REMEMBERING PEARL HARBOUR

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 954, 22 November 1957, Page 12

REMEMBERING PEARL HARBOUR

DAY OF INFAMY, by Walter Lord; Longmans, Green and Co., English price 18/-. HE Japanese strike at Pearl Harbour on the morning of Sunday, December 7, 1941, destroyed both the might of the U.S. Pacific Fleet and the vestigial belief that chivalry has a place in modern war. Both American reaction and the quaint title of this book cry horror at Japanese treachery in failing to notify the U.S. of their intentions beforehand. As the pilots of the Imperial Navy made their near-perfect, textbook attacks on the base and on the aircraft lined up (to prevent sabotage) on the airfields, the Americans looked on in stupefied unbelief. Of the 600 people interviewed for this minute-by-minute account, only one seems actually to have recognised the enemy aircraft. Later, when the stunned Americans began shooting, their aim reflected their (continued on page 14)

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(continued from page 12) state of shock, One witness reported seeing a master-sergeant ride with his head down, furiously pedalling his bicycle and firing-a .45 pistol into the air. Some naval gunners likewise were more intent on throwing something back than on aiming carefully at any of the 253 attackers. The result was that Honolulu proper was hit by only one Japanese bomb, but by no fewer than 40 U.S. naval shells. For the destruction of 18 ships and 188 aeroplanes, the Japanese paid with only six submarines (five of them midget) and 29 aircraft. By nightfall, American gunnery had improved. While the Japanese followed their unaccountable decision not to press

the attack and headed homeward, the U.S. Navy shot down an entire flight of is own carrier-based aircraft. An army sentry fired so persistently at his relief that he was finally left alone to stand duty all night, The book suffers in coherence from its fragmentary method of compilation and its neglect of the interesting question of responsibility. But it has the large virtues of documentary realism: it is crammed with memorable incident; it includes Japanese accounts of the action; and it is generously interleaved with revealing photographs from sources on both sides, A most readable account, for the non-specialist, of the blow which knocked America, fighting mad, into the

Zuth century.

A.S.

F.