The date that President Franklin Roosevelt said “will live in infamy” – December 7, 1941 – indeed endures as an American milepost.

Seventy-five years to the day after hundreds of Japanese fighter planes attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor inciting our nation’s entry into World War II, John T. Kuehn of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth examines the event from its planning to the damage it wrought and the strategic disaster it proved to be for Japan.

Kuehn challenges the notion of the country being caught completely unaware by the raid and the suggestion that, without Pearl Harbor, there would have been no war in the Pacific.