When the attackers finally headed back toward their ships around 10:00 A.M., the ordeal at Pearl Harbor was far from over. Thousands of men and women had been wounded, some of them severely, and in the hours following the disaster, they streamed into local hospitals, including the island's largest—Tripler Army Hospital, located several miles east of Pearl. As doctors and nurses tirelessly fought to save the wounded, armies of rescuers worked around the clock trying to free sailors trapped in the burning hulks of their once-proud ships. Thirty-two men were pulled from holes gouged in the upturned hull of the capsized Oklahoma,but many others from that vessel—448 to be exact—lost their lives.

Even while these desperate rescues continued, thousands of miles away in the United States, the country was in a state of shock. Standing before a packed...