Pearl Harbor Ghosts.

IT WAS NOT the most dramatic, overwhelming surprise attack of the war- that distinction belongs to the German invasion of the Soviet Union six months earlier. Nor was it the conflict's most decisive naval engagement; that came six months later, at Midway. The attack did not even destroy its vital objective-the enemy's aircraft carriers and petroleum storage farms-and those targets that were hit were quickly repaired (with the exception of the gutted battleship Arizona) and sent back into action against the forces that had ambushed them.

Still, it is the only military action of World War II that many Americans can recall with any specificity. The psychic effects of Pearl Harbor were deeper than the immediate military consequences. It is one of those historical dividing lines. There is a before and an after. In between, there is the "Day that will live in infamy," as Franklin Roosevelt characterized it for eternity.

Thurston Clarke's Pearl Harbor Ghosts is written from a decisively post-cold-war sensibility. His approach is anecdotal and journalistic, relying heavily on personal interviews and first-hand impressions gathered from tours of the Arizona memorial, Schofield barracks, Hickam Field, and other haunted sites. He has recreated, often brilliantly, the experiences of ordinary men and women who lived through that day and were changed permanently by it. His accounts of the astonished disbelief of those under attack are utterly compelling, as when he describes the men aboard the destroyer Helm who were strafed by Japanese pilots who smiled and waved at their victims: "for some inexplicable reason, perhaps because no one yet believed the attack was real, We all waved back."'

Clarke displays considerable narrative gifts when he describes those last bungling hours before the Japanese planes began their torpedo and dive-bombing runs on the battleships where buglers and bands stood by to break out the colors. The obtuseness of commanders who refused to take seriously the encounter of the destroyer Ward with a Japanese midget submarine at the mouth of the harbor; (Admiral Husband Kimmel was dressed and ready for golf and decided to "wait for verification"); the insouciance of the officer in charge of the radar station that picked up the waves of incoming planes (when one of his operators asked, "What do you think it is?" the lieutenant answered, "It's nothing"); the tardiness bordering on dereliction of officers in Washington, including George C. Marshall, who were aware through code penetration that the Japanese were set to deliver an ultimatum-all of this is described faithfully and with a sure sense of doom.

The reader, then, shares completely Clarke's sense that

The last, heartbreaking chances to put

Oahu on alert have the slow-motion inevitability

of a nightmare.... When I read

about them, they send my heart beating

faster, making me wish I had been there,

telling Stark not to put down that telephone

but to call Kimmel directly, warning

Marshall not to trust the vagaries of

his signal center ... persuading Tyler to

believe Elbott's radar report, and arguing

Kimmel out of dismissing the Ward's

encounter as a possible false alarm. How

could it be, I want to shout, when Outerbridge

has reported firing on" a submarine,

meaning he used his deck guns,

meaning he had to have seen it ! Ghosts, however, is more than a skillful mix of contemplation and verite. Clarke also wants to understand, to follow the impact of the attack down through time. He is concerned with the "real lessons, the ones bearing a certain uncomfortable relevance to the present ... rarely mentioned, perhaps because they are too controversial, too depressing, or simply too terrifying. These are lessons of how obsession with internal subversion may leave you vulnerable to your genuine enemies, the lesson of how a catastrophe described an impossible or unthinkable, such as Pearl Harbor-or an oil spill, nuclear-plant disaster, or accidental nuclear war-can sometimes happen. And most of all, there is the lesson of how racism and national pride can lead to a false sense of security."

Mr. Clarke, as they say, has an agenda. Which is not an altogether bad thing; merely something that needs to be examined as carefully as he examines the events of that day.

There was an undeniably racist element in the savage war between Japan and the U.S., and those attitudes are a long way from dead. Examples range from the trivial-such as Admiral Halsey's crack that the "Japs are losing their grip, even with their tails," to the deplorable internment of U.S. citizens of Japanese descent. But, well, but you can also say that it was hardly American racism that defined the war. The true racists were the Japanese, who eagerly allied themselves with the most notoriously racist government in all of history. The Japanese had been fighting an offensive war for ten years before they attacked the United States. They made slaves of those they conquered.

And while the U.S. has engaged in mea culpas for the internment policy and paid reparations to its victims, the Japanese still refuse to compensate their Korean victims. The Japanese believed, before Pearl Harbor and now, in their destiny to rule and the good fortune of those they chose to subdue.

If the American obsession with sabotage from Japanese fifth columnists was a mistake, and even a mistake grounded in racism, it does not follow that the U.S. was surprised on December 7, 1941, because of bigotry. In fact, with time, the ability of the Japanese to catch the Americans unprepared seems less and less impressive. As a nation, we make a habit out of being surprised. We were surprised when the North Koreans crossed the 38th Parallel. Surprised again when the Chinese invaded. We were surprised when the Soviets got the bomb. Surprised when the Wall went up in Berlin and, again, when it came down. Surprised at Tet. And when Iraq invaded Kuwait. In fact, one sometimes wonders why we bother staffing a CIA-except for the entertainment value of its periodic scandals-since Americans are hooked on surprise and the CIA might actually deprive us now and then of our fix.

Finding racism, then, as the key to our defeat at Pearl Harbor seems like a reach, an attempt to give it a trendy slant, a touch of modern liberal guilt. The same, it seems, is true of Clarke's attempt to link Pearl Harbor in spirit with Hiroshima.

"If you believe," he writes, "as I do, that the humiliation of Pearl Harbor contributed to the willingness to drop atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagaski and is responsible in part for current attitudes toward Japan, then December 6 was a last chance to avoid more than a single day of carnage."

By this logic, racism led to our humiliation at Pearl Harbor and, therefore, to the use of the bomb. This is another bold reach on Clarke's part. The decision to use the bomb will be debated forever. But just as the Japanese were willing to attack Pearl Harbor for their own reasons (racist or otherwise), it seems clear they, too, would have used the bomb if only they'd had one. After the destruction of Hiroshima, the Japanese government summoned the head of its nuclear program to Tokyo and asked if he could produce a bomb within six months. Presumably, Japan's rulers did not intend to drop it on Koreans.

Throughout the book, Clarke takes Americans to task for their belief that "Pearl Harbor was the result not of Japanese bravery, skill, and tactics, but of subversion and sabotage." Fair enough. But the problem is not one of racial insensitivity as much as amnesia. During this fiftieth anniversary, Pearl Harbor will be the subject of endless books, articles, and television shows. In fact, Clarke's book will be the main source for a two-hour CBS documentary, allowing Americans to relive, once again, their most disastrous ordeal of arms, to pick at the scab of their own military ineptitude.

One longs for the book and network documentary that would tell the story of how, six months later, U.S. Navy pilots sank three of the Japanese carriers that attacked Pearl Harbor in five minutes, accomplishing one of the greatest strategic reversals in all of history, a victory to stand with Salamis, Leptano, and Trafalgar. Or of how the U.S. Marines held Guadalcanal for weeks against superior Japanese forces, during which time they were once reduced to a single operational fighter plane.

Those are not stories about racism and complacency and do not touch on the trendy theme of guilt. Those ghosts, then, are left in peace.