Countdown to Pearl Harbor: The Twelve Days To The Attack

Countdown to Pearl Harbor: The Twelve Days To The Attack by Steve Twomey

I really wasn’t expecting much of this read; I grabbed it while I was at Pearl Harbor because how could I not get a book while I was there?

My “favorite” non-fiction book of all time is The Looming Tower. If I had it my way that should be required for senior year reading. It’s no surprise that a book following the other great American surprise attack follows similar beats to The Looming Tower and ends on the same conclusion: there was no conspiracy, there was no plot, there was only a dearth of imagination as to their foe’s capabilities and a failure in internal communication.

Each chapter takes place over a single day leading up to December 7th. The form begets a well paced read. Within that, Twomey does a great job of pulling in different perspectives including both civilian and Japanese accounts to create a well rounded study. Fundamentally, it seeks understanding not assignment of blame.

In between the events, there’s a portrait of fallible men trying to make the best decisions possible and how the quirks of personality culminated into disaster. There’s a portrait of how structural flaws can cripple any organization if there’s no oversight that is applicable outside of military history. Most importantly, there’s a good analysis in framing historical study. At the outset, Twomey clearly lays out the state of play in 1941 and how any analysis and commentary must germinate within that framework.

The prose really dragged this book down the overall rankings. It was straight up confusing at times, and there were times where journalistic, matter-of-fact prose was incorrectly deployed. Just because it’s a history book doesn’t mean I don’t want to be injected into the moment. Grann does a really good job of knowing when to be a journalist and when to be an author and Twomey doesn’t quite get there.

Overall, this is a great human read, not just a great book on the Second World War. This book changed my framing of Pearl Harbor and thus must be graded well. Side note: I’m debating starting a column on the Second World War. If that’s something you’d be interested in drop a note in the comments.

Final Grade (all out of ten):

Plot: 9

Characters: 8

Conflict: 9

Theme: 9

Setting: 8

Prose: 6

Tone: 7

Quality: 9

Impact: 8

Enjoyment: 9

Overall: 82/100

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A/N:

Over the next ten days I’ll be releasing full reviews of my top ten books of 2025. From there, I plan on publishing a weekly book review. I’m hoping this is a way to keep me reading regularly and academically.

A quick note on my grading philosophy which I formed listening to a few movie critics. I believe that a 7 in any of the categories above constitutes “Good”. Anything above that is something that is above and beyond in any one particular category. I believe this creates a more nuanced evaluation of any Story. Very, very rarely do I give scores above 90 (8 since I started grading books back in 2022). Consider anything a 70 or above the equivalent of 5 stars. You may note that some entries are tied. The tiebreakers are the higher individual score in Enjoyment, then Impact, then Quality, then back up to Plot and descending from there.

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