Pearl Harbor Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
110 free Pearl Harbor trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
67 free Pearl Harbor trivia questions with answers. Pearl Harbor is one of those events everyone knows and few know well. This quiz goes past the date and the famous speech into the details: the radar warning that was waved off as friendly bombers, the destroyer that fired first, the only battleship to get underway, the mess attendant who manned a machine gun, and the third wave that never came. It runs from easy questions for a classroom or a family quiz night to genuinely hard ones about the planners, the midget submarines, the declaration of war and what happened to the admirals afterwards, plus a few on the memorial and the films. Difficulty is shown on every question. Every answer has been checked against a source page, mostly the Wikipedia articles on the attack, the individual ships and the people involved, and each question shows its citation, so you can use it for a history lesson or a December 7 remembrance round with confidence.
30 of 110 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, fell on which day of the week?
Sunday
Sunday was no accident: Japan's spy in Honolulu had reported it was the day when the most ships were likely to be in harbor, and planners counted on a weekend morning's low alert.
Q 02Pearl Harbor is on which Hawaiian island?
Oahu
Oahu became the Pacific Fleet's home in 1940, when Roosevelt moved it from San Diego to Pearl Harbor in the hope of deterring Japan.
Q 03Across the International Date Line, Japan dates the Pearl Harbor attack to which day?
December 8
December 8: the Japanese carriers kept Tokyo time, so their clocks read shortly after 3 a.m. on the 8th when the first bombs fell, and Japan's declaration of war carries that date.
Q 04Which Japanese fighter plane escorted the bombers that attacked Pearl Harbor?
Mitsubishi Zero
Mitsubishi Zero fighters escorted both waves and strafed the airfields; the name comes from the plane's Type 0 label, for the Japanese imperial year 2600, or 1940, when it entered service.
Q 05Four of Pearl Harbor's six attacking carriers were sunk in which 1942 battle?
Midway
Midway, in June 1942, sank Akagi, Kaga, Soryu and Hiryu after American codebreakers learned where the fleet would strike next, and Japan was forced onto the defensive.
Q 06Which admiral, commander of Japan's Combined Fleet, conceived the Pearl Harbor attack as a pre-emptive strike?
Isoroku Yamamoto
Isoroku Yamamoto had studied at Harvard and served as naval attaché in Washington, and his respect for American industry convinced him Japan's only chance lay in one crippling opening blow.
Q 07Who commanded the Japanese carrier strike force that delivered the attack on Pearl Harbor?
Chūichi Nagumo
Chūichi Nagumo was a surface-ship officer rather than an aviator, and was handed the navy's main carrier force largely because of his seniority.
Q 08Which commander of the first wave at Pearl Harbor later settled in the US and toured as a Christian evangelist?
Mitsuo Fuchida
Mitsuo Fuchida turned to Christianity after reading a tract about Jacob DeShazer, an American airman who had been a prisoner of the Japanese, and the two men later preached together.
Q 09The code word "Tora", radioed three times from over Pearl Harbor, signalled what?
Complete surprise had been achieved
Complete surprise had been achieved: 'tora' is Japanese for tiger, and with the defenders unready the slow, vulnerable torpedo bombers could lead the first wave against the battleships.
Q 10During planning, Japan's naval leaders referred to the Pearl Harbor attack by which code name?
Operation Z
Operation Z took its name from the famous Z signal flag that Admiral Togo had flown to rally his fleet in a great victory a generation earlier.
Q 11Pearl Harbor's planners closely studied a 1940 British carrier raid on the Italian fleet at which port?
Taranto
Taranto was where 21 slow Swordfish biplanes from a single British carrier put three Italian battleships out of action in one night, proving a fleet was not safe at anchor.
Q 12The Pearl Harbor strike force assembled in secret in a remote bay in which northern island chain?
The Kuril Islands
The Kuril Islands gave the fleet a remote anchorage to gather unseen, and it then crossed the North Pacific on a course chosen to stay clear of normal shipping lanes.
Q 13The November 1941 US note that Japan treated as an ultimatum is named after which Secretary of State?
Cordell Hull
Q 21About how many Americans were killed in the attack on Pearl Harbor?
2,400
About 2,400: the official toll is 2,403, and nearly half of them died in moments when a bomb set off the forward magazine of the battleship Arizona.
Q 22The Pearl Harbor attack order, 'Climb Mount Niitaka', named the Japanese empire's highest peak, which stood on which island?
Taiwan
Taiwan was under Japanese rule, so its Yu Shan, then called Mount Niitaka, outranked Mount Fuji by 176 metres; the coded order went out to the fleet on December 2.
Q 23Most of the civilians killed during the Pearl Harbor attack died when what landed in Honolulu?
American anti-aircraft shells
Cordell Hull's note asked Japan to pull out of China and Indochina; by the time it was delivered the strike fleet had already put to sea, though it could still have been recalled.
Q 14Which Japanese emperor gave the final go-ahead for the Pearl Harbor attack on December 1, 1941?
Hirohito
Hirohito had approved the plan on November 5 but held back the final order until an Imperial Conference on December 1, after his advisers judged the American terms impossible to accept.
Q 15Spy Takeo Yoshikawa reported on the Pearl Harbor fleet for months while posing in Honolulu as what?
A consular official
A consular official on paper: under the cover name Tadashi Morimura he tracked the fleet from a hilltop above the harbor and from small planes he rented at the local airport.
Q 16Why were Japan's aerial torpedoes given wooden fins and an anti-roll device before Pearl Harbor?
To operate in the shallow harbor
To operate in the shallow harbor: an ordinary air-dropped torpedo plunged too deep on entry, so breakaway wooden fins were added that kept these ones running near the surface.
Q 17Hours after Pearl Harbor, Japanese bombers caught American warplanes parked on the ground at Clark Field in which territory?
The Philippines
The Philippines lost half of its American air force that day, much of it on the ground at Clark Field, even though commanders there had known of Pearl Harbor for about nine hours.
Q 18Lt Kermit Tyler took the radar blips of Pearl Harbor's first wave for what?
B-17 bombers due from California
B-17 bombers due from California were expected from almost the same direction, and the radar operators never told Tyler how large the blip was; the bombers then flew in from the mainland in the middle of the raid.
Q 19Japanese troops began landing in which territory about an hour before the first bombs fell on Pearl Harbor?
Malaya
Malaya came first: Japanese troops were wading ashore at Kota Bharu about an hour before the raid on Hawaii, so the Pacific War opened not at Pearl Harbor but on a beach in Southeast Asia.
Q 20At the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, what was Hawaii's political status?
A US territory
A US territory since 1900, Hawaii would not become a state until 1959, and within hours of the attack it was put under martial law that lasted until 1944.
American anti-aircraft shells did it: many of the Navy's rounds were badly fused, missed the planes and exploded when they hit the ground in the city, whose fire crews were away at the bases.
Q 24Which battleship rolled over and capsized at Pearl Harbor after taking multiple torpedo hits?
USS Oklahoma
USS Oklahoma trapped hundreds of men as she rolled, and a civilian yard worker, Julio DeCastro, led the team that cut 32 of them out through the hull; raised but never repaired, she sank under tow in 1947.
Q 25Which leader wrote that on the night of Pearl Harbor he 'slept the sleep of the saved and thankful'?
Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill heard the news at Chequers with the American ambassador and saw at once that the United States was now in the war, which he took to mean the war would now be won.
Q 26Which battleship was the only one to get underway during the Pearl Harbor attack, before being deliberately beached?
USS Nevada
USS Nevada drew a swarm of dive bombers as she steamed down the channel, and was run aground on purpose so she could not sink in the entrance and bottle up the fleet.
Q 27Only one battleship was present at both Pearl Harbor and which 1944 invasion?
The Normandy landings
The Normandy landings: the battleship shelled German positions on D-Day, went on to bombard Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and survived the atomic bomb tests at Bikini before the Navy sank her as a target in 1948.
Q 28Which former battleship, serving as a target ship, was torpedoed at Pearl Harbor and never raised?
USS Utah
USS Utah had been stripped of her big guns years earlier to serve as a target for American bombers; the Navy gave up trying to raise her, and she still lies where she rolled over.
Q 29Which future US senator, then a Honolulu teenager, gave first aid to casualties on the day of Pearl Harbor?
Daniel Inouye
Daniel Inouye, a 17-year-old Red Cross aide that day, went on to lose his right arm fighting in Italy and then to represent Hawaii in Congress for more than fifty years.
Q 30The fleet flagship USS Pennsylvania escaped serious damage at Pearl Harbor largely because she was where?
In dry dock
In dry dock, Pennsylvania sat beyond the reach of torpedoes and took a single bomb, while the two destroyers docked just ahead of her were burned out.