Chuck heard a plane and looked up. It was coming in from the west, so low it looked as if it might be in danger of crashing. He assumed it was about to land at the naval airstrip on Ford Island.

Woody, sitting near Chuck in the bows, frowned and said: ‘What kind of plane is that?’

Chuck knew every aircraft of both the army and the navy, but he had trouble identifying this one. ‘It almost looks like a Type Ninety-seven,’ he said. That was the carrier-based torpedo bomber of the Imperial Japanese Navy.

Woody pointed his camera.

As the plane came nearer, Chuck saw large red suns painted on its wings. ‘It is a Jap plane!’ he said.

Eddie, steering the boat from the stern, heard him. ‘They must have faked it up for an exercise,’ he said. ‘A surprise drill to spoil everyone’s Sunday morning.’

‘I guess so,’ said Chuck.

Then he saw a second plane behind the first.

And another.

He heard his father say anxiously: ‘What the heck is going on?’

The planes banked over the Navy Yard and passed low over the launch, their noise rising to a roar like Niagara Falls. There were about ten of them, Chuck saw; no, twenty; no, more.

They headed straight for Battleship Row.

Woody stopped taking pictures to say: ‘It can’t be a real attack, can it?’ There was fear as well as doubt in his voice.

‘How could they be Japanese?’ Chuck said incredulously. ‘Japan is nearly four thousand miles away! No plane can fly that far.’

Then he remembered that the aircraft carriers of the Japanese navy had gone into radio silence. The signal intelligence unit had assumed they were in home waters, but had never been able to confirm that.

He caught his father’s eye, and guessed he was remembering the same conversation.

Everything suddenly became clear, and incredulity turned to fear.

The lead plane flew low over the Nevada, the stern marker in Battleship Row. There was a burst of cannon fire. On deck, seamen scattered and the band left off in a ragged diminuendo of abandoned notes.

In the launch, Rosa screamed.

Eddie said: ‘Christ Jesus in heaven, it’s an attack.’

Chuck’s heart pounded. The Japanese were bombing Pearl Harbor, and he was in a small boat in the middle of the lagoon. He looked at the scared faces of the others – both parents, his brother, and Eddie – and realized that all the people he loved were in the boat with him.

Long bullet-shaped torpedoes began to fall from the underbellies of the planes and splash into the tranquil waters of the lagoon.

Chuck yelled: ‘Turn back, Eddie!’ But Eddie was already doing it, swinging the launch around in a tight arc.

As it turned, Chuck saw, over Hickam air base, another flight of aircraft with the big red discs on their wings. These were dive bombers, and they were streaming down like birds of prey on the rows of American aircraft perfectly lined up on the runways.