The Attack: At 7:55 a.m. on Sunday, December 7, 1941, a drowsy military complex in Hawaii was suddenly jarred awake by an air attack.”

Dorinda continues: A Newsweek magazine article from November 25, 1991 vividly describes the attack.

Newspaper headlines on the day after the attack.

“But no one who was in their sights on Dec. 7, 1941, will ever forget what it was like that day. The planes screaming down for the kill. The shriek of the bombs, the whump of exploding torpedoes, the spit of bullets, the licking flames and oily black smoke over Battleship Row, where the Arizona exploded, entombing its crew, and the Oklahome lay belly up like a dead whale. Charred, bleeding, mangled, the wounded cried out in agony. Corpses floated in the harbor and came to rest nose down in the sand.

When President Roosevelt called Dec. 7 a date that would live in infamy, his patrician eloquence didn’t quite capture how ordinary Americans felt about it. “We weren’t at war,” says Ken Creese, then 17, a radioman second class who survived. “It was a sneak attack — those guys were murdered.’

“The Japanese had planned carefully. They knew that on Sundays, the American fleet was usually in port, with the sailors on liberty. They had maps of Pearl Harbor, and knew where each ship was berthed. They had even built a mockup of the harbor, so their pilots could walk around it and get the sense of looking at their targets from above.”

Next: The War Years