Day of Infamy Book

"A date which will live in infamy." Thus did U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt refer, in one of the most memorable addresses ever given by an American statesman, to December 7, 1941 - the Sunday morning on which air and naval forces of the Japanese Empire launched a surprise attack against the U.S. Navy's Pacific Fleet base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. A pedantically minded English teacher might point out that F.D.R., in his December 8 speech to a joint session of the U.S. Congress, used the wrong pronoun - "which" where he should have said "that" - but his name for the date stuck, and Walter Lord drew upon it for Day of Infamy, his ground-breaking 1957 book about the Pearl Harbor attack.

Lord, a Baltimore journalist, was an indefatigable interviewer; he sought out the testimony of almost 600 Pearl Harbor survivors while conducting research for Day of Infamy. Moreover, he was a talented and prolific writer with a gift for bringing historical events to life with you-are-there immediacy. While he is probably best known for A Night to Remember, his classic 1955 recounting of the 1912 sinking of R.M.S. Titanic, this book draws upon his talents in a comparably memorable way.

In Day of Infamy, Lord shows his talent for finding the small anecdote that contributes to the reader's understanding of the big picture. Early in the book, for example, while discussing the preliminary Japanese maneuvers that led up to the attack, Lord looks at the attempt by a Japanese mini-sub to infiltrate Pearl Harbor, and on the subsequent attack on the mini-sub by the destroyer U.S.S. Ward. An ensign in a nearby PBY flying boat, participating in the attack, worried that they might be accidentally conducting an attack on a U.S. submarine: "He could see the court-martial now. And he could see himself labeled for the rest of his life as the man who sank the American sub. In a wave of youthful self-pity he began picturing himself trying to get any job anywhere" (p. 51). In that detail, Lord captures a simple and deadly truth: that war is a stressful enterprise carried on mainly by young people who are not at all sure whether what they are doing will turn out as they are hoping.

Not all of the anecdotes set forth by Lord are that light-hearted in nature. Once the attack has actually begun, there are plenty of stories of wartime tragedy. For instance, a private first class at the Army Air Corps's Hickam Field is described as seeing the danger facing a group of fellow soldiers inside a building, and calling out to warn them, but in vain: "It was too late. Trays, dishes, food splattered in all directions as a bomb crashed through the roof. Thirty-five men were wiped out instantly" (p. 100). There are plenty of such grim details in Day of Infamy; over 2400 Americans died that day.

Lord takes care to convey the Japanese perspective on the raid as well, as when he chronicles how Captain Mitsuo Fuchida, who led the first wave of attack bombers, tried to ensure that all of its pilots would time their attacks precisely. "When Fuchida saw the third plane in his group get out of line and prematurely drop its bomb, he was thoroughly annoyed. The man had a reputation for carelessness anyhow. Fuchida scribbled, 'What happened?' on a small blackboard and waved it at the culprit. The pilot indicated that he had been hit, that the bomb lines had been shot away, and Fuchida was filled with remorse" (p. 154).

But as Lord is an American writer, chronicling this American defeat that propelled the United States of America into the Second World War, it should be no surprise that Day of Infamy foregrounds stories of American endurance and heroism. Characteristic of this area of emphasis in the book is Lord's description of what happened when a second wave of Japanese dive bombers struck the Kanehoe Bay naval air station 90 minutes after the initial attack: "Suddenly all guns began to concentrate on one fighter. Everyone had the same idea at once - it seemed like telepathy. Smoke began pouring from the plane. Ensign Reese wondered if the pilot was crazy - it was hard to believe that they were actually shooting one down. But it was true. The pilot never pulled up. As he hit the hillside, there was a cloud of dirt, a burst of fire in the air, and the plane completely disintegrated" (p. 200).

Such moments of victory were rare enough for the Americans at Pearl Harbor, and therefore it is understandable that Lord wants to make the most of them.

Lord also captures well the chaotic scenes after the air raid had ended. We know, with the benefit of hindsight, that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was a raid and nothing more; its aim was to damage the U.S. Pacific Fleet sufficiently to dissuade the United States of America from challenging the Japanese Empire's plans to control the Pacific basin. But the people of Hawaii, that Sunday, did not have that hindsight-based knowledge; for all they knew, the air raid was but a prelude to a full-scale Japanese invasion of Hawaii. Against that background, the courage and shared effort that military and civilian personnel alike displayed in treating the wounded and preparing for possible invasion was most impressive. Characteristic in that regard were the words of one man at Queens Hospital, "riddled with shrapnel. When Dr. Forrest Pinkerton began explaining that he would have to delay treating the less serious wounds, the man calmly broke in, 'Just do what you can, I know there are other people waiting'" (p. 254).

Lord concludes by chronicling President Roosevelt's "date which will live in infamy" speech from December 8, 1941. As Lord puts it, "The speech was over in six minutes and war voted in less than an hour, but the real job was done in the first ten seconds. 'Infamy' was the note that struck home, the word that welded the country together until the war was won" (p. 286).

Day of Infamy is well-illustrated with maps and photographs. Yet the heart of the book can be found in the hundreds of interviews that Lord meticulously conducted with participants who, at the time, were still of age to remember. When Lord wrote this book, after all, the Pearl Harbor attack was only sixteen years in the past; he had the same abundance of living witnesses, ready to testify, as a journalist of today writing about the 9/11 attacks. For any reader who wants a quick, concise, compelling, and well-written account of the Pearl Harbor attack, Day of Infamy provides just that sort of reading experience.