At 7:53 a.m. Sunday morning, December 7, 1941, a call came in over the switchboard of the Honolulu Police Department which jarred the monotony of the skeleton Sunday staff at the Station into electrified activity. "I'm eating breakfast in the parlor with my family," reported Thomas Fujimoto, who lives in the Damon Tract near Pearl Harbor, "and a bomb just struck my kitchen. They're bombing all Pearl Harbor." A call to the Pearl City Branch of the Police Department, verified the fantastic report. Instantaneously the Police switchboard was jammed with calls reporting falling bombs with their aftermath of death, fire, and destruction. Thus began the story of the first aerial bombardment of an American city. America has been at war before, but wars of the past-where the civilians received news of the war by dispatches from a front which was across the ocean-seem pedestrian in contrast with lightning war from the air which soldier and civilian must face side by side. The story of Honolulu and its Police Department under aerial siege is exciting and worth telling, not as a reminiscence of a past event, but as a recorded illustration of the problems which police departments of other American cities may be required to face and deal with before this total war is over. It is hoped that the reading of this record may be of value to other police departments in organizing themselves for maximum service and efficiency, and may help them to strengthen in advance what appear as weak links in their chain of defense.