2001's Pearl Harbor has been frequently cited by publications as one of the most historically inaccurate movies ever released.
- Rafe flying for the RAF in 1940 while still serving as an officer in the US Army Air Force obviously wouldn't happen, as that would be a clear violation of American neutrality. The Eagle Squadrons
were volunteers who either were typically rejected by the USAAF for lack of flying abilities or trained in Canada.- There were a handful of active-duty US personnel flying with the British in 1941, but were subject to some very strict Rules Lawyering and prohibited from engaging in combat operations. For instance, the British PBY Catalina (built by Consolidated Aircraft in San Diego, California) that located the notorious German battleship Bismarck after the Battle of the Denmark Strait was flown by a US Navy pilot ostensibly supervising a "long-range type-familiarization flight" for his British crew. None of them were allowed to share the sky with German aircraft.
- One scene shows the planes en route to attack Pearl Harbor flying over an organized baseball game taking place on the ground. The real-life attack took place at 7:00 am, obviously well before any baseball games would be going on.
- This scene is accompanied by another of a housewife hanging up clothes despite the early hour, clearly inserted for some Faux Symbolism because the large pole to her left looks like a cross (and she appears to kneel before it).
- In a couple of establishing shots, there are more Japanese planes visible than actually participated in the attack.
- Some shots of the attack show Japanese fighter planes firing on and killing civilians. In the actual historical event, Japanese soldiers were specifically ordered to leave civilians alone. While a few of them defied orders and attacked civilian targets despite this order, there's no evidence that a hospital was bombed during the raid. Ironically, the Doolittle raid did involve killing civilians, but there's no such depiction in the film.
- Rafe manages to fight in the Battle of Britain, Pearl Harbor, and the Doolittle Raid. This wasn't true of any real pilot.
- It is extremely implausible that any pilot would be switched from flying single-engine fighters to the much larger, twin-engine B-25 Mitchell. The skills and training needed for the two types of aircraft are just too different. Furthermore, the crews on the Doolittle Raid were specially selected for their experience and proficiency with the B-25 (largely from the 34th Bombardment Squadron of the 17th Bombardment Group - "The Thunderbirds"). The movie's given reason is Rafe and Danny are "only the fighter pilots with active combat experience". However, what was needed for a bombing raid wasn't experience in air-to-air combat, it was the ability to take off from a carrier deck on a plane that was never intended to have that capability. Rafe and Danny are both army pilots rather than navy pilots, so neither would have any experience with carriers.
- The Battle of Britain lasted until October 1940. The Germans continued to conduct air raids over England in 1941 (the "Blitz"), but only did so at night.
- Upon arriving in England, Rafe is given a shot-up Spitfire whose pilot was killed. British fighter production was very high during this period of the war. The RAF was suffering from a shortage of pilots rather than aircraft.
- Pretty much nothing of the attack in the movie is historically accurate.
- USS Oklahoma did not turn 180 degrees when she capsized. She only rolled about 120 degrees before her superstructure came to rest on the shallow harbor bottom, with only the two starboard screws out of the water.
- The most dramatic Real Life events aboard the battleships, namely USS Nevada's attempted breakout and subsequent beaching, the emergency counterflooding to save USS West Virginia from capsizing, and the firefighting effort aboard USS California (whose magazines had to be flooded to save the ship from a catastrophic explosion) are ignored. Ironically, West Virginia was Dorie Miller's ship.
- Speaking of Dorie Miller, there is no way he could have fired at attacking planes flying between battleships, as they were moored very close together, without any room for a plane to fit between the rows. Also, he would be effectively machine-gunning the ship next to him and probably wounding their AA crews.
- A particularly egregious case of taking artistic license too far is the fact that this movie shamelessly attributes the real deeds of actual people — namely, fighter pilots George Welch and Kenneth Taylor, who managed to take off in their P-40 Warhawks and shoot down a few Japanese airplanes — to completely fictional characters made up for the movie.
- To add to the insult above, the way Danny and Rafe fly (zero maneuvering, flying on low altitude in a straight line) is an extreme case of Just Plane Wrong and would get them killed very fast. It's only thanks to Plot Armor that the Japanese somehow just keep missing. Rafe's line "We can't outrun them, we'll just have to outfly them!" is also pretty cringe-inducing, given that it is completely inverted from how the USAAF were supposed to dogfight Zeroes in P-40s, even at that point in the war: The P-40 was less maneuverable than the Zero, but could fly faster than it any day of the week, meaning the best strategy was literally to outrun them and pick them off in fast hit-and-run attacks instead of trying to get into a turning dogfight that almost guaranteed you being shot down in a ball of flame.
- FDR's "Infamy Speech" is heavily abridged, running about a third as long as the real speech. He does not mention the other locations in the Pacific that the Japanese attacked at the same time as Pearl Harbor, including Hong Kong and Wake Island. In addition, FDR did not say that 3000 Americans had died. Not only would it have been bad for morale, but the number of dead was only estimated at the time. Also, the final line of the speech is condensed.Real Life: I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7th, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.Film: Because of this unprovoked dastardly attack by Japan, I ask that the Congress declare a state of war.
- The Doolittle Raid:
- The crews are shown frantically ditching equipment to reduce weight immediately before takeoff. These preparationsSuch As were done weeks in advance at the Mid-Continent Airlines modification center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with further modifications done at the Sacramento Air Depot.
- They are shown taking off downwind and barely making it off the deck, with each plane dramatically dipping downward after leaving the carrier before ascending. Only the "Ruptured Duck" (of Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo fame) had such a close call due to the flaps being accidentally lowered. All other planes, due to headwinds of 40 MPH on a carrier going 25 MPH were lifting off before reaching the calculated lift off point on the deck (some distance from the end of the deck).note
- Colonel Doolittle shouts "Max power" halfway down the deck, when the B-25s were already revved at full power before the brakes were removed; waiting until halfway before takeoff to increase power wouldn't create enough lift and would result in crashing into the sea.
- The Doolittle Raiders did not bomb Tokyo in formation. They split up to hit targets spread all over the greater metropolitan area for maximum psychological effect. They were also not at all "chewed up" by anti-air fire, since absolutely no one on the Japanese mainland expected to see enemy aircraft overhead, and few had any time to even man the AA positions until the planes were already gone; of the five men killed during the Doolittle Raid, only one man was killed in China when his parachute failed. The four others were executed by the Japanese in 1944.
- The depiction of the planes in general, which overlaps with Weapons Understudies and Just Plane Wrong, including but not limited to:
- The Mitsubishi Zeroes featured during the attack are painted in late-war green as opposed to the grey scheme worn at the time of the attack. Not only that, but the Zeroes in question are the late-war A6M5 model (first produced in 1943) as opposed to the A6M2 model which was used at the time. Weirdly enough, the "Val" and "Kate" bombers are painted correctly for the time period.
- The P-40 Warhawks shown are shown to be the mid-war "E" variant as opposed to the more period-accurate "B / C" versions. Another error is their paint scheme on the wings showing the mid-war US roundel (which lacked the red dot) as opposed to the prewar/early-war roundel painted on the sides of the same planes.
- The B-25 Mitchells used during the Doolittle raid are the J version (distinguishable by the placement of the dorsal gun turret near the cockpit as opposed to the tail), as opposed to the B models used during the actual raid.
- The Spitfires in the "Battle of Britain" scene are all cannon-armed, which, if the scene is supposed to depict 1940, is wrong. There would not be a major roll-out of the first reliable cannon-armed Spitfire, the Mark IIb, until early 1941, and although No. 19 Squadron did operate experimental cannon spitfires in 1940, their squadron code (painted on the side of the plane) was "QV" in 1940, whereas Rafe's has "RF", marking it as 303 (Polish) Squadron. Additionally this in itself is incorrect,as the two Polish squadrons flew Hurricanes during the Battle of Britain, not Spitfires.
- The prologue, set in 1923, has the boys playing in a derelict Boeing-Stearman 75 crop duster. This model was introduced in 1934 and was first available to civilians (and modified for crop dusting) when military surplus was auctioned after the war; it would have been more suitable to use a Curtiss JN-4 Jenny, which was almost ubiquitous as a civilian-model prewar biplane in that era.
- Admiral Yamamoto wasn't even with the Kido Butai (the Japanese carrier task force) during the attack. He was in the Sea of Japan, on board the IJN Nagato. The Kido Butai was commanded by Admiral Chūichi Nagumo, who does not even appear in the film.
- The most mocked line outside the United States, by far, is Danny's "I think World War II just started." In response to the Pearl Harbor attack, two years after the German invasion of Poland. Some dubs change it; for example in the Spanish version the line is: "They just threw us into World War II." Calling it "World War II" is also a bit of an anachronism; even as far as 1941, World War I was still mostly known as "the Great War", with the current ongoing conflict in Europe simply being known as "the War" since it hadn't quite reached the global scale up until that point. It was not until later that "World War I" and "World War II" became common terms.
- Charles de Gaulle did call it a "World War" in his famous Call of June 18, 1940, but not "World War II".
- Prior to the Doolittle Raid, the pilots are shown listening to "Orphan Annie," more commonly known as Tokyo Rose, which did not start broadcasting until nearly a year later.
- In the final voiceover, Evelyn states that the Japanese started to pull back after the Doolittle Raid. They did pull some fighter squadrons back to the home islands to defend against future raids, but the voiceover sounds like the entire Japanese military was giving up territory in order to consolidate. In reality, they started to fight more aggressively to secure their defenses, culminating in the Battle of Midway.
- Before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese are shown using a large scale model of Pearl Harbor, which include the repair ship USS Vestal, which moored alongside the USS Arizona on 6 December to conduct repairs. There is no way the Japanese could have known this ahead of time. This is likely based on a famous photograph taken after the attack of a model built for propaganda purposes, which did feature the Vestal.
- The montage at the beginning shows an M26 Pershing in Cologne. In 1940, the M26 wasn't even on the drawing board yet.
- FDR mentions the need to send more tanks to the Soviet Union, who were allies of Nazi Germany at that point. It wasn't until Operation Barbarossa in mid-1941 that they began to fight Nazi Germany, and they weren't considered part of the Allies until 1942.
- In their first scene, Major Doolittle shows Rafe a newspaper with the headline "Germany Advances On All Fronts." The scene takes place in January 1941. Germany was not undertaking any major offensives at that time. They secured Western Europe in the summer of 1940 and were making preparations for Operation Barbarossa. Their next campaign, the invasion of Yugoslavia, would take place in April.
- The film omits Admiral Kimmel's famous Heroic BSoD, replacing it with him merely touring the harbor after the attack. While the attack was still underway, a spent round smashed through a window and struck him, leaving only a smudge on his uniform. He then remarked "It would have been merciful had it killed me," and afterwards removed his four-star rank insignia.
- President Roosevelt was having lunch with Harry Hopkins, his Secretary of Commerce, when he received a phone call informing him of the attack.
- Chester Nimitz is prominently featured as a senior member of the military prior to and after the attack. He was a rear admiral before the attack. Both William Leahy and Ernest King were much more senior than he was.
- Rafe's RAF squadron is shown sleeping in tents right next to their planes. This was not done because it would make them easy targets for air raids. The pilots on duty would be close to their planes in the event of a scramble order, but the sleeping quarters would be well away from the strip.
- No woman is shown wearing stockings. Stockings were a major part of women's fashion at the time, to the point it was common to draw a line of the back of one's leg with pencil when nylon stockings could not be obtained during wartime rationing.
- The movie was criticized by Native Hawaiian and Asian-American groups for the practically total absence of both from the film, despite them being almost equal in numbers to whites, back then and now. The only appearances of them are when a Japanese-American dentist receives an anonymous call from Tokyo and unwittingly provides last-minute intel for the attack, and during the attack when a doctor of either Hawaiian or Asian descent tries to help a shell-shocked sailor who refuses to be treated by "a Jap."
