Pearl Harbor 50 Years Later :...

Hector C. Bywater was, at three or four removes, my predecessor on the Daily Telegraph of London. As the naval correspondent of that newspaper, of which I am now defense editor, he knew everyone of note in the naval world of the 1920s and 1930s and wrote prolifically about the strategy of sea power, both in its columns and in a series of widely read books.

He did not always make himself popular. His urge to make headlines led him to tell more than his informants sometimes thought he should. It also tempted him to stray across the line that divides journalism from espionage, a temptation that serious journalists ought always to resist. Nevertheless, his name is still remembered, something for which few journalists can hope. The principal reason for that is the dramatic forewarning he gave of the danger of a Japanese naval attack on U.S. power in the Pacific in a book published in 1925.

The book was “The Great Pacific War,” which described a Japanese-American war of 1931-3, in which Japan seized an island empire and defied the United States to reassert its mastery. The genre was not new. Future warfare had been a favorite subject with the reading public since the 19th Century, starting with Chesney’s “Battle of Dorking” in 1871, which alarmed Victorian Britain with its picture of a Prussian army debarking on the Channel coast.

At least one Frenchman, Danrit, made a successful career out of sensationalist accounts of future German attacks on an unprepared France; ironically, he was to be killed in 1916 at Verdun, one of the places he had demanded should be better fortified against German invasion. Erskine Childers, in “The Riddle of the Sands,” anticipated Bywater’s alarmism in a brilliant tale of German plans to outwit British naval supremacy in the North Seas; it is still read with admiration by fans of the intellectual spy story.

Bywater’s book was not in that class. It was written not as a novel but as a history of future events, and scarcely bears re-reading today. The interest attaching to it stems from the influence it is said to have had on Admiral Yamamoto, commander of the Japanese Combined Fleet in 1941 who, as naval attache in Washington in 1926, noticed the interest its publication had aroused.

There are, however, difficulties about drawing a direct link between Bywater and Pearl Harbor. First, Bywater envisaged a long war before the two fleets met. Second, he foresaw the battle as one between battleships; his description of the operation of carrier aircraft is quite clumsy.

It is true that he correctly anticipated Japanese strategy, which was to seize an island perimeter as a barrier against an American counter-offensive. That idea, however, had been advanced by Japanese naval strategists themselves, notably Aiyama, as early as 1907. Their plans were kept secret, of course, so that Bywater deserves credit for perceiving their inner thoughts. He cannot be credited with planting the seed in their minds, since it had taken root long before he wrote.

William Honan’s real success in “Visions of Infamy” is in his portrait of Bywater. Bywater was a fairly nasty piece of work, keen always to exaggerate both his expertise and his influence, and unchoosy as to how he made a buck. He fitted perfectly into the shadowy world of secret-selling and arms-trading of which Sir Basic Zaharoff was the uncrowned king; the only surprise about his career is that he did not die rich. Honan very interestingly, suggests that he died in fact by poison, administered by a Japanese agent. Alcoholic poisoning, that nemesis of a journalist down on his luck, seems more likely, but it is a testament to Honan’s skill in depicting his subject’s hustling rise and sleazy decline that either exit from life is made to seem equally probable.

Stanley Weintraub’s book about Pearl Harbor is based not upon speculation, but is a minute-by-minute narration of the events of the day of infamy itself. He paints a broad canvas, from Hawaii to the German front lines outside Moscow, the decks of an American cruiser in Icelandic waters, the Chinese tenements of Hong Kong and the Japanese Embassy in Washington, among many other places.

This kaleidoscopic style of relating history was most recently popularized by Cornelius Ryan, who began fairly modestly with a dozen eyewitnesses of D-Day and ended by presenting a cast of hundreds at the fall of Berlin. It makes for unfailingly fascinating reading. Little matter that many of those wheeled onstage have nothing relevant to tell us about the episode in question itself. A book constructed in this fashion has the appeal of a newspaper gossip column. Any one paragraph is as interesting as any other paragraph, immediacy and the personal angle compensating for lack of a central argument.

The secret ingredient in Weintraub’s recipe is that he does actually understand what is going on. While many authors who adopt the kaleidoscopic approach do not apparently know the end of the story when they begin, and merely pile reminiscence on reminiscence in the hope that a theme will shape itself by the process of accumulation, Weintraub has a cunning gift for interspersing the significant flash of illumination among the mere play of mirror effects. What, the casual reader might ask, do Charles de Gaulle and the Australian first secretary in the Washington embassy have to do with a Japanese surprise attack on the American Pacific Fleet? The answer is that De Gaulle made a brilliantly perceptive forecast on hearing the news of Pearl Harbor, while the Australian first secretary put his finger on the nub of a controversy that had divided the Japanese navy before the fatal decision was taken.

“Well,” said De Gaulle on being brought news of the attack, “this war is over. . . . Nothing can resist the power of American industry. . . . And after that will come two phases. The first will be a rescue of Germany by the Allies; as for the second, I fear that will be a war between the Russians and the Americans.” To have predicted the victory of 1945, the Marshall Plan and the Cold War in the space of a couple of sentences is evidence of how awesome were De Gaulle’s political gifts. Almost as interesting, however, was the comment on the same piece of news made by Alan Watt, the Australian: He did “not understand why Japan did not attack only British territory in the first instance, to test whether Roosevelt could have persuaded an isolationist Congress to declare war in such circumstances.”

As we now know, and Bywater certainly did not foresee, the Japanese Naval General Staff, headed by Admiral Nagano, had indeed argued trenchantly against Yamamoto and the staff officers of the Combined Fleet that American possessions and forces could not be attacked. The British and Dutch colonies in Southeast Asia, he insisted, offered all the resources that Japan lacked, and to seize them while leaving the American Pacific Fleet intact, in the hope that the United States would continue to sit on its hands, was the wiser strategy.

Warriors can rarely bring themselves to resist a shoot-out. That was the nemesis of the Combined Fleet in 1941. Its leaders were warriors who had inherited a tradition of victory unbroken since the Russo-Japanese war. They had talked themselves into believing that an attack on Pearl Harbor could be another Tsushima--when Togo, the Japanese Nelson, had sent the czar’s navy to the bottom in 1904--and wise counsel could not convince them otherwise. So it was that on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, the air groups of the Japanese carriers appeared as if out of nowhere to devastate Battleship Row and leave the surface power of the American Navy in Asia a smudge of smoldering wrecks.

Thurston Clarke, in “Pearl Harbor Ghosts,” makes his own attempt at the kaleidoscopic approach, interspersing reminiscence of the events of Dec. 7 on Hawaii with his own contemporary observation. As a historian and also a recent visitor to Pearl Harbor, I cannot say it comes off. Pearl Harbor is too large an event for anything but the large book, which Clarke’s is not.

Large, of course, need not be big. Prange’s “At Dawn We Slept” is so big that it defies reading, though it is the fullest account of the day we possess. Spector’s “Eagle Against the Sun,” which devotes only a few pages to the attack, puts it so brilliantly into the context of the Pacific War that one might be forgiven the feeling that one needs to read nothing more.

What one would now like to read is a Japanese account written to Western standards of accuracy and perspective. It is no good for the Japanese to pile dollar on dollar in the hope that the size of their bank balances will make them trusted, let alone loved. The truth of the matter is that, as anyone who knows the United Kingdom, the United States, the Netherlands and Australasia cannot forebear from testifying, they are trusted no further, as a British brigadier who survived the war put it to me recently, than he could throw a grand piano with two broken wrists.

The source of that mistrust goes back to Pearl Harbor. Until the Japanese bring themselves to acknowledge that the “day of infamy” was indeed a day of infamy, the operators of the second largest economy in the world are never going to enjoy on the international scene anything much more than the right to fund the trade deficits of those states that do take responsibility for their actions. Pearl Harbor represents a deficit on Japan’s real credit that the ownership of a hundred Rockefeller Plazas cannot offset. Some honest history might begin to repay the debt.