To Wake the Giant: A Novel of Pearl Harbor

by Jeff Shaara

having our fleet in Hawaii is a cautionary symbol, reminding the Japanese that they simply can’t gallop all over the Pacific as they please.

Roosevelt’s secretary of the navy, Frank Knox, spoke up now. “Mr. President, there is one accurate statement of which we are well aware. We do not possess adequate numbers of aircraft on Hawaii to effectively patrol a three-hundred-sixty-degree circumference, twenty-four hours a day.”

What Hitler has done is attack the nation with the largest landmass on earth. This makes as much sense to me as loading up the Japanese army and ferrying them over to California to invade the entire United States.

The Magic machines had intercepted an unusual message sent via the Purple codes, and it immediately crossed the desks of everyone in Washington authorized to receive it. It was an oddly detailed set of instructions from the Japanese foreign ministry to its consulate in Honolulu. The instructions called for the entire area in and around Pearl Harbor to be laid out in a series of grid lines, as though a checkerboard was to be superimposed over a map. The instructions also called for the consulate to designate the types and classes of the warships anchored in the harbor.

Hull’s reaction to the intercept was concern, but the cryptologists and the ranking military officers all the way up the chain of command dismissed his worries.

To the Japanese, control and occupation of China, Korea, and any other nation or territory along the Pacific basin was their destiny; the utter inferiority of so many other cultures made that imperative.