Pearl Harbor: Deadly Surprise Attack (American Disasters) Review

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(More customer reviews)Pearl Harbor: Deadly Surprise Attack is part of the American Disasters series, a group of juvenile-literature titles intended to introduce elementary-age kids to momentous negative events in American history. As an introduction, this is a decent enough title, I suppose. But it's really nothing to get excited about, and probably shouldn't displace other similar works on the subject.

Author Therese De Angelis strives to place the attack within the political and military context of the era, particularly Japanese expansion in the Far East and American reactions to it. The book's one map illustrates the Pacific, and labels Hawaii, the U.S. mainland, and Japan, but none of the other nations mentioned in the text. And while there's one aerial photo of the Pearl Harbor naval base, there's no map of either the harbor or of Oahu generally. I found this probably the book's most serious shortcoming.

While the general portrait of the planning, execution, and aftermath of the attack are competently told, there are a number of small mistakes that mar the narrative. One paragraph on page 13, for example, mentions that the U.S. Air Force had bases in Hawaii, although in fact the U.S.A.F. wasn't founded as an independent service until after the war. And in a chart of "Other Military Disasters" at the end of the book, the Boston Massacre and the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution are included. Those may be many things, but was the resolution itself a "disaster"? Was the massacre "military"?

More seriously, De Angelis writes on page 15, "Most experts who study World War II agree that Yamamoto greatly misjudged how fiercely Americans would react to an American attack." In fact, Yamamoto probably understood better than anyone in the Japanese senior command what the American response would entail, and had the fewest illusions about what his nation was facing as a consequence. Oddly, toward the end of her book, De Angelis states that the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency and the formation of the Department of Defense resulted from the Pearl Harbor attack, but then comments that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were *not* direct results of the attack.

On the whole, this book may be a fair way for parents or teachers to help children get a general idea of what happened at Pearl Harbor and why. But anyone wanting more than the basics will need to look elsewhere.

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