A love triangle painted over one of the worst mornings in American history — and a case study in what happens when a film invents the people it puts inside a real disaster.
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Work through the four short activities. Each word appears in a situation that gives its meaning away — you don't need to know the film yet. Say your answer out loud first, then reveal.
Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor (2001). Read each part, try the quick check from memory, then discuss. (There are spoilers ahead — that's the point; we're here to talk about it.) The film builds a romance on top of a day on which thousands of real people died, so keep that in mind as you read.
Rafe McCawley and Danny Walker have been inseparable since childhood, when they played at flying in the fields of Tennessee. By 1941 they are young lieutenants in the United States Army Air Force, serving under Major Jimmy Doolittle. At a medical examination in New York, Rafe meets a Navy nurse, Evelyn Johnson, and the two fall quickly and completely in love.
Then Rafe volunteers for the Eagle Squadron — a Royal Air Force unit made up of American pilots flying in Britain — while America is still officially out of the war. Evelyn and Danny are posted to Hawaii. Over the English Channel, Rafe is shot down, and the news reaches Hawaii that he is dead.
Grief throws Danny and Evelyn together, and by the autumn they are in love. On 6 December, Rafe walks back into their lives, alive. The friendship breaks; the three of them go to bed that night with a private disaster on their hands, entirely unaware of the public one that is a few hours away.
1. Why do Danny and Evelyn believe they are free to fall in love?
2. What happens on 6 December, the night before the attack?
1. Rafe has volunteered for the Eagle Squadron in Britain and is shot down over the Channel; they are told he is dead.
2. Rafe comes back alive and discovers Danny and Evelyn together — the friendship collapses, hours before the attack.
Shortly before eight on the morning of 7 December 1941, Japanese aircraft come in low over Oahu. The film gives this sequence forty minutes: the battleships along the moorings, the torpedo runs, the fires, men trapped below decks in capsizing hulls. Rafe and Danny reach a small outlying airfield, get two fighters into the air and shoot down several attackers between them. It is the only real resistance the film shows.
At the hospital, Evelyn and the other nurses are overwhelmed within minutes. They run out of supplies, use lipstick to mark which of the wounded can be saved and which cannot, and go on working through the day. The film's most sombre passages are here rather than in the sky — an ordinary Sunday turned, in under two hours, into the worst day the base had ever known.
In the aftermath, a shaken country listens to President Roosevelt ask Congress for a declaration of war. Evelyn tells Rafe she is expecting Danny's child. The two men are still barely speaking when they are called to volunteer for something secret.
1. What do Rafe and Danny manage to do during the attack?
2. What is happening at the hospital while the attack goes on?
1. They reach an outlying airfield, get two fighters airborne and shoot down several Japanese aircraft — the only serious defence the film depicts.
2. Evelyn and the nurses are overwhelmed with casualties, run out of supplies and have to decide, on the spot, who can be saved.
The secret job is retaliation. Doolittle is assembling a raid on Japan itself: heavy twin-engined bombers, far too big for a carrier deck, will be flown off one anyway, strike Japanese cities, and carry on westwards to land in China. Everyone who volunteers understands that they may not be coming back. Rafe and Danny both put their names down, and they train together for months without ever quite repairing what broke on 6 December.
The raid goes in. The bombers reach Japan, drop their loads and press on until the fuel runs out, coming down in occupied China. Rafe and Danny survive the crash landings, but on the ground they are found by Japanese troops. Danny is fatally wounded shielding Rafe. In his last minutes he learns that he is going to be a father, and Rafe tells him that he is not dying — he is becoming one.
Rafe comes home and marries Evelyn. The film closes years later with the two of them and a small boy at Danny's grave; the child carries his father's name, and Rafe takes him up in a biplane over the same fields where two boys once played at flying.
1. What is the secret mission, and why is it dangerous even before the enemy is reached?
2. How does the film end?
1. A bombing raid on Japan, flown off an aircraft carrier in bombers never designed to launch from one; there is no way of landing back on, so the crews must reach China on their remaining fuel.
2. Danny is killed in China; Rafe returns, marries Evelyn and raises Danny's son, and the family visits Danny's grave.
Everything in this lesson is a chain of causes: an attack causes a declaration of war; a decision to invent two heroes causes a film historians still complain about. English gives you three different shapes for that chain, and the commonest mistake at this level is using one shape with another's grammar.
Complete each sentence. The note in brackets tells you what kind of connector the grammar of that sentence needs.
1. the shallow water of the harbour, an ordinary torpedo would have buried itself in the mud. (preposition + noun phrase)
2. The third strike was never launched the American defences had woken up. (conjunction + clause)
3. The Pacific Fleet's carriers were at sea that morning; , they escaped the attack altogether. (linking adverb joining two clauses)
4. Two of the pilots reached an outlying strip the main airfields had already been hit. (conjunction + clause)
1. Owing to / Due to / Because of / On account of (all take a noun phrase)
2. because / since / as (all take a full clause)
3. consequently / therefore / as a result / hence
4. because / since / as
Test yourself: can you say each sentence again using a different shape? "The carriers were at sea, and as a result of that accident of timing they survived."
Fill each gap with one verb only. Ask yourself first: is this sentence running cause → effect, or effect → cause?
1. The attack in the deaths of about two thousand four hundred Americans.
2. Years of failed negotiation to a decision to strike without warning.
3. One Sunday morning about a change that could not be reversed: the United States was in the war.
4. The film's worst errors from a single decision — to put two invented pilots at the centre of a real catastrophe.
1. resulted (result in — cause → effect)
2. led (lead to — cause → effect)
3. brought (bring about — cause → effect)
4. stem (stem from — effect → cause; "arise from" also works)
One connector per gap, and don't repeat yourself. Read the finished paragraph aloud.
The American aircraft carriers were away from Hawaii on 7 December, and that accident of timing the fleet kept the ships that would matter most in the years ahead. The attack in about two thousand four hundred American deaths. , a country that had spent two years arguing about whether to stay out of the war stopped arguing. Congress voted for war the following day, committing the United States to a conflict it had worked hard to avoid — an outcome that directly from the decision to attack at all.
owing to / due to / because of · resulted · Consequently / As a result / Therefore · thereby · stemmed
Notice the four shapes doing four different jobs: preposition + noun, verb + preposition, adverb opening a new sentence, and thereby + -ing attaching a consequence to the clause before it.
Carry these into the Speak tab. This whole lesson is an argument about causes — what the attack caused, and what a screenwriter's choices caused.
Most films in this series bend history a little. This one is routinely named among the least accurate war films ever made, and that is what makes it useful: you can hold the film in one hand and the record in the other, and see exactly where they part company — and ask why.
The film's two heroes are invented. Rafe McCawley, Danny Walker and the nurse Evelyn Johnson do not appear in any record of that morning, because they never existed. What did happen is that around fourteen American fighter pilots got airborne on 7 December, and between them they were credited with roughly ten of the twenty-nine Japanese aircraft lost that day. Four of those pilots were killed.
Two of them, Second Lieutenants Kenneth Taylor and George Welch, drove under fire from Wheeler Field to the small strip at Haleiwa, took off in Curtiss P-40 fighters and flew more than one sortie. Welch was credited with four Japanese aircraft, Taylor with two confirmed. General Henry H. Arnold nominated both for the Medal of Honor; both received the Distinguished Service Cross instead. The film takes their drive, their airfield and their kills, hands the whole thing to two fictional friends, and adds a love triangle.
The Eagle Squadrons were real: three RAF units of American volunteers, 71 Squadron formed in September 1940, 121 in May 1941 and 133 in July 1941. Some 244 Americans flew with them, and they were not handed over to the United States Army Air Forces until 29 September 1942, when they became the 4th Fighter Group. So the chronology the film needs simply is not available. The Battle of Britain ended in October 1940, yet the film has Rafe flying in it into 1941; and an American who had joined the RAF would still have been in Britain, in RAF uniform, when the bombs fell on Hawaii.
This matters more than a date on a caption. The subplot exists to give the leading man a broken heart and a resurrection, not to describe anything that occurred. It is the clearest example in the film of history being reshaped around a romance rather than a romance being fitted into history.
On 18 April 1942 — four months after Pearl Harbor, not a few weeks — sixteen B-25 Mitchell bombers with eighty airmen aboard flew off the deck of the carrier USS Hornet under Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle. They struck targets in Tokyo, Yokohama, Yokosuka, Nagoya, Kobe and Osaka — spread across six cities, not a single formation over the capital as the film shows. Every aircraft that reached China was lost. Eight airmen were captured; three were executed and one died in captivity. The material damage to Japan was slight; the effect on morale on both sides was enormous, and it pushed Japanese planning towards the battle at Midway that broke their carrier force.
Naval historians reviewing the film in 2001 also objected to its Doolittle: the real one held a doctorate in aeronautical engineering from MIT, while the film plays him as a man baffled by a slide rule. They noted too that Admiral Yamamoto is shown with the strike force although he never sailed with it, that USS Arizona is destroyed almost at once when in fact she was hit some twenty minutes into the attack, and that the celebrated "sleeping giant" line attributed to Yamamoto comes from the 1970 film Tora! Tora! Tora! rather than from any record.
Kenneth Taylor, the pilot whose morning the film borrows, called it "a piece of trash… over-sensationalised and distorted". He had served as a technical adviser on Tora! Tora! Tora!; nobody consulted him on this one. National Geographic made a documentary, Beyond the Movie: Pearl Harbor, walking viewers through the errors. Critics were unkind — the film holds a 24% rating on Rotten Tomatoes across 194 reviews — although it won the Academy Award for Best Sound Editing and was nominated for six Golden Raspberries, including Worst Picture. For the Japanese release Disney softened the closing American-victory narration and altered a racial slur in the dialogue; Japanese viewers interviewed at the time complained that the Japanese in the film were simply evil, with no families and no lives of their own. The film does keep one real person: Doris Miller, a mess attendant on USS West Virginia who was never trained on the guns, manned one anyway, and helped carry his mortally wounded captain clear. He was awarded the Navy Cross by Admiral Nimitz on 27 May 1942, and was killed on 24 November 1943 when USS Liscome Bay was torpedoed.
And underneath all of it sits the plain, sombre fact the film is built on. 2,403 Americans were killed and 1,178 wounded on 7 December 1941; 1,177 of the dead were aboard USS Arizona, and 429 aboard USS Oklahoma. Two waves came in — 183 aircraft, then 171 — and a planned third strike was called off. The Pacific Fleet's three aircraft carriers were at sea and untouched, which shaped the next four years of the Pacific war. President Roosevelt asked Congress for a declaration on 8 December; it passed with a single dissenting vote, and on 11 December Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. That is what the attack brought about: not a love story, but the entry of the United States into the Second World War.
This is the heart of the lesson — do it all out loud. The timer keeps you going; fill the time with detail.
Tell the story of Pearl Harbor in your own words, as if to someone who has never seen it. Move through the arc: two boyhood friends who become pilots → the nurse, and Rafe presumed dead over the Channel → 7 December and the two fighters that get airborne → the hospital, and the aftermath → Doolittle's raid, China, and what it costs.
Work in at least five key words (retaliation, galvanise, scramble, aftermath, plausible, sombre, embellish, compress, distort, salvage), and build the chain of causes with today's connectors: "the attack resulted in…", "as a result of the news…", "consequently…".
Here is the argument at the heart of the film — and of this lesson. A film-maker says: "Nobody will watch two hours about a naval base. Give them people to love, and they will learn something they'd otherwise never look at." A historian replies: "You have handed real men's actions to invented ones, and now that is what everybody thinks happened."
Take a side and make the case properly, then argue the other side for one minute. Use cause-and-effect language throughout: what does each approach lead to?
Widen it out. When something really happened, who has the right to retell it, and under what conditions? Make your case.
Stuck for an idea? Pick one of these and run with it: