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Infamy at 7:48 AM: Inside the Attack That Shattered Pearl Harbor
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
At 7:48 AM on December 7, 1941, 353 Japanese aircraft descended on Pearl Harbor in two devastating waves — and nothing about America, or the world, would ever be the same. This episode follows the warnings that failed, the ships that burned, and the 2,403 Americans who never came home.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
It's just before eight in the morning on a Sunday. Pearl Harbor is quiet.
To understand Pearl Harbor, you need to go back further than December of nineteen forty-one. The collision between Japan and the United States had been building for decades.
The answer came from Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander of the Imperial Japanese Navy's Combined Fleet. Yamamoto was an unusual figure in the Japanese military establishment.
Here's the thing about Pearl Harbor. It wasn't invisible.
At seven forty-eight AM, the skies over Pearl Harbor filled with planes. The first wave hit simultaneously across multiple targets: airfields, hangars, support facilities, and the ships moored along Ford Island's Battleship Row.
Two thousand, four hundred and three Americans were killed. One thousand, one hundred and seventy-eight were wounded.
President Roosevelt learned of the attack that Sunday afternoon. By evening, he was drafting what would become one of the most consequential speeches in American presidential history.
What Pearl Harbor destroyed in the United States wasn't just ships. It was a political movement.
The unification that followed Pearl Harbor had a darker dimension. One that the country would spend decades coming to terms with.
Yamamoto's plan was tactically near-perfect. Six carriers crossing four thousand miles undetected.
Two thousand, four hundred and three. That's the number this episode is built around.
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