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By Root 1141 0

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 at 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 victories, then lacked either the will or the means to follow through. Adm. Chuichi Nagumo was stunned by the success of his own aircraft in wrecking five U.S. 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 U.S. 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 to plausibly 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 decisively cripple their war-fighting capability. It was thus a grossly misconceived operation. From 7 December 1941 the United States became unshakeably committed to total war, total victory. The legend of the “Day of Infamy” united the American people as belligerents in a fashion no lesser provocation could have achieved.

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 United States 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 U.S. 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, and families sundered. The magazine’s 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 modest in their demands upon life. What they have is precious to them … What they hope to achieve, they are willing to work for—they don’t want or expect it to be given them … What we have now will do. But it ought to be better, it must be better, and it will be better.”

If this was a trite assertion of the American Dream as the nation embarked upon hostilities, it seems nonetheless to reflect its dominant mood. The struggle would cost the United States less than any other combatant—indeed, it generated an economic boom which enabled Americans to emerge from the war much richer than they started. But many suffered a lasting sense of unfairness,