Melber’s discussion of the attack itself is equally thorough. Certainly, the basic facts of Japan’s two-wave assault on Oahu are well known: from the main types of Japanese aircraft, the Nakashima B5N torpedo and horizontal bombers, the Aichi D3A dive bombers and the Mitsubishi “zero” fighters A6M2, at launch sites and targets; and, of course, the gruesome death and destruction caused by the attack. Melber’s account, however, with its focus on Japanese attackers, provides a well-rounded analysis. As a result, subsequent coverage of the execution of the strike force and the course of events becomes more easily comprehensible. And for readers who tend to associate carrier-based strike primarily with American battleships anchored at Ford Island, Melber’s book effectively analyzes the scope of targets, particularly the various naval airfields, of the army and navy that were attacked. A final chapter, meanwhile, explores the significance of the attack, which admirably includes debunking the conspiracy theories that have developed over the years about President Franklin D’s alleged inside knowledge of the attack. Roosevelt. In a word: nonsense.
By focusing almost exclusively on the period from early 1941, when Nomura Kichisaburō was appointed ambassador to the United States until the December attack, the book glosses over important historical context and the deeper issues that divide the two nations.
The book’s greatest weakness, despite its 70 pages, is its first chapter on the “road to Pearl Harbor” and US-Japan diplomacy. By focusing almost exclusively on the period from early 1941, when Nomura Kichisaburō was appointed ambassador to the United States until the December attack, the book glosses over important historical context and the deeper issues that divide the two nations. In particular, very little is said about the diplomatic revolution that followed the Great War. Fleeting references are made to the Washington conference (1921-22), but the new principles proclaimed at the Paris peace conference (1919) and embodied in the nine-power treaty (1922), the Kellogg-Briand pact (1928 ) and London Naval Conference (1930) are mostly ignored. The same goes for the Sino-Japanese war, which is little covered in the opening chapter. As a result, for example, it becomes much more difficult for a reader to grasp the significance of Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s Four Principles and his insistence that Japan accept them for more substantive talks. A careful examination of the four principles shows that they are a compressed version of the principles set out in the treaties of the 1920s, which Japanese aggression in Asia clearly violated. Although Melber, to his credit, frequently cites the four principles, a historical connection between Hull’s demands and the 1920s treaties is only made in passing so that a reader can make sense of it all.[1]
Moreover, the book perpetuates historiographical confusion by labeling Japanese leaders as hawks/militarists or doves/moderates. The basis of this delimitation tends to be that by which the Japanese leaders supported or did not support going to war against America. The problem with such a historical perspective is that it ignores underlying ideological leanings. Divisions arose among Japanese leaders over whether it was strategically pragmatic to attack America, but a broad coalition of Japanese leaders in the 1930s nevertheless believed in the rightness of Japan’s “cause” – its expansionism and primacy in Manchuria and eventually in China proper and Southeast Asia. The case of Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro sheds light on this semantic confusion. Konoe aggressively sought Japanese hegemony in Asia; and between July 1937 and July 1941, made many decisions to achieve this. In the fall of 1941, however, he opposed a war with the United States for strategic reasons. In the case of Konoe, do the sudden strategic fears of an aggressive imperialist justify the label of moderate? The shortcomings of such an interpretation become clear when Melber asserts “that a meeting between Konoe and Roosevelt…would have offered a good opportunity to reach a bilateral agreement without interference from anti-American extremists in Japan.”[2]
On the whole, however, especially for readers unfamiliar with the Japanese planning and execution of the attack of December 7, 1941—or whose knowledge of the Japanese side is limited to an abstract reference to “Tora Tora, Tora ” – Melber’s study is a lucid synthesis of events and a solid contribution to the historiography of Pearl Harbor.