The Pearl Harbor Murders

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In less than forty-eight hours, six Japanese aircraft carriers-220 miles north of the island of Oahu-would launch 350 warplanes in an attack not preceded by any formal declaration of war. Every significant Naval and air installation would feel the brunt of the surprise raid, which lasted less than two hours and cost the United States military three destroyers, three cruisers, eight auxiliary craft, eight battleships, 188 aircraft and the lives of 1,763 officers and men. This figure increased to 2,404 when fatalities ashore-including civilian-were added to the grim roster.

To the survivors, these deaths seemed more like murder than casualties of war: the unsuspecting victims on the Arizona, a thousand sailors on a single battleship obliterated by a single bomb during peacetime, were victims of a sneak attack one historian aptly termed as "outside the bounds of traditional warfare … better described as mass murder."

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