Beschrijving
On 7 December 1941, the United States suffered a strategic shock that has been explained ever since as either an intelligence failure or an inevitable tragedy. Pearl Harbor: The Day America Woke Up argues that the attack is better understood as the product of interacting choices: Japanese leaders seeking a decisive opening under constraint, and American leaders attempting deterrence while managing escalation risk, all within institutions that turned ambiguous warning into routine. The result was not ignorance, but a fatal mismatch between what was known, what was believed, and what was acted upon.Kenji Takahiro traces how operational planning and doctrine made surprise achievable, and how peacetime assumptions made vulnerability durable. By following the pathways of political signalling and the institutional realities of intelligence interpretation, the book shows why alerts did not translate into readiness, even when conflict was expected. It also examines the role of naval doctrine in shaping what each side considered plausible: what kinds of attacks seemed feasible, what targets mattered most, and what a \
