Product Description

December 7, 1941 was one of the single most decisive days of World War II - the day that brought the USA into the fight. Six Japanese aircraft carriers disgorged their full complements in two waves on the superior US Pacific Fleet as it lay slumbering in Pearl Harbor. Depending on opposing viewpoints, the attack was either a brilliant maneuver of audacious strategy, or a piece of unparalleled villainy and deception by a supposedly friendly power. This revised edition, containing the latest research on the events of December 7, 1941, reveals several previously unknown aspects of the attack and dispels key myths that have been built up around the fateful day - a day, Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared, that would "live in infamy".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #194171 in Books
• Brand: Team Orion
• Published on: 2001-09-25
• Released on: 2001-09-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 1.00 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 96 pages

From Booklist
This slim but informative and visually attractive overview-summary of that horrible day in December 1941 is just one volume in the Praeger Illustrated Military History series, which will eventually include more than 100 titles; the first "batch" comprises 34 volumes covering battles in World War I and World War II. Subsequent volumes will include coverage of the American Civil War, the ancient world, and the Napoleonic Wars. The format will be the same in each volume: cogent discussion of commanders, makeup of the opposing forces, actual maneuvers on the battlefield, results, and the battlefield as it looks today; the target audience for each volume is the general reader who wants basic information on consequential battles throughout history. The entire series would, of course, make a marvelously comprehensive addition to a public or school library's history collection, but the librarian may find that a more realistic approach would be to order the volumes most relevant to one's specific collection and readership needs--and, certainly, the individual volumes can either stand alone or alongside a few select series mates. For more information on individual titles, visit the publisher's Web site at www.praeger.com. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
“[a] marvelously comprehensive addition to a public or school library's history collection.”–Booklist

From the Publisher
Highly visual guides to history's greatest conflicts, detailing the command strategies, tactics, and experiences of the opposing forces throughout each campaign, and concluding with a guide to the battlefields today.

Customer Reviews

A Decent, if Flawed Summary
Pearl Harbor 1941 is graphically very appealing. If one ignores the first 35 pages and the final few pages, one might even call this an excellent summary. For readers with only a general interest in the Pearl Harbor attack, this volume will suffice, but historians will probably only appreciate the excellent maps and order of battle information. Particularly troubling, given the immense primary and secondary sources available on this subject, is the author's tendency toward misleading and erroneous facts.

The opening introduction and background section is totally inadequate. While the author takes time to mention Hawaii's historical background, he makes less effort to paint the immediate causes of the attack. There is no mention of either the Chinese invasion of China in 1937 that led to the deterioration of US-Japanese relations or the Russo-Japanese border fighting in 1939-40 that shaped Japanese strategic conceptions away from further Eurasian entanglements. The statement that the "US Pacific Fleet was a deterrent" is misleading; that was how FDR viewed it, not the Japanese, who saw it as a threat to their expansionist ambitions in the Pacific. Even Admiral Kimmel, who commanded the Pacific Fleet, felt wholesale transfers of men and vessels to the Atlantic undermined its deterrence value.

The section on opposing commanders is more than a bit rambling and has odd choices of individuals, some of whom were not military commanders involved directly in the campaign. The US section has Kimmel, Short, Stark, Marshall, Hull and FDR. The Japanese section has Yamamoto, Fuchida, Genda, Nagumo and Nomura. Certainly politicians and diplomats such as FDR, Hull and Nomura do not belong here. Noticeably absent are the US air commanders in Hawaii, Bloch and Martin, who certainly bore some responsibility for the defeat. The entry for Nagumo is misleading, implying that he committed suicide at Saigon in 1944 "when the inevitable result of the war became clear." Instead, Nagumo was commander of the naval base on Saipan and committed suicide when US troops overran the island. The entry for Yamamoto that claims he was, "a man who fought but wanted peace" is nauseating. Just what did he ever do for peace? The chronology section, although detailed, is also marked with misleading or erroneous entries, further complicated by the fact that the author does not specify what time zone he is using. For example, he states that the Japanese fleet sailed on 25 November, but local time was actually 26 November. The crucial 27 November "war warning" is falsely delivered as advising Kimmel and Short that negotiations had failed and to "be prepared for any eventuality." It said no such thing.

Although there is a section on the Japanese attack plan, there is no section on US defensive plans or the Rainbow War Plan. The author should have mentioned the Martin-Bellinger studied which addressed the vulnerability of Oahu to air attack. In the Japanese section, there is no mention of the vociferous opposition to the raid and how Yamamoto had to threaten resigning in order to get the operation approved. The whole approach to Japan's strategy is euphemistic: "Japan expanded into Asia..."and the US "thwarted every Japanese attempt to extend Asian influence," instead of, the US sought to contain Japanese aggression. There are many other errors in this section, some so mundane, like claiming that the Japanese task force sailed from "Tankan Bay" instead of Hittokappu bay, that it is a wonder that the author even bothered to peruse secondary sources.

Amazingly, the sections on the actual attack are quite good. To be fair, they are better than Gordon Prange provides in his long-winded At Dawn We Slept. Smith provides excellent maps and graphics for the attacks on each air base and the naval facilities, as well as a decent textual summary. Three-D maps are provided for the first and second wave attacks, as well as the attack on Hickam Field. There is even a map depicting US naval movements in Pearl during the attack, which is most unusual. Several excellent illustrations and many photos complement the text. Overall, these 36 pages that cover the attack (one more page than Prange) are excellent.

Unfortunately, in the aftermath section the author reverts to his misleading tendencies. He claims "all eight [US] battleships [were] sunk or heavily damaged," which is totally wrong. The USS Maryland and Pennsylvania were only slightly damaged and soon available for service, USS Tennessee was moderately damaged. His follow-up conclusions are overly generalized and ignore the immediate affects of the raid.

Overall, this a handy, colorful summary volume, but it should not be used as a substitute for serious history. Unfortunately, the author has taken far too many liberties with the historical record for this to be considered a reliable summary.

Great book
My copy didn't come with a CD and has 104 pages but is pretty much the same thing as this one. It is well written and well illustrated as is typical of Osprey works.

A good read for anyone interested in thie event.

Long ago on a far away island.....
For most people (including most American military people) Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 is a far away island and a long time ago. To those in the American intelligence community, Pearl Harbor was the definition of being asleep at the switch-9/11 has replaced Pearl Harbor as the yardstick of intelligence failure. Carl Smith's "Pearl Harbor 1941" tells one part of Japan's "southern operation"-and provides a context for that "Day of Infamy" with background information and a thumbnail history.

I was stationed at the Kaneohe Bay Marine Corps Air Station from September 1976 to June 1979 (with a brief eight-month cruise aboard the LPH-10 Tripoli), I spent some time as an Army intelligence analyst, and I last toured the Pearl Harbor monument and visitors' center on Oahu around Easter in 1998. Pearl Harbor Day is very real to me even though I was born fifteen years after the Japanese raid occurred.

Carl Smith hints at the complexity of the period immediately preceding Pearl Harbor Day. Some of my research into the events leading up to December 7 differ from the author's, but that's history! History is a "best guess" based on available information. I'm unqualified to determine if some of the variance between my limited work and Carl Smith's are due to error. One thing stands out in my mind because I work with 24-hour time globally-Pearl Harbor Day in Japan is December 8. Earth is divided into 24 time zones due to rotation-sunrise is at different times in Honolulu and Manila and Tokyo. I am unsure when I read Smith's timeline which time zone the event happened in. My research indicates that the United States expected to be attacked at any moment, but that attack would happen in the Philippines first. Smith's bibliography should prove useful to the amateur historian-I've read about 60% of the books he listed, and I own several.

The best part of "Pearl Harbor 1941" are the maps and many illustrations that set the scene and describe the sequence of events on 7 December 1941. Carl Smith's "Pearl Harbor 1941" has a place in my Pearl Harbor library. Pearl Harbor didn't happen in a vacuum-it was part of a sequence of events beginning in 1855 and continuing today. For me, at least, Pearl Harbor 1941 isn't long ago on a far away island.