7.12.1941 Japan attacked Pearl Harbor

At dawn on December 7, 1941, the first wave of Japanese aircraft took off from aircraft carriers 400 miles north of Hawaii. The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

As early as November 26, 1941, a fleet of 31 ships, including aircraft carriers, set sail from Japan under the command of Admiral Chuichi Nagumo. American intelligence monitoring Japanese military preparations did not detect the flotilla. At dawn on December 7, the first wave of Japanese aircraft took off from carriers 400 miles north of Hawaii.

Despite the threat of war with Japan, a peaceful Sunday routine could be seen at the American base. The base was unprepared for the Nakajima torpedo bombers, which flew at low altitude, and the Aichi dive bombers that swooped down from above.

"These planes were followed by horizontal bombers, which flew direct anti-aircraft fire to destroy the already burning ships, and Zero fighters, which struck American planes on the airfields. The action on the ground was a story of individual courage in the midst of collective chaos. Regardless of the extensive damage inflicted on Pearl Harbor, the attack failed in part because the American carriers were not in port and therefore not destroyed," writes R. G. Grant in his book Battles.

Although President Roosevelt was undoubtedly one of the best informed men in the US, even he could not give an answer to the question: How could the Japanese have caught us with our pants down?

As late as December 1941, a special commission was appointed by the United States Congress to continually anticipate the results of its investigation. The whole thing was completed in 1946, when forty voluminous volumes dissected in minute detail all the events leading up to the war between the U.S. and Japan, including thethe reasons why clear orders were not sent by the ministries of the respective branches of the armed forcesto alert fleets and crews in exposed positions.

"There was also open discussion before the Committee of Inquiry about the so-called Code Purple, which was used during the war...and about the so-called magic system by which the Americans were able to read Japanese dispatches so encrypted from August 1940 onwards. Many of the questions surrounding the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor have been clarified by the aforementioned Congressional investigative commission, others have been answered by historians, yet allyet some remain unanswered to this day, and the mystery of Pearl Harbor will probably never be fully solved...," writes Miroslav Šiška in History on Saturday.

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