Which brings me to Countdown to Pearl Harbor: The Twelve Days to the Attackby Steve Twomey, an accomplished newspaper journalist who won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing while at the Philadelphia Inquirer. Navy and many of its sailors was, ahem, intimate. After all, their relationship with the U.S. Later, of course, I wised up, and also understood why the ladies of the night were so anxious to help. I was so young I didn’t know what a prostitute was, and was rather mystified why the blood of such patriotic women might be thought unsuitable for transfusion. I particularly remember one passage in Day of Infamy, where Lord described how prostitutes in Honolulu, who were told they could not give blood for wounded sailors, nevertheless volunteered to help in other ways. Lord, who also wrote A Night to Rememberabout the sinking of the Titanic, was a consummate storyteller and brought both tragedies to life. Describing confusion between Kimmel and Harold Stark, Chief of Naval Operations, about the state of Japanese-American diplomacy, he writes: “‘He might have asked me for a clarification,’ said Stark, who might have provided one of his own.” The American navy was sunk as much by its own assumptions and miscommunications as it was by Japanese torpedoes.I have been fascinated by the Pearl Harbor attack ever since I read Day of Infamyby Walter Lord as a child.
Twomey nonetheless refrains from vilifying any of the main actors in his narrative, and no one officer is singled out as the scapegoat. How then, in a climate of impending hostilities, was the American navy blind to a Japanese fleet that managed to stealthily sail thousands of miles of open Pacific ocean to Hawaii undetected? Seeking to understand rather than to blame, what Steve Twomey’s Countdown to Pearl Harbor finds in the days and months leading up to the attack is an acute failure of communication.įinding fault with the actions of officers up and down the chain of command, Mr.
Throughout 1941, as diplomacy with Japan reached a dead end, Husband Kimmel, commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, was routinely warned of a possible Japanese surprise attack in lieu of, or at least in conjunction with, an official declaration of war.
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