Bill McWilliams

From Pearl Harbor With Love: A Manuscript Awaiting a Publisher

From Pearl Harbor With Love is a powerful history and true story of the bitter, destructive Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, and its immediate aftermath, including the seaborne evacuation of thousands from Hawaii - and the devotion of a Marine officer’s daughter to a young Navy ensign - a crew member on the battleship USS Tennessee - their love, marriage, and determination to remain near one another amid the turmoil and bloody chaos of war.

Overview

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

Edmund Burke

Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by imagination.

Voltaire

Like the sinking of the Titanic and the agony of 9/​11, Pearl Harbor will never leave us – never. And now, a fresh, exciting new history, From Pearl Harbor With Love, is here, a history that brings readers alongside those who fought the battle on 7 December 1941, on and below decks on the ships, on the airfields, in Honolulu and surrounding areas; in the cockpits during fierce air battles over Oahu, and on the carrier decks on both sides; concentrating on the men and women who were on the receiving end of the enemy’s devastating attack – and includes events occurring in the twenty-four fateful days following the air raid.

Filled with emotional, sometimes wrenching human interest as well as a wonderful love story, it reads like an action-packed novel. Written in crisp, clear, easy-to-read laymen’s terms, the entire period comes to life through meticulous, in-depth research that blends excerpts from a wide variety of sources including personal diaries and letters, heretofore classified official records and correspondence, martial law records and decision papers, messages, texts of presidential addresses, unit histories, wartime plans; war journals, and orders of battle; ships’ deck logs, war diaries and action reports; histories of Naval combatants, luxury liners, Army, and Army Air Force units; maps, photographs, and sketches; interviews of eyewitnesses and participants, excerpts from previously recorded accounts of the attack; and the written and spoken words of the men, women and then-young-children who lived its life and death events.

In the opening lines readers find themselves on board the luxury liner-converted-to-troop ship, SS Lurline, the last days of December 1941, secretly en route to San Francisco with two other Matson Line ships and three Navy escorts, then with Task Force 16, three battleships damaged at Pearl Harbor, plus their escorts, secretly en route to Puget Sound Navy Yard. On Lurline is Mary Joleen “Joey” Border, twenty-one year old Navy wife of Ensign Robert Lee “Bob” Border, United States Naval Academy class of 1939, who is on board the USS Tennessee, in the battleships’ “Dash to Resurrection.” Both have left Oahu six days apart, not knowing where each was going. Joey is a passenger in the second of three convoys to leave Oahu in December 1941, the beginning of the evacuation of more than 20,000 people, including wounded, widows, other survivors, military dependents, non-essential government employees and their dependents, and tourists trapped on the islands - ordered to leave Hawaii following the Japanese attack.

Then the opening narrative abruptly changes course in time and circumstance. Readers are in the isolationist decade of the 1930s while war breaks out across the Atlantic and Pacific. They draw close to Bob and Joey who meet in December 1940, fall in love, marry, and live through an increasingly turbulent 1941, leading inexorably to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. They will be on board the USS Tennessee and West Virginia with them for dinner and a movie two nights before the attack; at the football game between Willamette University’s Bearcats and the University of Hawaii Rainbows on Oahu Saturday afternoon, and a music-filled “The Battle of the Bands” at Pearl Harbor’s new Bloch Recreation Center the night before the attack; on board the carriers Enterprise, Lexington, and Saratoga, which were not in Pearl Harbor when the attack comes; ride in the cockpits of eighteen of Enterprise’s Douglas Dauntless dive bombers in Scouting Squadron Six (VS-6) when they launch at 0618 hours Sunday morning for Ford Island Naval Air Station and fly completely unaware into the midst of the Japanese attack; on the minesweeper USS Condor and training ship USS Antares when their crews first sight a Japanese submarine near the entrance to Pearl Harbor in the early morning hours of 7 December; in the cockpit of a PBY Catalina patrol plane and on the bridge of the destroyer USS Ward as both attack and Ward sinks a Japanese midget submarine just outside the harbor entrance an hour before the air attack; in the Army’s new, mobile radar site which first detects the inbound Japanese air armada fifty-five minutes prior to the attack, and in the Information Center where the radar reading is discussed and eventually incorrectly interpreted as a flight of twelve American B-17s flying into Hickam Field from Hamilton Field, north of San Francisco, California.

Then comes the attack and it’s bloody, fiery aftermath, days and nights filled with fear, tragic hair-trigger mistakes and acts of courage, heroism and uncommon valor – plus stunning surprises found in some seldom and never-disclosed history. The story of Convoy 4032 and its Navy escorts in Task Group 15.6, and their zigzagging, five-day dash to San Francisco through Japanese submarines ringing Oahu, and a barrier of additional enemy submarines lying in wait off major ports on the United States’ west coast, is just one of many never-before-told Pearl Harbor stories readers will discover in this book.

To learn more about From Pearl Harbor With Love, E-mail the agency representing the work at: info@​professionalmedia.biz