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This country is

at war with Germany.

We shall go on to the end.

I remember the sheets of flame, which came up and almost blinded us from our guns.

Pearl Harbor is often remembered as a stunning Japanese success, a perfectly executed surprise attack that changed the course of the Second World War.

But what if that familiar story is wrong?

In this episode, I'm joined by now regular of the podcast, Mark Stilly, to rethink one of the most famous events

of the war. His book, Pearl Harbor, Japan's greatest disaster, argues the attack was not a master

stroke at all, but a tactical disappointment, an operational failure and ultimately a strategic catastrophe for Japan.

Mark, welcome back.

If we're going to build a picture of why Pearl Harbor was a disaster for Japan,

I wonder if our starting point should be why the Japanese felt they needed to go to war with the US. Could war have been

averted in the months before the attack? Well, I don't think that was a likely outcome. I tried to make

this book a mainly military account of the attack on Pearl Harbor, because not many books

cover that part in detail.

However, it's hard to do that without having some context by covering the road to war.

And that's even more important because there have been other accounts recently published

...