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Countdown to Pearl Harbor: The Twelve Days to the Attack (A Gift for World War II History Buffs) - Softcover

Twomey, Steve

 
9781476776484: Countdown to Pearl Harbor: The Twelve Days to the Attack (A Gift for World War II History Buffs)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1476776482 ISBN 13: 9781476776484
Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

In this “riveting” (Los Angeles Times) account of the days leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Steve Twomey “infuses a well-known story with suspense” (The New York Times Book Review), offering a poignant new perspective on the most infamous day in American history.

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.

The brilliance of Countdown to Pearl Harbor is in its elegant prose and taut focus. “Even though readers already know the ending, they’ll hold their collective breath, as if they’re watching a rerun of an Alfred Hitchcock classic” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch).

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Steve Twomey began his career in journalism as a copyboy at the Chicago Tribune when he was in high school. After graduating from Northwestern University, he began a fourteen-year career at The Philadelphia Inquirer, during which he won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, and then worked at The Washington Post for the next thirteen years. More recently, he has written for Smithsonian and other magazines and has taught narrative writing at the graduate schools of New York University and the City University of New York. The ghostwriter of What I Learned When I Almost Died and author of Countdown to Pearl Harbor, Twomey lives in Montclair, New Jersey, with his wife, Kathleen Carroll. They have an adult son, Nick.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Countdown to Pearl Harbor ONE AN END, A BEGINNING
Saturday, February 1, 1941

BENEATH OAHU’S CLOUDLESS blue canopy, men in white jackets, slacks, hats, even shoes, surged over a gangway and spilled onto the polished wooden deck of a ship named for one of the forty-eight states. Every battleship in the fleet bore the name of one, as if its species embodied the very Union itself. The officers snapped salutes to the Stars and Stripes at the Pennsylvania’s stern, 608 feet from her bow. By now, each of the sixteen American battleships was older than most members of her crew and not exactly gazelle-like, lugging armor plating, crowded magazines, big guns, small guns, antiaircraft guns. But they remained tough and still occupied the rung of highest naval prestige, which was to sink the enemy’s big ships so America could rule the waves of commerce and impose its will, should that seem desirable.

To witness a broadside from their main batteries was to see an angry Zeus hurl tons of explosives a dozen miles or more. A radioman aboard the California would recall the 35,000-ton ship’s “convulsive lurch” as blasts from the fourteen-inch guns slammed her in the opposite direction, “sideways in the water.” There would be “mighty thunderclaps of sound,” and flames, and smoke that “smelled as if it had just come from the nether regions.” Hanson W. Baldwin, the military-affairs reporter for the New York Times, found it “frightening” to be aboard a battleship and “have a sixteen-inch gun go off at full load and high elevation, because you get an awful whump in the stomach and ears, and everywhere else!” In a few months, the program of the Army-Navy football game in Philadelphia would feature a photo of the Arizona crashing bow-on through formidable seas, seemingly unsinkable and certainly intimidating. Battleships had panache, and people loved the sight of them.

Arriving from throughout Pearl Harbor, the guests in white uniform eddied aft and formed into a square, its center left empty, beyond the last of the Pennsylvania’s four main turrets, whose three barrels had been elevated slightly to make more room for the capped heads beneath. Above, on the turret’s roof, stood announcers of the Columbia Broadcasting System. One microphone for the outgoing admiral had been placed in the middle of the human square, another for the admiral ascending. Two thousand ninety-one nautical miles to the northeast, on the mainland, it was Saturday afternoon.

“The ceremony is about to get under way,” CBS’s Victor Eckland said, “and as we take a sweeping glance from one side of this giant battleship to the other, we see an array of manhood in naval officialdom of which every American can be justly proud.” The navy did seem to inflate the national pride. More than the army and the marines—there was no separate air force yet—it wore a halo of glamour, sailing the country’s two flanking oceans, slicing protective wakes. As was often and simply put by press and politicians alike, America had invincible warships. Visiting Hawaii the previous September, the secretary of the navy, Frank Knox, had let himself positively roar: “The greatest, most powerful and the most effective fleet on the high seas anywhere in the world.” He would utter similar claims during the coming months, including one that would be published on the front page of the New York Times edition that would be delivered to doorsteps on the first Sunday morning of December, the seventh. Some officers on Oahu wished Knox would be less enthusiastic. They knew the navy was not ready to fight. The public might get the wrong idea.

That day’s change of command would be less celebratory than was traditional during peacetime, not because America was at war, but because it was rapidly approaching one and was rearming as fast as it could, faster than at any time in its history, racing against an emptying hourglass. Since 1939, the Nazis had overrun much of Europe and had besieged Great Britain, and since 1937, the Japanese had consumed much of China and had swarmed into Indochina. Full-dress attire would not be in order aboard the Pennsylvania. Guns would not boom in salute. Air fleets would not dapple the sky in review. Nor would the harbor pause in respect. “We hear the hum of work—riveters, steel workers, ship fitters, boilermakers, and all of the other men and machines that are being kept busy here at Pearl Harbor,” Eckland went on.

The geologic miracle that was the harbor was a substantial reason the United States had decided it ought to own Hawaii, having egged on political unrest—minority whites versus the indigenous—that opened the door to annexation. The islands had been an independent kingdom, blessed—or maybe cursed—with a huge lagoon stamped into the southern coastline of Oahu. Its name, Pearl, may have arisen from its oyster beds. Its shape evoked an alluvial fan. Or maybe a clover: a narrow stem leading from the sea to three watery petals, west, middle, east. Echoing a Scotland that was nowhere within nine thousand sea miles, the petals had come to be called “lochs,” Gaelic for “lakes.”

During annexation hearings in 1898, General John McAllister Schofield, who had explored Hawaii extensively, told the US House of Representatives that Oahu’s clover lagoon would be ideal for a modern navy—meaning a late-nineteenth-century one, which had no worries about being trapped in a confined harbor and riddled by airplanes, for there were none of those yet. Pearl’s narrow mouth and channel could easily be guarded against an incursion by hostile warships. Any shells fired from offshore could not reach warships tethered inside. The lochs and surrounding land could support dozens of warships, as well as docks, maintenance shops, and coal stocks for ship boilers. If we don’t take Pearl Harbor and Hawaii, General Schofield testified, the Spanish might. The Japanese might. Imperial lust had triumphed. On August 12, 1898, in a ceremony in Honolulu, the flag of the United States had risen above its newest acquisition, probably against the wishes of most Hawaiians.

At ten a.m., the two highest-ranking participants in the Pennsylvania’s formalities emerged from its innards. “With the dignity of their rank and surrounded by their fellow officers and men who share with them the tradition of 165 years of U.S. naval history,” the announcer said, “Admiral James O. Richardson and Admiral Husband E. Kimmel make their appearance on deck. Admiral Richardson steps from the port hatch to the quarterdeck, and Admiral Kimmel steps from the starboard hatch to the quarterdeck. They approach Columbia’s microphones together.”

For Richardson, who was sixty-two, the moment overflowed with humiliation. He had risen out of the backwater of Paris, Texas, to the navy’s best job, commander of the Pacific Fleet, only to have it yanked away after a dozen months, not the minimum eighteen, let alone the twenty-four that most fleet commanders actually served. “My God, they can’t do that to me,” he had said upon reading the message an aide delivered to him on an Oahu golf course on January 5. The public removal of a man considered smart, witty, and competent dumbfounded many serving under him who, using the initials of his first and middle names—J and O—called him Uncle Joe. The victim professed he hadn’t foreseen his demise, either, but that was more fib than fact. Richardson was a font of negativity and a know-it-all. “Unfortunately,” he said later, “I am definite in most of my opinions.”

Attending the Naval War College in Newport,...

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Verlag
Simon & Schuster
Erscheinungsdatum
2017
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1476776482
ISBN 13 
9781476776484
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
392
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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