J. Garry Clifford - Böcker

Introduced into Congress two days before the fall of France and signed into law three months later as Luftwaffe bombs set London afire, the Selective Training and Service Act began the process by which fifteen million Americans were inducted into the armed services during the Second World War. Clifford and Spencer recount a neglected but vitally important development in the transformation of American policies prior to Pearl Harbor—the first time in American history when men were conscripted into military service during peacetime.Central to the discussion in The First Peacetime Draft is the first important American policy response to Hitler's victory in Europe in the spring of 1940 the Selective Service Act. It marked the effective end of the isolationist tradition in the United States because for the first time while the country remained officially at peace civilians were drafted into the armed forces to face the possible threat of aggression from abroad. Emerging from the initiative of civilians, not from the Army or the White House, the conscription campaign resulted in a colorful three-month public debate that engaged the entire population.This volume is based on research in more than ninety manuscript collection in the United States, Canada, and Britain, as well as interviews with some two dozen participants. In addition to being a detailed political history of the debate over conscription, it places the draft in the context of Roosevelt's zig-zag path to war and evaluates it in terms of the overall evolution of the American defense and foreign policies since 1940.

On December 7, 1941, the course of U.S. history changed forever with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Three weeks prior, Japanese Special Envoy to the United States Saburo Kurusu visited Washington in an attempt to further peace talks between Japan and America and spare his country the loss he knew would occur if a war began. But as he reported, "Working for peace is not as simple as starting a war." For more than seventy years, many have unfairly viewed Kurusu and his visit as part of the Pearl Harbor plot. Editors J. Garry Clifford and Masako R. Okura seek to dispel this myth with their edition of Kurusu’s memoir, The Desperate Diplomat.Kurusu published his personal memoir in 1952, in Japanese, describing his efforts to prevent war between the two nations, his total lack of knowledge regarding the Pearl Harbor attack, and what "might have been" had he been successful in his endeavor for peace, while offering an exclusive perspective on the Japanese reaction to the attack. However, the information contained in his memoir was unavailable to most of the world, save those fluent in Japanese, because it had never been published in another Language. With the discovery of Kurusu's own English memoir, his story can finally be told to a wider Audience.Clifford and Okura have used both the Japanese and English memoirs and added an introduction and annotations to Kurusu's story, making The Desperate Diplomat an essential look at an event that remains controversial in the history of both nations. Anyone who takes interest in the history of Pearl Harbor cannot afford to omit this previously unavailable information from their library.