When U.S. Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt declared that December 7, 1941, would be “a date which will live in infamy,” he was primarily referring to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. However, later in that same speech, he clarified that the Pearl Harbor attack was just one element of a larger Japanese offensive that was unfolding that day. On December 8 local time (the following locations are on the other side of the International Date Line from the United States), several hours before the first planes were sighted over Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces began an amphibious invasion of Malaya. By that evening, the Japanese had established a strong beachhead and had devastated the Royal Air Force’s offensive capability in the area. Japanese bombers from Formosa struck U.S. airfields in the Philippines, destroying more than half of the U.S. Army’s aircraft in the Far East and wiping out the largest contingent of B-17 Flying Fortresses outside the continental United States. Japanese bombers launched from the Marshall Islands targeted the American garrison on Wake Island as the prelude to a land invasion (the repulse of an initial amphibious assault on December 11 was the first tactical defeat suffered by the Japanese navy in World War II). British air power in Hong Kong was destroyed by a Japanese air raid, and Japanese land forces invaded Thailand. Air raids on Guam preceded an invasion that the island’s meager defensive units were ill equipped to repel; American forces surrendered on December 10. In Shanghai the gunboats USS Wake and HMS Peterel (U.S. and British flagged, respectively) presented the only obstacles to Japanese occupation of the city’s International Settlement. The Peterel was sunk by Japanese fire after a spirited but ultimately futile defense, while the Wake’s skeleton crew was overwhelmed by a Japanese boarding party, making that ship the only one in the U.S. Navy to be captured intact during World War II. As Roosevelt summarized, “Japan has, therefore, undertaken a surprise offensive extending throughout the Pacific area.”
These successes were entirely in keeping with Japanese Adm. Yamamoto Isoroku’s appraisal of the situation in the Pacific prior to hostilities. “In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain, I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success.” (This is likely the inspiration for the apocryphal “sleeping giant” quote commonly attributed to Yamamoto.) Indeed, almost exactly six months after Pearl Harbor, the tide would permanently turn in the Pacific at the Battle of Midway. Yamamoto’s sweeping, excessively complex battle plans, which had served him well in December 1941, would prove to be his undoing at Midway. American naval pilots, aided by decrypted Japanese communications and no small amount of luck, destroyed Japan’s first-line carrier force and effectively deprived Japan of the ability to prosecute an offensive war in the Pacific.