Online Book Display: Pearl Harbor

In Washington, DC, in late November 1941, admirals composed the most ominous message in Navy history to warn Hawaii of possible danger--but they wrote it too vaguely. They thought precautions were being taken, but never checked to be sure. In a small office at Pearl Harbor, overlooking the battleships, the commander of the Pacific Fleet tried to assess whether the threat was real. His intelligence had lost track of Japan's biggest aircraft carriers, but assumed they were resting in a port far away. Besides, the admiral thought Pearl was too shallow for torpedoes; he never even put up a barrier. As he fretted, a Japanese spy was counting warships in the harbor and reporting to Tokyo. There were false assumptions and racist ones, misunderstandings, infighting, and clashes between egos. Through remarkable characters and impeccable details, Pulitzer Prize-winner Steve Twomey shows how careless decisions and blinkered beliefs gave birth to colossal failure. But he tells the story with compassion and a wise understanding of why people--even smart, experienced, talented people--look down at their feet when they should be scanning the sky.

When Japan attacked the United States in 1941, its leaders, in large part, understood they were entering a war they were almost certain to lose. In a groundbreaking history that considers Pearl Harbor from the Japanese perspective, certain to revolutionize how we think of the war in the Pacific, Eri Hotta poses essential questions overlooked for the last seventy years: Why did these men--military men, civilian politicians, diplomats, the emperor--put their country and its citizens in harm's way? Why did they make a decision that was doomed from the start?

When the Empire of Japan launched a surprise attack on American bases in Hawaii, the people of the United States knew instantly that the nation was at war. So devastating was the news to a country still largely in the throes of a depression that survivors can still recall some six decades later where they were, who gave them the news, the clothes they were wearing, and the confusion and eventual hardships that such a development brought. This collection of memories, told in participants' own words, gathers accounts from both military and civilians, children and adults, people of many ethnic backgrounds, from all over of the United States. Together, these ordinary Americans paint a portrait of a nation stunned, but determined to rise again.

December 7, 1941--the date of Japan's surprise attack on the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor--is "a date which will live" in American history and memory, but the stories that will live and the meanings attributed to them are hardly settled. In movies, books, and magazines, at memorial sites and public ceremonies, and on television and the internet, Pearl Harbor lives in a thousand guises and symbolizes dozens of different historical lessons. In A Date Which Will Live, historian Emily S. Rosenberg examines the contested meanings of Pearl Harbor in American culture.

"Remember the Arizona!" was the battle cry of American sailors stationed in the Pacific during World War II. The mighty warship, which was bombed at Pearl Harbor by the Japanese on December 7, 1941, became and remains to this day a symbol and rallying point for America's sudden entrance into war. Here, using eyewitness accounts of the bombing and the sinking, the authors narrate the compelling history of the USS Arizona before, during, and after the attack, and describe the Arizona Memorial's legacy today.

Memorializing Pearl Harbor examines the challenge of representing history at the site of the attack that brought America into World War II. Analyzing moments in which history is re-presented--in commemorative events, documentary films, museum design, and educational programming--Geoffrey M. White shows that the memorial to the Pearl Harbor bombing is not a fixed or singular institution. Rather, it has become a site in which many histories are performed, validated, and challenged.

On December 7, 1941, the course of U.S. history changed forever with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Three weeks prior, Japanese Special Envoy to the United States Saburo Kurusu visited Washington in an attempt to further peace talks between Japan and America and spare his country the loss he knew would occur if a war began. But as he reported, "Working for peace is not as simple as starting a war." For more than seventy years, many have unfairly viewed Kurusu and his visit as part of the Pearl Harbor plot. Editors J. Garry Clifford and Masako R. Okura seek to dispel this myth with their edition of Kurusu's memoir, The Desperate Diplomat.

In the fifty years that have passed since the Japanese navy attacked Pearl Harbor and America suffered its greatest defeat of the war, many studies of the 'date which will live in infamy' have been written. Virtually every detail of the event has been dissected, every perspective explored--except one. Until now, we have not had a full account from the U.S. enlisted men and women who lived through the attack. This book is their story.

No One Avoided Danger is a detailed combat narrative of the 7 December 1941 Japanese attacks on NAS Kaneohe Bay, one of two naval air stations on the island of O'ahu. Partly because of Kaneohe's location - 15 air miles over a mountain range from the main site of that day's infamous attack on Pearl Harbor - military historians have largely ignored the station's story. Moreover, there is an understandable tendency to focus on the massive destruction sustained by the U.S. Pacific Fleet. The attacks on NAS Kaneohe Bay, however, were equally destructive and no less disastrous, notwithstanding the station's considerable distance from the harbor.

The attack on Pearl Harbor is one of the most perplexing cases in living memory of a weaker power seeming to believe that it could vanquish a clearly superior force. On closer inspection, however, Record finds that Japan did not believe it could win; yet, the Japanese imperial command decided to attack the United States anyway. Conventional explanations that Japan's leaders were criminally stupid, wildly deluded, or just plumb crazy don't fully answer all our questions, Record finds. Instead, he argues, the Japanese were driven by an insatiable appetite for national glory and economic security via the conquest of East Asia. The scope of their ambitions and their fear of economic destruction overwhelmed their knowledge that the likelihood of winning was slim and propelled them into a war they were always going to lose.