History Smashers: Pearl Harbor, by Kate Messner

Photo by Wil C. Fry

★★★★ (of 5)

Full Title: History Smashers: Pearl Harbor
Author: Kate Messner
Illustrator: Dylan Meconis
Year: 2020 (mine was library hardcover)
Pages: 172*
Genre: U.S. History, World War 2, Racism
Publisher: Random House Children’s Books (Penguin Random House)
ISBN 978-0-593-12038-5

(* 172 pages does not include Timeline, Author’s Note, Bibliography, Image Credits, Index, or previews of related books.)

After reading Kate Messner’s History Smashers: Women’s Right To Vote at the suggestion of my 11-year-old daughter — and really liking it — my daughter said Pearl Harbor was another good book in the series so I checked out this one too. The book is part of a “History Smashers” series that includes a few other titles; the idea is to take a historical incident or phenomenon (Underground Railroad, Titanic, the Mayflower, etc.) and distill the truths into an easy-to-read format for pre-teen children, while also debunking commonly repeated myths (and outright fabrications in some cases).

This book, like the others, makes the topic clear in the title, as well as with the cartoon-drawing on the front cover. This one is about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, though it begins some time before that and goes on to deal with the aftermath.

Like the Women’s Right To Vote book, this one was obviously written for children (based on phrasing and word choices), I wouldn’t say it was “dumbed down” — it simply doesn’t delve as deep into every corner of the story that a book written for adults might do. I thought it was relatively thorough for a children’s history book, looking at the historical root causes of the war in the Pacific, including the trade disputes between the U.S. and Japan, colonialism, and so on, and also mentions the lead-up to the attack in question. It dispels quite easily the myth that the attack on Pearl Harbor was a complete surprise with zero advance warning — which is something that was either strongly implied or overtly taught when I was young. The book also frankly covers the aftermath of the attack — including the casualties and injured survivors, the abhorrent U.S. response of forcibly removing Americans of Japanese descent from their homes and imprisoning them for years, and even the environmental damage caused by the decision to leave the sunk ships in place in the harbor (even today, oil is leaking from those ships, poisoning the waters).

I thought it was outstanding that Messner pointed out the difference in how the U.S. government reacted with regards to U.S. citizens descended from various enemy countries. Though Germany and Italy were also Axis powers, steadily pounding our allies in Europe, there was no mass round-up of German-Americans or Italian-Americans (though there was of course animosity in some quarters). Racism appears to be the only motivation for the mass round-up of Japanese Americans and U.S. residents of Japanese descent.

Though part of the book is illustrated in comic-book style, it also includes many historical photographs — of soldiers, ships, and places involved.

Conclusion

I quite enjoyed the book (though perhaps not as thoroughly as the Women’s Right To Vote book) and would highly recommend it to anyone who wants to fill in some knowledge gaps surrounding the Pearl Harbor attack or World War 2 in general. (I think it’s aimed at readers aged 9-13, or so, but likely most adults would learn something from it too.)