Pearl Harbor: From Infamy to Greatness by Craig Nelson
Pearl Harbor: From Infamy to Greatness by Craig Nelson
The America we live in today was born not on July 4, 1776, but on December 7, 1941, when an armada of hundreds of Japanese warplanes, supported by aircraft carriers, destroyers, and midget submarines, suddenly and savagely attacked the United States, killing 2,403 men -- and forcing America's entry into World War II. Pearl Harbor: From Infamy to Greatness follows, moment by moment, the sailors, soldiers, pilots, diplomats, admirals, generals, emperor, and president, as they engineer, fight, and react to this stunningly dramatic event in world history.
Bestselling author Craig Nelson maps the road to war, beginning in 1914, with Franklin D. Roosevelt, then the assistant secretary of the navy (and not yet afflicted with polio), attending the laying of the keel of the USS Arizona at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Writing with vivid intimacy, Nelson traces Japan's leaders as they lurch into ultra-nationalist fascism, which culminates in their insanely daring, yet militarily brilliant, scheme to terrify America with one of the boldest attacks ever waged. Within seconds, the country would never be the same.
In addition to learning the little-understood history of how and why Japan attacked Hawaii, we hear an abandoned record player endlessly repeating "Sunrise Serenade" as bombs shatter the decks of the Pennsylvania; we feel cold terror as lanky young American sailors must anxiously choose between staying aboard their sinking ships or diving overboard into harbor waters aflame with burning fuel; we watch as navy wives tearfully hide with their children in caves from a rumored invasion; and we understand the frustration and triumph of a lone American teenager as he shoots down a Japanese bomber, even as the attack destroys hundreds of U.S. airplanes and dozens of ships.
Backed by a research team's five years of work, which produced nearly a million pages of documents, as well as Nelson's thorough reexamination of the original evidence assembled by federal investigators, this page-turning and definitive work provides a thrilling blow-by-blow account from both the Japanese and American perspectives and is historical drama on the grandest scale. Nelson delivers all the terror, chaos, violence, tragedy, and heroism of the attack in stunning detail and offers surprising conclusions about the tragedy's unforeseen and resonant consequences that linger even today.
Simon & Schuster, Hardcover, 2016
This is a BRAND NEW book.