"A Day Which Will Live in Infamy"

On a sleepy Sunday morning, 7 December 1941, 353 Imperial Japanese airplanes approached the US naval base of Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Territory of Hawaii. Without warning (or any declaration of war), Japan attacked the US at 7:48 am.  By the next day, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt would declare war on the Japanese Empire, thus entering America into World War Two.  Three days after that, Germany and Japan would both declare war on the United States (though they had no treaty obligation with Japan to do so). 

While Japan was attacking the Hawaiian installation, it was also attacking other American and British military sites in the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, Malaya, Singapore and Hong Kong. The Japanese goal was to disable the US and British fleets, preventing them from hampering Japan's action in Southeast Asia. In hindsight, it seems a tremendous act of hubris—for Japan, a tiny island nation, to attack a huge, resource-rich continental power.  At the time, America's population was approximately twice the size of Japan's.

I was born 7 miles (and 22 years) away from Pearl Harbor—where the hulking USS Arizona still lurks below the water.  A tiny streamlet of oil courses its way to the water's surface. Straddling the corpse is the USS Arizona Memorial which stands-over, but does not touch, the sunken ship.