There’s a good argument to be made that 1941 was the most decisive year of the 20th century. It was the year the Germans invaded the Soviet Union and began the bloodiest war in history; the year the Nazis made the most crucial decisions about the Holocaust; and, most vital of all in terms of the geopolitics of the century, the year the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and brought America into the second world war.

But can we narrow that argument down still ­further, and say that it was not the whole year, 1941, that was decisive, but a mere 22 days? That’s the proposition David Downing puts forward in Sealing Their Fate. His book begins on Monday, November 17, 1941 and ends on Sunday, December 7, and is the story of the voyage of the Japanese fleet towards Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, set against the other wartime events of those three weeks and a day: the German advance towards Moscow; Rommel’s fight against the allies in North Africa; and the political ­machinations in Tokyo, Washington, Moscow, Berlin and London.

It’s an intriguing way of looking at the history. But the trouble is that Downing has taken one event that is utterly central to the history of the 20th century — the Japanese decision to attack Pearl Harbor — and interwoven it with a series of other events that are merely snapshots of a greater whole. These 22 days were not, for example, the most crucial phase in the development of the Nazis’ Final Solution nor the most important stage in the German fight against the Red Army. And as for the war in North Africa, ­Rommel’s activities during this period were very much a sideshow compared with the vital decisions taken by the Japanese in Tokyo.

But the book is still an enjoyable read. Downing, also a published thriller writer, drives the narrative forward at breakneck speed. The only downside is that he is rather given to gnomic thrilleresque axioms that on reflection turn out to be self-evident (“the dead had no interest in victory”) and slightly dodgy metaphors (“the balloon of British self-confidence, already overblown, received another dose of inflation”).But strip away the occasional pop-fiction writing and the unnecessary subplots and you have a ­gripping piece of history, because the story of the run-up to Pearl Harbor isn’t just epic, it’s replete with monumental misjudgments on all sides.

Admiral Yamamoto, for example, the architect of the plan to attack the American fleet, knew that Japan was about to enter a war it couldn’t win. As he had written himself in January 1941, “To make victory ­certain, we would have to march into Washington and dictate the terms of peace in the White House” — something he knew was impossible. By the afternoon of Tuesday, December 2, 1941, Yamamoto was reduced to expressing the wistful hope that maybe Japan could find some kind of exit strategy from the forthcoming war because “American opinion has always been very changeable”.

As for the Americans, they had precipitated a ­diplomatic crisis by refusing to export oil and other raw materials to Japan as a result of Japanese ­aggression in southeast Asia. And then, having caused the crisis, they dealt with it ineptly.

Indeed, one of the most naive diplomatic moments in the history of the 20th century occurred in ­Washington on the afternoon of Wednesday, ­November 26, when Secretary of State Cordell Hull handed over his “10 points” proposal to Japanese officials. As Downing correctly states, Japan was “asked to pull all its troops out of China, [and] to abandon the tripartite pact [with the Germans and the Italians]. These were ridiculous demands, far beyond anything that was politically possible for their government in Tokyo. Surely Hull understood this. They could not report such an offer, the diplomats protested; their government would just ‘throw up its hands’”.

Why did Hull make the Japanese an offer he knew they had to refuse? Almost certainly because he didn’t want to look like an “appeaser”, and because he didn’t take the Japanese threat as seriously as he should. In fact, virtually nobody in the American (or British) administrations seems to have thought the Japanese were capable of attacking successfully. Then as Downing says, on December 7, 1941 they were all “caught napping by the Japanese”, as a result “of serial incompetence which almost beggars belief”.

The 22 days in December 1941 Downing describes were certainly crucial. But, in essence, only because of Pearl Harbor. So it’s a shame his book — which should be of real interest to the general reader — doesn’t just focus on the background to that one extraordinary event.

Sealing Their Fate by David Downing
Simon & Schuster £18.99 pp384

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