Day Of Infamy
   Walter Lord
  2001 An Owl Book/Henry Holt & Co. NY
   ISBN: 0805068031


Tracing the drama of the massive aerial attack which catapulted America into the Second World War as the fabled Pacific Fleet rested at port on a sunny Sunday in paradise.

As broad & vast as the Pacific Ocean, Walter Lord's 1957 classic retelling of the many & various, military & civilian, pieces of the shattered puzzle that became the impetus for President Roosevelt's six-minute radio speech, has been reissued for the 60th Anniversary of that Day of Infamy when naval & air forces of the empire of Japan, suddenly & deliberately attacked the United States of America.

Anyone who has flown to Hawaii or even sailed there, knows how far away from the mainland is that chain of idyllic islands. For us in the age of jets & satellite links & cell 'phones, it's only a matter of minutes, hours at the most. 60 years ago, it was a lot longer &, in many ways, much more isolated. So when the drone of a flight of planes coming in at dawn roused citizens & service men alike, well, they had been expecting some planes from California & went about their Sunday rituals.

From Admiral to General, from Teenager to Housewife, from Nurse to Pilot, Walter Lord records the stories & puts the puzzle together in an eminently readable flow of memories. Richly flavored with the spice of seeing the attack from the other side, following the Japanese build-up of a secret mission & the mindset that had their fleet cruising across an empty ocean with their decks crammed with planes whose pilots had been blessed by their emperor.

As Chapter VII's title: I Didn't Even Know They Were Sore At Us!” indicates, Americans living & stationed on the Hawaiian Island of Oahu & especially around panoramic Pearl Harbor & Ford Island, were living & loving in their usual ways, perhaps a little on alert, after all there was a war going on over in Europe, again.

Walter Lord has done an admirable job of reminding us just how innocent we were & in that innocence how unprepared we were, how untrained at putting the clues together ~ remember no one really believed anyone had the reach to reach us, let alone attack us.

As the chapters to Day of Infamy unfold we are party to the missed cues as well as the fomenting excitement of a nation girding up its loins to bite the butt of a vast & complacent people.

& then, on the drone of a swarm of planes coming out of nowhere & their silent unseen compatriot submariners, all hell breaks loose & a sunny spot in paradise becomes an inferno of fuel plumes, burning bodies, blasting bombs & torpedoes & earsplitting chaos. Suddenly a many-colored world becomes shrouded in the smoke greys & the flame reds.

As Stephen E. Ambrose writes: “There have been many books on Pearl Harbor...but none of them have ever equaled Lord's in telling the story of Pearl Harbor.” After I finished Day of Infamy I was surprised at how thin this book is, just under 250 pages. For the time I was reading it, I was among those huge naval ships, scanning vast ocean distances, listening to hordes of plane propellers & the hum of the odd submarine crew on their lonely missions & privy to the chasm of cultural differences ~ what drove the Japanese & what hindered the Americans.

Between these covers I stood among the host of determined, terrified & courageous people who came together for that moment in time which will always be a Day of Infamy.

More from Walter Lord: A Night to Remember & The Fremantle Diary
(05/27/01)

Rebecca