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.)īy signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy.Īlready a subscriber? Log in to hide ads. 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. The complexities of refueling while underway. “The Japanese, of course, had sifted the military negatives,” Twomey writes. 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. 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. 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. 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.Įvery 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. Probably fewer than 2000 survivors of the attack are still alive. This year marks the 75th anniversary of the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor by the Empire of Japan in December of 1941.
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