The Sleeping Giant

On a quiet Sunday morning in December 1941, three hundred and fifty-three Japanese aircraft came out of the sun over Hawaii, and in one hundred and ten minutes they changed the world. By the time the smoke cleared over Battleship Row, more than two thousand four hundred Americans were dead, a reluctant nation had been hurled into war, and the largest conflict ever fought across the largest ocean on Earth had begun.

In 'The Sleeping Giant', E.B Cohen tells the whole sweeping story in a single volume - from the black ships that first pried Japan open, through the oil and empire that made war inevitable, to the thunderclap at Pearl Harbor and the four years of fire that followed. Here is the codebreaking triumph and the five unbelievable minutes at Midway that turned the tide; the blood-soaked climb through Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Saipan, and Peleliu; the greatest sea battle in history at Leyte Gulf; the black sand of Iwo Jima and the typhoon of steel at Okinawa; and the terrible new weapon that finally brought the Rising Sun to earth over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Written in vivid, plain language for the general reader, this is narrative history that explains not just what happened but why - why oil could start a war, why an airplane could kill a battleship, why a nation of factories defeated a nation of warriors. Honest about the war's hardest questions and unflinching about its human cost, it carries the reader from the first bomb to the final surrender in Tokyo Bay, where the ocean's long circle closed at last.

This is the complete story of Pearl Harbor and the war for the Pacific - the day of infamy, the years of fire, and the sleeping giant that woke.