--- title: Myths about Pearl Harbor Debunked By World War II Historian description: A World War II historian debunks three myths about Pearl Harbor for the 80th anniversary. canonical: https://time.com/6124756/pearl-harbor-world-war-ii-myths/ author: Olivia B. Waxman article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2021-12-07T15:44:42.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-10-14T09:17:19.730Z article:section: History og:title: 3 myths about Pearl Harbor, according to a military historian og:description: 80 years later the Japanese attack, myths and misunderstandings persist about what President Franklin D. Roosevelt called "a day that will live in infamy" og:url: https://time.com/6124756/pearl-harbor-world-war-ii-myths/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt25eab61119c74a09/698a203e929fad290ebf80b9/pearl-harbor.jpg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1024 og:image:height: 576 og:image:alt: Destroyer Explodes og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: 3 myths about Pearl Harbor, according to a military historian twitter:description: 80 years later the Japanese attack, myths and misunderstandings persist about what President Franklin D. Roosevelt called "a day that will live in infamy" twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt25eab61119c74a09/698a203e929fad290ebf80b9/pearl-harbor.jpg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # 3 Myths About Pearl Harbor, According to a Military Historian > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-sub-2026q3/newsletters?i=8745522b-761e-41c0-ab7a-1ea5f385e255&cr=time-sub-2026q3-v1) * TIME Subscriptions: [time.com/subscribe-agent](/c/time-sub-2026q3/subscribe?i=8745522b-761e-41c0-ab7a-1ea5f385e255&cr=time-sub-2026q3-v1) ## Video: UNKNOWN: Eighty Years After Pearl Harbor, Two Brothers Are Identified By DNA [Watch (HLS stream): UNKNOWN: Eighty Years After Pearl Harbor, Two Brothers Are Identified By DNA](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/EZaceMGY.m3u8) (8:04)  _Published 2021-11-23. The DPAA is an obscure unit inside the Pentagon, which scours the globe for the remains of long-lost service members who vanished in the air, land or sea during combat. This short documentary from TIME takes viewers along as the DPAA utilizes DNA and forensic analysis to identify the Trapp brothers, and ultimately bring them home to their family._  by [Olivia B. Waxman](https://time.com/author/olivia-b-waxman/)  ## Olivia B. Waxman Staff Writer Dec 7, 2021 3:44 PM UTC The DPAA is an obscure unit inside the Pentagon, which scours the globe for the remains of long-lost service members who vanished in the air, land or sea during combat. This short documentary from TIME takes viewers along as the DPAA utilizes DNA and forensic analysis to identify the Trapp brothers, and ultimately bring them home to their family.  by [Olivia B. Waxman](https://time.com/author/olivia-b-waxman/)  ## Olivia B. Waxman Staff Writer Dec 7, 2021 3:44 PM UTC _Tuesday marks the 80th anniversary of the Japanese attack on_[ _Pearl Harbor_](https://time.com/4577616/remembering-pearl-harbor-history/) _on Dec. 7, 1941, killing some 2,400 American servicemen and leading the U.S. to enter World War II._ _And 80 years later, myths and misunderstandings persist about what President Franklin Roosevelt called “a date which will live in infamy.”_ _“The attack on Pearl Harbor was a crime, a military attack that took place without a declaration of war,” says Rob Citino, senior historian at the National World War II Museum. “But at the same time, all these stories are very, very complex.”_ _Here, Citino highlights, in his own words, a few common misconceptions about how, and where, Pearl Harbor fits in World War II history—and shares what they say about what America chooses to remember about the war._ --- ## **Myth: World War II began with Pearl Harbor**  The American destroyer USS Shaw explodes during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, home of the American Pacific Fleet during World War II, December 7, 1941. Keystone/Hulton Archive—Getty Images It’s in movies, it’s in books. The big myth we have to get rid of is \[marking\] December 7, 1941, as the date World War II began. The U.S. was the last of the great powers to get involved in the war, but [Pearl Harbor](https://time.com/4588330/pearl-harbor-mystery/) didn’t start World War II, not by a long stretch. Picking a discrete moment to kick off \[World War II\] is underselling its complexity. Asia and Europe are already at war. The Japanese had occupied Manchuria in northeastern China in 1931\. They launched a full-scale invasion of China in 1937\. Germans invaded Poland in September 1939 and that, of course precipitated full scale war in Europe. If you’re a citizen of the Soviet Union, your war didn’t start until June 1941 when the Germans invaded you—that’s Operation Barbarossa. But if you happened to live in Ethiopia, World War II opened for you in 1935, when the Italians invaded your country. We don’t talk about this much—Americans don’t like to hear this—but of all the great powers, \[America\] got in last. **Read more:** [_The Real Biggest Myths About World War II, According to a Military Historian_](https://time.com/6045753/v-e-day-wwii-myths/) --- ## **Myth: Virtually everyone in America volunteered for military service in the days after Pearl Harbor**  Cabinet members watch with mixed emotions as President Franklin D. Roosevelt, wearing a black armband, signs the United States' declaration of war against Japan at 4:10 p.m. Washington time on Dec. 8, 1941. Bettmann The myth that we’ve read many times is that the American people rose up as one after Pearl Harbor; that they broke down the doors of recruiting offices coast to coast. If you think this \[is real\], you’ve probably seen too many movies. A lot of Americans fired up by the Japanese attack on [Pearl Harbor](https://time.com/4129649/pearl-harbor-news-gathering/) volunteered for some military service in the weeks after the attack, but the vast majority of U.S. forces in World War II—about two thirds of the 16 million Americans who put on a uniform—got into the military the old fashioned way: They got drafted. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had already instated the military draft in the fall of 1940, over a year before Pearl Harbor. By the time [Pearl Harbor](https://time.com/3619050/map-pearl-harbor/) was attacked, the total number of men in uniform was over 2 million. Months before Pearl Harbor, this new draft army was already being put through the paces in large-scale open-field maneuvers in Louisiana, the Carolinas, and Arkansas—practice runs for actual combat. The country wasn’t really on a war footing, but it was getting there and it certainly wasn’t on a voluntary basis. This myth of volunteerism plays into other myths: that the country was hopelessly unready for war when the Japanese launched their surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. And that’s not true. The fleet was certainly unprepared that morning, obviously. But men were in uniform, rearmament was underway, factories were being converted to war production. **Read more:** [_What’s the Most Accurate D-Day Movie? Here’s What 3 Movies Got Right—and Wrong_](https://time.com/5600203/d-day-movies/) --- ## **Myth: The U.S. was a “sleeping giant” at the time of Pearl Harbor.**  Fleet Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Corbis/Getty Images The attack on Pearl Harbor did a great deal of damage to the U.S. Pacific Fleet. But it failed to knock out the U.S. aircraft carriers—two of which were at sea at the time while a third was in San Diego. Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who planned the attack, is supposed to have said in the aftermath, “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.” The trouble is that the U.S. was certainly not “sleeping” at the time of Pearl Harbor. The Roosevelt administration had been playing hardball with the Japanese for years, trying to get Japan to lay off its war of conquest in China. The U.S. had embargoed all sorts of strategic goods and raw materials to Japan: weapons, aviation fuel, scrap iron. And in the the summer of 1941, Washington had actually placed a freeze on all Japanese assets in the U.S. and made it impossible for Japan to purchase oil. The country was deep into the process of converting the economy from consumer goods to wartime production. So the giant wasn’t really “sleeping”, even if the fleet at Pearl Harbor was surprised by the initial blow. As to that Yamamoto quote? Well, it’s been impossible to find the actual source. Most of us first heard it in the blockbuster film _Tora! Tora! Tora!_ in 1970, so it’s more Hollywood than history. The producer said the screenwriter found \[the quote\] in a letter, but no one has really been able to produce the letter or confirm who the recipient was. **Read more:** [_4 Movies That Got World War II Right, According to a Historian_](https://time.com/5826591/accurate-world-war-ii-movies/) ## Transcript December 7, 1941. The Trapp brothers were assigned to the battleship USS Oklahoma. The ship was attacked by Japanese aircraft, which caused it to quickly capsize. Resulted in the loss of life for 429 crew members. We were unable to identify these brothers. I've always said that, as a nation, we had the will and the funding to send those young men off to war. Now we should have the will and provide the funding to bring those young men back home. DPAA was established in 2015, having the mandate to search for, recover and identify the unknowns from World War Two to present. We like puzzles. Sometimes there's a puzzle that sits on a table and you get 98 of the pieces in place and then there's two pieces missing. I don't think you put the puzzle away. December 7 would come around, and it was really difficult for my mom to talk about it. I mean, we knew she had brothers, but it wasn't a topic until I was older. I think the story came to light when looking through pictures. They were just playmates growing up. She loved them dearly. Harold, or Hal, was very studious and wanted to be an engineer. William is the one who wanted to enlist, and because they were so close, they enlisted together on the same day. And it's been 80 years since they passed away. The attack on Pearl Harbor occurred on December 7, 1941. The USS Oklahoma capsized, trapping about 400 sailors and marines inside. The Trapp brothers, I just felt for those families. Getting the word that you've lost both of your sons. I can't imagine the grief that they had to live with. The Navy's policy is, the men that were on the ship, that becomes their final resting place. It's kind of like being buried at sea. The difference with the Oklahoma was, because they thought they could salvage the ship, they had Navy divers going in, retrieving the remains of those that had died. Right after the war, the U.S. Army Mortuary tried their best to identify these guys. And for whatever reason, various reasons, they couldn't identify them. And that's why they were transferred to Hawaii and buried as unknowns. As a nation, like this is how we move on. You know, because we didn't have the technology. So you have to move on. I don't think people understand what it means to have somebody who has been unidentified for 75 years. It affects the generations. My grandmother, she died from her grief and my mother, it did affect her. When the DPAA reached out to us it was just like a miracle. Families will always tell me, "Just bring me something." "My father, my brother, bring him back to us." Once we had the possibility of utilizing DNA, we realized that we could probably make some identifications of those individuals that had been buried as unknowns from the USS Oklahoma. Our identification process begins well before anything comes into our laboratory, so our historians and analysts are doing a lot of research. We have a case file on each one of our unaccounted-for service members. Their dental records, medical records, even just their age, stature, that we would use for our identifications. The USS Oklahoma was a long project. There's 208 bones in the human body, and there were 429 individuals on that ship. We were dealing with a highly-commingled set of remains. About a quarter of the ship was represented in one casket. We estimated that we'd probably do about 5,000 DNA samples. The identification that we're making is based on mitochondrial DNA. Mitochondrial DNA is something that's passed down through maternal lineage. And so anybody in that maternal lineage would have the same mitochondrial DNA sequence. They sent us the tests in the mail, we also got three tests for our children. So they had a good DNA sample or mitochondrial DNA sample. And then from there, we were able to use dental as well as anthropological methods to then individuate the brothers. So we knew dentally which skull belonged to which brother, and then the stature really came into play. So Harold is several inches taller than William. So just from the length of the bones, we were able to determine which brother was which. The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency announced today that brothers Harold F. Trapp and William H. Trapp, who were killed during World War Two, were accounted for on November 24 of 2020. I simply want to recognize that there is grief, recognize that there is loss, and recognize that because of the advance of technology, we've now been able to correctly and fully identify. So it's my honor today to be with you to bring honor to this family. Carol, on behalf of the President of the United States, a grateful nation, and the US Navy, please accept this flag as a token of our appreciation for your loved ones' honorable sacrifices. Thank you We anticipated that we were going to be able to identify about 80% of the unaccounted for from the USS Oklahoma. And now that we're coming to a close, we've been able to identify over 340 individuals. We're not gonna find them all. But we're not gonna leave any stone unturned. We will pursue it until, you know, there's nothing more that we can do. That identification is really important. You just have no idea what it means to have this closure. 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