While fishing with his friends off Honolulu on December 7, 1941, teenaged Adam is caught in the midst of the Japanese attack and through the chaos of the subsequent days tries to find his father, a naval officer who was serving on the U.S.S. Arizona when the bombs fell.

In 1944, a fifteen-year-old Jewish boy tells his family he will travel in the West but instead enlists in the United States Air Corps and is subsequently taken prisoner by the Germans.