My wife and I had started a general Insurance agency and real estate business in Gillette, Wyoming. I was the chief salesman and had begun to travel outside our immediate area seeking clients. On one such trip, I spent the night at the historical Irma Hotel in Cody, Wyoming. I was facing a rather boring evening by myself when I began to recall my friendship with Sheriff Blackburn. I again began thinking of the story of Earl Durand, so I decided to wander over to the county library to seek further details on the history of the Durand event. I was told that a signifi cant fi le was preserved about the event, but that the fi le was kept at the Powell library.
My wife and I had started a general Insurance agency and real estate business in Gillette, Wyoming. I was the chief salesman and had begun to travel outside our immediate area seeking clients. On one such trip, I spent the night at the historical Irma Hotel in Cody, Wyoming. I was facing a rather boring evening by myself when I began to recall my friendship with Sheriff Blackburn. I again began thinking of the story of Earl Durand, so I decided to wander over to the county library to seek further details on the history of the Durand event. I was told that a signifi cant fi le was preserved about the event, but that the fi le was kept at the Powell library.
A groundbreaking history that considers the attack on Pearl Harbor from the Japanese perspective and is certain to revolutionize how we think of the war in the Pacific. When Japan launched hostilities against the United States in 1941, argues Eri Hotta, its leaders, in large part, understood they were entering a war they were almost certain to lose. Drawing on material little known to Western readers, and barely explored in depth in Japan itself, Hotta poses an essential question: Why did these men—military men, civilian politicians, diplomats, the emperor—put their country and its citizens so unnecessarily in harm’s way? Introducing us to the doubters, schemers, and would-be patriots who led their nation into this conflagration, Hotta brilliantly shows us a Japan rarely glimpsed—eager to avoid war but fraught with tensions with the West, blinded by reckless militarism couched in traditional notions of pride and honor, tempted by the gambler’s dream of scoring the biggest win against impossible odds and nearly escaping disaster before it finally proved inevitable. In an intimate account of the increasingly heated debates and doomed diplomatic overtures preceding Pearl Harbor, Hotta reveals just how divided Japan’s leaders were, right up to (and, in fact, beyond) their eleventh-hour decision to attack. We see a ruling cadre rich in regional ambition and hubris: many of the same leaders seeking to avoid war with the United States continued to adamantly advocate Asian expansionism, hoping to advance, or at least maintain, the occupation of China that began in 1931, unable to end the second Sino-Japanese War and unwilling to acknowledge Washington’s hardening disapproval of their continental incursions. Even as Japanese diplomats continued to negotiate with the Roosevelt administration, Matsuoka Yosuke, the egomaniacal foreign minister who relished paying court to both Stalin and Hitler, and his facile supporters cemented Japan’s place in the fascist alliance with Germany and Italy—unaware (or unconcerned) that in so doing they destroyed the nation’s bona fides with the West. We see a dysfunctional political system in which military leaders reported to both the civilian government and the emperor, creating a structure that facilitated intrigues and stoked a jingoistic rivalry between Japan’s army and navy. Roles are recast and blame reexamined as Hotta analyzes the actions and motivations of the hawks and skeptics among Japan’s elite. Emperor Hirohito and General Hideki Tojo are newly appraised as we discover how the two men fumbled for a way to avoid war before finally acceding to it. Hotta peels back seventy years of historical mythologizing—both Japanese and Western—to expose all-too-human Japanese leaders torn by doubt in the months preceding the attack, more concerned with saving face than saving lives, finally drawn into war as much by incompetence and lack of political will as by bellicosity. An essential book for any student of the Second World War, this compelling reassessment will forever change the way we remember those days of infamy.
In this story of the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, the notorious gambler Yamamoto is pitted against the equally legendary American admiral Bill Halsey in a battle of wits, nerve, and skill.
Using previously unreleased documents, the author reveals new evidence that FDR knew the attack on Pearl Harbor was coming and did nothing to prevent it.
"A Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter chronicles the 12 days leading up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, examining the miscommunications, clues, missteps and racist assumptions that may have been behind America's failure to safeguard against the tragedy, "--NoveList.
