At 7:55 on the morning of December 7, 1941, Japan launched a massive attack against the United States as its carrier-based aircraft struck the naval base at Pearl Harbor on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. The attack was so devastating that it appeared to have destroyed America's entire Pacific Fleet. By the time Japanese planes returned to their carriers, they had sunk or disabled 19 ships (including six battleships), killed 2,403 soldiers, sailors, and civilians, and destroyed 180 American aircraft, most of them lined up on the ground at Hickham Field. In one of the most thoroughly planned and well-executed maneuvers in modern military history, Japan also attacked American and British bases in Midway, the Philippines, Guam, Hong Kong, and Malaysia. These coordinated attacks led President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to speak of December 7 as "a date that will live in infamy" on the following day, when he asked the Congress for a declaration of war against Japan.

Although the bombing of Pearl Harbor is known in history as a "sneak attack," tensions between the United States and Japan had been growing for more than a decade. Japan's renunciation of the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 and the London Naval Treaty of 1930 had already put Washington on its guard. But when these were followed by the invasion of China in 1937, the alliance with Germany and Italy in 1940, and the occupation of French Indochina in July 1941, a growing sense that war was inevitable seized both nations--and both were beginning to prepare for that war. In the summer of 1941, the United States froze Japanese assets, embargoed petroleum and other war materials, and virtually severed all commercial relations between the two nations. Even as Japanese planes took off from their carriers, negotiations between Japan and the United States were still in progress. But the Japanese prime minister, Tojo Hideki, had decided on war.

Led by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the Japanese high command had carefully planned the attack on America's Pacific Fleet. Months of intensive planning had led the Japanese military to believe that a well-delivered knockout blow on the Pacific Fleet would prove so devastating that it would force the United States to accept Japanese hegemony over Southeast Asia and the Indonesian archipelago. The Japanese fleet of five carriers, two battleships, three cruisers, and 11 destroyers sailed from Japan on November 26 under great secrecy. Eleven days later, with the fleet 275 miles north of Hawaii, Japan sent 360 planes to attack the American naval and air bases. While damage from the attack was extraordinary, and while it illustrated the laxity of American military planning, the attack still fell short of Japan's objectives. The attacking planes missed what the high command considered the most important target, the three aircraft carriers attached to America's Pacific Fleet. None of the carriers was moored in Pearl Harbor on that Sunday morning.

America's Pacific Fleet would be rebuilt with stunning speed, and the aircraft carrier would prove to be the single most important weapon in the island-hopping war that was to follow the attack on Pearl Harbor. Even more important to the ultimate success of America's war effort was the way the attack on Pearl Harbor became a rallying cry that united the entire country. Antiwar sentiment, which had been running strong and had prevented President Roosevelt from carrying out a more aggressive American role in the struggle against the Axis powers, virtually disappeared overnight. Both Congress and the nation-at-large responded to the attack with a determination that the Japanese had not foreseen. The slogan "Remember Pearl Harbor!" became 20th-century America's equivalent of "Remember the Alamo!," and Roosevelt's request for a declaration of war was passed with only a single dissenting voice, that of Representative Jeanette Rankin of Montana. (She was the first woman to serve in Congress, she had also been the one dissenting congressional voice in the vote that propelled America into WW1.)

American industry immediately shook off the lingering effects of the Great Depression and focused the nation's immense industrial might on winning the war. As a people, Americans were more unified than ever, and the nation discovered that its physical resources and industrial power were unmatched.

But for the first six months following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan's armies swept through Southeast Asia in a series of lightning conquests. With the fall of the fortified Island of Corregidor in May 1942, the entire Philippines fell under Japanese control. In rapid succession, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, and Burma were overwhelmed. Even Australia seemed vulnerable to a Japanese assault by late spring of 1942. The Japanese military drive wasn't halted until the Americans defeated Japanese forces at the battle of Midway in June 1942, which cost Japan not only four of its aircraft carriers but the impetus it had possessed to that point. For the first time, the Japanese navy had been forced to retreat. When the battle of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands also ended in defeat and retreat for the Japanese, the course of the war had decisively changed. From January 1943 on, Japan was to fight a defensive war. American technical superiority, along with the nation's growing confidence in its military performance, would witness one Japanese defeat after the other.

But the War in the Pacific proved to be as long as it was ugly. Fought on islands and archipelagoes once known only to students of geography, it progressed from bloody battle to bloody battle. Almost as difficult for the military as fighting an island-hopping war against Japan's dedicated troops was the constant struggle against disease and a hostile environment. The fighting on Guadalcanal killed some 1,600 American troops. But far more than that number succumbed to malaria and other jungle diseases. In 1944, the American fleet achieved a narrow but decisive victory over the Japanese navy in the Leyte Gulf, which sparked the army's recovery of the Philippines.

As the war progressed, the United States took possession of islands closer to the Japanese mainland, which were then turned into air bases. At this point, a massive bombing campaign against the Japanese mainland began. Japan's cities were constantly targeted as America waged what the French sociologist Raymond Aron has termed "total war." The bombing campaign didn't end until atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9, 1945). The bombing of Japan was already so massive that more Japanese were killed in a single night's firebombing of Tokyo than at either Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Yet with its navy destroyed, its cities in ruins, and its air force reduced to suicide attacks against the encroaching American fleet, there was still some resistance from the Japanese military to the idea of surrender. But because of the emperor's direct intervention, Japan agreed to the surrender terms on August 14, 1945. An exhausted Japanese nation lay in ruins. The official surrender documents were signed on September 2, 1945, on the deck of the USS Missouri.

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