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By Root 1338 0

a sailor aboard the carrier Enterprise, which entered Pearl Harbor late on the afternoon of 8 December, having been mercifully absent when the Japanese struck. ‘One battleship, the Nevada, was lying athwart the narrow entrance channel, beached bow first, allowing barely enough room for the carrier to squeeze by … The water was covered with oil, fires were burning still, ships were resting on the bottom mud, superstructures had broken and fallen. Great gaps loomed where magazines had exploded, and smoke was roiling up everywhere. For sailors who had considered these massive ships invincible, it was a sight to be seen but not comprehended … We seemed to be mourners at a spectacular funeral.’

The assault on Pearl Harbor prompted rejoicing throughout the Axis nations. Japanese Lt. Izumiya Tatsuro wrote exultantly of ‘the glorious news of the air attack on Hawaii’. Mussolini, with his accustomed paucity of judgement, was delighted: he thought Americans stupid, and the United States ‘a country of Negroes and Jews’, as did Hitler. Yet fortunately for the Allied cause, American vulnerability on Hawaii was matched by a Japanese timidity which would become an astonishingly familiar phenomenon of the Pacific conflict. Again and again, Japanese fleets fought their way to the brink of important successes, then lacked either will or means to follow through. Admiral Chuichi Nagumo was stunned by the success of his own aircraft in wrecking five US battleships in their Sunday-morning attacks. For many years, it was argued that he wilfully missed the opportunity to follow through with a second strike against Pearl Harbor’s oil storage tanks and repair facilities, which might have forced the Pacific Fleet to withdraw to the US west coast. Recent research shows, however, that this was not feasible. The winter day was too short to launch and recover a second strike, and in any event Japanese bombloads were too small plausibly to wreck Pearl’s repair bases. Even the problem created by destruction of shore oil tanks could have been solved by diverting tankers from the Atlantic. The core reality was that Nagumo’s attack sufficed to shock, maul and enrage the Americans, but not to cripple their war-fighting capability. It was thus a grossly misconceived operation.

For many months, Winston Churchill had been haunted by apprehension that Japan might attack only the European empires in Asia, so that Britain would confront a new enemy without gaining the US as an ally. Hitler meanwhile contemplated a mirror image of this spectre, fearing that America might enter the war against Germany, while Japan stayed neutral. He had always expected to fight Roosevelt’s people once he had completed the destruction of Russia. In December 1941 he considered it a matter of course to follow Japan’s lead, and entertained extravagant hopes that Hirohito’s fleet would crush the US Navy. Four days after Pearl Harbor, he made the folly of the strike comprehensive by declaring war on the United States, relieving Roosevelt from a serious uncertainty about whether Congress would agree to fight Germany. John Steinbeck wrote to a friend: ‘The attack, whatever it may have gained from a tactical point of view, was a failure in that it solidified the country. But we’ll lose lots of ships for a while.’

In the course of 1941, the Ladies’ Home Journal had published a fascinating series of domestic profiles of Americans of all social classes, under the heading ‘How America Lives’. Until December, the threat of war scarcely impinged on the existences of those depicted. Some struggled financially, and a few acknowledged poverty, but most asserted a real satisfaction with their lot which explains their dismay, following Pearl Harbor, at beholding familiar patterns broken, dreams confounded, families sundered. LHJ editor Mary Carson Cookman wrote a postscript, reflecting on the profiles published earlier in the year, and the new circumstances of Americans: ‘War is changing the condition of life everywhere. But … the people of the United States are good people; they are almost surprisingly