1941 was great except for the last month.
Oh, but that last month defined the next four years!
Both my Mom and my father-in-law went through Pearl Harbor. For my Mom, who was a high school student then, the first days after were the worst, because everyone assumed the Japanese were going to actually invade. Her family apparently had a lot of hunting rifles and a certain amount of handguns around the house (they had a cattle ranch on the Big Island among other things so they were used to having guns around), so my grandfather distributed guns to everyone in the family and they spent the whole first night awake in the dark anticipating the Japanese troops. In the middle of the night there was a lot of gunfire echoing in the valley. It turned out one column of American troops coming up from Kailua met another group of American troops coming the other way from Honolulu. In the dark, they each thought the other group was the enemy, and opened fire. No one was killed in that firefight though. But it was a scary time.