At the end of Harry Turtledove’s Days Of Infamy, the Japanese empire was firmly in control of Hawai’i, the Americans who had tried to defend Oahu in the months after the attack and invasion of December 7, 1941 were POW’s, and the Kingdom of Hawai’i was restored under a puppet King and Queen hand-picked by the Japanese Army. The second volume of the story, End Of The Beginning, picks up where it predecessor left off and tells the story of what can only be called Japan’s Rape of Oahu and America’s efforts to retake the islands.
If anything, the brutality of the Japanese military that Turtledove focused on in the first volume is even more apparent here. POW’s are starved and worked to death — any honor they had as soldiers having been eliminated by the fact that they lost the battle. We also see the occupation of Oahu through the eyes of civilian characters — Japanese-American, Hawaiian, and white — trying to find a way to survive under a regime that obviously doesn’t care if they live or die.
Meanwhile, across the Pacific, the United States is rearming and preparing to take the islands back. Through the eyes of characters like Joe Crosetti, a new pilot training to fly off of carriers, and Les Dillon, an Marine veteran of the First World War, we see the preparations for and the execution of an invasion of Hawaii that makes the Japanese equivalent 18 months earlier pale by comparison.
Turtledove also does an excellent job of getting us inside the heads of several Japanese characters as they slowly come to realize that their country’s occupation of Hawaii cannot last.
This is partially a spoiler, but it becomes evident quite early in the book that the United States will retake Hawaii (really, Oahu, since the Japanese never paid any real attention to the other islands). And it happens for the same reason that America’s victory in the Pacific happened in our universe. Japan was simply unable to compete with the industrial might of the United States. Where Japan committed three carriers to the Pearl Harbor attack, the United States committed six to the re-invasion of Hawaii. Turtledove’s point here clearly is that, while a hypothetical occupation of Hawaii might have bought the Japanese Empire time, it would really only have delayed the inevitable.
As the book closes, the occupation of Hawaii has ended, but the War in the Pacific has just begun. In the closing pages of the book, bombers are leaving Hawaii for strikes against the next target….Midway. Given the brutality of the Japanese occupation, one can only wonder what the rest of the war might be like. Unfortunately, at the moment, it appears unlikely that there will be another volume in this series.
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November 5th, 2007 at 9:03 am
Excellent review and I agree there is a lot of potential for further writing. The fall of Japan was precipitated by the detonation of atomic weapons, but what if they didn’t work? What if the entire project resulted in a large pile of glowing slag in the desert? What if the Americans had had to invade the Japanese home islands? Japan was not completely destroyed at the end of the war, they still had stockpiles of weapons, about 3 million combat veterans in China and a population willing to carry on a murderous geurilla war for the Emperor. The invasion of Japan would make the invasion of the CSA as told in Turtledoves Return Engagement series mild by comparison.