Fleet headquarters is at Joint Base Pearl Harbor–Hickam, Hawaii, with large secondary facilities at Naval Air Station North Island, California.

Headquarters, battleships, aircraft carriers and heavy cruisers were stationed at San Pedro close to the Long Beach Naval Shipyard.

During the summer of 1940, as part of the U.S. response to Japanese expansionism, the fleet was instructed to take an "advanced" position at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

Political considerations were thought sufficiently important that he was relieved by Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, who was in command at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

At the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Pennsylvania was in dry dock undergoing maintenance, and Colorado was in the midst of a refit at Bremerton Navy Yard, Washington.

[6] One of PhibPac's subordinate commands during World War II was Transports, Amphibious Force, Pacific Fleet, or TransPhibPac.

That day, the Japanese Combined Fleet carried out the attack on Pearl Harbor, drawing the United States into World War II in the Pacific.

The Pacific Fleet's Battle Line took the brunt of the attack, with two battleships destroyed, two salvageable but requiring lengthy reconstruction, and four more lightly to moderately damaged, forcing the U.S. Navy to rely primarily on aircraft carriers and submarines for many months afterward.

The Submarine Force began a sustained campaign of commerce raiding against Japan's merchant marine, beginning the first day of the war, which ultimately claimed 1,314 ships totalling about 5.3 million tons (by the imperfect postwar reckoning of the Joint Army-Navy Assessment Committee, JANAC).

The Pacific MDZ has responsibility for coastal defense up to 200 nautical miles (370 km; 230 mi) around the U.S. West Coast, Aleutian Islands, and Hawaii during times of hostility.

[citation needed] Missouri and New Jersey performed a simultaneous gunfire demonstration for the aircraft carriers Enterprise and Nimitz during PACEX.

This marked the first United States Navy visit to the Soviet Union's Pacific port of Vladivostok since before World War II.

Later ships of the Pacific Fleet, notably USS Mobile Bay, a Ticonderoga-class cruiser, provided support to the entry of INTERFET in East Timor in 1999.

Between 25 and 27 March 2006, Carrier Strike Group Nine participated in a series of anti-submarine warfare exercises (ASW) in Hawaiian waters while en route to the U.S.