Overview: One of the most bitter battle arenas of the Second World War, Pearl Harbor represented the trigger that led America into the greatest conflict ever recorded and the eventual liberation of the people of Asia and the Pacific. On the 7th December 1941 Japan launched surprise attacks across the Pacific region, setting battleships ablaze in Pearl Harbor, then routing the British in Malaya and capturing Singapore itself: the greatest humiliation in British war history. The Japanese now seemed unstoppable and after being at war with China for a decade, and shocking the world with atrocities like the Nanking Massacre, they believed their destiny was to rule Asia under the Emperor, for them, a living god.