Wake Island, Western Pacific Ocean • December 23, 1941 On this date in 1941 Wake Island defenders surrendered after 2 attack waves of 1,000 Japanese marines each stormed the beaches. Two days earlier, in their largest attack yet on Wake Island, the Japanese had sent 49 aircraft, dive bombers and fighters both, to knock out the last of…
Washington, D.C • December 22, 1941 On this date in 1941 the Japanese public glimpsed their first photos in the newspaper Asahi Shimbun of their country’s devastating attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the worst military catastrophe in American history. On the same date, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister…
Washington, D.C. • November 20, 1941 On this date in 1941 in Washington, Japanese ambassador Kichisaburō Nomura presented his government’s final proposal for peace in the Asia Pacific region. Through much of 1941, Ambassador Nomura had negotiated with U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull to resolve festering bilateral issues. Chief among the issues were the…
Off Savo Island, Solomon Islands, South Pacific • November 13, 1942 Commissioned on February 14, 1942, the light antiaircraft cruiser USS Juneau (CL‑52), named after the capital city of Alaska, first saw service in the Caribbean, where it performed blockade patrol in early May off Martinique and Guadeloupe Islands to prevent the escape of Vichy French…
Bari, Italy • November 8, 1943 On this date in 1943, 13 U.S. Army flight nurses, 13 young enlisted medics, and 3 flight crew boarded a Douglas C‑53 transport in Sicily for a 90‑minute flight to Bari on the Italian mainland. As a unit of the 807th Medical Air Evacuation Squadron, the team’s assignment was to…
Tokyo, Japan • October 16, 1941 On this date in 1941 three-time Prime Minister of Japan Prince Fumimaro Konoe resigned from office. Konoe (also rendered Konoye) had lost the support of cabinet and Army minister Gen. Hideki Tōjō, who called for a firmer line with the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt over the U.S….
Quebec, Canada • August 18, 1943 On this date in 1943 in Quebec, Canada, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King, along with their Combined Chiefs of Staff, set to work planning Operation Overlord, the 1944 invasion of German-occupied France. At this first of two Quebec conferences,…
A Smithsonian Top History Book of 2016
A Japan Times Best Book About Japan of 2016
A fascinating look at the twelve days leading up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor—the warnings, clues and missteps—by a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter.
In Washington, DC, in late November 1941, admirals compose the most ominous message in Navy history to warn Hawaii of possible danger, but they write it too vaguely. They think precautions are being taken, but never check to see if they are. A key intelligence officer wants more warnings sent, but he is on the losing end of a bureaucratic battle and can’t get the message out. American sleuths have pierced Japan’s most vital diplomatic code, and Washington believes it has a window on the enemy’s soul—but it does not.
In a small office at Pearl Harbor, overlooking the battleships at the heart of America’s seafaring power, the Commander of the Pacific Fleet tries to figure out how much danger he really faces. His intelligence unit has lost track of Japan’s biggest aircraft carriers, but assumes they are resting in a port far away. The admiral thinks Pearl is too shallow for torpedoes, so he never puts up a barrier. As he frets, a Japanese spy is counting the warships in the harbor and reporting to Tokyo.
There were false assumptions, and racist ones: The Japanese aren’t very good aviators and they don’t have the nerve or the skill to attempt a strike so far from their home. There were misunderstandings, conflicting desires, painful choices. And there was a naval officer who, on his very first mission as captain of his very first ship, did exactly the right thing. His warning could have averted disaster, but his superiors reacted too leisurely. Japanese planes arrived moments later.
Twomey’s telescoping of the twelve days leading to the attack unravels the crucial characters and moments, and produces an edge-of-your seat drama with fascinating details about America at this moment in its history. By the end, the reader understands how assumption is the root of disaster, and how sometimes a gamble pays off.
A human drama unlike any other—the riveting and definitive full story of the worst sea disaster in United States naval history.
“ENTHRALLING.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) • “OUTSTANDING…A MUST-READ.” —Booklist (starred review) • “GRIPPING.” —Publishers Weekly
Just after midnight on July 30, 1945, days after delivering the components of the atomic bomb from California to the Pacific Islands in the most highly classified naval mission of the war, USS Indianapolis is sailing alone in the center of the Philippine Sea when she is struck by two Japanese torpedoes. The ship is instantly transformed into a fiery cauldron and sinks within minutes. Some 300 men go down with the ship. Nearly 900 make it into the water alive. For the next five nights and four days, almost three hundred miles from the nearest land, the men battle injuries, sharks, dehydration, insanity, and eventually each other. Only 316 will survive.
For the better part of a century, the story of USS Indianapolis has been understood as a sinking tale. The reality, however, is far more complicated—and compelling. Now, for the first time, thanks to a decade of original research and interviews with 107 survivors and eyewitnesses, Lynn Vincent and Sara Vladic tell the complete story of the ship, her crew, and their final mission to save one of their own.
It begins in 1932, when Indianapolis is christened and launched as the ship of state for President Franklin Roosevelt. After Pearl Harbor, Indianapolis leads the charge to the Pacific Islands, notching an unbroken string of victories in an uncharted theater of war. Then, under orders from President Harry Truman, the ship takes aboard a superspy and embarks on her final world-changing mission: delivering the core of the atomic bomb to the Pacific for the strike on Hiroshima. Vincent and Vladic provide a visceral, moment-by-moment account of the disaster that unfolds days later after the Japanese torpedo attack, from the chaos on board the sinking ship to the first moments of shock as the crew plunge into the remote waters of the Philippine Sea, to the long days and nights during which terror and hunger morph into delusion and desperation, and the men must band together to survive.
Then, for the first time, the authors go beyond the men’s rescue to chronicle Indianapolis’s extraordinary final mission: the survivors’ fifty-year fight for justice on behalf of their skipper, Captain Charles McVay III, who is wrongly court-martialed for the sinking. What follows is a captivating courtroom drama that weaves through generations of American presidents, from Harry Truman to George W. Bush, and forever entwines the lives of three captains—McVay, whose life and career are never the same after the scandal; Mochitsura Hashimoto, the Japanese sub commander who sinks Indianapolis but later joins the battle to exonerate McVay; and William Toti, the captain of the modern-day submarine Indianapolis, who helps the survivors fight to vindicate their captain.
A sweeping saga of survival, sacrifice, justice, and love, Indianapolis stands as both groundbreaking naval history and spellbinding narrative—and brings the ship and her heroic crew back to full, vivid, unforgettable life. It is the definitive account of one of the most remarkable episodes in American history.
The United States Navy won such overwhelming victories in 1944 that, had the navy faced a different enemy, the war would have been over at the conclusion of the Battle of Leyte Gulf.
However, in the moment of victory on 25 October 1944, the US Navy found itself confronting an enemy that had been inconceivable until it appeared. The kamikaze, ‘divine wind’ in Japanese, was something Americans were totally unprepared for; a violation of every belief held in the West. The attacks were terrifying: regardless of the damage inflicted on an attacking airplane, there was no certainty of safety aboard the ship until that airplane was completely destroyed.
Based on first-person accounts, Tidal Wave is the story of the naval campaigns in the Pacific from the victory at Leyte Gulf to the end of the war, in which the US Navy would fight harder for survival than ever before.
