Resurrection: Salvaging the Battle Fleet at Pearl Harbor

Rating:
Summary: Inspiring story of what happened after the bombs fell
Review: I tried to think of a way to avoid the Paul Harvey-ish cliché of "the rest of the story," but it's hard to do. Nearly all general histories of the Pearl Harbor attack either end with the close of the attack, or move into the (necessarily more important) aspect of America starting to respond to the changed world situation and coming to grips with the onset of war. Epilogues sometimes report that most of the damaged ships actually returned to the battle lines, but in-depth reports of what happened at Pearl Harbor itself following the attack are pretty rare.

Daniel Madsen steps into this void with a book that, to use another cliché, reads like a novel. Where he could easily have gotten bogged down in damage reports or engineering minutia, he instead tells a surprisingly interesting story that turns as much on personalities as on mechanics. Amid the uncertainty of never knowing for sure whether the Japanese would return for a second strike at the fleet, civilian and naval engineers, divers, repair workers, and line officers devised innovative solutions to large and sometimes unprecedented problems. I can't speak too highly of how Madsen succeeds in weaving this into an interesting and well-paced narrative.

Readers familiar with the Pearl Harbor story will appreciate finding out what happened to the ships, and the base as a whole, in the weeks and months following the attack. Although the eyes of the world moved away from Pearl and onto the wider theater of war after the first days of December, 1941, the story of what happened there is still one well worth telling. I commend Daniel Madsen for the fine job he did telling it, and recommend his work to students of the attack and naval history buffs generally.

Rating:
Summary: Inspiring story of what happened after the bombs fell
Review: I tried to think of a way to avoid the Paul Harvey-ish cliché of "the rest of the story," but it's hard to do. Nearly all general histories of the Pearl Harbor attack either end with the close of the attack, or move into the (necessarily more important) aspect of America starting to respond to the changed world situation and coming to grips with the onset of war. Epilogues sometimes report that most of the damaged ships actually returned to the battle lines, but in-depth reports of what happened at Pearl Harbor itself following the attack are pretty rare.

Daniel Madsen steps into this void with a book that, to use another cliché, reads like a novel. Where he could easily have gotten bogged down in damage reports or engineering minutia, he instead tells a surprisingly interesting story that turns as much on personalities as on mechanics. Amid the uncertainty of never knowing for sure whether the Japanese would return for a second strike at the fleet, civilian and naval engineers, divers, repair workers, and line officers devised innovative solutions to large and sometimes unprecedented problems. I can't speak too highly of how Madsen succeeds in weaving this into an interesting and well-paced narrative.

Readers familiar with the Pearl Harbor story will appreciate finding out what happened to the ships, and the base as a whole, in the weeks and months following the attack. Although the eyes of the world moved away from Pearl and onto the wider theater of war after the first days of December, 1941, the story of what happened there is still one well worth telling. I commend Daniel Madsen for the fine job he did telling it, and recommend his work to students of the attack and naval history buffs generally.