Naval Station Pearl Harbor
The overall death toll was 2,467 people: 2,403 American citizens—2,335 members of the U.S. military and 68 civilians—and 64 members of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Five U.S. battleships were sunk and the other remaining three were badly damaged. Overall, nine ships of the U.S. fleet were sunk and 21 ships were severely damaged. Three of the 21 would be irreparable. 188 U.S. aircraft were completely destroyed and 159 others were damaged. Japan lost 29 out of the 353 aircraft they attacked with. The attack on Pearl Harbor was the largest destruction of life and property on American soil both in peacetime and in general by foreign nationals prior to the September 11 attacks, and remains the deadliest attack on American soil both in peacetime and in general by a foreign nation.
Cornelius Cole Smith Jr.
During the attack, he led a four-man rescue party which pulled between fifteen and twenty sailors from oil-soaked and burning water; he modestly recounted his actions in later years saying only that his rescue party did "pretty good". He searched in vain among the wounded and dying at the Naval Hospital for his friend Harry Gaver Jr., son of Black-Foxe Military Institute commandant Major Harry Gaver, who had been killed on the USS Oklahoma earlier that morning. He later said, while standing among Marines firing at enemy planes flying over the Navy Yard, that "every Leatherneck's face wore a look of shame"; "Here we are with our pants down and the striking force of our Pacific Fleet is settling on the bottom of East Loch, Pearl Harbor. Who wouldn't be ashamed?" He wrote a personal account of the battle, based on his own wartime diary, for the Proceedings of the United States Naval Institute, "...A Hell of a Christmas," (December 1968) years later.