Lord tells us on page 178 that they didn't bother trying to cover their tracks on the flight back: there "just wasn't enough gas for deception". We also follow the Japanese after they return to the carriers following their crime. People expected another wave of bombers, others expected a land invasion some heard that the invasion was already taking place, yet others heard it was taking place in California.
Then there is the weird coda that is the battle for Niihau – of which I knew nothing about beforehand – which reminded me a bit of the Scouring of the Shire in The Lord of the Rings.Īnd for all Lord's diligence in piecing together experiences of the attack, it is the aftermath where some of the most interesting stuff is to be found. Lord also mentions some of the little trivia that really helps bring out the oddness of the scene: the jukebox that plays 'I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire' because no-one has turned it off since the attack began the writer Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Tarzan, residing as a civilian in Honolulu and arriving to help dig slit trenches and, in the sort of eerie coincidence that always seems to accompany great tragedies, the army-and-navy magazine from eight days before the attack, in which a picture of the Arizona – blown up on December 7th – was accompanied by a caption stating 'despite the claims of air enthusiasts no battleship has yet been sunk by bombs'. Lord is a gifted writer as well as a diligent researcher and historian, and there is plenty of evocative imagery: of the Japanese listening to Oahu radio in the night as they approach of the trapped sailors banging away from inside the capsized hull of the Oklahoma and of the Nevada underway through the flames with the Star-Spangled Banner flying.
It is hard to keep track of all the different goings-on and, as Lord admits at the end, it is very difficult to accurately convey a hectic day which was all about surprise, deception, anxiety and fear.īut you get a sense of the individual struggles: the little wars fought by ordinary people on that day, and the examples of unorthodox and spontaneous heroism (I was particularly touched by the example of the civilian crane operator who drove his huge contraption up and down the quayside to deter dive-bombers from attacking a nearby battleship which was in dry-dock – a scene which is visible in the photo on the cover of the book). As with A Night to Remember, his book on the Titanic disaster, Lord impressively chronicles the little stories that sometimes get lost in the big picture: the heroism, the sacrifice, the bewilderment and, yes, sometimes the loss of nerve. If you are looking for a military history of the importance of the "battle" in the context of the war, of the preparations for it, and its effect on policymakers and the American public, Walter Lord's Day of Infamy isn't it.īut it is an excellent narrative of that day, pieced together from eyewitness accounts into a story that reads almost like a novel. ( )Ī great narrative of the events of December 7th, 1941 – and only December 7th, 1941. In addition, the narrative stands as a horrifying testimony for what it's like to be the target of such an attack, no matter who you are or where you live. Thereby, he has created a lastingly important document of what was experienced that day. Lord spends almost no time on the geopolitical context for the attack, nor on the many conspiracy theories that arose later. I raced through this book in three or four sittings. Time is spent, also, on the frustrating, tragic string of miscommunication and incredulity about early warning signs of trouble. This book is akin to Cornelius Ryan's book about D-Day, The Longest Day, which I read earlier this year, in that Lord ran down as many of the survivors/participants/witnesses to the Pearl Harbor attack as he could and created a "you are there" pastiche, from the planning of the attack by the Japanese, to the innocent, unaware early morning spent by so many around the harbor and the town, to the experience and horror of the attack and battle itself, to the aftermath. The author, Walter Lord, also wrote the classic history of the sinking of the Titanic, A Night to Remember.
Day of Infamy, published in 1957, provides a minute-by-minute account of the Japanese attach on Pearl Harbor.
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