3 excellent new books on Pearl Harbor

These varied and lively histories will bring the history of Pearl Harbor to a new generation of readers.

Seven Days of Infamy: Pearl Harbor Across the World By Nicholas Best Thomas Dunne Books 336 pp. Pearl Harbor: From Infamy to Greatness By Craig Nelson Scribner 544 pp. Countdown to Pearl Harbor: The Twelve Days to the Attack By Steve Twomey Simon & Schuster 384 pp.

This year marks the 75th anniversary of the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor by the Empire of Japan in December of 1941. Probably fewer than 2000 survivors of the attack are still alive. With every year, the event slips further away from living memory and further into the history books, where it will be analyzed and re-analyzed as one of the most pivotal moments of 20th-century history, when the war that had been raging for years in Europe and throughout the Pacific finally reached the United States.

Every publishing season sees a batch of such history books, and 2016's autumn features three outstanding examples, each looking at the events of Pearl Harbor from a different perspective.

Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter Steve Twomey, in his nonfiction debut Countdown to Pearl Harbor: The Twelve Days to the Attack, concentrates on the long prelude to December 7. Marshaling a comprehensive array of primary sources, he takes his readers into the two weeks of intense decision-making on the part of the Japanese military leaders as they contemplated an operation whose scale and difficulty were mind-boggling. An attack group consisting of six aircraft carriers would sail over 3,000 miles of open water in order to get close enough to the US Navy air base at Pearl; in order to hide its movements, the strike force would need to be refueled at sea, and the whole operation would be vulnerable to detection the entire time. “The Japanese, of course, had sifted the military negatives,” Twomey writes. “The astounding distance. The complexities of refueling while underway. The risk of calamitous discovery. They had calculated the odds they could pull off such a raid as … fifty-fifty, perhaps a little better.” Japanese Admiral Yamamoto, we're told liked those odds.

Those odds were tragically increased by the complacency of Pearl Harbor's commander, Admiral Husband Kimmel, a distinguished officer Twomey describes as “navy classic, raised on big-gun platforms.” Kimmel had seen plenty of hypotheticals and heard plenty of chatter, but at the end of all of it, he'd “arrived at the conclusion that an air attack on Pearl Harbor was not probable.” (Another of the season's outstanding books on the subject, "A Matter of Honor" by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, digs far more deeply into the whole question of Kimmel's guilt or innocence.)

In Pearl Harbor: From Infamy to Greatness, his gripping account of the attack itself, veteran historian Craig Nelson picks up on that sense of confident impregnability at Pearl. “With twenty-twenty hindsight,” he writes, “it is mystifying to read again and again of how insistent military officers in Hawaii were before December 7 that nothing was a threat to them, but this was in fact a broadly held sentiment in the United States before the attack on Pearl Harbor.” Right up until 7:48 a.m when the first wave of 183 attack planes began strafing and bombing the US battleships sitting peacefully in their berths, the conventional thinking was that no enemy fleet of sufficient size to pose any real threat to Pearl could manage to cross such a vast distance completely undetected, particularly given the difficult of refueling in the stormy North Pacific, which Nelson describes as “backbreaking, dangerous work.”

Like Twomey, Nelson infuses his account with the primary-source memories of the people involved, giving his book a tense, epic feel reminiscent of the best general histories of the event, books like John Toland's "Infamy," Walter Lord's "Day of Infamy," and the still-unbeaten masterpiece on the subject, "At Dawn We Slept" by Gordon Prange and Donald Goldstein. And Nelson is careful to remind his readers of the bigger picture: “The attack on Pearl Harbor,” he points out, “was for Japan at that moment merely a preemptive strike, a minor sideshow to Operation Number One.”

Operation Number One, what Nelson calls “one of the greatest military operations of all time,” called for near-simultaneous attack-waves of invasion striking not just Oahu but Malaya, Singapore, Burma, the Philippines, Wake, Guam, Borneo, and Java, and something of the amazing reach of this plan is captured in Nicholas Best's excellent new book Seven Days of Infamy: Pearl Harbor Across the World, in which he not only recounts many dozens of contemporary reactions to the attack but also places Pearl Harbor in the broader context of the Pacific war that swept out of Japan that winter. “Wherever they were in the world,” Best writes, “millions of people stopped what they were doing to absorb the news” – from Ronald Reagan to a young Jack Kennedy to Ernest Hemingway and Mao Tse-tung, Best finds dozens of these fascinating reactions, but the real strength of his book – what makes it in many ways the most interesting of these three – lies in its taut sense of the wider impact the Japanese attacks had internationally, from Ottawa to Canberra.

The faint echoes of those attacks have all but faded in the present day, but in histories this varied and this lively, they can be heard sharp and clear by a new generation of readers.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to 3 excellent new books on Pearl Harbor
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2016/1201/3-excellent-new-books-on-Pearl-Harbor
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe