This is the true story of how that happened: the codebreakers working in a windowless Pearl Harbor basement who correctly guessed Japan's next target through nothing more than a faked radio message about a broken water pump, the aircraft carrier patched together in seventy-two frantic hours when engineers said it needed months, the entire squadron of American torpedo pilots who flew to near-certain death and unknowingly cleared the sky for what came next, and the five minutes when three Japanese carriers — decks crowded with fully fueled, armed aircraft — were caught with almost no fighter cover at the single worst possible moment of the entire war.
Narrated with vivid, grounded detail and drawn from American and Japanese accounts alike, this is the real history behind the battle that turned the tide of the Pacific War.