First edition | |
Author | Martin Cruz Smith |
---|---|
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Publisher | Simon & Schuster |
Publication date | 30 September 2002 |
Media type | Print (Hardcover, Paperback) |
Pages | 352 (hardback) |
ISBN | 0-684-87253-6 |
December 6 is a 2003 thriller novel by American author Martin Cruz Smith. [1]
In late 1941, Harry Niles owns a bar for American and European expatriates, journalists, and diplomats, in Tokyo's entertainment district, called the "Happy Paris". With only 24 hours until Japanese fighters and bombers attack Pearl Harbor, Niles has to consult with the local US ambassador, break up with a desperate lover, evade the police, escape the vengeance of an aggrieved samurai officer and leave the island, the exit points from which are all closed. Having grown up in Tokyo, Niles is fluent in the Japanese language and culture, and is highly streetwise. [2] [3]
The novel was published in England under the name Tokyo Station. [4]
Isoroku Yamamoto was a Japanese Marshal Admiral of the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) and the commander-in-chief of the Combined Fleet during World War II until his death.
The Attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise military strike by the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service upon the United States against the naval base at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Territory of Hawaii, just before 08:00, on Sunday morning, December 7, 1941. The attack led to the United States' formal entry into World War II the next day. The Japanese military leadership referred to the attack as the Hawaii Operation and Operation AI, and as Operation Z during its planning. Japan intended the attack as a preventive action to keep the United States Pacific Fleet from interfering with its planned military actions in Southeast Asia against overseas territories of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and the United States. Over the course of seven hours there were coordinated Japanese attacks on the U.S.-held Philippines, Guam, and Wake Island and on the British Empire in Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong.
Zuikaku was a Shōkaku-class aircraft carrier of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Her complement of aircraft took part in the attack on Pearl Harbor that formally brought the United States into the Pacific War, and she fought in several of the most important naval battles of the war, before being sunk during the Battle of Leyte Gulf.
Pearl Harbor is a 2001 American romantic war drama film directed by Michael Bay, produced by Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer and written by Randall Wallace. It stars Ben Affleck, Kate Beckinsale, Josh Hartnett, Cuba Gooding Jr., Tom Sizemore, Jon Voight, Colm Feore, and Alec Baldwin. The film presented a heavily fictionalized version of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, focusing on a love story set amid the lead up to the attack, its aftermath, and the Doolittle Raid.
USS Enterprise (CV-6) was a Yorktown-class carrier built for the United States Navy during the 1930s. She was the seventh U.S. Navy vessel of that name. Colloquially called "The Big E", she was the sixth aircraft carrier of the United States Navy. Launched in 1936, she was one of only three American carriers commissioned before World War II to survive the war. She participated in more major actions of the war against Japan than any other United States ship. These actions included the attack on Pearl Harbor — 18 Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bombers of her Air Group arrived over the harbor during the attack; seven were shot down with eight airmen killed and two wounded, making her the only American aircraft carrier with men at Pearl Harbor during the attack and the first to sustain casualties during the Pacific War — the Battle of Midway, the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands, various other air-sea engagements during the Guadalcanal Campaign, the Battle of the Philippine Sea, and the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Enterprise earned 20 battle stars, the most for any U.S. warship in World War II, and was the most decorated U.S. ship of World War II. She was also the first American ship to sink a full-sized enemy warship after the Pacific War had been declared when her aircraft sank the Japanese submarine I-70 on 10 December 1941. On three occasions during the war, the Japanese announced that she had been sunk in battle, inspiring her nickname "The Grey Ghost". By the end of the war, her planes and guns had downed 911 enemy planes, sunk 71 ships, and damaged or destroyed 192 more.
Takeo Yoshikawa was a Japanese spy in Hawaii before the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
Mitsuo Fuchida was a Japanese captain in the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service and a bomber aviator in the Japanese navy before and during World War II. He is perhaps best known for leading the first wave of air attacks on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. Working under the overall fleet commander, Vice Admiral Chūichi Nagumo, Fuchida was responsible for the coordination of the entire aerial attack.
The USS Panay incident was a Japanese attack on the American gunboat Panay while it was anchored in the Yangtze River outside Nanking, China on December 12, 1937. Like the infamous attack on Pearl Harbor four years later, Japan and the United States were not at war at the time. The Japanese claimed that they did not see the US flags painted on the deck of the gunboat, apologized, and paid an indemnity. Nevertheless, the attack and the subsequent Allison incident in Nanking caused U.S. opinion to turn against the Japanese.
USS Northampton (CL/CA-26) was the lead Northampton-class cruiser in service with the United States Navy. She was commissioned in 1930, originally classified a light cruiser because of her thin armor but later reclassified a heavy cruiser because of her 8-inch guns. During World War II she served in the Pacific and was sunk by Japanese torpedoes during the Battle of Tassafaronga on 30 November 1942. She was named after the city of Northampton, Massachusetts, the home of former President Calvin Coolidge.
Magic was an Allied cryptanalysis project during World War II. It involved the United States Army's Signals Intelligence Service (SIS) and the United States Navy's Communication Special Unit.
Gordon William Prange was the author of several World War II historical manuscripts which were published by his co-workers after his death in 1980. Prange was a Professor of History at the University of Maryland from 1937 to 1980 with a break of nine years (1942–1951) of military service during World War II, and in the postwar military occupation of Japan, when he was the Chief Historian in General Douglas MacArthur's staff. It was during this time that Prange collected material from and interviewed many Japanese military officers, enlisted men, and civilians, with the information later being used in the writing of his books. Several became New York Times bestsellers, including At Dawn We Slept and Miracle at Midway.
The Pearl Harbor advance-knowledge conspiracy theory is the argument that U.S. Government officials had advance knowledge of Japan's December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor. Ever since the Japanese attack, there has been debate as to how and why the United States had been caught off guard, and how much and when American officials knew of Japanese plans for an attack. In September 1944, John T. Flynn, a co-founder of the non-interventionist America First Committee, launched a Pearl Harbor counter-narrative when he published a forty-six page booklet entitled The Truth about Pearl Harbor.
Joseph Clark Grew was an American career diplomat and Foreign Service officer. He is best known as the ambassador to Japan between 1932-1941, and as a high official in the State Department in Washington between 1944-1945, where he opposed hardliners, sought to avoid war, and sought a soft Japanese surrender in 1945 that enabled a peaceful American occupation of Japan after the war.
Yoshiko Uchida was an award-winning Japanese American writer.
The Pacific War is a series of alternate history novels written by Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstchen with Albert S. Hanser. The series deals with the Pacific War between the United States of America and the Empire of Japan. The point of divergence is the decision of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander-in-chief of the Japanese Combined Fleet, to take personal command of the 1st Air Fleet for the attack on Pearl Harbor, rather than delegate it to Adm. Chūichi Nagumo.
A series of events led to the attack on Pearl Harbor. War between Japan and the United States had been a possibility that each nation's military forces planned for in the 1920s, though real tension did not begin until the 1931 invasion of Manchuria by Japan. Over the next decade, Japan expanded slowly into China, leading to the Second Sino-Japanese war in 1937. In 1940 Japan invaded French Indochina in an effort to embargo all imports into China, including war supplies purchased from the U.S. This move prompted the United States to embargo all oil exports, leading the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) to estimate it had less than two years of bunker oil remaining and to support the existing plans to seize oil resources in the Dutch East Indies. Planning had been underway for some time on an attack on the "Southern Resource Area" to add it to the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere Japan envisioned in the Pacific.
Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor took place on December 7, 1941. The U.S. military suffered 18 ships damaged or sunk, and 2,400 people were killed. Its most significant consequence was the entrance of the United States into World War II. The US had previously been officially neutral but subsequently entered the Pacific War, the Battle of the Atlantic and the European theatre of war. Following the attack, the US interned 120,000 Japanese Americans, 11,000 German Americans, and 3,000 Italian Americans.
Konpeki no Kantai is a Japanese alternate history series produced by J.C.Staff. The series focuses on both a technologically-advanced Imperial Japanese Navy and a radically-different World War II that were brought about by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto's revival by unexplained circumstances. The original video animation (OVA) series is also notable for using the Imperial Japanese calendar, instead of the Western calendar, in denoting the years in which the events of the series take place. It also spawned a 1997 OVA side story, Kyokujitsu no Kantai, one manga sequel, and two turn-based strategy games for the PC-FX and the Super Famicom.
Little Tokyo, U.S.A. is a 1942 American film. Produced in the period just after the United States entered World War II, it was meant to alert Americans to the dangers of foreign agents. It is now controversial for its largely negative portrayal of Japanese-Americans.
The attack on Pearl Harbor has received substantial attention in popular culture in multiple media and cultural formats including film, architecture, memorial statues, non-fiction writing, historical writing, and historical fiction. Today, the USS Arizona Memorial on the island of Oahu honors the dead. Visitors to the memorial reach it via boats from the naval base at Pearl Harbor. The memorial was designed by Alfred Preis, and has a sagging center but strong and vigorous ends, expressing "initial defeat and ultimate victory". It commemorates all lives lost on December 7, 1941.
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