On 19th October 1940, the Hawaiian Air Force, later known as the Seventh Air Force, was established to provide air defense of the Hawaiian Island and to engage with threats in the Pacific.
Just over a year later the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor devastated this force. Out of a total of 231 aircraft of the Hawaiian Air Force, 64 were destroyed and not more than 79 were left usable. Out of the inferno emerged the newly reformed Seventh Air Force It faced, in the central Pacific, the largest water theater in the world - sixteen million square miles, five times the size of the United States.
