How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

by Daniel Immerwahr

The army’s official history of the war judges the Philippine bombing to have been just as disastrous as the Hawaiian one. At Pearl Harbor, the Japanese hobbled the United States’ Pacific fleet, sinking four battleships and damaging four others. In the Philippines, the attackers laid waste to the largest concentration of U.S. warplanes outside North America—the foundation of the Allies’ Pacific air defense. The United States lost more than planes. The attack on Pearl Harbor was just that, an attack. Japan’s bombers struck, retreated, and never returned. Not so in the Philippines. There, the initial air raids were followed by more raids, then by invasion and conquest. Sixteen million Filipinos—U.S. nationals who saluted the Stars and Stripes and looked to FDR as their commander in chief—fell under a foreign power. They had a very different war than the inhabitants of Hawai‘i did. Nor did it stop there. The event familiarly known as “Pearl Harbor” was in fact an all-out lightning strike on U.S. and British holdings throughout the Pacific. On a single day, the Japanese attacked the U.S. territories of Hawai‘i, the Philippines, Guam, Midway Island, and Wake Island. They also attacked the British colonies of Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong, and they invaded Thailand.