Further north, the radar station at Opana Point picked up a massive incoming formation on its screen just before seven in the morning. The two privates operating it, Elliott and Lockard, reported the contact to the intercept centre. The duty officer there, a newly assigned lieutenant named Tyler, concluded the blips were a flight of American bombers expected in from California that morning. He told the operators not to worry about it. The formation continued south.

At forty-eight minutes past seven, Hawaiian time, the attack began. Commander Mitsuo Fuchida led the first wave of a hundred and eighty-three aircraft in from the north. Torpedo bombers came in low over the harbour, targeting the row of battleships moored along the eastern shore of Ford Island. Dive bombers peeled off toward Hickam Field, the main Army air base, and Wheeler Field, the primary fighter station. Zero fighters swept ahead to strafe parked aircraft before they could get airborne, catching them wingtip to wingtip in the open, where they had been arranged to prevent sabotage on the ground.

Men aboard the battleships woke to the sound of explosions. Ammunition lockers were locked. Most of the Navy's large guns were unmanned. Only a quarter of the machine guns got into action in those first minutes. The famous signal went out from the headquarters of the patrol wing: "Air raid Pearl Harbor. This is not drill." But by then, the torpedoes were already running.

The first great blow fell on Oklahoma. Four torpedoes struck her in rapid succession, then a fifth. The last two hit above her belt armour at the waterline. She rolled. Then she kept rolling, capsizing completely, trapping hundreds of men inside her hull. Four hundred and twenty-nine of her crew died that morning. Alongside her, West Virginia took seven torpedoes, the last tearing away her rudder. She settled to the bottom of the harbour, her captain, Mervyn Bennion, cut down on his own bridge by fragments from a bomb that struck the ship moored next to her.

Then Arizona. A modified armour-piercing shell, converted from a sixteen-inch naval shell and dropped from high altitude, punched through her forward deck and detonated her ammunition magazine. The explosion was visible across Oahu. Nearly twelve hundred men died in moments, almost half of all American fatalities that morning. The blast was so total that Arizona was never salvaged. She remains where she sank, a tomb beneath the harbour.

Nevada, already hit by a torpedo and burning amidships, made a run for the harbour entrance. Her captain was ashore; a lieutenant commander named Thomas took the conn and got her moving. Japanese bombers immediately concentrated on her, hoping to sink her in the channel and block the harbour entirely. She took six more bomb hits. To prevent exactly that blockage, she was deliberately run aground near the harbour entrance, her crew fighting fires as she settled into the mud.

California was hit by two bombs and two torpedoes. Her crew was raising steam to fight the flooding when they were ordered to abandon ship, just as burning oil from the destroyed Arizona drifted down toward them across the water. She sank slowly over the next two days. Maryland and Tennessee took bomb hits but stayed afloat. Pennsylvania, the fleet flagship, sat in dry dock and absorbed one bomb. The dry dock itself saved her. Two destroyers sharing the dock with her, Cassin and Downes, were not so fortunate: bombs pierced their fuel tanks, the leaking oil caught fire, and flooding the dock to fight the flames only spread the burning oil higher. Both were gutted.

The air bases ashore fared no better. At Hickam Field, at Wheeler, at Kaneohe, aircraft were destroyed on the ground in the opening minutes. Of roughly four hundred American aircraft in Hawaii that morning, nearly two hundred were destroyed and another hundred and fifty damaged. Eight Army pilots managed to get airborne during the attack. Six of them were credited with shooting down at least one Japanese plane. The rest could only watch.

Seventy-five minutes after the first wave arrived, the second wave of a hundred and seventy-one aircraft came in from the north. This wave found the defences already roused. Anti-aircraft fire was heavier, more organised. Japanese losses in the second wave were more than double those of the first. The bombers hit what they could, targeting hangars, fuel lines, and surviving ships, but the element of surprise was gone. By half past nine, the last Japanese aircraft turned north toward the carriers.

The human cost was being tallied in the harbour's smoke-filled water. Ninety minutes after it began, the attack was over. Two thousand, four hundred and three Americans were dead: sailors, soldiers, marines, and sixty-eight civilians. Among the dead civilians were three Honolulu firemen who had driven to Hickam Field to fight the blazes and were killed by Japanese machine-gun fire and bombs as they worked. Another six firemen were wounded. Every one of the Americans killed or wounded that morning was, legally, a non-combatant. There was no state of war when the first torpedo hit.

Japanese losses were remarkably light: twenty-nine aircraft, five midget submarines, and a hundred and thirty personnel. Of those, fifty-five were airmen and nine were submariners. One man, Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki, whose midget submarine had grounded twice, swam ashore and was captured by a member of the Hawaii National Guard. He became the first Japanese prisoner of war taken by the United States.

Aboard his flagship north of Oahu, Nagumo faced a choice. Several of his junior officers, including Fuchida, urged him to launch a third strike. The harbour's oil tank farms, repair shops, and dry docks had not been touched. Those facilities were what kept the Pacific Fleet operational. Without them, Pearl Harbor would be a shell. Nagumo hesitated. His losses in the second wave had been steep. The location of the three American aircraft carriers, which had been at sea during the attack and were completely unscathed, was unknown. A third wave would require landing the first two waves, rearming, and launching again, with planes returning after dark, a manoeuvre no Japanese carrier crew had trained for.

Nagumo ordered the task force to withdraw. The oil tanks stood unburned. The repair shops were intact. The submarine base was untouched. Yamamoto, when he learned of the decision, said later it had been a great mistake. Admiral Chester Nimitz, who would take command of the Pacific Fleet in the weeks that followed, went further: he argued that if those shore facilities had been destroyed, serious American operations in the Pacific would have been postponed by more than a year. Rear Admiral Hara, one of the Japanese carrier commanders, put it with bleak precision: "We won a great tactical victory at Pearl Harbor and thereby lost the war."

The next morning in Washington, President Roosevelt addressed a joint session of Congress. He called December 7 "a date which will live in infamy", described the attack as deliberate and unprovoked, and asked for a declaration of war against Japan. Congress obliged in less than an hour. Four days after the attack, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States, though the Tripartite Pact with Japan did not require them to do so. Congress declared war on both that same afternoon. A conflict that had been Europe's war, and Asia's war, became in the space of a week a single global war.

The salvage operation at Pearl Harbor began almost immediately. A Navy captain named Wallin led the effort, directing thousands of divers and civilian contractors who worked in the oily darkness inside the damaged hulls, patching holes, clearing wreckage, pumping out flooded compartments. Within six months, five battleships and two cruisers had been refloated and sent to shipyards for repair. The work continued for another year, a total of roughly twenty thousand hours of diving. Six of the eight battleships struck that morning eventually returned to service. They fought in shore bombardment roles for the rest of the war, and five of them took part in the last battleship-on-battleship engagement in history, at the Battle of Surigao Strait in 1944.

Two ships were beyond saving. Arizona remained on the harbour bottom, her superstructure cut away, her hull becoming a memorial. Utah, an old target ship repurposed for anti-aircraft training, also stayed where she sank. The men inside both hulls were never recovered. A white memorial structure was built above Arizona's hull in the early 1960s, spanning the wreck without touching it, the ship's oil still seeping slowly to the surface decades later, what visitors came to call "the tears of Arizona".

The attack's consequences spread far beyond the harbour. Within hours of the strike, Japanese forces began their campaign in the Philippines. Three days after Pearl Harbor, Japanese aircraft sank two British capital ships, the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, off the coast of Malaya. Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who had promised to declare war on Japan within the hour of any Japanese attack on the United States, described the news as the most direct shock he received in the entire war. Japan was suddenly supreme across a vast stretch of ocean, from the central Pacific to the Indian Ocean.

At home, the attack triggered fear and suspicion that fell hardest on Japanese Americans. Within hours, hundreds of community leaders were rounded up and taken to high-security camps. Over the following months, more than a hundred and ten thousand Japanese Americans, nearly all of those living on the West Coast, were forcibly removed to interior camps. In Hawaii itself, where Japanese Americans made up more than a third of the population, the internment was smaller in scale but no less traumatic for those caught in it.

The strategic ironies accumulated with time. Yamamoto had designed the attack to prevent the Pacific Fleet from interfering with Japan's southern advance. He succeeded, for a few months. But the ships he most needed to destroy, the aircraft carriers, had been at sea that Sunday morning and were completely untouched. The war that followed would be fought primarily by carriers, not battleships. The doctrine that had made the battleships the primary target, the idea that battleships were the decisive weapon of naval war, died at Pearl Harbor, though not in the way Japan intended.

More consequential still was what Nagumo left standing. The oil tank farms held enough fuel to sustain fleet operations. The repair shops could put damaged ships back to sea. The submarine base sheltered the force that would, over the following three years, strangle Japan's economy by cutting its supply lines. And in the basement of the old administration building, a cryptanalytic unit continued its work, eventually breaking Japanese naval codes and providing the intelligence that enabled the ambush at Midway in June 1942, the battle that broke Japan's carrier strength and turned the Pacific war permanently.

For decades afterward, the question of what Washington knew and when it knew it refused to go away. American commanders had held Pearl Harbor on alert multiple times in the months before the attack, always releasing the alert when nothing happened. A naval war game in 1932 had demonstrated Pearl was vulnerable to exactly this kind of carrier-launched strike. A general named Mitchell had written a report in the 1920s identifying the specific vulnerabilities in Hawaii. The warnings existed. They were filed and forgotten.

Admiral Stark, the Navy's chief in Washington, was found to have failed in his duty to adequately warn the fleet commander at Pearl Harbor, Admiral Kimmel, of the severity of the situation in the final days before the attack. Kimmel himself was relieved of command shortly after. Fifteen Medals of Honor were awarded to men who fought at Pearl Harbor that morning, along with dozens of other decorations. The six pilots credited with shooting down Japanese aircraft during the attack received the Distinguished Service Cross. The firemen killed at Hickam Field did not receive their Purple Hearts until December 7, 1984, the forty-third anniversary of the attack.

The Japanese plan had been built on a specific hope: that a devastating blow to the Pacific Fleet would break American morale, force Washington to abandon its demands, and open the way to a negotiated peace. That hope was wrong from the beginning. The attack on Pearl Harbor did not demoralise the United States. It unified it with a fury that surprised even those Japanese officers who had studied America most carefully. Yamamoto, who knew the country better than almost anyone in the Japanese high command, had said before the attack that he feared they would be waking a sleeping giant. He was right.

The men who died at Pearl Harbor were, as the author Craig Nelson observed, almost entirely very young, mostly seventeen and eighteen years old, the junior enlisted personnel who lived aboard the ships while their officers lived ashore in houses. They had no warning, no declaration of war, no reason to expect that Sunday morning to be different from any other. The oldest of them had been children during the last world war. They were the ones on the water when the torpedoes came. What followed, the four years of total war across two oceans, the tens of millions dead worldwide, the atomic bombs, the end of the old empires, the shape of the modern world, all of it traces a line back to that harbour, that morning, and those boys.