Pearl Harbor

Pearl Harbor was attacked by Japanese carrier aircraft on 7 December 1941. The strike damaged the U.S. Pacific Fleet and shocked American public opinion. It was followed by declarations of war and the rapid expansion of the Pacific conflict.

The attack mattered because it transformed World War II into a fully global war for the United States. It also created personal stories of sailors, nurses, families, Japanese American communities and intelligence failure. Pearl Harbor can anchor novels about sudden rupture, mobilisation, revenge, fear and the beginning of a long Pacific war.

World War II fiction has a very large reading audience, from Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See and Kate Atkinson's Life After Life to Robert Harris, Alan Furst, Herman Wouk, Kristin Hannah and Ken Follett. Series and thrillers often use occupied Europe, intelligence work, resistance networks, codebreaking, naval war and family survival as their core material. These entries should therefore support both literary novels and high-conversion series pages for wartime, espionage, Holocaust, home-front and military fiction.