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(More customer reviews)In "Target: Pearl Harbor," Michael Slackman has written the best-balanced account of the event. Gordon Prange's monumental "At Dawn We Slept" invested hundreds of pages in assessing the various imputations of blame and other issues of interest to specialists. Slackman presents a "just-the-facts-ma`m" approach better suited to ordinary readers. While he admits he has added little new to the known facts, he pulls no punches about the ones already known. Even the obsessive Prange left out the most gruesome details.
Not many Americans, then or since, had the moral courage of a "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell, who capped a long retreat from the Japanese with the assessment, "I claim we took a hell of a licking." Many professional historians, starting with the eminent Charles Beard, have made fools of themselves by trying to take credit for the victory at Pearl Harbor away from the Japanese and blaming it on somebody else, usually Franklin Roosevelt.
Slackman points out that, "For the Japanese, Pearl Harbor was, in strategic terms, a subsidiary operation," since their eyes were on Southeast Asia and its minerals.
The Pacific War, as Japanese and English historians rightly prefer to call it, was "a classic case of cross-cultural misunderstanding."
The Americans held Japanese abilities in contempt, preferring to worry about the expected sabotage from the Japanese-Americans who made up 40 percent of the resident population in the islands. The Japanese in the islands proved to be totally loyal to America.
Religion also entered strongly into the equation, although Slackman does not mention this. One Navy pilot who was shot down at Pearl Harbor and later claimed credit for sinking a Japanese aircraft carrier at Midway described the Japanese as "heathens," as if this was another justification for making war.
On the Japanese side, similar contempt for the soft Americans led them to overplay their hand. The Japanese were good - as they proved by beating the U.S. Navy again and again in the Solomons - but they were also lucky. Slackman's assessment of the motivations and capabilities of the two sides is the best-balanced I have read, with one exception - like almost every other historian, he judges the author of the Pearl Harbor attack, Isoruku Yamamoto, to have been "brilliant."
"Foolhardy" describes him better. Against weak, unprepared opponents, he did well. But he didn't know how to exploit victories or prepare a defense. Even at Pearl Harbor, the Japanese losses were 10 percent; when losses rose that high in the aerial war against Germany, they were regarded as unacceptable and operations were suspended.
Few of the experiences of the attackers are recorded in "Target: Pearl Harbor," because neither the records nor the men survived the war. On the American side, December 7 was a day of panic, fear, suffering and bravery. Fourteen Americans were awarded the Medal of Honor, and several civilians were given the highest honors the military could manage.
But there was infamy on the American side as well. American soldiers and sailors robbed the corpses of their slain comrades, a fact that even Prange decided not to mention.
Pearl Harbor need not have happened, at least not the way it did happen. Fighting admirals like Bill Halsey were loaded for bear the first week of December but didn't meet any Japanese. Golfing admirals and generals, like Husband Kimmel and Walter Short, the Oahu commanders, were worse than useless.
The recriminations after Pearl Harbor were simultaneously genuine and politically motivated, as Slackman understands. The recriminations, however motivated, set up the United States for a second disaster, as bad in its way as Pearl Harbor.
After the war, it was believed (incorrectly) that a failure of intelligence had "caused" Pearl Harbor. This belief was one of the potent fathers of the Central Intelligence Agency. Oil still seeps from the hull of the battleship Arizona; the corrosion of central intelligence still seeps through the national polity.
Slackman did most of the research for "Target: Pearl Harbor" in the early '80s under the sponsorship of the National Park Service and the Arizona Memorial Museum Association. The association is co-publisher with the University of Hawaii Press.
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