Smith does not tell the reader, but Kimmel had succeeded Admiral Joseph Richardson as CINCPAC on 1 February 1941, in the main, because Richardson had questioned the wisdom of the decision to move the Pacific Fleet more or less permanently from San Diego to Pearl Harbor. Both the Army and Army Air Force were under his direct command. Short (1880-1949) a University of Illinois graduate commissioned into the United States Army in 1901, was the Commander of the Hawaiian Department at the time of the attack.
His counterpart, Lieutenant General Walter C. Kimmel (1882-1968), a 1904 graduate of the United States Naval Academy was CINCPAC (Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet) at the time of the attack. In the succeeding chapter entitled "Opposing Commanders," mini-biographies of six American and five Japanese leaders are presented. What is it that makes this new entrant into the literature so engaging and compelling? Certainly it is a new and up-to-date telling of the story of that fateful day which brought America legally and forcefully into World War II.Ĭarl Smith, a writer for popular military magazines who has a life-long fascination with the events of 7 December 1941, begins with a two-page introduction providing essential background, geophysical locations, and an evaluation of the political situation. Hundreds of books and thousands of journal articles have been written about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor - what the Imperial Japanese Navy called Operation Hawaii (also called Operation Z) and what President Franklin Delano Roosevelt termed "the date which will live in infamy." By this meticulously planned and conducted attack by Japanese air and naval forces, the Japanese Empire destroyed or decimated a major portion of the United States Pacific Fleet while sustaining minor losses. Pearl Harbor: A Concise Assessment of the Day of Infamy/Operation Z Published on H-US-Japan (September, 2000) Kolb (National Endowment for the Humanities)
Oxford and New York: Osprey Publishing, 1999.
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