her crew, and oil still rises from it.

Courage amid the confusion

About 8:00 to 8:30 a.m.: on the West Virginia

Aboard the West Virginia, Doris Miller, a Black messman who was a mess attendant second class, was collecting laundry when the alarm went off. In the Navy of 1941 Black sailors were largely limited to jobs like his, cooking and serving, and were not trained on the guns. Miller went on deck. He helped carry wounded men, and he helped move the ship's captain, Mervyn Bennion, who had been mortally wounded by shrapnel. Then he took over an anti-aircraft machine gun. He had not been trained to use it. He fired it until he ran out of ammunition and was ordered to abandon ship.

The Navy at first did not name him; for some months he was referred to only as an unidentified Black sailor. Under public pressure from Black newspapers, he was recognised and awarded the Navy Cross, which was presented by Admiral Chester Nimitz in May 1942. Miller died in November 1943 when the escort carrier Liscome Bay was sunk. His story belongs in The Harlem Hellfighters Spent 191 Days Under Fire and Came Home Heroes's company: another American who served under a flag that had not yet kept its word to him.

All morning: ordinary people

Beyond the famous names, the record is full of men who did what the moment required. Sailors fought fires. Men dived into burning, oil-slicked water to pull shipmates out. Soldiers at Hickam and Wheeler ran to the flight line to fire rifles at strafing planes. Ships got their guns into action, many of them with their crews improvising because ammunition lockers were locked and key-holders were ashore. The defenders got to their stations and fought back, and the Japanese lost 29 aircraft in the raid.

The second wave and the end of the raid

About 8:54 a.m.: the second wave

A second force of about 171 aircraft arrived at roughly 8:54, concentrating more on the remaining ships, the airfields and the dry docks. By this point the defenders had guns in action, and the second wave met stiffer resistance. The attack was over by roughly 9:45 to 10:00 (sources differ by a few minutes), when the last of the Japanese aircraft headed back to their carriers.

Tally of the day

When the smoke cleared, 2,403 Americans were dead, 2,335 military personnel and 68 civilians, and 1,178 were wounded. Four battleships were sunk, the Arizona, Oklahoma, West Virginia and California, and others were damaged; a number of cruisers and destroyers were hit; and nearly two hundred aircraft were destroyed. It was the worst single day of the war for the United States Navy.

But the Japanese had failed to hit three things that mattered. They did not sink the Pacific Fleet's aircraft carriers, which were away from the harbor on that day. They did not destroy the dockyard's repair facilities. And they did not hit the huge oil storage tanks. Most of the sunken battleships were later raised and repaired, and several returned to service. The surprise was devastating and not decisive, which is a lesson in itself: the attack woke a sleeping giant in a way that no negotiation could have.

December 8: the answer

About 12:30 p.m., Washington: the address

Early on the morning of December 8, the news was already on every front page and every radio. At about 12:30 in the afternoon in Washington, President Franklin Roosevelt went before a joint session of Congress. His address was brief, about six minutes. He opened with a line that has become part of the national memory:

Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

He told Congress that the attack had come while the two countries were still at peace and, at the request of Japan, still in conversation with its government about maintaining peace in the Pacific. Near the end he said:

No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.

Then he asked Congress to declare that a state of war existed.

Afternoon, December 8: the vote

Congress did not delay. The Senate voted 82 to 0, and the House of Representatives voted 388 to 1. The one dissent came from Representative Jeannette Rankin of Montana, who had also voted against the declaration in 1917 and who explained that she could not vote for war. Whatever you think of her vote, it was an act of conscience cast in public. The president signed the declaration in the afternoon. Germany and Italy declared war on the United States on December 11, and Congress answered in kind.

The constitutional point

Here is where the day connects to the document. Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the Constitution gives Congress the power "To declare War." It does not give it to the president. The Founders were wary of a single man who could take a nation into war on his own, and they gave the decision to the branch closest to the people. On December 8, 1941 the system worked as the Framers intended: the president, as commander in chief and the nation's voice, reported the facts and asked, and Congress, by an overwhelming vote, decided.

I make the point because in later decades the practice has drifted. Many of America's later conflicts have been conducted without a formal declaration, on the strength of authorisations or on the president's own authority. That is a subject for another post, and there are reasonable arguments on several sides. But the model of December 8 is still the model: a clear threat, a clear request, a recorded vote and a nation that knows it has chosen. Read the clause on the Constitution page and notice how short it is.

What the timeline teaches

I would put three lessons in numbered form, because the clock demands order.

1. Warnings are only as good as the system that carries them. The Condor saw a periscope, the Ward sank a submarine and Opana Point saw the aircraft. Each of those signals was real. What failed was the chain that should have joined them. After the war, investigations took up the question of blame, and Admiral Husband Kimmel and General Walter Short, the commanders in Hawaii, were relieved of their commands. People still argue about how fairly blame was spread. What no one disputes is that the information was there and the connection was not made.

1. Readiness costs money, and a free republic is slow to pay it. A nation that dislikes standing armies is a nation that must be prepared to build one quickly, and Pearl Harbor shows what the delay costs. The American habit is to disarm in peace and re-arm in a rush. The Founders' answer was a navy, which they could fund in peacetime, and the citizen's willingness to bear its cost.

1. Courage is not a matter of rank or planning. Dorie Miller, Lockard and Elliott, the Ward's crew, the sailors who pulled their friends from the water: none of them was following a plan that anyone had written for the day. They did the next right thing. That is the American way of war, and it is the reason the later chapters of the Pacific war could be won. The Doolittle Raid Hit Tokyo Four Months After Pearl Harbor From a Carrier Deck and Midway and the Codebreakers Who Let the Navy Set an Ambush tell what came next, and The Home Front Built Ships in Days and Became the Arsenal of Democracy tells how the country answered.

The objection: could this have been avoided?

Serious people have argued for decades that the attack could have been prevented. The strongest version is that American codebreakers were reading Japanese diplomatic traffic, that Washington knew war was close, and that more had been available to warn Hawaii than Hawaii received. There is something to it. The intelligence was imperfect and the communication was poor.

But the objection can be pressed too far. The most credible reading of the record is not conspiracy but failure of imagination. The Navy and Army in 1941 believed an attack on Hawaii was possible and expected that if it came it would be an attempt at sabotage by agents on the island or a raid, not a carrier strike across thousands of miles of ocean. The Japanese plan was bold and risky, and its success depended on surprise and luck. The responsibility for the attack lies with those who launched it, and the failure of the defence is a lesson in humility, not a theory of betrayal.

The case in brief

1. The warnings of December 7, 1941 were real: a periscope sighted at about 3:42, a submarine sunk by the Ward before 7:00, and a large radar return at about 7:02, but the system that should have joined them did not.
2. The first wave struck at about 7:48 to 7:55 and the Arizona exploded at about 8:06; within roughly two hours it was over, with 2,403 Americans dead and four battleships sunk.
3. Courage, from Dorie Miller on the West Virginia to the unnamed sailors who fought the fires, answered the surprise, and the carriers and the oil tanks were spared.
4. On December 8 Roosevelt asked and Congress, which under Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 alone has the power to declare war, voted 82 to 0 and 388 to 1.
5. The lesson is readiness: connect the warnings, pay for the defence in peacetime, and trust the ordinary citizen who rises to the moment.

What you can do: read Article I, Section 8, Clause 11, then ask your representative in writing how Congress should keep its constitutional role in decisions of war.