I preface this by noting that I was a 4-year-old child when Pearl Harbor was attacked, and I was there, at Fort Kamehameha, an Army post abutting Hickam Field. That aside, the film is meticulous in its historical content, and is especially interesting in that it shows the parallel stories of Japanese and American events leading up to the attack.

The film covers the main events leading up to the actual attack, including the decrypting of Japanese diplomatic ciphers using the MAGIC system, and it shows the foulups that made the surprise attack both a surprise, and as devastating as it was.

There has never been another film as true to the actual attack as this one.