Few events in World War II were as defining as the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. The "date which shall live in infamy" — as President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously put it — prompted the American entry into the war, subdued an entrenched isolationist faction in the country's politics and, in the long run, prefigured Washington's assumption of the role of global superpower.
2,403 Americans died and 19 vessels were either sunk or badly damaged in the attack, which involved more than 350 warplanes launched from Japanese carriers that had secretly made their way to a remote expanse of the North Pacific. It caught the brass in Hawaii by surprise and stunned the nation.
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