As early as 1908 the United States viewed Hawaii as a Pacific refueling station. That year the United States Congress authorized construction of a coaling station at Pearl Harbor on Oahu, the key island in the U.S. territory of Hawaii. In the 1930s, U.S. Army Air Corps bases added a new dimension of defense—and made Japan concerned about America’s challenge as a Pacific power.

Fast forward to May 1940 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt shifted 200 warships from California to Pearl Harbor, causing some U.S. Navy officers to protest. As Japan and the United States moved toward war, an admiral called the U.S. Pacific Fleet base a “mousetrap” because of its narrow channel to the sea. But without the fleet in Hawaii, another admiral later said, “The entire Hawaiian Islands would have been open and ripe for invasion.”

July 1941: The U.S., long concerned over Japan’s conquests in China, tried to thwart Japanese expansion by cutting the country’s oil supply lines—depriving Japan of virtually all military fuel. In October Japan’s minister of war, Gen. Hideki Tojo, became prime minister and readied the nation for war with the U.S. As U.S. and Japanese diplomats met in November 1941, in Washington, Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto launched Operation Hawaii, an attack on Pearl Harbor by aircraft carriers and submarines.

Earlier, in September 1941, Japanese naval officers had played a war game that indicated two or three of Japan’s six carriers would be lost in a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. But Yamamoto—chief umpire of the game—dismissed the results.

At dawn on Sunday, December 7, Yamamoto’s carriers were 275 miles (440 kilometers) north of Oahu. Most sailors were still asleep at 7:55 when the first of some 350 Japanese warplanes attacked Pearl Harbor. The strike killed 2,403 Americans and wounded 1,178. By chance, all three U.S. aircraft carriers were elsewhere. A stunned American officer sounded the alarm: “AIR RAID PEARL HARBOR X THIS IS NO DRILL.” America went to war with the battle cry, “Remember Pearl Harbor!”

Yamamoto, commander in chief of the Combined Fleet of the Japanese Navy, modeled his December 7, 1941, strike on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor on the attack by British carriers on the Italian fleet at Taranto in November 1940.

U.S. Admiral Chester W. Nimitz took command of the shattered fleet. Neither admiral knew they would match wits in the Battle of Midway, a turning point of the war.

Yamamoto was a bold, poker-playing gambler. He opposed Japanese militarists, thereby risking assassination—the fate of other antiwar officers. In 1939, when he became head of the fleet and saw Japan moving toward war with the United States, he argued for a “fatal blow” on the U.S. Pacific Fleet to produce a negotiated peace. The blow would be an attack on Pearl Harbor. But the U.S. aircraft carriers escaped unharmed. Yamamoto’s next plan was to draw the U.S. naval forces into battle at Midway and destroy them there.

Taking command of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, Nimitz showed his confidence in Navy cryptanalysts who were deciphering Japanese coded messages. When, in the spring of 1942, they said Yamamoto was planning to invade Midway, staff officers insisted that the cryptanalysts had been deceived. But Nimitz sent his three available aircraft carriers—the Enterprise, Hornet and Yorktown—against Yamamoto and defeated him. It was the turning point of the Pacific war.

In May 1942 a Japanese fleet headed for the U.S. Navy base on Midway, a tiny atoll named for its mid-Pacific location. The island lay about 1,300 miles (2,080 kilometers) northwest of Hawaii. Yamamoto, architect of the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, called his new plan Operation MI—the Midway-Aleutians assault. He believed that Nimitz would try to intercept the Aleutian-bound force, exposing Midway—and ultimately Hawaii—to invasion.

Nimitz, forewarned by cryptanalysts who had broken Japan’s code, knew Yamamoto’s plan. U.S. carrier aircraft, with a 175-mile (280-kilometer) range, launched when the Japanese were 200 miles (320 kilometer) away. Many planes ditched. But several U.S. torpedo-carrying planes spotted the fleet. Japanese fighters and anti-aircraft guns hammered the torpedo planes. But as they came in at low level, U.S. dive-bombers zoomed virtually unopposed on the aircraft carriers Akagi, Kaga, and Soryu—veterans of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The U.S. bombers dived on Japanese carriers crowded with aircraft being armed and fueled. The bombers sank three carriers and fatally damaged the fourth. Along with the U.S. carrier Yorktown, whose 2,270 survivors were rescued, the destroyer U.S.S. Hammann was lost.

From Midway on, the U.S. forces were on the offensive in the Pacific. Japan found itself defending an ever-shrinking empire until its armed forces surrendered in September 1945.

#