For That One Day
Description. A short description of a book from my bookshelf, not a review.
Mitsuo Fuchida led the air attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, and this memoir is his account of the war from the cockpit and the operations room. He describes the planning and execution of the raid, the carrier battles that followed, and his presence at Midway, where appendicitis kept him out of the air as the Japanese carriers were destroyed.
The second half is an unusual postwar story: Fuchida's conversion to Christianity and his years as an evangelist in the United States. Historians have questioned parts of his wartime testimony, particularly his account of Midway, so the book is best read alongside later scholarship. It remains a vivid first-person view of the Imperial Japanese Navy at its peak and of a man coming to terms with defeat.
From the bookshelf · read 2019–2020