A First Shock
DANGEROUS as it is to attempt to estimate the importance of events which occurred the day before yesterday, we may assume with some safety that the sudden Japanese attack of December 7th, 1941, upon the American and British positions in the Pacific was a turning- point in modern history. And in the course of that wild and treacherous day there occurred no episode more spectacular and bloody than the raid upon the U.S. naval and air base at Pearl Harbour. The technique of the surprise attack upon a peaceful neighbour without a formal declaration of war, first employed by Frederick the Great in his invasion of Austrian Silesia, is now some two centuries old; in modem times no nation has done more than the Japanese to develop and perfect it. That Sunday in Hawaii, when more than 2,500 American combatants were slaughtered— almost in their beds—and the main U.S. Pacific fleet suffered grievous damage, must surely remain for some time the supreme masterpiece of dishonourable surprise.
For this reason Mr. Clark's little book is of high interest to any student of warlike affairs. In some ways, of course, it is tanta- lisingly inadequate; it completely ignores, for instance, the mystery of the American failure to guard against surprise—a negligence which in the light of Japan's previous record and of the fruitless negotiations at Washington, would seem to border upon the criminal. But it does present in concise form a clear impression of the chaos, the terror and the courage which suddenly distinguished that calm, sunny morning.
It is interesting, too, from another aspect. It has brought home to me, more perhaps than any other book I have read, the width of the psychological gap which still divides the sheltered American from us storm-tossed Europeans. The scenes which Mr. Clark describes—men trapped in blazing hulks, a boy blown in pieces through a ladder's iron rungs, poor devils choked by escaping oil as they swim away from the doomed ships—for us such incidents are commonplace enough; but for Mr. Clark they become a back- ground of fantastic horror, against which the normal heroism and discipline of trained men assume incredible dimensions.
Incidentally, Mr. Clark appears to harbour few doubts of the 15o,000 Japanese in the Hawaiian Islands; he suggests that most of them reacted like good Americans to tirt attack. In view of what we have seen happening in Malaya and the Philippines, it is to be hoped that Mr. Clark's optimism is not generally shared in Honolulu.
SIMON HARCOURT-SMITH.
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