Day of Infamy

Warden was just going back for seconds on both hotcakes and eggs when this blast shuddered by under the floor and rattled the cups It had become very quiet and everybody had stopped eating and looked up at each other.

"Must be doin some dynamitin down to Wheeler Field," somebody said tentatively.

-- James Jones, From Here to Eternity

The brass band on the stern of the U.S.S. Nevada kept on playing The Star- Spangled Banner for the 8 a.m. flag raising even after a Japanese bomber roared overhead and fired a torpedo at the nearby Arizona. The torpedo missed, but the bomber sprayed machine-gun fire at the Nevada's band and tore up its ensign.

"This is the best goddam drill the Army Air Force has ever put on," remarked an Arizona sailor standing idly at the battleship's rail.

"Air raid, Pearl Harbor, this is no drill," said the radio message that went out at 7:58 a.m. from the U.S. Navy's Ford Island command center, relayed throughout Hawaii, to Manila, to Washington. But there was an even sharper sense of imminent disaster in the words someone shouted over the public address system on another docked battleship, the Oklahoma: "Man your battle stations! This is no shit!" Across the lapping waters of the harbor, church bells tolled, summoning the faithful to worship.

Almost alongside the Oklahoma, another torpedo hurtled through the air. After releasing it, recalled Lieut. Jinichi Goto, commander of the Japanese torpedo bombers, "I saw that I was even lower than the crow's nest of the great battleship. My observer reported a huge waterspout springing up . . . 'Atarimashita! ((It hit!))' he cried."

"I felt a very heavy shock and heard a loud explosion," said the Oklahoma's executive officer, Commander Jesse Kenworthy Jr., "and the ship immediately began to list to port. As I attempted to get to the conning tower over decks slippery with oil and water, I felt the shock of another very heavy explosion." Kenworthy gave the order to abandon ship. He barely made it over the rising starboard side as the giant battleship began to keel over, trapping more than 400 crewmen below decks.

Just as the Oklahoma capsized, a tremendous explosion tore open the Arizona. "A spurt of flame came out of the guns in No. 2 turret, followed by an explosion of the forward magazine," said a mechanic on the nearby tanker Ramapo. "The foremast leaned forward, and the whole forward part of the ship was enveloped in flame and smoke and continued to burn fiercely."

In Commander Mitsuo Fuchida's bomber circling overhead, antiaircraft fire knocked a hole in the fuselage and damaged the steering gear, but Fuchida couldn't take his eyes off the fiery death throes of the Arizona. "A huge column of dark red smoke rose to 1,000 ft., and a stiff shock wave rocked the plane," he recalled years later, when he had become a Presbyterian missionary. "It was a hateful, mean-looking red flame, the kind that powder produces, and I knew at once that a big magazine had exploded. Terrible indeed."